When the dust settled, and I had Thomas strapped back into the stroller with his soother in his mouth and his blanket in his fist, I felt hollow. I stood and watched the lake slap and jostle the shore, rougher than it had been when I’d left it behind in Chance Bay that morning. It almost wasn’t morning anymore. I started walking.
I wasn’t running away, but that’s what got us here—we’d run from the coast, from houses we’d never afford, jobs we couldn’t compete for despite degrees and experience. We’d come north to have a chance at a new life, one almost ready-made in Danny’s dad’s hometown, in the cabin his grandfather built on a bay named for his family, in a fully furnished cabin Danny inherited. It wasn’t what I’d expected, though—not the town, the cabin. Not that I’d known what to expect. Remembering leaving Vancouver felt like digging a knuckle into a bruise—the city receding behind us as we drove across the bridge into North Van, then through the coast mountains toward the wilds of the Interior. I could still feel the ache of leaving, but part of it was the memory of my breasts near to explosion with mastitis.
It was fall. I remembered the trees all orange and brown, a highway pullout with a pond. I saw mallards, a dilapidated dock, but I didn’t really see them. I had my teeth clenched. I sat in the car and swore.
“You have to let him suck,” Danny said.
“It hurts too much.”
I’d held my breasts from underneath and they were like two heads, so heavy, so hard. I wished for breast skulls. I wished I’d never have to feed anything from them again. I wished I was a flat-chested kid in a field, lying on her back staring at the sky. I’d been that kid once. Now my chest was a grotesquery that stung like an open wound.
Danny had walked the baby away from the car a few steps, then walked back. I leaned my head against the headrest on the passenger side watching his skinny hips, the light glinting off his glasses every time he turned. I had mastitis. I’d looked it up. It affected cows, goats, anything with udders.
“Why is it happening?” Danny tried to get the baby to want the soother, jiggling it around his wet lips like he hadn’t already been rejecting it for half an hour. Thomas wailed around it, punching his baby fists in the air.
“I didn’t feed him enough. We were driving. No, we were moving and then we were driving. Yesterday and the day before and the day before we were distracted from the schedule.” The schedule had been my lifeline. Then moving was. I let the baby sleep so I could pack more. I let him finish nursing even if I knew he wasn’t really done. Sometimes I hadn’t offered him both breasts. I glanced at my bare chest and away. Mountains of pain. Eruptions of scalding, black awful. I didn’t care who saw them in this parking lot halfway to nowhere.
“Can we try again? He’s so hungry.”
I closed my eyes. “Yes. But then we’re stopping in the next town for formula. And painkillers. And vodka.”
“You’re a good mother, you know.”
I’d kept my eyes closed. He was kind but not perceptive. I held out my arms for the baby.
“Do you need something to bite down on?”
That made me open my eyes. He was also funny, Danny. Sometimes he was very funny, I remembered, back when we weren’t parents. I eyed him. “Just get me an apple from the bag. And my notebook. Please.” I didn’t want to write anything, I just wanted it near—fat with ephemera, bookmarks and ticket stubs, poems and photos and thoughts. It was my security blanket.
Thomas rooted around my nipple, wild for the smell of milk coming off me. I held my breath and angled his mouth, and the pain when he latched sent a black spike through my head. I felt it through my bowels and sat stiff. I had to consciously try and let the milk flow, to soften my arms for him, to be a dispenser of nourishment, not a woman with flames in her chest, not a woman whose breasts had been replaced with boulders ready to burst from her skin.
Danny came back with an apple and my brick of a notebook and set them on my lap. He picked up my shirt from the ground where I’d thrown it, shook it out, and wiped the tears off my face. He crouched next to me, stroking my hair. He stayed close, pressed his finger into my shoulder for a long second. You, it meant. He’d always done it, ever since the beginning, though I couldn’t remember when he started and I couldn’t say why I knew what it meant. Had he explained it to me? I didn’t know. I breathed and Thomas sucked and the highway hummed with traffic. I looked past Danny and fixed my eyes on a tilted outhouse. Birds swooped low over the pond next to it, feasting on mosquitoes, and slowly I relaxed my shoulder blades, loosened my jaw, stroked the soft skin on the baby’s forehead. I loved his forehead. It was my favourite place to kiss.
