“Heather, skin burns less through glass.”
She glanced at him. “Bet?” she asked.
“Five dollars?”
“You’re on.” But this time there was not the same lightheartedness.
An hour later they passed an unmarked turnoff to the north.
“The turnoff to Isaac’s Harbour,” Benny said solemnly. They had been there together, two years ago, and had a wonderful time.
“No, it’s still ahead.”
He waited, then: “Yes, Heather, that was it.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“It’s very important for you to be right, isn’t it?”
“I might say the same thing to you, stranger.”
“What does that mean?”
They would be home soon, and they would separate. There was a tiny swollen pressure behind her eyes, deep in her optic nerves and across the bridge of her nose.
“I’m sorry, Benny. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I feel as though I don’t know what to say to you anymore.”
“Hey, there’s that new coffee shop up ahead. Let’s stop, stretch our legs. I’m sure we’ll have better luck with the coffee there.” He paused. “I’m sorry too, sweetheart.”
She turned to look at him, thinking they could somehow start the weekend over, but his expression was guarded. His eyes looked glazed. His smile was apologetic.
At the coffee shop they took a table by the window. It was late afternoon and colder. The wind had turned around and the sun was gone. The small harbour just below the parking lot was bottlenecked with ice.
He said the coffee was not bad and encouraged her to drink hers, but she knew it would only increase her agitation.
“I think I’ll go for a long walk when I get home,” he said.
“I think I’ll pop in on my mother.” She felt relieved; it was beginning to feel normal.
“Are you going to tell her about this weekend?”
It was then that Heather noticed the elderly woman sitting alone, directly behind Benny. She wore a black wig and a hearing aid like a wad of gum in her ear. Her face looked unbearably tired. She was resting her elbows on the table and holding her mug inches from her mouth between sips, as though to conserve the energy involved in lifting the mug from the tabletop.
“I worry about your mother,” Benny was saying. “She knows a lot of people. I’m not comfortable with her knowing about my life. It’s not her business. Can you promise me you won’t discuss our weekend?”
“Benny, is that really so important?” She had almost said, now.
“You won’t promise me that?”
She couldn’t look at him. She was staring at the old woman, so that when the woman turned suddenly, her expression transformed from stoic self-preservation to alarm, Heather was looking directly into her watery eyes.
“Did you hear that?” the woman asked Heather. “Someone shouting?”
Heather turned back to Benny. “Don’t do this,” she said.
“Someone shouting?” the woman repeated.
Two couples approached an adjacent table. Heather was aware of them start to set down their food, then glance at Heather and Benny and move to a table farther away.
Benny was reaching for the ignition when he stopped and leaned against the steering wheel, squinting at the ice in the harbour below. “Are those seals?” he asked.
She had seen them, too. Her voice, when she answered, was faint. “No.”
“What are they?”
They could hear the shouting now. And see the figures below at the edge of the pack ice. As they got back out of the car, they were immediately met with the frustrating impression of slow motion brought on by panic as a young man scrambled up the slope at the edge of the parking lot, waving his arms and shouting, Does anyone have a rope? while restaurant customers and employees were running out of the restaurant. Within seconds, ropes were hauled from the backs of trucks and cars and Benny had disappeared into a crowd of men rushing down to the ice.
Heather followed, then fell behind when an elderly man, anxious to help, appeared beside her and took her arm above the elbow. She slowed, but felt driven to the point of nausea by her anxiety to keep up with Benny, whom she could no longer see. She glanced at the man, trying to hide her impatience. He was unsteady on his feet and his hands were trembling. He wore a dark overcoat and a slightly grandiose leather cap.
Then, halfway down the slope, he seemed to grow furious with himself.
“Go on, maid, don’t wait for me,” he said, but Heather knew he would never be able to negotiate the rocky embankment alone. She would later remember thinking it was regrettable the day was ending, the light already beginning to fade.
As Heather reached the bottom of the slope, she saw a huddle of men along the shore. Benny was among them, stretched across a ledge of ice with another man locked to his waist. One end of a green rope was wrapped around Benny’s wrist. The other end disappeared into the water. What had looked like an expanse of solid ice from the parking lot was a mass of ice chunks, none thick or stable enough to support a person for long. Swells were travelling through the slushy ice, lifting and dropping their cargo before crashing against the shore. With each wave the sea heaved closer to the men.
“I’ve lost him!” Benny shouted wildly. “Hey! Doesn’t anyone see him?”
The man holding him straightened, though he kept a hand on Benny’s back. “No, boy. And you’d better get back a bit.” Heather could see a hardness around the man’s mouth as he spoke.
More people were arriving, and in the distance sirens sounded. A waitress appeared, breathless, and asked, Was it children?
Someone nodded. Two boys.
“Why weren’t the foolish buggers in school?” a man asked.
Heather turned and saw it was the old fellow she’d helped down the slope.
“It’s Sunday, Pops.”
“Come on,” the man holding Benny said. “You’re risking your own life now.”
