“She’s a little nuts.”
“Agreed.”
“Anyway, I’m not angry.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m sad.”
“Me, too.”
“And I think—”
Two women walked into the changing room.
“Let’s go outside,” Johanna said.
Outside, a hot wind smacked their faces but the rain had stopped. They fell into step, headed for the beach with its now dull gray sky and strangely morose surf, flat as slate. So much for paradise. The weather just kept getting worse. They both paused to take off their shoes when they reached the damp sand, then moved toward the water and let the surf touch their toes.
Shell bent, picked up a rock, looked at it for a moment, then tossed it. “I’ve always wished I could skip rocks,” she said as the stone plopped into the top of a wave and sank.
Johanna picked one up, too, a smooth flat rock the color of a terra-cotta roof. “It’s all in the wrist,” she said, flicking hers and sending the rock hopping. “My dad taught me. He taught me to pitch baseballs, too, but he said skipping rocks was way different. Be gentle, he always told me. Here, try this one.” Now Johanna picked up a skinny flat rock. “This one is perfect. It has a little chip. You can grip it better.” Johanna thought of her father, who had taught her to do this in the big lake they lived near, on a gray afternoon when she had been starting to realize he wasn’t going to be there with her for too much longer, that advanced pancreatic cancer was not something you recovered from, that there were going to be a lot of things left unsaid between them because he was running out of time. “You have to put your index finger around it. It’s the kind of thing that seems impossible until you do it, and then you wonder how you ever doubted yourself.” Johanna realized she was repeating the exact words her father had said to her. She found herself wishing she had listened to everything he had ever said more closely. Maybe he had always been trying to tell her something about her life.
Shell didn’t throw the rock, just looked at it. “He separated us,” she said. “Things are so bad between us that we aren’t even in the same villa.”
“You and your husband?”
Shell nodded.
“Who separated you?” Johanna asked.
“Miles.”
Johanna’s eyebrows raised. “Really?” she said. “I didn’t know they did that.”
“It’s not what we need,” she said. “And I don’t know how to explain that. No one is listening.”
“I am.”
Shell threw the rock. It didn’t even reach the ocean, just hit the sand and rolled into the water. “No one knows why we’re here,” she said.
Johanna focused on a wave faraway, tried to follow it with her eyes as it crashed toward shore, but lost it eventually; it blended in with all the others.
“Our daughter died,” Shell said. “She was three. Our only. Our baby.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you. It’s awful. Do you know you’re the first person I’ve said that to, that she died? The only person here, other than Colin, who knows?” Shell bent down and picked up another rock. “What’s the trick, I just...?” She flicked her wrist but held on to the rock, didn’t let it fly.
“Hold the stone like this,” Johanna said, putting her fingers over hers and showing her how. “Try not to think about it too much.”
Shell turned it over and held it the way Johanna showed her. “I thought it would be a lot harder to say that, to talk about it. I thought I’d fall apart.”
“You’re very strong.”
“That’s what he keeps saying.” A pause. “I’ve heard half of couples don’t survive the death of a child. I don’t want that for us, but I don’t know how to fix things.”
Shell released the rock. This one sank, too.
Johanna was embarrassed by how badly she had wanted that rock to skip for Shell. The world was not a perfect place. It wasn’t even close. Shell bent down and picked up another rock. She threw it hard. It splashed into the waves. And she grinned for a moment. “Sometimes, it just feels good to throw things,” she said.
Johanna whipped a rock, too, pretended she was throwing a baseball.
“Whoa, you must have been some pitcher.”
Johanna smiled. “I wasn’t bad.”
“You know, I feel like I can barely make it through another day, let alone the rest of my life. It was just over a year ago, her death. I feel like I should be letting go, but I don’t want to let her go, ever. I even feel her with me sometimes.” Shell trailed off. “And when I don’t, I drink. Another thing I find it hard to talk about. Should you be charging me by the hour?”
“No one could blame you for drinking, for caving under the pressure of all the grief you must feel. It’s normal.”
