The Things Owen Wrote

by Jessica Scott Kerrin

  “Can I borrow your cell phone, Pops? I need to call Kevin to tell him I won’t be home this weekend.”

  His granddad hands him the cell phone. Owen dials the number. Kevin answers.

  “Kevin? It’s Owen. Listen. I can’t go biking this weekend.”

  “Oh? Why not?” Kevin asks.

  “I’m going to Iceland.”

  “Yeah, sure you are.”

  “I am. I’m at the Edmonton airport right now.”

  “But your parents are in Las Vegas, aren’t they?”

  “I’m here with my granddad. He has two free tickets to Iceland and he needs to return his friend Gunnar’s medal.”

  Owen leaves out the whole notebook-switching fiasco. Even his best friend doesn’t know about the things Owen wrote in his field notes.

  “Medal? What medal?” Kevin asks.

  “A medal for translating poems. Stephansson’s poems.”

  “Stephansson? Isn’t he that guy with the house full of bats?”

  “Yeah. That’s him.”

  “And you’re at the airport?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. Listen.” Owen holds the cell phone up so that the overhead speakers can be heard announcing their flight. “See?” Owen says.

  “Really? You’re actually going to Iceland?”

  “Yes.”

  “Awesome!”

  “I know! See you!”

  Owen hands the cell phone back to his granddad. They line up to board the airplane. They show their passports and paperwork to the flight attendant, and she points out where they will be sitting.

  Neville gives Owen the window seat, and Owen enjoys the roar of the takeoff. He looks down at the patchwork of land that they are flying over. It reminds him of the earth-tone quilt that his mom bought for his bed from the annual Agriculture and Craft Fall Fair. The ruler-straight gray highways and winding indigo-blue rivers thread through the patches like embroidery.

  Owen’s granddad explains that the view will soon change. Their flight will take them north. They will fly over the top part of Saskatchewan, across Nunavut, over the Northwest Passage, Baffin Island, Greenland and the North Atlantic Ocean to a city called Reykjavík in Iceland.

  “Much of the view will be barren,” Neville says. “Or the ocean. Not much to see.”

  “How long is this flight?” Owen asks.

  “About six and a half hours,” Neville says. “But remember, there’s a time-zone difference. We’ll be landing in the morning, only it will feel like the middle of the night to us because Iceland is six hours ahead of Alberta.”

  Owen nods. He doesn’t really understand the time math, but he trusts his granddad’s calculations.

  Owen pulls a magazine about Iceland from the flap in front of his seat and starts to leaf through it. He pauses to look at the rugged landscape photographs. He studies the emerald-green, jet-black and pumpkin-orange lava fields. He reads about the most famous volcano in Iceland, Mount Hekla. He lets out a whistle when he sees the soaring flames and plume of smoke. He can practically feel the heat, the awe, the terror.

  His granddad barely notices because he is buried in a mystery novel about a missing dog. He is using his favorite bookmark, the laminated bank receipt for the last paycheck he deposited before retiring.

  Owen recalls that he drew an exploding volcano in his field notes when he learned that Stephansson’s family had left Iceland following an eruption that poisoned the land.

  His notebook!

  A fresh wave of panic hits Owen when he thinks about what his notes contain, but then he quickly assures himself that he’ll have them back soon enough.

  The flight attendants come around with the meals, so Owen stows the magazine and pulls his tray table down. He chooses beef, which the attendant hands to him. So does his granddad, but the attendant has run out of beef. She apologizes and offers what’s left: fish.

  Owen wishes that his granddad did not have to order fish. He does not like the smell. It reminds him of the food flakes he used to feed to Fiona.

  Fiona was his pet goldfish.

  Was.

  The memories flood back.

  The day Owen brought Fiona home was so happy. He was shopping with his grandmother for a new bicycle helmet when they came upon the pet store.

  “Let’s go in!” Owen begged.

