by Various
“Lake Winnipeg can be like the ocean,” I offered. “It’s a lot closer.”
Lora pretended not to hear. She was filling in Becky’s passport application. Next of kin. Who to call in case of emergency. The colour of her eyes, her hair. How much weight she took up in this world.
The passports cost $67 a piece. We had eleven days until payday. A carton of milk in the fridge. A couple of whitefish in the freezer. A mounting stack of bills from every quack we could find this side of the border. Tibetan herbalists. Homeo-pathologists. The oxygenated water man.
These were our dark days.
“We could go to those little cabins at Gimli,” I tried. “Becky loves it there.”
“In winter, Michael? So she can stand on the beach in her snowsuit? Nothing’s open.”
“I meant in the summer. We can take Becky next summer.”
When Lora finally looked up at me, I’d become a stranger. Her eyes saw just another someone who couldn’t comprehend how far away the summer was.
Two cops – a large white guy and an even larger black woman – appeared out of nowhere. Me and the pervert were still down on the ground, panting. After I choked out my side of the story, the guy muddled through his. He was just taking a few beach photos for his wife’s scrapbook was all. He blubbered the words in fits and starts, like a four-year-old getting jabbed with needles.
“So why’d you dump the camera then?” the lady cop asked. Officer Jarvis. I still don’t know her first name. She answers her phone like a man. Jarvis, she barks, in a deep, no-nonsense, get-to-the-point kind of way.
The guy shook his head from side to side, mumbling how there was a crazy man chasing him through the trees.
She followed me back to the mangroves and we rooted around in the muck.
“That’s a nasty cut,” she said, her giant hand pointing to my shoeless foot.
Blood gurgled from between my toes and puddled on the wet ground.
I found the camera wedged between the folds in a mossy log. The lens cap had sprung loose, cracked in two. Jarvis pushed me aside effortlessly, brushed off the ants, and lifted it by the strap.
I wanted to know what they could do to a pervert in the us of A. If they could shackle his wrists and throw him in a cell with carjacking types who had little girls of their own.
Her expression remained hard, but her voice seemed to soften. “Let us worry about the details, how about? You give us your information and we’ll let you know.”
Lora’s church paid for our airfare. I didn’t want their charity – I didn’t even know those people – but their gesture made Lora cry. I vaguely remembered meeting Danny the Preacher in the meat section of Sobeys. He seemed more a John Lennon than a Jerry Falwell type. I imagined him sitting beside my wife, one empathic palm lightly patting her knee, while she poured out the details of our whole sad story. I hated that picture in my head, but it was those kinds of intimacies that allowed her to go on. And she had to go on or I was done for.
In the beginning, I tried to do the right thing. I’d usher our ragged family back to the house from the latest ordeal with the god-like Dr. Arnold. We’d throw in the Land Before Time video for Becky, and Lora would go into the bathroom to scrub away the hospital stink, and I’d move from room to room, fixing the sticky window and cracked tiles, rechecking the furnace filter, re-sorting the paint cans under the stairs. I’d grind the coffee beans when the church people arrived, bow my head and wait silently when they offered their prayers, hold back Becky’s hair when she vomited into the pail. Throughout it all, I’d keep saying to Lora, over and over, “Becky’s gonna be okay; we’re gonna be okay.”
That was in the beginning. Lora finally told me to shut up and spare her my empty, godless assurances. I felt relieved to not have to speak the words. After that, we spent our days dancing around the elephant, waiting for night, barely clinging to respectability until Becky had been tucked away. Then we came together like animals, my wife and me, clenching and pounding and clawing through the darkness. I did nothing to stop it. I let the anger wash over me like a scalding shower, not much caring if I tore her in two. In the mornings, Lora dressed in the closet behind the closed door so I wouldn’t see her purpled skin.
When Officer Jarvis and I got back to the parking lot the other cop stood post by the police cruiser, arms crossed, yawning. The pervert slumped in the back seat. I walked up to the car and glared through the glass at his sweaty face. A blood-soaked gauze square had been taped to the gash above his right ear. He stared past my hip at the camera swinging below Jarvis’s fist. Then he put his unshackled hands to his face and rocked back and forth. I almost felt pity. Not for the man, but for what a man can be reduced to.