“I blame myself, though. For all of it. No wonder my husband can’t look at me. We’re finished. We’re for sure finished. And this is just an incredibly painful, embarrassing end to it. Probably what I deserve. I don’t know. It’s all so murky, but it must be what I deserve.”
“You really shouldn’t do that. People do, all people do that when something bad happens. They blame themselves—but you’re being way too hard on yourself.”
Shell turned to her. “You know, when you were telling that story the other day, about that man and the gun, I just kept thinking that I would have begged him to kill me.”
“No. Trust me, you wouldn’t have.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was there. I know what a person feels when something like that happens. You want to live. Even if you think you don’t. You understand what your life is worth. You see the light you couldn’t see before. Maybe just for a minute, but you do.”
Shell picked up another rock and heaved it. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“I needed someone like you. And you were there. It feels like a miracle.”
“I can listen more. There’s nowhere I need to be.”
“It’s okay. I should probably get back. I feel really tired.” Her voice was weakening.
“Listen, we’re in Bungalow 17,” Johanna said before Shell walked away. “If you need anything, anything at all, even if you just want to talk again, come by.”
“Sure,” said Shell. Johanna watched her walk away. The wind picked up and with it, her sense of foreboding. She almost followed, but she couldn’t think of any more to say.
Grace was surprised to see Colin Williams, rain in his hair, distress in his eyes, standing at her office door.
“Should I have called?” he asked. “I’m sorry. I know I haven’t come to my appointments for the past few days, and now I’m just showing up, and it’s just about dinner. But I really need to talk to someone.”
She tried to smile. “Of course.” She could not allow it to show, how badly she had wanted the next hour to herself. Just to think. And to take a Tylenol for the searing pain in her wrist. “Come on in.”
His face was too young for his silver hair, and there were circles under his eyes and a tired defeat in them. She thought about his wife and she thought about Miles and found herself looking away from him as a sword of guilt stabbed at her heart. You could put a stop to this. You never have. It’s on you, too.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been coming,” he said. “You probably think I’ve been working, but I haven’t. I lost my phone chargers.” Grace felt a prickle of alarm. “It’s so stupid—both of them, gone. Like they’ve disappeared into thin air. So, I haven’t been in touch with anyone. And I started doing some soul-searching about all that—about exactly why it was so important. And then I started looking for my wife. I need to see her. I need to talk to her. Where the hell is she? No one at the front desk would tell me. They looked scared when I asked. I’ve started to consider knocking on bungal
ow doors, until she opens one of them. Can you help me? Do you know where she is?”
“I’m sorry—what do you mean, where is she?”
“We’ve been separated. You must have known that.”
“Oh. Yes.” She swallowed and picked up her notebook so she’d have something to do with her hands. She disagreed with separations, and strongly. She had told Miles this, but it didn’t matter. He prescribed them anyway. This time, without mentioning it to her. She thought of Colin’s missing phone chargers, Shell’s confiscated vodka bottles, the safe in one of the boardrooms where Ruth kept the sleeping pills and valium and anything else she decided could potentially stand in the way of the work they were trying to do. They were playing God, all of them. They were a trifecta: Miles, Ruth, Grace. The father. The child. And Grace, the spirit, hanging in the background, standing by and doing nothing. Some argued that was where the real power lay. Grace didn’t feel so sure. All she knew was that she needed it to stop.
“I know, I know, it’s against the protocol to know where she is,” he said, mistaking the blank look on her face for something else. “But this so-called protocol is killing me. I need to talk to my wife.”
“Why don’t we talk for a while? And then—the truth is I actually don’t have her bungalow number with me right now, but I’ll get it to you. I promise. Okay?” He allowed her to deflect his other question. He was a good man, she could tell. Lost, broken, confused—something there inside him, something really bad that had happened between him and his wife, but a good man, ultimately. Gentle. Sad. Now the stab of guilt inside her turned to something else: an ache of empathy. This was a man who was suffering deeply. She could feel it in the room. But instead of feeling ignited by the possibility of helping him, she felt tired.
