The Whole Beautiful World

by Melissa Kuipers

  Kirkby finally breaks through the mattress and secures it with the hook. He jumps into the tractor, which growls and blows warm exhaust onto the passengers. Kirkby grins back at them, and Emily tries frantically to get a grip on the corner of the mattress.

  The tractor pulls the chain taut so the mattress jolts into entertainment mode. “Yee-haw!” calls one of the guys at the back, and the girls in the middle giggle. Dirt and gravel are spitting up into Emily’s eyes and nose. She takes a deep breath and breaks into a coughing fit as her throat and lungs fill with dust.

  “Don’t breathe through your mouth!” the pilot yells.

  THAT AFTERNOON AT work the doctor had been called away from the clinic, which made Emily anxious because it meant she had to continue through failed pregnancies as if nothing had happened, remaining aloof to the patients’ questions until a medical professional could follow up with a proper diagnosis.

  Emily had greeted a woman who brought that palpable joy of pregnancy to the dimly lit room. Emily seldom shared the excitement anymore, finding a detached presence more beneficial for both herself and the patient. There had just been too many disappointments.

  This woman was bigger than she should be for ten weeks, her tight T-shirt bulging a little at the belly.

  Emily ran through her rehearsed lines: “Could you lift up your shirt for me, please?” and “I’m going to apply the gel to your stomach now. It might be a little cold.”

  “I’ve been trying for two years now,” the woman said, reaching up to touch the gauzy orange fabric around her neck. The scarf was swallowed up in the ridges of her neck as she leaned forward to watch the wand roll around on her belly, pushing out secrets of new life into the machine. But Emily could see that there was no life inside her, only lesions growing all along the inside of her uterus.

  “Can you see it?” the woman asked.

  “Not right now,” said Emily distantly. She dragged the probe along, driving waves of sound through the cancer, reflected brightly onto her screen. She wanted to say, “Don’t you know? Can’t you feel inside yourself that things are not right?” And yet, she thought, the signs can all be wrong—presumably this cancer had provided the woman with a false positive on her pregnancy tests.

  After one sharp prod from Emily’s transducer, the woman’s hand shot up protectively to her gel-covered belly—misdirected maternal instincts firing off. Emily turned the screen away from the woman’s arching neck, refusing to look at her. But the orange scarf kept flickering in the corner of her vision.

  “I’m supposed to be able to see it,” the scarf said. “The doctor said I could.”

  “Usually you can,” Emily said, trying to keep the transducer in her hand from shaking, “but I’m having some difficulties with the monitor.”

  Emily knew the woman feared what she thought was the worst, though she did not know what the worst was. After a minute the scarf asked quietly, “Did I miscarry?”

  “No,” said Emily, which was true, as there had never been anything there to miscarry. But everything within her tightened as soon as she said it, as if someone had wrapped elastics around every joint and muscle.

  The woman’s fist clenched and unclenched around the ends of the scarf. Emily pressed the wand into the wrong answers. She dug around, trying to get the clearest images of lumps and growths reverberating through the woman’s uterus that, at best, would mean she would survive and never bear the child she wanted.

  “I’VE LANDED IN this field before,” says the pilot, leaning his mouth close to her ear and pointing as they ride. She tries to look up, but immediately her eyes sting with dirt and resentment.

  “Right there, close to the road.” His voice rattles over the gravel. “We dragged for a while through the crops. Kirkby’s dad wasn’t too happy that we took out some of his plants.”

  Kirkby turns smoothly onto the road, and the mattress follows obediently. He turns and screams out of the window, “Damn you, Paula! Damn you and the mattress you fucked around on!”

  The riders holler and yelp back, beer glasses clinking with cheers. Kirkby’s tractor jolts into third gear.

  Kirkby begins to yank the tractor wheel back and forth. The mattress fishtails and its occupants lean to and fro, with exaggerated whoops and giggles. The mass of friends suddenly lurches too hard against Emily, and she tumbles through the gravel, then rolls into the tall grass on the shoulder.