Jarvis handed me a pen and a clipboard and told me to use the cruiser’s hood for a desk. She said I should write down everything from when I first saw the suspect to when she and her partner showed up. “Stick to the facts,” she warned. “Leave your emotions out of this.”
I stared at the form for a long time, emotionless, trying to remember the facts. We wanted to give Becky everything. That was a fact. But when that wasn’t enough, we brought her to the ocean instead. Lora and I set up camp on the beach, closer to the water than the rest. “Look, Becky, look at the huge waves.” We watched as our daughter listlessly filled her pail with the heavy, wet sand. “Where are the shells, Michael?” Lora kept asking. “There’s just these tiny broken bits that could be anything. Washed up cardboard pieces or oyster turds.”
“I’ll get rid of the lunch garbage.” I walked away from them, turning back once. I remember trying to muster a little enthusiasm for Lora’s sake, making some stupid remark about blowing up the beach ball, a soccer game, girls against boys. Lora nodded absently, not taking her eyes off Becky.
The cameraman stood beyond the garbage cans. Click. Click. Click. I thought maybe it was dolphins, or a pelican skimming the water’s surface, so I turned around too. That’s when I saw what he saw. I was overcome by such a profound and utter misery my knees buckled out from under me. The top of Becky’s head was as smooth as a snow globe, her stick of a leg needle-bruised from knee to thigh. Click. Click. Click. She could have been a war refugee, a skeleton child with an unspeakable past. Lora kept thrashing Becky’s bathing suit with her open palm, as though it were filled with stinging bees and if she just kept pummelling, she could kill them all. Click. Slap. Click. Slap.
I scribbled out the story about my chasing the bastard. First we ran here, and then we ran there. I left out the part about my needing to run away from that scene on the beach.
Officer Jarvis read over my account while her partner leaned into the car door and examined the group of bikinied girls that had gathered a few cars down. Jarvis must have been satisfied, because she initialled the statement and told me to go back to my family. Before she let me go, she folded at the waist and looked down at my congealing toes. “Get that checked out,” she ordered. “You should probably get a tetanus shot. No telling what you stepped on.”
Then she flicked a dismissive wrist at her partner and they both got in the car and drove away with the pervert in the back.
By the time I limped back to the beach, Lora was frantic. Becky had fallen asleep in her arms under the shade of the rented beach umbrella. Where had I disappeared to? How could I just leave them like that? What happened to my foot for God sakes?
I stuck to the facts, while Lora’s eyes darted back and forth looking for terrible things against the concrete wall that held back the road. Then we packed up the umbrella and the towels and pails and the ball-still-in-its-bag and trudged through the tunnel and back to our motel.
Lora wanted me to go to emergency for my foot, but I couldn’t face another hospital, so we stayed in our shabby room the rest of the day. She filled the bathtub and I soaked my foot until the yellow water turned pink, and then she wrapped my toes in overpriced gauze strips from the motel’s gift shop. We ordered takeout Chinese that came in those house-shaped cardboard boxes you s
ee on TV. Becky ate part of a dumpling. We threw the rest away.
“I want to go home, Michael,” Lora whispered. “There’s no hope here.” Our daughter lay between us on the motel bed, oblivious to the ocean we’d brought her to on the other side of the closed curtains.
Becky slept the entire flight home and all through that night too. The next morning she wolfed down a man-sized heap of Shreddies. Dr. Arnold told us this might happen and that it would be a good sign. When Becky held out her bowl for more, Lora kissed her forehead and said, natural-like, “Sure sweetie. Of course. As much as you want,” as if her asking was a regular thing. But when Lora tried to pour the milk, her fingers shook so badly I had to cover her hand with mine and steer the carton to the bowl.
