Berth

by Carol Bruneau

  Steeling myself, I crept to the bathroom. I don’t know what I was hoping to find: evidence of someone else? Maybe some hint of habitation—a mess. Hairs in the sink, a razor on the edge of the tub, strange deodorant.

  Nothing.

  I went and found some plastic bags—in the closet, right where they should’ve been—then tiptoed to Sonny’s room. The door was shut tight. What lay behind it clawed at me. The carpet had lines from the vacuum, and Sonny’s Lego airbase was set up. Not as he’d left it, with crashed planes and limbless men, but intact, possibly upgraded. And on the desk, below the window, was a shrine with Sonny’s school photo and that picture of us on Family Day, the Sea King in the background, and Sonny’s dodge ball and bike helmet.

  I imagined Charlie touching these things: his pained smile. His smell, for heaven’s sake—of engines and aftershave and a hint of sweat. And his voice: accusing, judging. Bitch. Then softer, younger: Willa? You seen my socks? My shaving soap?

  I pictured him squirting WD-40 on Sonny’s bike chain. And I thought of the morning Sonny and I had left, the sky’s pale blue before the fog set in.

  I wish there’d been something to tidy. But nothing needed attention, except maybe the dressers, and I couldn’t bring myself to re-enter that room. It was too full of Charlie; not just his things, but the buzz of him—or my memories of it. The way he’d shivered sometimes in his sleep; the effect of spending too much time around engines, the jittery pull of those dinosaur helos? “Think of your favourite old car,” he’d said once, explaining the allure of his job. It had meant nothing, because I didn’t have one. Sighing, he’d moved on.

  Charlie was so many shades of a person, it struck me, as many blues as the ocean. What colour did that make me, a sponge absorbing each hue? I tried not to think about it, emptying Sonny’s drawers and scooping clothes into bags. God knows why, since he’d outgrown most of them.

  I didn’t take anything for myself. Oh, there were things that might’ve come in handy, like some old binoculars Charlie never used, on a shelf in the bedroom. But there was nothing I needed, and I’d finished with that room. The time jogged me. The clock on the stove, ever reliable, said ten-thirty, and I wondered how Sonny was making out, hoping his stomach had settled.

  Grabbing my collection of bags, I locked up, leaving everything exactly as I’d found it. Still, I wondered if Charlie would know I’d been there, if he’d pick up my scent. How could he not?

  It was a long time till school dismissed at three, too long to stick around. So I started walking again, turning onto the highway in the direction of the Passage. It had to be a good five-mile hike, with cars and trucks whizzing past. A couple of drivers seemed to slow down and stare; I could’ve been a tramp carrying a bundle on a stick. But nobody stopped or even waved, and after a while I felt invisible again. A chopper rumbled overhead, coming in for a landing. Hugh would be wondering where I’d got to. Nobody had mentioned me going to school.

  Traffic stirred whirls of dust, clouding my head with the stink of exhaust. My heels burned, but by noon I’d left behind the busiest stretch of road and the air seemed cooler, fresher. That grey and white house, where Hugh’s friends’d had the party, came into view and I quickened my pace. Paula was getting her baby out of the car. I could’ve used a drink or a visit to the bathroom, but she either didn’t see me or didn’t recognize me going by. Maybe it was my baggage.

  Outside the Kwik Way, I set everything down and went and bought a Popsicle. It melted faster than I could eat it; most of it fell on the road going over to the wharf. Wayne’s boat was tied up, but he was nowhere around. I went back to the Kwik Way to use the pay phone. Hugh would be worried.

  He sounded as if he’d just woken up, vague and far away. My voice was sure to sound different on the phone.

  He seemed confused when I explained about waiting for the bus, both of us catching a ride with Wayne.

  “Listen—it’s okay. Take as long as you need.”

  “Save him the extra trip, right?”

  “Yeah? Oh. Sure. Okay. See ya.” No miss you or don’t be long.

  Hanging up, I went inside and bought an apple—lunch—and went back to the wharf to eat it.

  A good three hours to kill.

