Watermark

by Christy Ann Conlin

  * * *

  It had once been a grand hotel with lavish Victorian gardens. Our parents had their wedding reception in the gardens. Their wedding album was in the attic. The photos were black and white, but the splendour of the flowers was still perfectly captured in the pictures. I remember when the garden was paved over. Edmund, he was long gone, in Vancouver then. You were sailing on Aylesford Lake that summer and I was working in the town tourism office beside the concrete wishing pool directing visitors to historic sites.

  * * *

  We didn’t have a church funeral for our father, just a burial ceremony in the little graveyard near Nate’s house. The trees were bare and the snow had not yet fallen. The air smelled of pine and rotting leaves. Edmund had decided on the ceremony because our mother was in bed crying for days. You’d wanted Dad cremated, wanted to wait until spring to scatter his ashes. But Edmund overruled you. He said Mum couldn’t bear to put it off. You stomped about the house. Shame and humiliation buried your anguish. Your anger was heavy, as though you had rocks in your pockets you couldn’t remove. And your rage when you saw the words Edmund insisted be chiselled into the marble tombstone.

  * * *

  Sometimes when I can’t stop thinking about what happened, I go back to the old hotel and sit in the lobby. The rooms have now been converted into cheap apartments. The lobby is even more rundown than it was when Dad died in the hotel room upstairs. Part of the lobby has been turned into office and commercial space. There is a liquor store and, across from it, a lawyer’s office, a criminal lawyer. It smells of cigarette smoke from the lawyer’s clients. It reminds me of you — how harsh you became after Dad died, how you always said it was criminals and poor people who smoked, the dead-end types.

  And you moved to Vancouver, just as everybody seemed to do back then. You promised Mum you would get in touch with Edmund. Cedar said you did see him but it was only because you both bumped into Edmund on the Downtown Eastside. Cedar said the two of you had been going to an artist’s studio on the Eastside, The Church, it was called. Edmund was on the street, cigarette hanging from his lips. He smelled bad, like a garbage bag in the sun. He tried to sell you pills. “Don’t you know who I am?” you yelled. Cedar had never seen Edmund, but she could tell from his eyes it was him — Atlantic blue, she said they were. Like yours. And mine.

  “Just give me a minute,” Edmund said, scratching at his greasy hair. Maybe Edmund was remembering when you would run behind him on the beach, always trying to catch him, and him throwing us in the air and catching us in his arms. Memories flying in his mind, wings beating so quickly they were only a blur, moments lost.

  Edmund wanted you to come and meet him in a park but you said you wouldn’t go there with a bunch of junkies. Cedar said Edmund wasn’t suggesting that. But then Edmund said he would meet you at Kitsilano Beach. Cedar told me you guys were held up in traffic that day. Edmund was already there on the beach when you and Cedar arrived. He sat on a log by the high-water mark, looking out at the tankers. You stood by the kiosk and watched him. Cedar told you to go out to him, but you didn’t. “What difference can I make now? This is not my brother,” you said to her. Edmund sat for a long while and then stood up, dropping his shoulders, walking away. Maybe he thought you were late, as usual. But then assumed it was his fault, that he must have mixed up the time. He tripped and fell down on the beach. Edmund was crying. Cedar said you still didn’t go out to him. Edmund got up and walked away without even brushing the sand off his face.

  A month later they called. Edmund had been found in a dumpster. It was his home, the dumpster — that’s what they told us, those ladies who worked with people on the street. Cardiac arrest. His heart was weak. It wasn’t an overdose. It was common with heroin addicts.

  After Cedar picked me up from the Vancouver airport, she took me out for coffee on the beach. I had flown out to be there for you, to fly home with you and Edmund’s body. You were making Edmund’s funeral arrangements on the phone with Mum so you didn’t walk on the beach with Cedar and me. Cedar said she wouldn’t be coming out to the funeral. I nodded, looking at the mountains. She stood at the edge of the water and lifted her arms. There was no sun that day, only mist. Cedar sang a song. It was a chant, and the words were om and la la la, and I watched the mountains vanish into the white. She held my hand as we walked back to the apartment. There was no ring on her finger anymore. Cedar told me that after she saw you ignore Edmund on the beach that day she knew she didn’t want to marry you. I told her we were going to sell the family home. My mother didn’t want to live there anymore. After the funeral I planned on moving to the city and getting a job. I was going to dye my hair neon blue. I still see Cedar in my mind’s eye, standing at the Look-Off, the sun sparkling on the water below as she tosses her head back with such lightness.

  You never knew I found the note our father left for Edmund. I didn’t tell you. It wasn’t like the short apology letters he left for you and me. Mum burned hers in the fireplace. I don’t know what he wrote to her. But I found Edmund’s, opened but abandoned, in the attic after you both had gone out west. All it said was: The world is too much with us, late and soon.

  * * *

  The air was cool and smelled like pine trees and sea salt on the November afternoon we buried our older brother. It was late in the day and a thin band of low red sun cut through the darkening sky. Nate’s father officiated at Edmund’s graveside liturgy, as he had at Dad’s. Nate pulled me aside before his father began addressing the small group assembled. Nate said in a quiet voice how our father had come to sit in the graveyard, in those days before he died. We’d thought Dad was at work in the office at the plant. But he had been laid off and hadn’t told us, getting ready for work every day and then driving his car to the graveyard. He parked in the back behind the church where no one could see him. But Nate had watched him from his bedroom window in the parsonage while he got ready for school, our father in his suit and holding his briefcase as he sat by the tombstones on the small bluff, looking out at the dramatic view of the mountain and water. Nate was just a boy. He couldn’t have known what our father was thinking on the old marble bench by the wrought-iron gate, looking out at a horizon which for our father held only sunsets.