  “Your parents are going to kill me,” Aileen joked, allowing Owen to tow her inside despite her half-hearted protests.

  As it turned out, the store manager was offering a special promotion to help celebrate the one-year anniversary of the store opening. She was giving out a free goldfish and coupons for goldfish flakes to anyone who would buy a bowl to keep the goldfish in.

  Owen could not resist. He picked out the one that had the purest shade of orange, and he called her Fiona because that was the prettiest name he knew. His grandmother even bought a castle for her bowl. When he got home, he set Fiona on a shelf above the kitchen sink where she could watch him from her world as he did homework at the table.

  Owen was vigilant about not overfeeding Fiona, and he kept her water crystal clear. Whenever they went to Grande Prairie to stay with relatives for Thanksgiving or some other family event, Owen would arrange for Kevin to come in and take care of her.

  “Don’t overfeed Fiona,” he warned Kevin repeatedly.

  And just to be sure, Owen left his best friend with detailed instructions, which Kevin dutifully followed to the letter.

  Fiona kept Owen company for years.

  Then came the terrible period when Owen’s grandmother became ill. Everyone spent more and more time at the hospital. Gradually, Owen did less and less homework. That meant he spent less and less time in the kitchen. When his grandmother finally slipped into a deep sleep, Owen and his family stayed at her side until the very end.

  The days after coming home from the hospital were the worst. Everyone moved so quietly, so wordlessly. The air was so empty. It was hard to breathe. Weeks passed after the funeral before Owen’s family could begin to move back into their routines.

  One day, when Owen returned home from school, he looked up from his math equations to check on Fiona.

  Only, Fiona wasn’t there. Her shelf was empty.

  Owen dropped his pencil. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had fed her.

  Or changed her water.

  “Mom!” he cried out. “Mom!”

  But then he remembered that his mom was running errands.

  Owen frantically scanned the kitchen: the counters, the top of the fridge, the pantry. He bolted from room to room in a desperate search.

  “Fiona! Fiona!”

  Nothing.

  Owen stopped to gulp deep, steadying breaths.

  Gutted, he returned to the empty kitchen.

  He slowly opened the doors to the cupboard beneath the sink where they kept empty glass vases.

  His heart fell to his feet.

  There was Fiona’s bowl.

  Clean and empty.

  He knew then that he had failed Fiona, failed her terribly.

  He knew his parents had been unable to bring themselves to tell him.

  Owen sat down on the cold tile floor and wept.

  Eventually, he dragged himself up, and with a shovel he found in the garden shed, dug a deep hole in the flowerbed along the fence and buried her bowl. Just before he covered it, he dropped a large stone on top, smashing the bowl to bits.

  No goldfish would ever replace Fiona.

  Owen made certain of that.

  “How’s your dinner?” Owen’s granddad asks.

  Owen is picking away at it, so lost in his thoughts about Fiona. But his granddad jolts him back into the airplane
, and Owen dutifully scoops up a mouthful.

  “Pretty good,” he says between bites.

  And it is. No mushrooms.

  After the flight attendants return to collect the empty trays, everyone on the airplane pulls down their window shades and settles in to sleep. Even the overhead lights on the airplane are dimmed so that only soft pastel patterns appear on the ceiling, mimicking the northern lights. The flight attendants quietly disappear into the back of the airplane.

  “You best get some shut-eye,” Neville says, reclining his seat and bunching up a pillow against his head. He folds his glasses into his shirt pocket.

  “I’m not really tired,” Owen admits, but he obediently pulls down his window shade like everyone else.

  “You will be when we land,” Neville warns. He puts on his eye mask, leans his head against his pillow and doesn’t say another word.

  Owen cannot sleep knowing they’ll soon be in Iceland. His thoughts race. He lifts the shade and looks out the window. It is still light out, but there is nothing to see because their airplane is flying above soft pink clouds. He looks away from the window and sees a passenger in the row beside their seats glaring at him because of the light coming into the cabin. Owen sheepishly shuts the shade. He digs out his camera and clicks through the photographs of his field trip to Stephansson House. He slows down when he comes to the ones of the poet’s front porch with its green gingerbread trim.