I couldn’t bear that scene – my daughter asking for more, like a normal kid, my wife wanting so badly to pour life back into her she was trembling like a bird. I left them in the kitchen and climbed into my truck and drove past every house in the neighbourhood. I couldn’t think of where else to go, so I headed to the job-site. I was supposed to be at the beach, taking care of my family. Nobody expected me back for days. But then that’s the thing, isn’t it? Life’s surprises. Nobody expected to find monsters under the bed either, waiting to prey on their little girls.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Dr. Arnold told us. This was at our last consultation. “But I’m optimistic,” he added at the end. Sneering, I thought. Lora said it’s just the way his mouth moves when he tries to smile. I suppose I should feel grateful to the man. But he makes it sound like we’ve been on a camping trip together, sharing the same tent. Who is he to think he can dole out hope like ice cream scoops? When I picture all the times his rough, clammy hands have been on my daughter, poking and prodding, oblivious to her tears, I want nothing more than to punch him in the mouth.
But hope is slippery. Becky’s grown an inch these past few months, the top of her new reddish curls reaching the sixth ladybug on her growth chart. I’m afraid to blink in case I miss something.
Lora hasn’t confessed to her church about the wasted there-and-back airfare. I haven’t confessed to Lora either. She has no idea about the kind of thoughts that were chasing me on that beach and ever since. My wife believes I’m a man she can count on. I’ve overheard her tell her friends as much when she’s talking on the phone.
A few weeks after we got back from our trip, she sent a card to Preacher Danny, which we both signed. He posted the note on the vestibule’s bulletin board. She wrote: We can’t thank you enough for your prayers. Your generous gift gave our family God’s ocean. She says God will forgive her for omitting the details.
Officer Jarvis says it’s all in the details. The pervert was a city worker, a member of the Coconut Creek Scratch Bowling League. His digital images were just a low-grade ranking of kiddy bum shots and side views. There were twenty-two such pictures on his memory stick – no coercion or enticement or children posed in sexual acts. There was no proof of distribution, either, nothing to warrant more than a slap on the wrist from the pornography police.
I should have thought to kill him when I had the chance. I have this weird little recurring daydream where he hangs himself in his wife’s laundry room. It comforts me, his dangling head swinging back and forth inside mine.
The summer’s come fast. My wife and I have a new routine these sweltering nights. We lock the screen door and turn out the porch light, and then we sneak into Becky’s room to listen to the sounds of her little girl snores. Lora sometimes takes my hand. Or she stands on her toes and brushes her cheek against mine. Or she rests against me like I’m her rock. She does these things so tenderly I can hardly catch my breath. Somehow she’s forgotten how we were, back when we had a dying child. We’ve never once spoken about the marks we left on each other. I want to ask for forgiveness, but I don’t have the courage.
I bought a bag of seashells at the airport. This was just before we pushed through the same boarding gate we’d stepped out of twenty-eight hours earlier. It was one of those rare last-minute ideas that turned out right. Lora buries the shells in the backyard sandbox, and she and Becky go beachcombing before the sun gets too hot.
On Saturday mornings I crack a beer, stretch out on the grass, and watch my girls. Mostly I watch Lora. There’ll be something about the way she tilts her head back and smiles at the sky that makes me believe the damage can be reversed. She’s long since erased the dirty pictures. I wish I could follow her path, dive into the place where she goes inside, but I don’t know how. Where she’s able to see the goodness of her God working alongside the terrible things that happen to people, I still see the terrible things. I see Becky tethered to the hospital bed, Becky inside his camera, Becky in the evidence file. I see Lora struggling underneath me, my fingers clamped over her throat or digging into the flesh of her perfect white arms. Sometimes, I wake up from a dead sleep and feel my lungs exploding, like I’ve been running across a beach of broken glass, trying to get away.
Officer Jarvis says to stop calling. She says the case is closed, and there’s nothing more to discuss. I think about what it takes to see what she sees each day and still keep going. To get out of bed, get your shirt buttoned right, act like you’re normal.
There’s a pea-shaped lump between my toes that throbs from morning to night. I don’t pretend to understand what I stepped into on that beach. All I know is I have my girls back, and I’d be hard pressed to run anywhere again. It’s a fair trade no matter which way you slice it. If Lora knew the whole story, she’d say her God thinks so too.