Evening fell while he nursed. I could feel my breasts softening, and when he was finished they were almost back to normal. The ducts deep inside them still ached, and I could feel swelling, still, right back into my armpits, but I managed to put on a shirt while Danny strapped Thomas into his car seat. My bra stayed on the floor mat and I kept my eyes from it. I worked my phone for a minute.
“Cabbage leaves. That’s what we need,” I told Danny when he got in the car.
“Cabbage leaves? Maybe monkey’s paws, too?”
I snorted. “How much further?”
“Ten k to the next town. Two more hours to Fort St. James.”
“Two hours to the middle of nowhere.”
“You might like it better if you didn’t call it that. It’s nice. All my best childhood memories are there.”
I bit into my apple. “It’s an Adventure, right?”
“Yep. Affordable and New.”
“A Fresh Start.” These were the words we used to explain it—to ourselves, to our friends in the city who couldn’t understand our leaving. It was a mantra and something to pin my mind to.
“We already own our own home there. Can’t say that in Vancouver. No one can say that in Vancouver.”
“But is it really a home?” I broke the chain of self-comfort. “It’s a cabin.” I rolled down my window and threw the apple core out toward the dark fields.
“It’s something. And it’s ours. Just like this car. Just like this family.” That was Danny’s role: Reminder of Things So My Questions Don’t Wreck the Fairy Tale.
I watched out the window even though the world was becoming indistinct in the dusk. I could feel the fever thrumming in my body, the fields and forests passing too fast. I closed my eyes and let sleep court me. Danny talked on about our destination, the quality of the road, about other drivers, animals in the ditch, and I let it rumble over me, just like the highway rumbled under me. Part of me was still in my bed in our old apartment in Vancouver. I imagined myself a ghost there. Some other couple in some other bed would lie down on my ghostly form and not know it. It felt like my breasts were glowing red.
I interrupted him by lifting a hand. “Can you see the heat coming off me? Like asphalt in the summer?”
“No,” he laughed.
“Turn up the music. I need distraction.”
“I’m not distraction enough?”
“Not from the calibre of my misery.” I thought about that for a second. I softened it for him. “But close.”
In Prince George, we rented a room. Danny wasn’t sure about driving on in the night with me in my condition (mastitis, misery). I told him he just didn’t know the way to his grandpa’s cabin. He pretended I wasn’t talking. Thomas slept all the way into town, up the stairs in his car seat, and into the motel room, which smelled like cigarette smoke and boiled sheets. It made me nervous, the baby sleeping, because it meant he would wake up at some point and the cycle would begin again. I needed the Advil to have kicked in so I could stand the nursing. Danny said four extra-strength pills were too many, that they would go in the milk and Thomas would drink it, but I told him he wasn’t inside my body and he didn’t have to have a kid sucking on him like the world’s biggest tick. He said that wasn’t funny. I closed my eyes again, which was stupid because I was standing in the middle of a dinky motel room at the Gateway to the North
, which then made me cry because I’d never felt so far from home, even when I was travelling in Europe or South America, even in my dreams.
In the morning, Danny brought coffee and doughnuts to me while I nursed and swore. Thomas rolled off my nipple at the sound of his dad’s voice and broke out beaming, milk streaming out of his toothless mouth.
“Thank god he’s got no teeth.”
“Does it feel any better? They look sort of smaller and less solid.” He meant my breasts. He reached to stroke one, so I intercepted his hand and held it, squeezing it to let him think that was better than touching me. Thomas clambered back on my boob, his spiked, starfish hands all over my bare chest. I remembered my dad’s purebred lab sheepishly trying to escape the enclosure she shared with her puppies, her scratched and bleeding dugs slapping the barrier as she stepped over it. I sent my love back to her too late; I would never have locked her in there with them had I known.
I ate my doughnut: a long john, my favourite, then I looked in the bag hopefully, and saw Danny had bought me another. He smiled through his bite, happy to have pleased me.
