by Liam Durcan
“Okay.”
“Do you believe I could do something like that?”
Brendan said I don’t know, or thought he said it, as he unlocked the car and felt his chest tighten and his shoulders draw up into a gesture that equaled the sentiment. He wanted to be on the road again, to feel the hypnotic calm of velocity and, when he remembered several minutes later and miles away, he was indifferent to the realization that he’d left the coffee behind.
Part II
At last each particle of space is meaningful, Like a syllable of some dismantled word.
—Louis Aragon
Chapter 11
The day’s last sunlight escorted them through the streets of North Hatley, sidewalks lightly patrolled by tourists. On the outskirts of town, Brendan had turned on the headlights and stopped by the side of the road, consulting the directions on the screen.
In the silence, Martin sat forward. “There should be a column.”
“A column?”
“Yeah. A supporting column. Doric.”
“Doric. Good,” Brendan said, staring straight ahead. “That helps a lot.”
He was lost. Of course, the word had no meaning now that he had a satellite tracking his every move and rolling out bits of the unknown world for him on which to continue. There was no lost anymore; there was only following directions or not following directions.
The car bobsledded down the small roads, which were perceptibly narrowing with each curve. It was dark now, the trees around them obscuring twilight, and Brendan strained to make sure he wasn’t missing details that could possibly guide them to the cabin. A column. Doric, no less. But a column shouldn’t be too hard to spot. Maybe there would be a sacrificial altar nearby. And although he was driving down an unnamed road—actually designated unnamed road on the GPS, much to Brendan’s satisfaction—to an uncertain destination, each gravel road growing narrower, Brendan felt oddly reassured, more certain for the possibilities winnowed down to inevitability. He was as blind as his brother here, as unaware of what lay around the corner, and yet it didn’t trouble him like he’d imagined it would.
The column appeared out of the foliage—huge and pale and hovering there starkly in the surroundings. It almost made him laugh. Ten feet tall. Apparently Doric, whatever that meant. Maybe Doric meant “bloody huge.” The car idled in front of the pillar, Brendan idling with it. How does something like that just appear? Where is it the second before you are aware of it? He then thought for a moment about the sort of person who would drag something like this out into the country, what type of personality had needs that could be addressed only by propping up a couple of tons of marble in the darkness of roadside underbrush. The lower half of the column was wrapped up in some sort of material that appeared to have been torn away in parts.
“Is that metal?”
“Sheet metal,” Martin replied as he peered out the window, scanning the ditch just in front of the column.
“Okay,” Brendan replied, surprised at how credulous he became once twilight passed.
Brendan pulled the car past the sentinel and into the drive, another road reduced to twinned tire tracks with an intervening median of overgrown grass that tugged at the underside of the car. He drove fifty yards, until the roadway opened into a gravel clearing in front of what looked to be a large farm silo with irregularly placed windows. Brendan stopped the car and eased it into PARK. He stayed in his seat. At this point, Martin leaned forward.
“We’re here,” Martin said with an offhand assuredness that only irritated his brother.
“I think so,” Brendan replied, still peering up at the structure with its lights on. In the darkness, the light was molten, each window a foundry furnace. Another car, a subcompact that glistened in the indeterminate color of reflected light, sat near what looked to be an entry. “Somebody else is here, too.”
The key, Martin assured him, was on the ring—one of twenty or so. Finding it would involve the sort of fumbling in the darkness of a doorway that Brendan hoped to avoid. Instead, he stared at the house, trying to see if someone was inside.
“Who’s here?” Martin asked as he stepped forward and stumbled on the gravel of the drive.
“I don’t know,” Brendan replied, and knocked on the door. A couple of neighborly taps and then a good bailiff-quality salvo. Nothing. Brendan stepped back from the door.
“Can you see anybody?”
“Not from here. Can we walk around to the other side?”
“You can’t find the key?”
“Someone’s in your house, Martin, I just want to see who’s here.”
“I’m coming, too.”
The front facade of the cottage was a two-story wall of galvanized sheet metal. Corrugated, like a Quonset hut tipped on its end. It didn’t look rustic. It didn’t look like anything Brendan had ever seen. On the way down, Brendan had grabbed glimpses of the other waterfront cabins seen through the trees. Cabin, of course, was the wrong word. It didn’t take much effort, even looking through the hedges, to see that the lakeside properties weren’t cabins or cottages or even chalets, but each one a three-thousand-square-foot, strictly adhered-to homage to a specific lakefront idyll. Brendan was familiar with that style of life, if only from seeing photos of these palaces in design magazines Rita would have sitting around. He’d managed to defuse her exploratory musings about their buying a country house—yes, that was the word, grander, and yet more modest for its Victorian sheen—because all he could see were the pretensions, the unused boathouse and the faux rustic tchotchkes and the board games safely sequestered in some skillfully distressed oxblood cabinet on which the flat-screen TV sat. Besides, since he’d sold the business, they’d begun to travel. They had a great life already. Why would they want to tie themselves down to a McMansion in the woods? Rita probably saw it as a place where the children and the eventual grandchildren would congregate. She must have imagined long weekends and a house full of voices. He hadn’t seen fit to grant her even the prospect of that, and so the lights that he saw from those houses were no longer only faint insults to his taste, but had taken on a lingering and more personal admonishment.