DANIEL GRIFFIN
THE LAST GREAT WORKS OF ALVIN CALE
I found out because of a dream. In this dream I was speaking to my son and asked how he was. “I’m skinny,” he said. “Really skinny.”
“How skinny?”
A long sandy silence followed. “Really, really skinny.”
“Why?” I said, and he paused again, long enough that it built a pressure inside me. Something awful waited.
“I’ve just become too skinny,” he said at last.
That pulled me to a shallow wakefulness and I tossed and turned a while. When the clock said five, I got out of bed, made coffee on the propane stove, and sat in the withering darkness. Although Alvin lives only a few hours south of me, we’ve whittled our connection thin and I hadn’t seen him in almost three years.
I should have made my way into town and phoned him right then, but instead, once daylight held a steady grip on the land, I picked up my rucksack and a small canvas and went out to paint.
There’s a cluster of giant firs I love – a cathedral that blots out the sky and encloses the forest floor. I set my stool in a well-worn spot in a bed of needles among the ferns and propped the blank canvas in front of myself. The painting consumed me as it always does, the physicality of the work, the concentration required to transfer life through my eyes and through the brush onto canvas. A day of work beat away the voices that dream had awoken. A week later, though, I dreamed about Alvin again. He said he wished he wasn’t so skinny. Pain and suffering lurked among those words. I was up early enough to watch the sun rise, but this time, once that ball of fire was clear of the trees, and its rays cut deep into my cabin, I walked out to the logging road, got in my truck, and headed for town. The nearest phone’s at a Petro-Can on the Pacific Rim Highway. I plugged in a quarter. Alvin’s phone rang almost a dozen times. I was ready to hang up when Sandy answered.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Skylar.”
“Oh my God. Skylar.” The way she said that set off a depth charge within me. “It’s your dad,” she said to Alvin. “Sorry if I woke you. If it’s a bad time …” And then my son was on the line. “I was wondering when you’d call.”
I didn’t recognize Alvin’s voice at first. He was six weeks into an experimental treatment for a stage-four tumour in his sinuses. His nose had started to collapse from the radiation and it gave his voice a high edge.
“Alvin?” I said. “What is it? W
hat’s going on?”
“Oh God, Dad. Oh Jesus. Didn’t you get my letters?”
I live in a cabin in the bush year round with no electricity and no phone. It’s crown land and it was once a commune of sorts. This story truly starts there almost thirty years ago. I was drawn to the west coast by what Emily Carr had done, what Jack Shadbolt and Sybil Andrews were doing, and what I thought I could do. I was pulled into the bush by the dark, rich colours of the earth, the filtered light and ancient trees. Alvin’s mother and I built the cabin I live in now. At its peak we were a community of a dozen souls – a draft dodger, his wife and their baby, a former math professor, a communist from the north of England, and a pair of sisters, one of whom had adopted a son. Curious locals joined us off and on. And starting in the summer of 1978, a girl from Quebec named Sylvette Turcotte. I met her on a rainy day outside the Co-op. She had a striking face – deep-set eyes, big and open. She’d travelled west with a boyfriend who now worked in a logging camp.
For almost three years Sylvette was my model. She was the source of the best work I’ve done in over forty years of painting. She had an elastic body, graceful and elegant in every posture. She had skin that picked up dimples of sunlight, a figure that cast shadows upon itself. There are models who contribute to figurative work on levels beyond shape and form, and she was one. Even today I believe her body enabled me to see the human figure in a new way.
People in town called us hippies. They talked about free love. There was love, but it was never free. My wife left me a year after Sylvette arrived. Alvin stayed. He was sixteen by then and had begun to sketch Sylvette while she posed for me. Like Picasso, Alvin never drew as a child draws. He was proficient and precise from the day he began. Standing beside me in that cabin twenty-some years ago, he captured her with simple strong lines, bold gestures with charcoal, pencil, and eventually paint.