Prince George turned out to be bigger than I’d thought. It was Saturday, I remember. We put Thomas in the baby carrier—a wrap that I still hadn’t mastered on my own. Danny wound it around me while I clutched the squirming baby to my front. I liked having my hands free and feeling like the baby was contained, but there was an unsettling element in his being tied to me. If I could figure out how it worked, I could strap him to Danny, and they would both like that, I knew.
We put on our sunglasses and put a hat on the baby and went out into the wind and grit of downtown Prince George in September. This would become my defining opinion of the city—dirt and gorgeousness in equal measure: fresh produce and cheerful stall-minders, blue sky above low buildings, boarded-up storefronts, white and Indigenous people in dust-coloured, many-layered clothing, congregating on benches and in alleys, trees in full fall leaf. I imagined us from above or behind, as if seen through a lens and we were typical and beautiful in our dailiness. Danny bought jerky and honey with cash. I ate a fresh bun. The painkillers worked and my breasts subsided, and when we got in the car to drive the rest of the way I was calm, becalmed, submissive to the current. I watched the scenery pass like an unnarrated nature film. Thomas slept in the back, Danny drove, and I waved goodbye to Mr. P.G. like he wasn’t a silly, giant wooden man at the edge of the last city in northern BC, but like a dad or a kind uncle who’d bought a lollipop to calm me.
In Vanderhoof there was a restaurant with lemon meringue pie where women wore white netted caps on the backs of their heads and dresses that brushed the floor. The meringue was delicious. I nursed Thomas in the shade of a tree, counting out loud the whole time to take my mind off the bolts of pain that broke through the barrier of the meds.
I read the descriptions of provincial parks to Danny while he drove.
“Liard. Where is that even?”
I checked. “Four hundred and eleven kilometres from Dease Lake.”
“How can that still be in the province? That would mean it takes three days to drive from Vancouver to the Yukon.”
“It does. And it takes two days to drive from Vancouver to the cabin.”
“You could do it in one.”
“Do you think anyone will visit us?”
“They said they would. Tanya said so. And Alison.”
I’d stared out the window at a creek creeping through a marshy field. Tanya wouldn’t come. There would be nowhere to shop. Alison said all kinds of things she didn’t mean. I remembered the shower they threw for me before Thomas was born, all the women in Tanya’s apartment. All of them drinking wine except me. The gifts ridiculous or inappropriate. How I’d realized in the middle of the party that the idea of a baby would stay abstract for them. Suddenly they’d seemed outlined in black—their short skirts, everyone’s hair up off their necks in the heat of the evening, Tanya slapping our friend Elise on the thigh and bending at the waist while she laughed. They’d all complimented me on how thin I’d stayed through the pregnancy. They bought me cute T-shirts and gourmet tea. They’d asked how Danny was handling it.
My phone hadn’t buzzed since the goodbye texts. Now I was abstract, too. How could these single women in their early twenties, my own age, with jobs and dates and downtown lives, imagine my new life when I could hardly fathom it, and I was living it? I felt nauseous and rolled my window down.
“You okay, Ren?”
I didn’t answer.
“I could stop.”
I waved him away.
“We’re almost there.”
Where was there? Cows stood hock-deep in creek water, crows lined the crossbars on power poles. We turned right at an intersection between two fields—the highway we left carrying on over the hundreds of kilometres to the Pacific, the highway we followed stretching out in front of us. I saw on the map that it ended in Fort St. James.
“There are fish in that lake as big as sharks, Renee. They live for a hundred years. They’re like dinosaurs.”
“I hate sharks.”
“Sturgeon are bottom-feeders. They eat stuff like weeds and garbage off the bottom. The thing is, native people there have fished them for generations. And there’d be a huge celebration when they caught one.”
“That would be like eating a grandfather. A hundred-year-old fish. Yuck. And I don’t think you say native people, I think you’re supposed to say Indigenous. Or maybe First Nations? I don’t know.”
