Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

  One summer she’d brought Emile home to meet everyone, and the two of them had swum across to the cabin on a whim, each paddling one-handed, holding the neck of a liquor bottle, with Emile towing a makeshift foamboard raft piled up with their clothes and cigarettes.

  Naoishe had turned on her back and swum otter-like to watch him coming, the raft’s rope between his teeth like a limp weasel. Big smiley bird dog, she remembers thinking.

  She’d called out, Why do you have to do everything the hard way? and he’d tried to respond but the rope made it impossible. Now she wondered what the words might have been.

  Naoishe set her teeth together and coaxed the ATV onto the ice. There was a slight groan beneath the tires, something she could feel rather than hear; a viscous fear in the belly, like when the floor drops out from a carnival ride. She held her breath and thumbed the throttle. In a month’s time the entire pond system would be lidded over with three feet of ice, and people would ride their snowmobiles all the way to St. John’s.

  A few years earlier a kid ran out of fuel trying to get to his father’s house in Witless Bay. He was found eight kilometers from the broken-down machine, curled up like he was sleeping. Last Christmas someone brought it up, how they’d seen his mother at the Costco, eyes like collapsed burrows, buying milk and macaroni dinner as if life were still worth living. Shame on her.

  Oh, come on—you can’t know. Emile had defended the woman. Who’s gonna keep their kids under surveillance twenty-four seven?

  The aunts had flashed the look, the “outsider” look, to which Emile was thankfully either oblivious or indifferent. Later Naoishe had drawn her arms across her body, spoken aloud to her daughter through the muffle of wool and blood: Listen, you in there. Once you get out here I am never going to let you go.

  Did Emile blame her, her body? No, of course not. Of course not. He’d held her tight by the shoulders and spoken close to her face. It was not her fault. She’d done everything right. They’d be more careful next time.

  More careful, she thought. Less careless. It sounded, to her, like blame.

  At Thanksgiving he’d flown back alone to his family in Saguenay, and she’d encouraged him to stay on there. That was mid-October. Then the leftover jack-o’-lanterns were deflating, up and down neighboring porches, and raccoons had moved back into the roof in preparation for the cold. Among Emile’s texts were reminders for her to take the car in for snow tires.

  Naoishe had carried a box of his winter clothes to the post office and had it shipped express.

  This is crazy, he called to say. But he’d stayed up there to meet the package, and the ones that followed.

  A footnote to a bad year, to this other disaster. She realized she felt just as cut off either way: alone in their Toronto apartment, curled up on the couch, chipping away at an Everest of backlogged emails (condolences, check-ins, appeals to go back to teaching other people’s children how to read, how to write, how to twist pipe cleaners into vague animal shapes); or the same thing, but with Emile pottering around in the background, trying to get her to eat things, drink things, laugh at things. These were two kinds of the same aloneness.

  And this third kind, this middle-of-a-frozen-lake aloneness? It wasn’t so different. But there was something satisfying, even comforting in the magnitude of surrounds, the physical apartness. It seemed important to feel small.

  The quad carried her over the bank, up onto land, and she parked it in the open-faced shed that housed firewood and a diesel generator. Naoishe shook her hands out of her riding mitts and felt behind a fuel can for the key, hoisted the panniers off the bike and dragged them across the snowy clearing to the cabin’s door. She fumbled the key against the lock, her hands stupid with the cold.

  She’d been expecting a friendly, musty squalor, the familiar disorder from her teenage visits, but she shoved the door open on a room that was prepped as if for a paying guest. Iona must’ve sent Uncle Wish out there that same day, or perhaps—it was possible, given the situation—he had thought to go himself. One of the bunk beds that lined the back wall was already made up with pillows and three layers of blankets. A few logs were stacked beside the woodstove and a nest of kindling waited to be lit. On the table a yellow checkered tea towel swaddled a fresh loaf of dense molasses rye, and next to it a note read, Dear Neesh, Welcome! followed by bullet-point instructions for the new generator.