“Have you always had this place?” Brendan peered up at the facade, trying to make sense of it.
“Since the late seventies, the land belonged to Sharon’s dad. We built on it in the early eighties, when the kids were small.”
“You designed it?”
“Of course. Sharon and I take turns with it, alternate summers. But she rarely uses it, so it’s pretty much mine.”
“Big of her,” Brendan said, finding himself smiling. “Most exes would have sold it off or burned it down.”
“Well, Sharon’s not like that,” Martin shot back. “That happen to you?”
“Rita died two years ago.”
Martin stopped. He looked over his left shoulder and then straight ahead again. “Mom didn’t say anything.”
“Mom can’t remember much of what either one of us tells her.”
“I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“I mean at the time.”
“I was dealing with it.”
“Still.”
“What, you’d have come to the funeral?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“You never met Rita. You never saw fit to call or to visit. You left me trying to explain who you were to my family and why you weren’t part of our lives. You think I’m going to call you for her funeral?” Brendan pulled even with his brother as he said this, the two men standing face-to-face. Up close, Brendan noticed how Martin’s eyes darted around, the flailing efforts to see something. Odd animal panic. It almost made him feel ashamed.
“I couldn’t go back; you knew that. Why was it up to me to make the first move?” Martin said.
“Because you left . . .”
“I had to leave.”
“You didn’t just leave; you renounced us.”
“I came back for Dad—”
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“Day late and a dollar short on that one. . . .”
“—and what did I get for it?”
“I was messed up.”
“Yeah, I figured. So drive me back to Montreal if you hate me so much. You’re free to go.”
“Yeah, I’ll just leave you here in the woods.”
“Why are you here?”
“What?”
“Why are you here, anyway?”
“We’re family.”
“Cut the bullshit. It’s not like you’ve been dying to reconnect with me over the years.”
“I have a respons—”
“Stop it. The truth. Did Mom ask you?”
“I told you, nothing registers with Mom. She still asks about me about Rita and Sharon.”
“Is it guilt? Because you can just fuck off about that right now. Fuck off right back to America.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, you don’t have a lot of people clamoring to look after you.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sorry,” Brendan said. They were both exhausted, Brendan could sense it in their voices. “Here, let me help you.”
Martin pushed Brendan’s hand away. In the darkness, his brother’s movements were surprisingly smooth and his refusal seemed vindicated. He hesitated for a moment, tottering toward what appeared to be a path that led around the structure. Brendan followed, partly out of deference to someone who knew the trail, partly out of a desire to monitor and even catch his brother should his balance fail him.
As dark as the clearing seemed, the path through the trees was deep-space black and silent. Here, on a little path complicated by jutting stones and the exposed roots of surrounding trees, Martin advanced without difficulty, while Brendan stumbled along in his wake. The confines and darkness of the underbrush made him feel suddenly claustrophobic, a thousand hands reaching out from nowhere to brush against them.
The path ended and they came upon the lake, lights along the shoreline doubled into the stitching of a seam of night. Martin kept walking straight ahead down a gentle grade, heading toward the shoreline until Brendan reined him in and turned him around toward the back of the structure.
To their left was a raised patio extending from the back of the building, a promontory from which one could spend hours studying the lake. Whereas the front of the building was clad in sheet metal, the back was walled by glass. It was quite beautiful, more than he’d expected, Brendan realized. A house glowing warm in yellows and greens.
There was a solitary figure on the deck, illuminated and shadowed by the patio lights, facing away from them, not reacting to the commotion of their backwoods stumbling. A head of pony-tailed hair, all calipered by headphones. Martin’s daughter or the fresh ex-wife maybe. Too young to be Sharon, quite clearly a living saint whose constitution could likely not admit such lounging. Maybe this was the girlfriend, the most recent, just another soon-to-be wreck in his brother’s debris field of a personal history. Whoever she was, she sat motionless, dozing or just relaxing to music. They moved closer and Brendan felt dread at the thought of whoever she was being surprised out of the darkness and silence. Brendan stopped as they approached the deck, unwilling to move closer, preferring at that moment to turn around and sit in the car until morning. But at this moment, Martin stuck his head up into the air and moved it ever so slightly, like an adjustment to a satellite dish.
“Norah?” Martin shouted, loudly enough that Brendan winced and they heard the scattering of loons among the echoing of the name along the water. “Norah.”
The young woman startled and used both hands to throw off the headphones. She looked over in their direction, to where the voice had come from, obviously unable to fix upon what she was searching for. She stood and walked over to the deck’s edge, where she addressed the darkness and whoever happened to be standing in it.
“Dad?” she said, staring into the dark. “Is that you?”