  She lies there a minute, closing her eyes against the pain and whirling dust, waiting for the sound of the tractor turning around to come back for her. It doesn’t.

  She rubs pebbles from her arm. Her arm holds the memory of the pilot trying to grab her and hold her on, but the jolt must have been too hard.

  Her entire left side stings. The crickets buzz in unison with her pain. Then she realizes that all of the tiny elastics wrapped around her have snapped. She wraps her throbbing arm around her throbbing knees.

  Footsteps skim the gravel behind her, coming closer. She runs her fingers along her grimy cheek. She wants to be angry at him, but she isn’t. She wants to remember the reason she picked him. His hand is on her bruised shoulder, his toes against her behind. He bends over above her, his face upside-down.

  “Scraped up bad, eh?” he says to the top of her head. She nods. The skin on her reddening leg pulses as he comes around to face her, takes off his grubby T-shirt. His beard is grey with dust in contrast to the protected fuzz on his chest. He wraps the shirt around her leg. It’s an odd romantic gesture, and she grins as he gently ties the sleeves in a knot.

  He pulls her into his bare chest, a miscalculated hug in which her face is pressed against his armpit. He runs his hand up and down her back. He offers a comfort she hasn’t earned, a comfort she wishes she could send through the air to the scarf.

  They sit in silence for a few minutes, watching the sun give off a last glow.

  “Do you know,” he asks quietly, “why they always serve champagne after a balloon ride landing?”

  She shakes her head.

  He leans back on his elbows, unconcerned with the dew. “Back when they were first invented, people were pretty religious, superstitious. You know that whole, ‘If God meant men to fly he would have given them wings’ type thing.”

  She knows he has told this story again and again, rehearsed and unoriginal. And yet she wants to hear it so badly, to be part of his floating world, even if it’s happening in the wrong order.

  “So the first guys to make an air balloon crashed it in a farmer’s field and proceeded to light the farmer’s field on fire. The farmers run out to the balloon, convinced that it’s the devil’s work, ready to run them through with their pitchforks. Then the balloon pilots pull out their champagne. In those days only the nobles were allowed to drink it, so when they offered it to the peasants, obviously they had to be from the nobility and the nobility had been put in place by God, so it must be good.”

  He sighs. “Now it seems the farmers are still ready to run you through with pitchforks for damaging their crops. The champagne doesn’t make up for it. There was a time when you’d be welcomed like a celebrity.”

  He leans over her, reaching out to her with a practised arm. And somehow for the first time, the rehearsed aspect of his lines and gestures make the whole process more meaningful, like all the previous times had been in preparation for this moment. He does not know it yet, but this might only go on another day or month or two, and then it will pass, and Emily and the pilot will simply be memories for each other. The woman will know her bad news by then, will have her uterus pulled up from her body, and with it, her core hopes. But other news will also come and go, bad and good.

  The pilot gently wraps one arm around her, runs the other hand through her tangled hair. The tractor is coming back around and its rumble is growing, the headlights flickering against Emily’s eyelids as it bumps along the gravel. Its squeaky honk drowns out the buzz of the insects. She and the pilot laugh as the friends on the broken-marriage mattress slide by and c
atcall to them, their voices a brief stream of sound through the dusky air, and then just an echo as they float away.

  ROAD PIZZA

  ON THEIR WAY BACK FROM the Beer Store, the night before the accident, Volk and Jason found the road pizza. The car’s headlights along the causeway lit up the white pizza box, and they pulled over to find a fully intact Hawaiian pizza.

  When they got back to the cottage, they folded pieces together and ate them like sandwiches. Rachel and I wouldn’t touch the stuff.

  “Seriously, best pizza ever,” Jason said with pride as we brushed our teeth before bed.

  “Don’t kiss me,” I heard Rachel shriek at Volk from their bedroom. “Who knows where that pizza’s been.”

  The next morning, the Saturday before Labour Day, Jason and Volk sat shirtless on the second-storey deck drinking breakfast beers. Rachel and I sat below them at the dock in wraparound skirts and bikinis. The fish in the channel bobbed and opened their tiny grey mouths like a nursery of babies learning to coo.