  From the panniers Naoishe unpacked the supplies she’d brought out, adding them to the pantry. The shelves were already stacked with field rations, as her uncle called them—tins of things that could be eaten cold if worse came to worst and there was no fuel, neither dry wood nor propane. Canned tuna, beans, pasta dinners. Bomb shelter food. There were also the perennial jars of home-preserved meat, replenished each fall when somebody got his moose. Metal screw-top lids corroding with spilled brine. Through the glass, Naoishe saw the stringy pink meat and die-sized lumps of white fat. Strange webbing, like something preserved a long time ago in formaldehyde. She hid them behind tins of chili and Italian wedding soup, foods whose contents were embellished by bright paper labels.

  While there were a few shreds of light left she went out to meet the generator, and startled a cat hunkered down amidst the pile of birch logs. A cub-sized black thing, yellow-eyed, its flattened ears finishing in owlish tufts. She hadn’t noticed it when she parked the bike, but it must have been there. Now it crouched yowling over a stumbling brood of half-blind kittens.

  Stupid time of the year to be having babies, she told it. Don’t they teach you that in wildcat school? But the cat only spat more viciously, and the kittens, if they survived through to March, would grow into vicious things too. Wish would’ve shot the cat and melted a bucket of snow just to drown the kittens. Fer der own good.

  Fine, she said, coaxing the generator into life before carefully extracting an armload of firewood from the cat’s adopted fort. Bonne nuit.

  The body has no memory for pain. She’d read that somewhere and believed it true. Now she knew it to be. The year had been an agonizing parade of firsts, and at each her grief had astonished her. She wondered if it would be easier to have something definitive to point to, an instance of physical impact; slipping in a wet stairwell, falling from a bike, getting rear-ended at an intersection. But then there would just be different whys, equally useless, and there would still have been enough room for guilt, cunning shape-shifter that it is, to creep in at the edges.

  When she’d come home from the hospital she found that Emile had pushed all of the baby’s things into the spare room—that’s what it was demoted to, spare—and locked the door.

  Have you set up a hydroponics lab in there? she asked. She felt equal measures of pity and disgust at him thinking he could screen her from any of it. It was his loss too, she knew, but not his failure. It was not his body that seemed simultaneously to mourn and to deny the loss of the child, producing milk, making provisions where none were needed.

  Come on, she said, I’m not a fucking kid. He gave her a wounded look along with the keys, and she went in there and wailed amidst the crib, the bassinet, the pastel drifts of bunny rugs and soft animals. Couldn’t it at least have happened sooner? Before they were fitted out with all this stuff? Of course the stores took things back under such circumstances, some sort of policy, but who had the energy? Other people, apparently. Her brother-in-law Jacob had come with the truck, while her sister Molly had helped sort through the receipts and credit card statements. The gifts though, the hand-knitted giraffes and mittens and red felt Mary Janes—what could you do with those? Hold on to them, Molly said. You’ll try again. It’s hard to think about now, but you will. And Naoishe had nodded, knowing she wouldn’t.

  From one of the water bottles she filled a saucepan and set it on the stove, stirring in a few tablespoons of powdered milk as it heated. When the milk had dissolved she splashed a little into a saucer and left it outside the door for the cat to find. To the rest she added cocoa and peppermint sugar, then rolled a
thin joint from the pot Jacob had snuck her at Christmas, when she’d told him she wasn’t sleeping so well.

  Hot chocolate and cheeba; a passport to seventeen. She wanted the soundtrack that went along with it, Blacklisted or The Greatest on the stereo, something she knew all the words and could sing to, lose her shit just a little bit.

  But there was no sound system out here save an old radio and a portable cassette player with a modest assemblage of tapes and dead batteries. She fell asleep to the CBC, waking at midnight to the dampened thuds of fireworks going off in the village, and remembering: New Year’s Eve. Like a child she went over to the window. Across the pond the trees looked soft, naked maple and dogberry with branches furred at the edges, like velvet antler fuzz. She waited and heard another smatter of distant explosions, but none of the shed-made roman candles or the store-bought jitterbugs made it above the sooty tree line. There was just the faint glow of them spread through the dense sky, and she took herself back to bed.

