All I Ask

by Eva Crocker

  “I used to work there,” I said.

  “Want to stop and get something to eat?”

  “No. Maybe if Viv was there, I don’t think she’s on today.”

  On the ferry we left the car and climbed the narrow metal steps up to the deck. I liked the feeling of the water shifting the floor beneath me. For a while we leaned against a big vent that poured out warm air from the engine room. But even next to the vent the wind was brutal, the snow had turned to freezing rain and it stung my face.

  “Do you want to go in?” Kris asked. Kris’s haircut left the tips of her ears unprotected and they’d turned bright pink.

  “Yeah, in one minute,” I said and walked to the back of the boat. I wanted to stand over the propeller and see it ripping the dark waves down the middle. Three thick lines of froth stretched away from the boat, aquamarine water seething in the ruts between them. The wake reached as far back as I could see. But I knew that out of my range of sight the ocean was zipping itself shut, closing over the motor’s dissolving white trails.

  “Oh man, I can’t look at that.” Kris had joined me at the rail. “Makes me seasick.”

  I decided I wasn’t going to tell her about the cops and the investigation. Hopefully the situation would just resolve itself and I would never have to tell her.

  “Let’s go inside,” I said.

  For the last ten minutes of the ride we sat on a bench seat in the cabin. I watched Bell Island grow bigger and bigger through rain-streaked windows. Kris had her head tilted back against the seat and her eyes closed, fighting off seasickness.

  “Look,” I said when we got close enough to see the varying shades of rust in the island’s cliffs. People around us were gathering their things, getting ready to troop below deck to their cars.

  “It’s almost like Arizona or Utah, you know those desert-y parts of the States?” Kris said.

  When we got off the ferry we went to Dicks’ for fish and chips. Kris and I sat in a booth with a view of the dance floor. It was four-thirty in the afternoon; we were the only people on the restaurant side, but the bar was filling up. On the back wall a mural of the town of Wabana was framed by tubes of red and green LED lights. Red and green paper garlands hung from the ceiling and a post in the centre of the room was wrapped in silver and gold tinsel. Trad music was piping out of two PAs up by the stage.

  Kris ordered a ginger ale with her meal to try to settle her stomach.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, cracking her drink open.

  “Are you going to be able to eat this?”

  “Eating might help,” Kris said.

  She took out her phone and made a Boomerang of me dripping ketchup over my fries. She turned the screen to show me the video: I smile as a spatter of ketchup sucks itself back into the nozzle of the red squeeze bottle and flies out again. I liked the idea of her posting it. Everyone would know we were out here together.

  Kris was still pale after eating; she paused on the way to the car and bent over with her hands on her thighs. I thought she was going to vomit but she straightened up after a moment.

  The freezing rain had let up but it was cold enough that a layer of slush stayed on the ground. We drove around the island with the windows down — Kris said the fresh air was helping so I didn’t complain about the cold. The sun was almost set, a bit of custard yellow streaked the navy sky.

  “Do you know when the last ferry is?” I said.

  “I think at eight.”

  “It’s every half hour?”

  “We have lots of time.” Kris turned her face towards the window and took a deep breath.

  “Did you know there’s an abandoned air strip here and they use it for dirt bike racing?” I asked.

  “I think your phone’s ringing.” Kris said.

  I took it out of my pocket. Holly was calling. I stuck it back in my coat still buzzing.

  “You can take it,” Kris said.

  “It’s just my roommate, I’ll call her later.”

  The phone kept buzzing.

  “I don’t mind. What if she’s locked out or something?”

  The buzzing continued, she was calling a second time.

  “I can’t really help her in that case.”

  “Wow, cold.”

  Finally my phone went quiet.

  We drove past abandoned houses, boarded-up community halls and rusted-out cars. But also houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys and dogs lounging in the driveways. Occasionally cars and quads passed us. We saw a woman driving an electric wheelchair along the shoulder of the road, the tires flicking up slush. And later an old man walking two Shih Tzus with brown stains on the white fur around their eyes. We passed a house with a cracked boulder on the lawn — someone had painted the words ’Tis But One Life on one half and ’Twill Soon Be Past on the other half.

  “Did you see that?” I said. “Go back.”

  Kris stopped the car, inched backwards along the shoulder and took a photo out the open window.

  “Maybe it’s a ‘live life to its fullest’ kind of thing,” I said.

  “Or maybe it’s a ‘can’t wait to get to heaven’ kind of thing,” Kris said.

  Later, Kris stopped the car in front of a church on an empty stretch of road. It looked deflated — all the walls were concave, buckling towards the centre. We got out and walked through tall yellow grass to look in the windows. The ground was boggy. When we reached the church I stepped on the cracked cement foundation and held onto a window ledge. The wooden ledge had turned soft and silver-grey in the sun; it wobbled in my hands.

  “Can you see anything?” Kris asked.

  I let go with one hand and reached into my pocket for my phone. I flicked the flashlight on with my thumb and shone the light through the rippled window. The pews were gone and the floorboards were broken in places.

  “It’s empty.”