  “Can’t be good for them, all these carbs,” said Rachel, tossing stale sour cream and onion chips to the fish.

  “There’s that turtle,” Jason called down from above us, pointing a sloshing beer towards the water. The turtle poked his sharp face out of the water amongst the fish, pretending to belong.

  “I swear that’s the one we saved,” he said. He had been quite proud of himself last summer when he spotted the little thing crossing the causeway, the wetness of its shell gleaming. He pulled the car over and lifted the small creature into the trunk. When we arrived at the cottage he carried it safely to the channel.

  If it was the same one, it was now three times the size, and would frequently sun on the banks of the channel. “He’s thanking us,” Jason said, leaning over the edge of the wooden railing, “by entertaining us.”

  “You’re blocking my sun,” I called back to him.

  That day last summer when he found the turtle was when Jason and I hooked up for the first time, in the musty air of the boathouse. We lay on a deflated inner-tube on the cement floor, the water lapping against the boat rhythmically, encouragingly. Rachel and Volk had started dating at the end of first year and had been together three months. “Jason’s so sweet,” Rachel would say when we were alone, “and cute,” prodding me in the ribs with a dainty elbow. But I had resisted, looking for more of a reason to be with him than the expectations of friends.

  When we returned to school after the summer I was unsure of what to make of things with Jason. It was convenient and comforting, the four of us going to the Strange Wolf in the evenings, cramming together on a tattered couch in Volk and Jason’s apartment to watch movies, Rachel and I huddled under a blanket at the boys’ rugby games. But during our weekends at Volk’s cottage, it seemed we could spend a lifetime together and never grow tired of each other.

  Across the channel two kids were trying to start a fire from the embers in their fire pit, still flickering from the night before. They prodded the coals with dried pine branches till they smoked, pulled them out, stared at the red glow pulsing through orange needles, shrieking at the power smouldering in their hands.

  Volk and Jason finished their beers and their conversation evolved into wrestling. Rachel and I closed our eyes behind sunglasses, listening to the wooden balcony creak with the tension of two bodies jostling on its two-by-four flooring, huffing and laughing and cursing, boys wrapping their arms around each other in false aggression.

  With a hard shove from Jason, three stakes of pine lining the space between the railing and the deck’s floor gave way against Volk’s weight and released him to the grass. He didn’t yell. Had he not fallen backwards the damage would have been a shattered ankle or a kneecap driven down against his shin. But when we reached him, his eyes were closed, his head sharply twisted, chin pressed against his bare shoulder. Rachel passed out and fell against me. The kids from across the channel screamed behind us. Jason grabbed the railing above the jagged hole where Volk had broken through.

  “Volk, come on, you bastard!” he yelled, his eyes pinched in panicked laughter. “You bastard—you’re fine, damn it!” He was still up there when Rachel came to and the ambulance arrived. I helped her into the passenger seat of her car and then jumped in the driver’s seat to follow it to the hospital.

  “Should we grab him a shirt?” Rachel asked as I turned the ignition.

  When we came back that night to pack up our stuff and tell Jason that Volk was in good spirits but probably wouldn’t walk again, Jason was gone.

  When classes started again in September, I sat down with Rachel to schedule breaks between our classes to visit Volk in the hospital. I called her every evening. I called Jason as well to invite him to join us, but he never picked up and I never left messages. I gave him his space for the first week and then swung by their apartment. The lights were off and no one came to the door. I walked by the field during rugby practice a few times. My heart stopped when I saw Volk’s number on the back of a jersey moving along the field, but then I realized the player’s hair was brown, not blond.

  The first few weeks Rachel stayed dry-eyed during our visits, eating the cubes of blue Jell-O Volk got with his dinner tray, filling him in on what was going in our classes.

  She’d let it all out on the way back. She started calling Volk by his first name. “Ryan’s just so calm,” she would say, saying the Ry part in a high-pitched tone, like she was talking to a baby. “Ryan’s so calm, I feel like I’m holding all his grief.”