The man gave Benny a hand and pulled him away from the water. Benny stood and stared first at the old man and then at the growing crowd. A couple of men came up and touched Benny, but his expression was blank and unresponsive. He still held the rope. Heather moved to stand beside him.
“But he had the rope in his hand,” Benny said.
People were moving jerkily along the shoreline, searching for some sign of a body, some colour other than the grey and white of water and ice. Heather knew that as the seconds passed it became more and more likely that no one would see those boys alive again. Yet only minutes ago — while she was picking her way down the embankment — they had been right here, with wet faces and flattened hair, in soaked, weighted winter jackets, reaching to Benny and thinking those inches to safety were nothing. That Benny would haul them out. She could see all this on his face and hear it in his voice.
Customers from the coffee shop, people like Benny and Heather who had only been passing through, began climbing back up the slope, while singly and in groups, townspeople came reeling down the embankment. Heather imagined the houses in the community above emptying as word went quickly around. Police, fire fighters and rescue workers appeared, bringing with them flotation rings, blankets, ladders, rakes and more rope — much of it simply tossed onto the ground. One woman, who had left the house without a jacket or coat, had to be held back from the shore. She wanted to leap into the water. Shouting, she didn’t understand why no one was going in after her son.
Heather thought of the pack ice she and Benny had marvelled at two days earlier. At the time it had seemed majestic, bounteous. Now it seemed like trickery.
The day Justin Tucker came to Heather’s house for her first date had not, in fact, been their first date. The week before he had driven her out to Torbay when the ice was in. She had never told anyone. She had followed him down across a sloping meadow and then onto the edge of the ice. The water had been still, not like this. She had seen seals a long way off. She knew of no one who h
ad been out on the ice. Everyone knew it was stupid — stupid as taking drugs and stealing.
Justin had hopped from ice pan to ice pan, a kind of flight, and she had followed him. It was just the two of them in the universe, zigzagging back and forth in looping, preordained patterns. After an hour they hiked back up over the meadow holding hands, still full of the exhilaration, the shock, of having tempted disaster, of having pressed up against the unimaginable. Was that what these two boys here had been seeking?
Heather felt the concerns of her life — bad coffee, sunburns through glass, even Benny’s illness — shrink before the horror of losing a child. She wondered if Benny’s private, inexpressible fear was the fear of losing his son, should the worst occur. Benny would not be here to guide him, shelter him. To simply know him as he grew from boy to man. Heather glanced around. When she finally saw Benny, she recognized him first by his clothing. He was drifting among the crowd, not speaking, no longer offering advice or help, like a sleepwalker, a shadow.
She made her way towards him. It was like moving through a busy train station or bus terminal. When she reached him, she took his hand. It was icy cold.
“Let’s get you home,” she said.
He turned to her. He looked like a man who would never comprehend another thing in his life.
Chapter Seven
Heather’s mother was crossing the backyard, trailing cigarette smoke and absently inspecting any new growth. Heather watched her bend down and ram the cigarette butt into the edge of a flower bed. Then she stood and lit a second.
When she came back into the room, she carried the smell of cigarettes caught in a layer of outdoor freshness. “Well, I’m gone.”
Heather nodded, watching a large colourful bird fly up to the feeder like it was doing the breast stroke. It had a black crescent on its breast and was so distinctive she knew it would be easy to identify. Yet somehow she felt let down. Gradually birdwatching from her bedroom was losing its magic. And it never seemed quite as exciting as that moment with the red crossbills.
Her mother was watching her from the doorway.
“Heather, you have all these books about birds, but you haven’t a single book about infants. You don’t have a crib or high chair or diapers or anything. And that can be so easily remedied.”
“Mom. I do not need a baby shower. Mom?”
“Okay, okay. Can I take you shopping then?”
“Not today.”
“Heather, you should get out. Your feet have healed. Even just a walk. Everyone is walking.”
“Everyone has quit smoking.”
“It would be good for you. It would get you out of your head. And that old bathrobe.”
Heather smiled, thinking her mother was a good example of someone for whom a little Reader’s Digest psychology went a long way.
“You’re stronger than you think. And actually quite normal.”
“Mom. No more psychobabble.”
“You’re right. I’ll stop.” Her mother went to the window, scaring off the beautiful bird, and looked across the yard at a neighbouring house. “Did I tell you I saw Peg O’Keefe? She regrets painting her house now. Golden Radiance. Does that sound like a heritage colour to you?”
Heather shrugged. Sometimes her mother got started on questions. Benny was like that. Had been like that.
“Did you know all five of Peg’s children are doctors?”
All those years, all those questions. He was always meeting her with a question, a direct look, an expectant pause.
“All tops in their class, Heather. Tops everything. Timmy. Dr. O’Keefe now. Eye specialist. A real crackerjack.”
If she wanted, Heather thought she could remember every single one of his questions, where they had been, what they had worn, or not worn. Her eyes began to fill and she blinked quickly.
“Only one moved away. The middle boy. What was his name? Callum is a cardiologist and Grace is something. Susan is a dietician.”
Heather looked at her mother. “Dieticians are not doctors.”