  In the morning she opened the door and saw the milk was still there, now solid and opaque in its saucer. The cat didn’t trust her, and why should it? It had gotten this far. Still, she felt rebuffed.

  The day was bright and clear. A good day for it, came a man’s voice in the back of her mind, falsely cheerful. She thought she recognized the voice as her father’s or grandfather’s, she wasn’t sure. She pressed—a good day for what, exactly?—but no response came.

  New Year’s Day, the last of the firsts. A year ago she’d woken to the smell of frying potatoes and eggs, Emile cooking a hangover breakfast despite the mutual lack of hangover—Look, he said, there’s a right way and a wrong way to start a year. The right way is smash browns. He’d pointed a spatula at her. Back to bed, I’ll bring a tray. But this morning she cut a doorstop slice from the molasses rye and folded it over itself to eat while getting dressed.

  Which film had been playing at the Royal that evening? It seemed impossible that she could not remember this now, when she remembered so many other details: the pale gray winter dress (now ruined, thrown out), the face of the usherette, the smell of popcorn left to burn.

  Miss? You’re, uhm …

  Emile’s hands shaking as he tried to turn his cell back on. Somewhere, perhaps, in a coat pocket or a wallet, there were ticket stubs.

  Stepping down from the cabin and into the snow she listened to the pines overhead, brittle with frozen sap and creaking like the rigging on a ship. She’d come out with vague ideas of ceremony, memorial. A package of tiny woolens, knitted animals, an engraved silver spoon. She wasn’t sure what she would do. What was fitting. Something would present itself. Years ago she’d read about cultures who buried babies in the hollows of trees, then sealed them over with mud or resin. Something like that. Or else she was going to take the hand auger out to the middle of the pond and drill a hole there, feed each item through to the water beneath, the tiny clothes in peach and pink, the toy giraffe, the silver spoon.

  But it all seemed pointless now. Stupid. Leaving things to rot and tarnish in a squirrel hole or in the lonely dark of the pond. She knew there’d be no comfort in it.

  Eight months. That close. She felt like howling. She might howl. This was a place where she could howl. Instead she said her name and it sounded just as forlorn. Her own name, as though calling herself back from the treacherous edge of something. It was involuntary, this utterance, this name-noise, and so she guessed this must be the purpose of it: come back, come back, get away from there.

  She brushed snow off the step and sat, feeling the bulk of the package under her coat. The weight of a child asleep on her chest—it was something she’d been looking forward to. The nurses had put the baby there for a minute, and in the year since she’d often found herself reaching up and pressing her hand against the spot, trying to reproduce the exact pressure.

  Across the clearing the cat emerged from the woodpile, carrying a kitten in its mouth. It ran across the snow on stocky legs, giving Naoishe and the cabin a wide berth, its bedraggled little bundle swinging pendulously.

  Naoishe watched as it trotted out across the ice, wondering what safer place it could have found.

  Horse Latitudes

  Somebody has that job, but we never catch sight of him. In the morning we’ll roll out to bloody drag marks at the side of the highway. Doesn’t matter how early I get up, dismantle the tent. Knock on the door of the Cardinal to rattle Thea awake before going in to put coffee on the stove.

  You decent? I’ll call out.

  Sure, I’m decent, she’ll call back, in her best Rita Hayworth. I’ll climb in and she’ll be sitting up, almost queenly in the unmade bed. Her voice will still be husky with sleep, and while I wrestle the ancient gas range into life, she’ll slip my boots on over her pajama pants and trudge out to the brick shower block. Lope back zipped into skinny jeans with a silk scarf tied over her damp hair just as I’m pouring the coffee into travel mugs.

  I’ll ease the truck onto the recurring dream of the Eyre Highway as early as seven, sometimes before, but he’ll have already been through—some poor bastard hefting shovelfuls of last night’s marsupial gore into the tray of a tonner, and continuing on across the Nullarbor. Going home to his wife and kids smelling of dead things.