  The roof of Wayne’s house showed through the skinny trees. By now I really needed to pee. Reenie won’t mind, I told myself, walking up the road and knocking. I felt a bit weird, especially after passing Paula’s. Though it’d been just as well, her missing me. Being around little kids would’ve reminded me too much of Sonny and his morning’s ordeal.

  Reenie took forever coming to the door. She looked a little shocked, but kind of glad to see me.

  “Willa?” She eyed all my stuff. “Been shoppin’, or what?”

  She seemed more dressed up than usual—the two or three times we’d met. Her brows looked freshly plucked. She had an interview at a bank—for a job, she said, flitting around in search of her cigarettes.

  “I won’t stay. It’s just…well, I’m kind of stranded, and…” oh, hell. “Can I use your bathroom?”

  She pointed the way. I thanked her.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  When I came out, she was in the kitchen lighting a cigarette. She nudged her fingers through her permed hair as she puffed.

  “Wayne’s around somewheres. He could take ya right now if you want. Not trying to rush ya or nothing. I was you, they’d hafta drag me over there. Dunno how you hack it, really, stuck on that goddamn islant.” She made a face, though who knows what it meant through the haze of smoke and all her nervous primping. But I got the distinct feeling she pitied me.

  I thought of Sandi and Paula, and felt this sudden urge to talk, this longing just to shoot the breeze. Between filing her nails, Reenie sipped what looked like cold coffee from a Garfield mug. She could’ve been a total stranger, could’ve been anybody. There was nothing there to invite my urge.

  “I went home today,” I spoke up, pointing at the bags parked in her hallway.

  “Okay?” she said suspiciously.

  Tell her, I thought; what’s the difference?

  “You know I left my husband.”

  She shrugged, as if people told her this sort of thing every day. Why was she applying to a bank? She looked like a hairdresser. Despite its hardness, her face had that open yet distant look.

  She sighed, inspecting a nail. “Well, I guess if you done that, you had good reason.”

  My turn to shrug. My neck felt hot. I’d given this away for nothing.

  Or maybe not. “Having a kid and all,” she murmured, “and Hughie ...”

  “Yes?”

  “Ah, nothing. I was just gonna say he’s…well, Hugh’s like a big kid himself, that’s all.”

  “Oh?” Which is why I love him, I thought, and why things’ll never be how they were with Charlie. Something in her eyes kept me from blurting it out.

  “Nothing,” she said, scrabbling through her purse.

  “You guys’ve known him for a while, I take it.”

  “Huh? Oh, Hughie and Wayne, they go way back.”

  She flipped car keys onto the table. I stayed put.

  “Yeah?”

  She started digging again.

  “He’s never told you?”

  I shook my head, a little confused.

  “They grew up together. They did time together, sweetie,” she said, deadpan. You could imagine that voice at the circus: please, clap now for the bearded lady!

  “You didn’t know?” She fluffed her hair up off her neck, glancing at the door with its tole-painted Welcome attached to a tiny, twee birdhouse.

  My cheeks felt hot. I should’ve just thanked her then and left. I mean, anyone with eyebrows like that is not to be trusted.

  “Nothing serious. Possession,” she crowed, a smile cracking her made-up face. “Don’t tell hi
m I said. It was just a bit of hash. Frig! Nothing to get pissy over.”

  “Who’s pissy?” I quipped, going along with her, even if it wasn’t funny. She had a weird sense of humour.

  “They were just kids, him and Wayne. Oh, mother.”

  “The music,” I cut in, and rose to gather up my stuff.

  “They been at that forever, too.” She pushed her hair back primly, showing a pimple coated with Erase. She said something about a record, her voice sarcastic. Her mouth tightened in a little line. My time was up; she’d run out of patience.

  “Listen. Keeps ’em out of trouble, eh?”

  “Right,” I said, as she followed me to the door.

  Wayne was outside peering under the hood of his truck. “Good luck with the interview,” I called as she got into her car. It looked quite new.

  “Easy on the clutch in that Tie-oughta,” Wayne hollered without looking up. “Now, I s’pose you want a ride.”

  “It’s okay, I can wait for Sonny.”