  “Should we go in?” Kris was standing at the bottom of a set of stairs that led to the front doors.

  “The floor is rotten.” I hopped off the cement ledge, landing on squishy ground.

  “I’m just going to see if it’s open.” Kris walked up the steps and tugged on each handle. There was a new lock on the old wooden doors, they shook in the frame but wouldn’t open.

  We walked through the graveyard beside the church instead. The grass made my jeans wet. A truck passed on the road; the headlights threw the church’s shadow over the graveyard as it drove by. I walked over to where Kris had stopped in front of a headstone. She bent to read the inscription. I leaned in and pressed the back of my hand against hers. She didn’t move her hand away. I turned my face to her but she kept looking at the stone.

  “Bernadette Murphy, Dearly Departed, Loving Wife and Mother,” Kris said.

  “’Tis but one life, ’twill soon be past,” I said.

  Kris drew her hand away. She took her phone out of her pocket and looked at the time.

  “We should probably head back to the wharf,” she said.

  I stopped by a juniper tree with a twisted trunk growing next to a stooped headstone. Its needles were almost lime green; I put one between my front teeth and my mouth filled with the bitter taste. Kris was clomping through the snow ahead of me, almost at the car. I looked up at the stars and took a long breath, trying to suck in the squat trees at the edge of the graveyard, the sunken church, the wet road, the plate of fries, the ocean. Trying to fill up on that and not leave any room for disappointment.

  In the car I took my phone out of my pocket. Notifications about the two missed calls from Holly were on the screen.

  * * *

  When we got back to Kris’s house, Frankie was blasting “All I Want for Christmas Is You” in their room. The song finished and started over again while we took off our winter gear.

  “They’re practising a lip-synch,” Kris said, closing her bedro
om door behind us.

  She went over to the computer and put on an Emmylou Harris album from YouTube. I didn’t know the songs but I recognized her voice, the way it oscillated between husky and startlingly high and clear. I sat on the bed.

  “Well, this is my room,” she said.

  “I’ve been here before.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Kris walked over and stood above me. She undid the top button of my jean jacket. The second button was harder, she had to squeeze the sides of the buttonhole to wiggle the silver fastener loose. I didn’t help her.

  “Do you want this?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  She undid the rest of the buttons. Then I sat up and tugged at the sleeves to get my arms out. When I found my way out of the jacket she climbed on top of me and kissed me. A sloppy make-out kiss with her hands in my hair and her knee grinding into my crotch. She put her hands under my shirt and grabbed onto my hips.

  “You’re so cold,” I said.

  She straightened her back, put her hands together and blew into them. She rubbed them together like someone warming up over a fire, then touched the back of one hand to my belly.

  “Better?”

  I pressed my crotch into her knee and curled my torso up to kiss her. I took my shirt off, shimmied back on the bed and undid my jeans. She stood and pulled my pants off by the cuffs, walking backwards and yanking. Then she undressed in front of me. She had on a sports bra and matching boxers, the brand name circling her hips and rib cage.

  I felt self-conscious about my faded underwear; loose curls of elastic stuck out of the waistband. The last time I did laundry, Holly pointed at a line of my panties drying on the upstairs rail and said, “Time to throw those out.”

  We got out of our underwear and rolled around, grinding and shifting our weight until we slid together. I was on top and I found a way to move without losing the warm wet of her crotch against mine. She started bucking into me, my hip joint was aching but I kept up with her. She dug her nails into the fat on my hips and I swatted her hands away with hard slaps. I was sweating but I didn’t stop moving until I felt her relax into the mattress beneath me.

  “Did you come?” I asked, slowing but still jerking back and forth on top of her.

  “Yeah,” she sighed.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?” I said.

  She flipped me over and went down on me. I warned her I was about to come — I reached out and tapped her urgently on shoulder, “I’m going to come, is it okay if I come? I’m really going to come” — and she kept flicking her tongue against my clit until it happened. We got under the blankets, both covered in cooling sweat. The Emmylou Harris album had ended and “All I Want for Christmas” rose through the floor. The first time we’d had sex it was easy and quick because we were drunk. This was more awkward and intimate.

  “Had you ever slept with someone who isn’t a cis dude before me?” Kris asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, you had?”

  “Yeah, I had.” I hated that I was blushing.

  Kris rolled over to get a water bottle that was wedged between the wall and the side of the bed. She scooched up on the pillows and pulled the nozzle open with her front teeth.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Just wondering.” Kris squeezed the bottle and shot a stream of water into her open mouth. The bottle was see-through purple with WATER IS A HUMAN RIGHT in bold print on it. There was a scummy square of dirt where a sticker had worn off.

  “Have you done it with a strap-on?” she asked.

  I thought about lying.

  “No,” I said. “Do you have one?”

  “Not anymore, I threw it out when me and my ex broke up.”

  We lay there quietly, my cheek resting just above her breast.

  “What time is it? My phone’s in my coat,” I said eventually.

  Kris dug around in the blankets.

  “It’s eight o’clock,” she said. “I’m starved.”