  He pauses to study a close-up. Then he notices something above the top window dormer. It is a wooden cutout of a crescent moon, painted green like the rest of the decorative trim.

  Owen zooms in on the green moon with his camera. It reminds him of a favorite bedtime story that his grandmother used to read to him when he was very small, something about saying good night to the moon and other things in a great green room.

  A familiar dull ache blooms in his chest.

  Owen glances at his granddad to see if he can read Owen’s thoughts, but his granddad looks asleep.

  When she was alive, Owen’s grandmother invited him to stay over whenever he wanted to. They had a spare bedroom on the third floor, the attic, of their house. It had sloped walls and windows at each end. The room was painted green, just like in the story she liked to read to him.

  But she had just as many stories of her own to tell. The story about her honeymoon was one of Owen’s favorites. He can almost hear her voice now.

  “We went to Ontario, to an area called Thousand Islands. It is a sightseer’s paradise. Public lighthouses, fairy-tale castles, maritime museums, quaint little waterside towns with darling boutiques. Your granddad had it in his head that he wanted to rent a sailboat named Little Fish for a few days,” Aileen told Owen.

  “Well, I went along with it, only I didn’t know how to sail and I had no interest in learning. But I decided that I could be happy just to sit and relax. After all, this was your granddad’s vacation, too. So I put on my big sun hat, grabbed my book and tucked myself into the corner of the cockpit with my iced tea. Still, he kept trying to get me involved, barking out orders like Captain Bligh. ‘Trim the sail! Pull in the sheet! Drop the anchor!’ And all I wanted to do was read my novel!

  “Then he got mad at me. ‘Look,’ your granddad said. ‘You need to learn how to sail this boat. What if I fell overboard?’ And then I got mad and said, ‘I don’t want to learn, so you best not fall in!’

  “The next thing I know, your granddad drops the sails, takes off his shoes and then jumps — that’s right — jumps overboard. As he treads water, the boat I’m in drifts, and he calls out, ‘Turn the engine on, then come around and get me.’

  “I couldn’t believe it. Talk about stubborn! Who is this person I married? So, I calmly put down my book, went below, found my life jacket and put it on. Then I came back up into the cockpit and jumped overboard myself. Without another word, I started swimming to shore so that he had no choice but to catch up to the boat, climb on board and steer it away from the rocks.”

  “I guess that taught him,” Owen always said.

  “It most certainly did,” Aileen always replied. “And that’s why we’re so happily married.”

  To this day, Owen wonders who was the more stubborn of the two given that both of them ended up in the water, fully clothed, with their boat drifting away.

  Owen stows his camera and sits back in his seat. He looks over at his granddad, who is snoring soundly, mouth slightly open, eye mask askew.

  The airplane starts to bank east over the vast steel-gray North Atlantic Ocean. Somewhere up ahead, Iceland beckons.

  But back at home, a lady from the Red Deer River Readers Book Club is leafing through her favorite cookbook, searching for a tasty casserole recipe to make and drop off on Owen’s front porch where no one is home.

  Four

  The Alberta prairie sun inches across the inside of the blue bowl sky. Below it, Marge Figgis has just come back from Tasty Foods, Red Deer’s discount grocery store. She is unloading the ingredients for a new casserole recipe onto her spotless kitchen counter.

  “How was the car?” Hardy Figgis bellows from somewhere in the basement where he is tinkering.

  “It’s still making that noise,” Marge yells back at her husband.

  It’s been making that noise for weeks.

  Hardy mutters in reply, but he is too far away for Marge to make out his words. She could walk over to the top of the stairs and ask him to repeat whatever he said, but that would take her away from her task at hand, which is to make a casserole for Neville Sharpe and his grandson, Owen.