Danny shrugged. “My grandpa always said Carrier. The Carrier people live up here. My dad said Indian, but what did he know? Anyway, Pope Mountain is the one on the north side, where we’ll be. There’s a trail to the top. I climbed it with my grandpa when I was five. He was so proud of me. I remember the view. Or maybe I’m remembering another view.”
We’d sold our bikes, our packs, the toaster, and the microwave. I kept the popcorn maker. We’d never bought a crib because we knew we’d be leaving, so Thomas slept with us or in a pack-away playpen. We felt so sensible, on schedule, like we had it figured out and everyone else was stupid for not understanding. Didn’t they realize that $2,000 rent on a one-bedroom apartment was ridiculous? We had five acres waiting for us in the north. We could fish in the lake at the bottom of our deck stairs. We could maybe have a garden.
Danny created a story of us that he recited in the months and weeks leading up to our leaving. But the moments he wasn’t talking, when I was on my own in the supermarket or out on a quick trip for more moving boxes, doubts crept in. Could we buy espresso up there? Or, when I was thinking like a grown-up: would there be a hospital? Would we have a doctor?
The map of northern BC is a blue-veined expanse freckled with lakes and more lakes. Names that made me laugh or that were too tough to sound out were dots along the highway, spaced far apart, impossible to imagine. I asked Danny to pronounce them and then, when we drove through Lytton, Clinton, Cache Creek, and Quesnel, I stared around me for clues in their strange ordinariness: gas stations and kids on the street corners smoking cigarettes. No indication in the benches and civic signs that I was on a journey into the wild—these were just normal Canadian towns. There were coffee shops that sold espresso. There were movie theatres showing movies not too out of date. The sky looked superblue beyond the Quonset huts and cinder-block warehouses, the rivers picturesque beside cookie-cutter houses and cute little rural schools. I’d looked back to check the baby when we were five hours out of Vancouver and caught sight of a train bridge behind us in the distance like a pencil drawing of the American West. It was momentous and simple at the same time. Dizziness overcame me every time I turned my head. I complained so much Danny did all the driving. And then the mastitis.
“I remember this.” Danny scanned the land ahead of us, his voice quiet, almost reverent. “I remember this bridge. This is the Nechako River. People swim here. I swam here once with Dad and Jimmy.” I preferred not to look at the river because of his druggie brother Jimmy,
but I could feel it was old, and real, and bigger than anything in my head—it would outlast me and my opinion of Jimmy.
We crossed the bridge, drove up the other side of the valley and onto a plateau. The sky stretched limitless in all directions. East between the edges of two huge fields, then north again, we drove and I watched a raptor rising on a thermal, round and round, up and up.
“This is Braeside. I remember my grandpa saying so. Farming country. There used to be a huge barn there, where those trees are. Look at that tractor. Jesus, that’s huge. This is Twelve Mile Hill. See the sign?”
I saw the sign. I saw a power station and a coyote in the ditch. Danny kept talking. Names and farms fell away behind us. We drove north, all uphill, it felt, closer and closer to the clouds. My eyes were heavy behind my sunglasses, the car hot in the afternoon sun, the comfort of Danny’s voice over the drone of the engine. I woke suddenly, thrown against my seat belt, the weight of the car’s momentum crushing me into the webbing. I heard the tires screech, Danny’s shout and Thomas’s holler. Three bears scampered off the highway into the brush at the side of the road.
“They came out of nowhere!”
I had my seat belt off, clambering over the seat to get to the baby. I jostled my breast on the headrest, wincing at the pain, and got Thomas’s soother back in his mouth. He settled immediately. He closed his eyes. I sat back. Danny held his hands up and we watched them tremble.
“You said there’d be wildlife,” I tried to joke.
“I think I need a minute. Can you drive?” He pulled onto the shoulder, stopped the engine, and got out. He walked away from us up the highway. No cars came. No cars, and no cars. I looked back behind us and saw nothing. I got out.
It smelled like hot, dry grass. It was so still, I heard the rustle of the needles on the roadside trees. I called his name. He turned and waved at me but didn’t come back.
Glory Page 2