  I lugged those ridiculous bags back to the dock and found a patch of grass and flaked out. But I wasn’t in much of a mood for sunbathing. Watching the clouds, shivering every now and then at the chill off the water, I wondered about Reenie, why she had it in for Hugh. The chill moved up my arms. Were there things he hadn’t told me? Drugs, shoplifting—I mean, who didn’t do crazy things as a kid? A teenager, I mean. I pictured myself, a younger, skinnier version, toking off a crumb of hash on a pin, pinching the odd chocolate bar, a pair of flip-flops. With no mom and my father on some other planet, there’d been no one around to notice. I pictured a younger, shorter Hugh rolling a joint, stealing candy, maybe an album. An eight-track tape.

  Reenie is nuts, I decided. She’s jealous.

  The coolness spread through me. Consequences. Punishment. I’d never got caught doing those stupid things; who knows how Dad would’ve reacted? Something would’ve come to me, though, some excuse, some good reason.

  I wanted to call Reenie and tell her she had it wrong, whatever it was about Hugh.

  An eye for an eye ran through my head: tit for tat. But as the wind churned up whitecaps, an image of Charlie came to mind. Items from the news he liked quoting, stories from the Middle East, or wherever it is people get their hands chopped off for stealing. Stealing what? A wife and son?

  Sick, the stuff that plays through your mind when you’re hungry and maybe a bit dehydrated and just want to get home. Especially after seeing someone like Reenie, never mind your kid barfing in a ditch and the house you’ve left suddenly as spotless as if it were inhabited by Mr. Clean and The Man from Glad. Now there’s a couple; anything’s possible these days.

  There wasn’t much you could rule out, really.

  I shut my eyes, felt the sun pulse through the lids till everything swirled orange. When I opened them, my watch said two-fifty. Sonny would be here any minute; we’d have lots to talk about.

  But when he got off the bus twenty minutes later, he scowled past me, barely saying hi to Wayne, who hobbled towards us, checking his watch. He was breaking up his day for this, after all. As he mumbled something about his ignition, I asked Sonny, “So how was it?”

  He just fired his pack into the boat, keeping silent the entire crossing.

  “Six minutes and thirty-five seconds,” Wayne brayed as we nudged the dock. You could see why he and Reenie were a pair. “Good thing Hughie’s not paying me by the hour, wha’? Ah, I’m just arsing around. Tell him I’m putting you on his tab.”

  17

  MERCATOR SAILING

  “Honey? Were home!” I hollered, just kidding. Sonny threw down his pack. Hugh was nowhere in sight, though he’d left a fresh pot of tea on the stove. Pouring myself some, I fixed Sonny a snack—bits of Kraft singles on saltines. Not great, but he had to be starving.

  “Eat your lunch?” I fished around. “So, how’s your teacher?”

  Sonny scarfed down his crackers, not speaking.

  “Where’s Oreo?” he finally asked, as if the dog had been sent to school too.

  “Beats me.” I paused, testing the waters. “While you were at school, um, I had this chance to go—”

  But he’d jumped up and was leaning outside yelling Oreo’s name.

  “Hugh has him out for a run, betcha,” I called, but the pup had disappeared. A little while later, there he was scaling the rocks towards the marsh. It was then I thought of the binoculars, the ones I’d seen this morning. This reminded me, fleetingly, of the house on Avenger, its morgue-like neatness.

  If he wasn’t out with the dog, Hugh would be up in the light. Crossing the yard, I tried the door to the tower and it swung wide. “Hugh?” I yelled, climbing. Sometimes the sun made him groggy and he’d doze off sitting on the floor, his legs stretched out.

  Reaching the lantern was like rising to the top of a huge baby bottle with a bright red nipple. He wasn’t there. All around me the world shimmered, a continuous, rolling blue with an edge the sea lacked in summer, a resoluteness. It was obvious why Hugh liked being up here; it made you feel in control. Of what, though, it was hard to say. Just in control. The mercury gleamed like a mirror and I paused there, my hand drawn down as if by a magnet. Holding my palm over it, I dangled one fingertip, let it touch the surface, just brushing it. I expected a silky feeling like hot mud. Instead it felt chilly, metallic. Realizing what I’d done, I wiped my finger on some paper towel, balling up the wad and leaving it on the ledge. The sun streaming in made me woozy, and I wondered if the vapour had an odour. I thought of Alice: the Mad Hatter and the March Hare having tea.