“So you are listening to me. Well, she married a doctor. Tops in their field. You look pale, honey.”
Years and years of questions, like kisses, tossed to her.
Are you a writer?
What made you choose that refrigerator? This bra, that blouse, this car?
Does this relationship mean as much to you as it does to me?
When will I see you again?
Her mother drew in a long breath. “Heather, many people face at least one serious hardship in their life.”
“Please. You don’t need to go on.”
“Then how about names? Have you given any thought to names yet?”
“What if a person has more than one hardship?”
“Those people are unlucky.”
Heather followed her mother to the door, then after she left, lingered there, taking in the view of the outside. She had hardly left the house in three months. Few people knew she was pregnant, a state of affairs that would be obvious to anyone now. She could hear birds, children, traffic, even the sound of her neighbour cutting wood. Was it Saturday or Sunday? He always cut and stacked new wood on the weekends this time of year and left it in his backyard through the summer to dry.
She began roaming through her house, tidying up, but for days still did not go outside.
One afternoon she was in the kitchen heating a can of soup. When it began to boil, she lifted the pot from the burner and remembered that once she had been happy. It must have something to do with the soup, she thought, reminding her of being over at Dad’s when it was his week to have them and Mandy wasn’t putting anything into her mouth except tomato soup. She had a sudden clear memory of who she was then, in her teens, a girl defined by frequent stabbing moments of happiness. Even the passage of time, the change of seasons, the very weather — wind, rain, snow, sun — had been sublime. They had protected her. She had been addicted to those moments.
Early the next morning, Heather rose and went to the window and looked out at her car, a red Echo. She speculated half a tank. She dug out heavy boots, an oversized coat, her new field guides and Mandy’s binoculars. She looked around. As soon as she was home again she’d take a shower and do the laundry. She’d go grocery shopping and thoroughly clean the house. She felt grand. It was the first time she had put something other than slippers on her feet in weeks, but she barely winced getting into the boots.
Outside she discovered it was a soft spring day. She squeezed her stomach in behind the steering wheel and was surprised by the cramped quarters. Her back immediately began to ache and she was breathless, but undaunted.
As she parked beside the dumpster behind the Canadian Wildlife Service building, Heather realized she felt almost hot under the spring sun. She dropped the visor and checked herself in the mirror. The woman who met her gaze looked alert, perhaps agitated, though frankly, the best word to describe that face, Heather concluded, popping the visor back up just as Darren exited the back of the building, would be deranged.
She watched Darren twice go back inside to collect something. He was wearing a T-shirt and loose jogging pants, an adaptation, Heather guessed, to the warmer weather. He fussed with the windshield wipers, though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and checked the air pressure in the tires. His movements were uncharacteristically sluggish. As she started her car and pulled out behind him, Heather decided there were two questions she needed answered.
Was he married?
Did she want him to be married?
PART TWO
Chapter Eight
The storm petrel was in a box in the basement, which was the safest place for it, though they owned neither dog nor cat and a bird would be safe anywhere in their house. But it was so small, so much smaller than you might expect. Not even the size of a blue jay, barely that of a robin. And it was the second in a week. The first was found in the Virginia Park area by a woman. It was sitting on her doorstep and she almost stepped on it leaving for work. Sh
e screamed, thinking it was something else, a rat perhaps. The second one — the one in the basement — had made landfall at the Kidsville Daycare in Mount Pearl. The children found it beneath the slide and had been passing it around all morning. People didn’t know what to do with them. It took a few seconds to realize they were looking at a bird at all. On rainy nights hundreds could be found stranded inland, having mistaken wet roads and parking lots for the black surface of the sea.
Darren knew not only what they were but that you needed to keep them sequestered until it was good and dark.
The Leach’s storm petrel was the first bird Darren identified. He was twelve, on his way home from school, when he saw a queer-looking bird in an empty lot. It walked clumsily among the weeds and, in Darren’s hands, gave off a sharp fishy stink. He brought it home and in the evening his mother sent him to the library with his older sister, Jeanette, who flipped through magazines while he read about Oceanodroma leucorhoa. An abundant species of seabird, but one few people ever saw. It spent its entire life over the ocean, hundreds of miles from any shore, visiting land only to breed, and only at night.
He had hurried home, knowing exactly what to do, but while they were gone the dog had crept into his bedroom and swallowed the bird whole.
“That poor dog was only jealous,” his mother said.
By ten o’clock the storm petrel was restless, its internal clock tuned to the arrival of night. From the kitchen they could hear it fluttering against the cardboard box, and Jeanette wondered aloud if it were not time for him to release the creature.
Darren put the box in the truck and drove it out to Cape Spear. When he opened the box he could see that the tips of the tail and wing feathers were severely frayed. It had been a trying day in the playground and a longer one in the box. The steep forehead gave the storm petrel a wise, pedantic look, despite its tiny size, while its slender black legs ended in webbed pads that looked impossibly soft. He imagined thousands of them running over the surface of the ocean at night, pushing against water as unyielding as concrete.
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