  We dressed and Kris drove us to the mall. She plugged in her phone and Lucinda’s voice filled the car again, backed by twangy guitar. One of the breakup songs.

  “I love the part about them listening to ZZ Top real loud,” I said. “Do you find it weird that she likes ZZ Top? Like kind of surprising?” Partly I was just showing off that I knew the words, trying to impress her.

  Kris nodded. “You just get so much about their relationship from that line though, right? This whole album is about intense, destructive love.”

  “I mean, ‘Drunken Angel’ obviously, yeah,” I said.

  “Yeah but even like ‘Car Wheels,’” Kris said.

  When the chorus came around again we sang it together, imitating Lucinda’s Louisiana accent. I stared straight through the windshield during the “forever and all time” part, afraid of what my face might be revealing.

  We ate in the food court. My underwear was still damp. I felt like I was in a sex-hormone-induced daze. I ate an enormous pile of fried noodles, and dipped golden chicken balls in cherry sauce so bright it glowed in the Styrofoam tub.

  I’d never been with a woman publicly. Dan, who I’d lived with above the laundromat before Viv and I moved in together, was the only real relationship I’d ever had. When Kris dropped me home, I wandered around the house thinking about the feel of the upholstery on her car seats, the way her body jerked against mine when she came, how good it felt to sit across from each other in the food court for everyone to see. I thought about how downcast she became at’Tis But One Life, ’Twill Soon Be Past.

  * * *

  My grandmother baptized me herself because my parents refused to do it. She shook a bottle of holy water over me in the front seat of her car. When I slept over at her house as a kid she knelt by the side of the bed in the spare room and we recited “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” It was the only prayer I knew by heart. We prayed before eating but it was a silent prayer.

  One night I found a bottle of holy water under the pillow in the spare room where I slept when I stayed at her house. It was a white plastic vial with an ornate gold cross in raised plastic on the front. It was dark in the bedroom but the streetlight outside the window made the reflective crucifix gleam. It scared me. I called my grandmother in and she took the bottle and put it on the dresser next to her satin jewellery box.

  “I don’t know how that got there,” she said. My grandmother never misplaced things. She scrubbed the silverware with a toothbrush every Sunday and ironed T-shirts. My grandmother thought I needed protection.

  She believed in signs from the universe, she had premonitory dreams and saw ghosts. She hated cats because her mother warned her cats would try to curl up on sleeping babies’ chests and suck their souls out through their lips. She threw extra salt over her shoulder into the devil’s eyes.

  Even though my mom rejected the church, she would sometimes ask me, “She’s catholic?” or say, “That’s a protestant name,” when I mentioned a new friend. Mostly it was about figuring out if she knew their family, I think. Names don’t have that meaning for me.

  I’ve never been to mass in my entire life. Most of what I know about the Bible I learned from Jesus Christ Superstar, starring Ted Neeley. From the time we were seven until we were about ten, Viv and I rented that movie over and over again. That one and Titanic. We would rewind and fast-forward Jesus Christ Superstar to find our favourite songs. On the screen, Jesus and his disciples walked backwards through the desert, chopped up by two thick lines of static.

  We loved the high priests. We wrapped ourselves in navy sheets and stalked back and forth across the coffee table singing along, each of us taking a specific role. Viv hated Jesus, she hated his lank blond hair and she thought his voice was whiny. When he stormed through the temple and smashed a slowly rotating rack of mirrors she sighed. “What
a drama queen.”

  Our elementary school, Bishop Field, had once been an all-boys catholic school. Religion was officially stripped out of the school system the year I started kindergarten, but there was still a small wooden cross with a tortured brass Jesus hung up by the loudspeaker in every classroom.

  There was a single bowling lane locked behind a door in the basement of the school. I’d only ever heard rumours about it until a volunteer after-school drama teacher accidentally unlocked the door in front of us one afternoon when she was looking for the multi-purpose room. Beams of light poured down on the bowling lane from three huge windows. The shellacked wood gleamed; a row of dusty pins was lined up at the bottom of the lane. Black balls, smaller than the ones at Holiday Lanes, sat in a rack up against the wall.

  “Oops,” the volunteer had said, shutting the door quickly. “Must be down the hall.”

  I knew the bowling lane was a relic from Bishop Field’s catholic days and as a kid I had assumed it had to do with some religious ceremony. We whined for her to let us bowl or even just stand in the room for a minute but she shook the bag of papier mâché mask-making supplies at us.

  In music class we still sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The lyrics of hymns were organized in a stack of red Duo-Tangs, their covers worn soft by generations of tiny hands. We stood shoulder to shoulder on the risers, facing a new poster about respecting differences as we bellowed, “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword / His truth is marching on.” We loved the violence of it. Some of us swung our fists at our sides as we sang and even lifted our feet, marching in place.

  * * *

  When Kris dropped me home after the mall, I plugged my phone in by the side of the couch and returned Holly’s calls. I was looking out the window at the parking lot, tethered to the wall by the charger. I hoped she wouldn’t pick up: I wanted to enjoy my post-date euphoria for as long as possible. But the line engaged on the third ring.