  The only smells were of dust and window cleaner. But I thought of that place in Japan: Minamata. How crows had fallen from the sky and cats jumped into the sea after eating mercury-poisoned fish. So the story in Life had said, the article that had run with the photo that was stuck in my memory, of that teenage girl and her mother. Falling birds had been the first sign that something was wrong.

  The Danbury shakes, Hugh had called the sickness suffered by those hatters in Connecticut, the ones with red hands from felting beaver pelts. I thought of spills from thermometers, leaky fillings in people’s teeth. The symptoms you heard about: thirst, confusion, nutty behaviour, an uneven gait.

  Hugh’s binoculars sat by the radio. Looping the strap over my head, I scanned the horizon through the salt-stained panes. It felt disorienting; the glasses were probably better for birdwatching. Climbing back down, I started towards the beach with them. Sonny would need coaxing to do his homework. The thought of it reminded me again of the house—Charlie’s house—and nights before bedtime. Charlie puttering, oiling the chain on Sonny’s bike. He’d been so careful not to miss a link. As if everything had to be perfect, otherwise why bother? Not that he’d been cruel, exactly; he’d probably never “stepped out.” But then there was his phone call.

  I sat cross-legged on the sand, focusing the lenses. The water spread like a glittery sheet. It was a trick, of course; if there was one thing you learned on Thrumcap, it was variation. One fog bank was not like another, nor one curve of beach like the next, no matter the weather. In a blink the ocean changed, yesterday’s blue different from today’s, currents like stretch marks. I could appreciate this, having given birth; miles from the sea I could’ve looked at my belly and seen it.

  Watching a sailboat, I tried to make out the skipper, then thought again of Hugh, how it wasn’t his nature to watch for lines or wrinkles. His job was to make sure sailors knew they weren’t adrift. Simple. He was like a big, beautiful kid. Frig Reenie; she was poisoned by living with Wayne.

  I wondered if Charlie ever missed me, or had I been like a propeller, invisible when operating smoothly? Marriage suffered the same fatigue.

  Endless blue, endless summer, but just as you grasped things they ended. For the millionth time, I wanted Hugh—Hugh moving inside and around and beside and above me, like vapour. Like some
sort of holy ghost.

  He was boiling water when I sauntered in. Sonny was hunched over a box, the first aid kit open on the table. The bleeding seemed to be from Sonny’s arm, till I spied squirming fur.

  “Calm yourself, Tess, it’s not that bad.” Hugh threaded a needle, dipped it in the kettle. “His ear. Must’ve had a run-in with something bigger. Whaddya think, Alex? A bear on the prowl, or what?”

  The pup’s eyes rolled. “I found him like this,” Sonny cried. “His ear all chewed.”

  Hugh bent closer. “Hold him tight, now, Alex.” His hand kept shaking as he stitched bloody skin together, then swabbed the wound with greyish gauze. “Didn’t know I took sewing, did you?”

  I stroked his arm. “What other tricks d’you have to show us, Mr. Gavin?”

  “Beats me.” He patted Oreo’s trembling rump. “Now, could we eat?”

  “Thanks, Hugh,” Sonny actually said.

  Nobody asked about anyone’s day. Just as well; the bags of clothes showed where I’d been. I would explain without words, later in bed.

  “Make sure the dog stays inside,” Hugh told Sonny after supper. “You can’t leave him wandering all day.” Then he said he was going ashore to jam; the guys had a gig coming up in November.

  “But that’s months away.”

  “Don’t wait up, sweetie. Keep your mother company, bud, and watch the pup. He’s too young to be off on his own.”

  ***

  Sonny spent the evening up in his room, the dog scratching to get out. I took a walk on Hangman’s Beach, the rocky one, drawn by the slant of light as the sun sank. The shingle was steep, treacherous; one false step and you’d slip and clatter into the surf. Hugh never came this way. But curiosity pulled me, a silly need to see if the sounds in my dreams could be heard out here. In the dead of night, they were cries for help.