This is your job, she reminded herself. You always have to be ready.
“Have a seat,” she said.
“I’ve made a mess of this. I should have said no when Miles suggested this ridiculous separation thing. But I was so angry with her. We’ve been through so damn much. And to be honest, I did need a break. I needed to think. And I have been doing that.”
“What have you been thinking, exactly?” She tried to focus just on him. But instead, she saw Johanna, there beside him on the couch, and then she saw Ruth, and then her sixteen-year-old self, Grace Tyler, the person she had been once. And she saw Shell Williams, with her sad, defeated eyes. She recognized that sadness and defeat. She blinked her eyes rapidly, making them all disappear.
“Shell’s anger is one real issue,” he said. “And my workaholism is the other. It’s not just that, though. There’s more. So much more.”
She didn’t feel strong enough for it, but there was no other choice. “Tell me what happened to you two.” She closed her eyes for a moment and pictured their home, Colin and Shell’s. It would be big, airy—maybe a bit too airy. Empty. A lake. Trees. A view they probably stopped noticing. There would be the issue of Shell’s drinking to contend with. Grace wondered how that fit into their lives. But she also knew there was something worse they were dealing with. Something big and dark and all-consuming. So much more, Colin had said. She braced herself.
Colin looked up at the ceiling of her office and rubbed his neck, as if priming himself. “Okay,” he said. Eyes closed, eyes open. “Our little daughter was killed in a car accident. A drunk driver.” His voice, calm and smooth a moment before, sounded like it had been pressed against a metal rasp and grated into the room. And her heart felt shredded, too, as she watched him lower his head into his hands the way he probably had the moment he heard his child was gone.
“Oh, no. I’m so sorry, Colin. Was it—Shell? Was she behind the wheel?”
He looked up. “What? No. Shell would never have done that. She only started drinking again after. Shell’s mother was driving. She was up for a visit from Toronto. Shell and I wanted a night off, just the two of us, so we sent them into town to watch a movie at the Heritage Centre. But Pamela got lost, and they ended up on a back road. And—”
He started to cry now. “Zoey,” she heard him say, anguish in his voice. She pictured a little girl with her father’s eyes and her mother’s steady gaze. Moments passed, and she held out the tissue box uselessly, but he didn’t take it. Finally, he looked up and wiped his eyes.
“It was my idea. I told Shell we needed some time alone. I was going to cook her dinner, we were going to relax. Because Zoey, she was a real handful.” Now, he was smiling and wistful.
The little girl Grace saw had shiny dark hair, like her mother’s. Her footsteps through the house were light and constant.
“I mean, she was wonderful, but a fairly typical three-year-old, you know? It was nonstop. I just—I thought since Shell’s mom was visiting we could take advantage of it. Just for one night. We’d been living in the middle of nowhere for a year, the mine was just breaking ground and I was working nonstop and she was taking care of Zoey all day, and at night she was exhausted. We were losing our connection.” A pause. “You have no idea what I would give if I could go back and do that night over. Because now? We have all the nights alone we want. And they’re awful.”
Grace nodded. Anger, and grief, and confusion. She understood. The bottles of vodka not hidden but out. Broken glass on a floor. Shouting with no one to listen. Grief like a broken bottle, spilling fumes and scattering shards of glass. You wouldn’t have been able to breathe in that house, you wouldn’t have known where it was safe to step. And she could see that this was not the way it had been in that house before Zoey died. Lonely, maybe—but not desolate, no. Love and laughter. She could see the loss of that in his eyes, hear it in his voice. He had loved his wife and daughter, and he still did. But the place where he had loved them, that was gone.
“They took a wrong turn, that’s all. If I’d given Pam better directions, if I’d warned her about the roads near the mine, and maybe how you never knew—but I should have known. What some of those guys are like.”