  Volk asked about Jason from time to time, turning to me for the answers. “He’s good!” I’d say, overly chipper. Then worried about making him seem insensitive, I’d say, “He’s having a hard time with things.”

  “Yeah. So am I.” Volk turned away, and Rachel squeezed his hand.

  “Did I tell you Aleesa Prins is pregnant?” she asked.

  “Bet she’s still hot,” Volk said, a smile returning to his face. Rachel fake punched him playfully in the shoulder.

  “Not fair,” he said. “I can’t fight back.”

  One time on the drive home Rachel said, “I think you should apologize. On Jason’s behalf.”

  I was quiet for a minute. “Why should I do that?”

  “Volk needs an apology, for closure. You’re closest to Jason.”

  “That’s not my job. And he knows Jason is sorry.”

  “I’m not sure any of us knows how Jason feels. He’s been taking the easy way out.”

  “That’s not fair. Besides, I don’t even know if he’s still in school.”

  “You could try harder. You could fight for the relationship.”

  We didn’t talk for the rest of the ride. I dropped Rachel off at her dorm without saying a word.

  “I sometimes think it’s amazing,” said Volk one time during that half year of visits, “that we didn’t get sick from that pizza.” Rachel laughed generously, the way you laugh on a first date. “It couldn’t have been there too long,” I said, “or the raccoons would have gotten it.”

  “But why was it there?” Volk asked. “Maybe someone pissed on it. Maybe a couple was fighting in their car and one of them threw it out the window. ‘I told you no pineapple!’ kinda thing. Or the pizza delivery guy got a fake order and threw it away. Maybe someone licked it and threw it out ’cause they thought it tasted like ass.”

  “Did it?”

  “Can’t remember. We were too excited about free food to care. I think what happened,” Volk said, “was someone put the pizza on top of their car while they unlocked it, or while they made out in the parking lot, or something. They just forgot it was there and drove off.” He knew the other reasons were more interesting, but this was the most likely.

  Rachel eventually stopped picking up my calls as well. “I just want more time alone with Ryan,” she told me finally. After that we would pass each other on campus and she would hug me without looking at me, would tell me it had been too long (I know, really too long!) and we needed to do coffee
(yeah, that would be great!) or something soon, but she was in a rush (of course, so am I), so she’d call me soon, honey, smooch, miss you (miss you too).

  A few months after the accident, once the family had accepted Volk’s paralysis, Volk’s dad tried to sue the builder of the cottage, who turned the blame to the architect. After a year of periodic court dates, Volk in his wheelchair at each one, the architect had his licence revoked and Volk had a settlement, the details of which he wouldn’t explain. Volk went back to school the following year, graduated and went to law school last I heard.

  The following spring I got drunk on a first date and told the guy about the balcony. I think I must have laughed when I told him, though I don’t remember the telling, only his response.

  “Wow,” he said. “Wow. Guys, eh? I read on Yahoo news about a guy whose friends poured lighter fluid over his crotch when he fell asleep at a party, and lit his pants. Just thought it was funny—they’d do it to each other’s socks all the time. The fire went out of control, second degree burns all over his, you know. He sued his best friends, and the parents. They settled.”

  When he drove me home after dinner, I threw up out the window. I watched the vomit spread out like long fingers across the side of his car.

  The next day I rented a car and drove two hours to visit the cottage. I called Rachel one last time to ask if she wanted to come with me.

  “That’s weird,” she said. “I think you need to let it go.”

  “Okay, thanks for weighing in,” I said.

  She told me she was thinking of breaking up with Ryan. “We don’t really have anything in common anymore. Honestly, I think I’ve just stayed with him because he needed me. But we’ve moved past that.”

  “I think you have too,” I said.

  She told me a friend had said Jason quit school and moved into his parents’ basement. He was taking courses online. He had gained a lot of weight, “about a hundred pounds. He hasn’t been very active. He feels bad about the whole thing,” the friend had told her. “And he misses you,” Rachel said.