Chapter 12
After Brendan dropped their bags off in the upstairs bedrooms, the three of them gathered in the kitchen, which was easily the most conventional room in the house. An off-season theme park of German-engineered appliances: copper pots and colanders of every conceivable dimension, their sheen attesting to their mostly decorative function, hung in clusters from the ceiling and custom cabinetry that lined the walls. A small kitchen island occupied the middle of the room, with its atoll of stools trailing alongside. Beyond the island, as the kitchen opened up on to the living room, the ceiling simply ended. At the edge, a twenty-five-foot ceiling hung over the living room. The kitchen was simply an alcove off this main room, nestled in one of the wings. Beyond windows that made up a wall of the sitting room lay the absolute darkness of Lac Massawippi.
The house was built in the shape of a giant articulated boomerang: a central area, a three-story cylinder, housed the living room and was flanked by two smaller, swooping wings, angled toward the lakefront, creating an enclosed area with a patio. He imagined that from a low-flying aircraft, it must look like the detached prow of an enormous freighter run aground.
Brendan turned down the burner on the stove and coaxed an omelette into existence. Norah, sitting at the island, was watching him handle the pan. He could tell she was hungry. Martin was indifferent, in a corner somewhere, probably touching a wall or sniffing the floor. Brendan was busy trying to concentrate on the omelette.
For Brendan, cooking was the most reliable way of defusing a difficult situation; experiencing the silences between Martin and his daughter after their arrival was enough to make him immediately demand to be shown to the kitchen. At least with Susan, there had been the bond of their work (even if it had been broken and reworked into the source of their argument), but with Norah there seemed to be nothing. After the niceties and twenty seconds of catching up, there was only dead air. But the smell of food filled the spaces and the activity rescued all of them. The perfect form of conflict resolution. It was a wonder that Brendan wasn’t a much fatter man.
The fridge had been bare, almost emptier than the one in Martin’s abandoned condo. Milk, a few eggs, a lump of cheddar that looked mere minutes away from a color change, and an assortment of fresh vegetables, the only sign of a recent restocking. It would be enough.
Norah was smaller than Susan. Perhaps that was just the impression that came from a person who remained silent. Brendan felt her watch him as he edged and shimmied the pan. With a deft flip, he turned the halves of the omelette against each other. He lifted the omelette and plated it for her. The same color hair, the color he remembered or imagined he remembered on his mother.
“Martin, do you want some?” Brendan asked, and Martin rotated his body to face him. He still had his sunglasses on.
“Is it eggs?”
“Omelette. Western. Universal code word for whatever’s in the fridge,” Brendan said, and pushed a plate toward Martin. Two hands slid over the counter surface until they encountered the edge of the plate. The right hand followed the edge, moving counterclockwise, the palm of the hand hovering over the omelette. The left hand was motionless, midair. Brendan watched in silence, wondering why the left hand was stalled in space. Eventually, Martin found the utensils and started cutting into the food. Brendan poured what was left of the mix into the pan for his dinner. Norah looked impressed, and Brendan couldn’t tell if it was that her father had guessed right about the food and was able to feed himself or if it was the forkful of food she had just lifted to her own mouth.
“Okay?” Brendan asked her.
“Very okay.”
“I never really learned to cook.” Martin said. “No time.”
“Something else for you to learn. It’s actually pretty easy,” Brendan said at the exact moment things began to go awry. Inattentive to the food in the pan, Brendan had let the omelette, his omelette, cook unevenly, and as he folded it, he already knew that biting into the pockets of semiliquid egg would be his reward for even a moment of culinary hubris. Maybe I’ll skip dinner, he thought. He
threw together enough vegetables to make a salad and shook the balsamic-looking contents of a bottle over it.
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” Martin said to Norah.
“I had some work to finish,” she replied.
“It couldn’t be done in town?”
“It’s quiet here. Is it okay that I’m here?”
“Sure. What sort of work?”
“If you want me to go . . .”
“I don’t want you to go,” Martin said in a low voice, and then raised his head to face Brendan. “She makes films.”
“Films? You’re making a film here?”
“I make documentaries. I’m editing my latest.”
“You can do that here?”
“With the right software and a good-enough laptop, I could do it in a coffeehouse.”
“It’s nicer here,” her father said. “Coffee’s free.”
Norah watched her father and put her fork down. “Are you okay, Dad?”
Martin paused. “They took away my license. Did you know about it?”
“No.”
“Susan didn’t tell you?”
“I haven’t spoken to her in a few weeks.”
“Well, she was in on it. Nice, huh?”
Brendan had salvaged his omelette and put it down on a plate just to the left of his brother. “Martin, she didn’t make the decision.”
“She didn’t stop them,” Martin said, and stared straight ahead, pausing, as if gathering the sound from around the room.
“When did you leave the rehab place in Vermont?”
“A couple of days ago.”
“They just let you go?”
“Yeah,” Martin said experimentally, ignoring whatever rebuttal Brendan might be thinking of offering. After a long journey, arrival felt like a victory.
Norah turned to Brendan. “You’re okay with this?”
“He was beginning to get a little restless at the Dunes.”
“Restless?”