Grace saw the late-evening summer sunlight on the brown corduroy road, like a song she had heard once, something about weeds standing shoulder high. She saw those, too. A forest of them on either side of that road, and light filtered through pine needles. Bugs hitting the windshield. The grandmother making a joke. The little girl in the back seat, in a hastily installed car seat. Back at home, bags under a mother’s eyes and a mother’s love; a father’s distraction and a father’s adoration. A husband and wife, alone for the first time in a while. Maybe a little shy of one another. Or maybe, finding their rhythm again easily.
“They were near one of the mines, and one of the guys who was working there—he had a problem. I’d heard about him, you hear these things in a small town. I’d talked to his boss about it. They were supposed to do something. I thought maybe fire him, but he was a good worker, apparently. Efficient. Even while high.” Bitterness in his voice now. Grace didn’t ask if the man had died. She cared as little as he did. What did it matter? “That’s the kind of thing—you check for, you know? All kinds of safety checks are important, at a mine. That’s my job. That’s what I do.” He sighed and looked out the window. The little glass clock ticked. “Employee wellness program,” he finally managed, as if these things mattered now.
“Colin?” She’d seen it: when he talked about his work he went on autopilot. He didn’t have to feel and so he didn’t.
“Yes, sorry, I was just—”
“Distracted.”
Their eyes met. “Come back,” she said.
“It’s so hard.”
“I know.”
“We hadn’t even started to worry, when the police came to the door.” A lengthy pause, with a lot inside it. Panic, a drive in the darkness, maybe he almost forgot to put the headlights on, maybe she hastily turned off the radio because she couldn’t stand the sound of music, or hearing what the weather might be like tomorrow. “And the hospital—they did everything they coul
d, but it was just a cottage hospital. They didn’t have the resources. They tried to MedEvac them to Winnipeg, but it was just too late. Halfway there...” Tears, again. This time he took a tissue. Grace could see it, feel it, smell it. Blood and antiseptic and a low-level building with only a few beds. A curtain around one of them. Someone crying. Shell. The doctors unable to conceal the distress. The helicopters, the pointless flight. A little angel girl dying up there in the clouds. A mother, too, the pillar Shell would have needed to help her through this. Grace understood what this scene would look like, and later, what the silence would feel like when there was nothing left to say. When hope had flown.
Her scalp was tingling. She felt a dampness, just below her eyes. She wiped the tears away, fast. He couldn’t see it. This had to be his pain, not hers. She could not allow transference. She had worked so hard to be stronger than this.
He had his eyes closed. He hadn’t seen her misplaced sorrow yet. The expression on his face was pure agony and there was nothing she could do for him but wait. While she did, she couldn’t help it: she saw herself in a hospital room, too, an infant in her arms, hers. Baby Boy Markell. His body was perfectly still and peaceful while her own body shook with the sorrow and rage and the pain of life. With the wrenching loss of the joy that could have been him. With all of the emotions he would never get to feel.
And Miles, entering the room. Miles with anger in his eyes. This was because of you, he had whispered, and the nurse had surely thought he was offering whispered words of comfort to his wife because she left Grace alone with him. Because your womb is filthy, he whispered. Because you are a traitor. She had believed him, of course. She had blamed herself. If only I had been someone different, my baby would be alive. You believed anything, in those hellish moments. And what you believed was almost never true.
Paul. Writer of gospels. That’s what Miles named their dead child, that’s what he told the reverend who came to baptize him the name was. A cross of water on his perfectly still, blue-tinged forehead. It hadn’t been the right name for him, though. Grace had known this even though she had barely known her son in this world—but she had known him. In the world of her body: that’s where they had met, a place where flutter-kicks and rolls just below her skin were a secret language. Her womb hadn’t felt filthy or traitorous when her child had made it his home. And his name hadn’t been Paul, she’d known. His name had been Sol: a name that meant peace, sun, wonderer. Grace had wanted her son to find the love of God, but she had also wanted him to be able to seek that path on his own.
The Last Resort Page 15