  This morning a pair of eagles are picking what’s left off the road, stretching sinewy strips of flesh between claw and beak.

  Jesus, behold the bloody majesty, Thea says from behind her sunglasses, turning her head from the passenger window. Didn’t know they were scavengers.

  She has the map across her knees. It’s been unfolded and refolded so many times that Lake Gilmore is just a hole where four creases used to meet.

  Go straight, she tells me. Go east. She’s said this every hundred kilometers since Norseman, and probably won’t stop saying it till we reach Ceduna. All her jokes are dad jokes, old-man jokes (Pleased to meet you, Hungry, I’m Thirsty. You feel like a pie? You don’t look like a pie.). I go ahead and laugh for her anyway.

  At Balladonia I feed fuel to the truck while Thea wanders through the roadhouse’s exhibition of Skylab wreckage, gleaned from the few dozen tons of dead space station sprinkled over the Nullarbor in the seventies. She leans in close to glass cabinets filled with pieces that fell to earth intact—a freezer, a hatch door, an oxygen tank—and other detritus that the atmosphere twisted and scorched beyond recognition.

  She looks as out of place here as the space junk. Her blunt black bob, the painted-on jeans showing how little there is left of her. Big-city skinny, heartbreak skinny; I can’t tell which. The Cartier that Thiago gave her is still strapped to her wrist, but her wedding and engagement rings she pitched into the river at Crawley the night before we left Perth.

  He always hated this city, she’d said, as the ripples traveled out to the bank to meet us. He’d hate to think his diamonds are in the mud at the bottom of the Swan.

  Here it is: I threw rice at their wedding. Tied streamers and beer cans to the back of their beautiful rented Daimler and waved them off, gardenias wilting in her hair, sweat patches under the arms of his handmade Kilgour suit. The whole time I had this picture in my head. Tabloid headlines from the front-page newspaper grates in the window of a newsagency twenty years before. Words like WEDDING TRAGEDY and NEWLYWEDS’ DISASTER in eight-inch lettering, and the mangled wreck of a white sedan, a tin piñata broken open, scattering wedding gifts across a slick black highway. Glassware and linen and electric knives and fondue sets. Creamy tulle frothing from the passenger side, or did I imagine that part? Even in my head, the image is brittle, overhandled, because I couldn’t leave it alone, couldn’t stop worrying at it. Because nobody holds on to something for nothing, right?

  In the end, Thea and Thiago’s disaster was so mediocre that even The West wouldn’t have run it. They didn’t last two years together, didn’t even make it to cotton.

  Thea doesn’t share the gritty details of how things shook apart. There was the apartment in Buenos Aires, seven rooms all with y
ellow curtains and too many amaryllis plants, their flowers like cartoon megaphones. Can’t seem to keep these damned things alive. She wrote that on a postcard last September, one that showed the Recoleta Cemetery and said, PS— wish you were here. That’s all I know about her life there. She speaks in half-sentences, trying to explain what it was like to come back to Perth on her own. Pulling up the roller door on the storage unit, on all the furniture she thought she’d one day send for, the boxes she’d padded out with blankets, worried they’d be thrown around the shipping container during its trip across the Pacific.

  I really thought that … I mean it wasn’t just … You know I went in and I opened these drawers expecting to find. I don’t know. Some kind of. I don’t know. Some kind of advice from the person who packed it all up.

  You mean you? I ask.

  Yeah, me, she says. Felt like my life had pretty much shrunk to fit that space. Like I could go in and pull the door down behind me and no one would ever come looking.

  Instead of entombing herself for all eternity in an eight-by-ten at King’s Storage, she’d bought the Cardinal from a widower in Mount Hawthorn. It was a cigar-smelling relic upholstered in brown and orange floral, lined with forty-year-old copies of Parade. She’d aired the thing out for a couple of weeks, replaced the musty foam mattress and the gas bottle, but left the soft sixties pornography soaking the damp from the cupboards. Then she’d called me.

  Chef, she said. What’s cooking?

  Took your time, I said. Nice of you to check in and all.