  Today is Friday. It is her turn.

  Marge digs out her Five Roses cookbook with its battered and butter-stained cover and turns to page 264. She scans the instructions for Beef and Barley Casserole. She is not a particularly good cook, so she has to follow the recipe to the letter.

  Marge washes her hands at the sink and ties a clean linen apron around her plump waist. She turns on her kitchen radio for company.

  CBC.

  Marge fills a pot with water, adds salt and turns the stove on to High. When the water boils, she adds the barley and sets the timer for twenty minutes, which is what the recipe tells her to do. At exactly twenty minutes, she turns the stove off.

  Meanwhile, Hardy climbs the basement stairs to see what she is up to. He is always checking on her. She does not check on him nearly as much, but he is so busy checking on her that he does not notice.

  He turns down the radio, which annoys Marge.

  “I’m making a casserole for Neville Sharpe,” she announces before he even has a chance to ask.

  She knows Hardy that well. They have been married for forty-seven years.

  Hardy consults the calendar posted on the fridge.

  “It’s not your turn. It’s Jóhanna’s turn according to the almighty fridge calendar.”

  Hardy hates the fridge calendar because it tells him everything that needs to be done on a daily basis: a lifetime of chores.

  “I know,” Marge says. “But I have some ground beef that I need to use up, and Neville is taking care of his grandson, Owen, this week. Growing boys eat a lot, so Jóhanna dropped off something for lunch and I’m covering dinner.”

  Hardy walks to where she is standing to read the recipe over her shoulder.

  “‘Beef and Barley Casserole,’” he reads out loud.

  He pulls a face behind her back. He has had casseroles too many times to count and he does not like them. He finds them too bland and the leftovers go on for days. He is surprised to see that this recipe calls for chili powder.

  “Are you really going to add the chili powder when you make this?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Marge says hotly. “I’ll put in what it calls for. A quarter of a teaspoon.”

  “Well, triple it,” Hardy suggests.

  “I most certainly will not triple the chili powd
er,” Marge declares. “I’ll do exactly what it calls for. You’re a maniac.”

  Hardy huffs. He goes to the kitchen’s back door and begins to take it off its hinges.

  Marge barely glances from her work. Hardy is about to perform a familiar task: the shaving of a door.

  Their old house is unique. It slants — not by much — to the right. It is as if their house is shouldering the constant prairie wind. And being slightly slanted is hard on rectangular doors. Every so often, they get stuck. When that happens, Hardy takes the door down and shaves a bit of wood off the top or the bottom with his hand planer so that it fits better. Over time, all the doors of their house have taken on a slightly trapezoid shape.

  “Is your book club this afternoon?” Hardy asks as he works on the door.

  Marge is a member of their neighborhood’s monthly book club called the Red Deer River Readers. She hates the club very much. She thinks the other members pick trashy books that have too much senseless violence or kissing scenes. Who wants to talk about violence or kissing at a book club?

  Not Marge, that’s for sure.

  There is a book right now on her night table that is only half-read and badly written. Even the cover is embarrassing — two people groping at each other in front of a stone castle that’s on fire — so she keeps it facedown.

  Still, Marge faithfully attends all the meetings, which are now held at Neville Sharpe’s home. She is convinced that if she does not go, the group will talk about her, and she hates that idea even more than being forced to read books she would never pick for herself. To cope, she brings her knitting to block out their endless chatter.

  The only one who liked the book club even less than Marge was Aileen Sharpe, Neville’s wife.

  Marge smiles to herself.

  Aileen Sharpe.

  What an opinionated crank.

  No one could get a word in edgewise or dared to disagree with Aileen if she was in the room.

  But deep down, everyone had to admit that Aileen was always right. And whenever Aileen got fed up with the club’s latest book choice, she would insist on a novel that was difficult but entirely unforgettable. Members of the club might not have liked Aileen, but they certainly respected her and they read anything she recommended from cover to cover.