  Our father’s grave is in the corner, near the edge of the small bluff. The world is too much with us carved so elegantly into the grey marble. I remember staring at his tombstone as we waited for Edmund’s funeral ceremony to start. Mum stood beside me with her head down and her gloved hands clasped together like two black doves.

  You arrived at the last minute, standing there by the gate when they lowered Edmund into the earth. The leaves were spiralling down, stark oranges, vivid reds and yellows.

  You, beside the closed gate and behind the gate, a childhood once alive with possibility, where the future soared like far-off mountains. The shovel hit the dirt. I looked up and it was the same man who had filled in our father’s grave but his hair was silver now. I did not know his name. Another man took a shovel and dug into the earth. And then you, you ran forward and cried, “Just a minute, just a minute,” as though one more moment could somehow make a difference. But the dirt was already falling in, leaves tumbling down like so many wings dried and turning to dust.

  Back Fat

  Being in a sailboat is like being in love. On a good day, it’s the coziest, safest, and most exciting thing to be in — on a bad day it’s like a coffin with standing room.

  I’m sitting on the bus out to my husband, Bob, or Dr. Bob, as his patients call him, and the boat. Bob always knew he wanted to practise medicine because he liked anatomy and money. Two dudes in the seat behind me are talking about their alternative band, Nutsak, and their New Year’s Eve gig in Seattle. It’s early December and they’re worried about Y2K, how when we fold over into 2000 it will be “game-freaking-over, man” because of a stupid computer coding error called the Millennium Bug. They fret this will spell the end of their fledgling N
utsak, their musical genius eclipsed by stupid coders, no time to make it big like Nirvana. I consider popping up over the seat and reminding them it didn’t go well at all for Kurt Cobain even without any technology glitches because he shot himself and now he’s dead but why bother because they would wonder what a chubby girl like me knows about grunge music anyway. I just sit there and their voices blend into the noisy chatter on the bus as we speed along to the town of Mission.

  In my university department, my doctoral advisor has explained how in the early days, some programmers misunderstood the Gregorian calendar. It sounds a bit implausible but you never know. Everybody’s panicking wherever you go. Maybe pandemonium will ensue. If it does, I would rather be in our cozy city apartment than trapped on a shabby old boat with constant engine problems and threadbare sails. I always need to have a plan, know what I’m going to do next. I speculate it’s one of the reasons it’s so easy for me to do what other people want me to. But it’s harder and harder to live like this. I put on my headphones and listen to the radio on my CD Walkman. Prince is singing “1999.”

  Bob wants me to stay for one night to at least experience what it’s like in the outstanding new marina where the boat is now moored. He’s hurt I haven’t made the effort to come out sooner. Three weeks ago he hired two professional sailors to move the boat from the Vancouver Marina to this place way out on the Fraser River in Mission. He wanted me to do it with him but fortunately I had exams which couldn’t be rescheduled. I was so relieved. He’s been working in Mission ever since the boat was delivered, with only two short trips in to Vancouver to see me. He says it’s my job to come to him. That I’ll love the new location. He says it will feel like an adventure book or action movie. He says that is his favourite thing about me, my eternal sense of adventure.

  All this said, the thought of sleeping on his rundown boat fills me with dread. I like watching adventure movies with buttered popcorn and chocolate milk. I like reading adventure narratives, in a soft chair with a cookie and a cup of tea. I detest real life adventure. But here I am, on the bus out to him and the boat. Every change I’ve ever made has been either forced on me or I’ve forced it on myself as a way of pleasing others. I am a master of doing what other people want, including marriage, of hunkering down and trying to endure. The adventure is trying to survive all these undertakings.

  The perception from the outside is very different — I realize this. Visually, and according to my resumé, I am something I am not. There’s a good hearty look to me. I’m stocky and strong. I can chop wood with an axe. I can tie knots while throwing up, hooked to a heaving boat on high seas. My outdoor skills were imposed on me by my father and my four brothers, who insisted I put in hours on the family lobster boat all the way through high school. They made me learn to sail on the weekends. They viewed all my outdoor abilities as essential life skills, not hobbies or passions. Being on a glassy, windless sea on a sunny day is lovely, but that is not a typical day on the North Atlantic.

  The bus speeds along. The mid-November sun greases the thick clouds on the horizon. Dense, bulging clouds that make me pat my back fat as the orange and red blubber clouds sizzle in the glorious evening sky. My father appreciates natural beauty in the way a working man does, loving it but hardly ever mentioning it. It’s a setting for hard work, not something to gawk at.

  My brothers and I grew up on the North Mountain, deep in the tangled woods, in a log house with a big stone fireplace, a wood stove, solar panels, and a spring-fed well. There was electricity, but when the power went out, as it did in every snowstorm, we were self-sufficient. My father and my uncles built the log house together, before I was born. My uncles all live in log homes as well. My father is a fisherman, so when he isn’t working on the water or at the wharf in Lupin Cove, he doesn’t even want to look at the Bay of Fundy. We are distantly related to Joshua Slocum, who was born in Mount Hanley, just west of where I’m from, near Seabury Gorge. When other girls were reading Anne of Green Gables he made me read Slocum’s 1900 memoir Sailing Alone Around the World about his solo circumnavigation of the globe on his trusty sloop, the Spray. It was the original adventure book unless you count The Odyssey.

  My father was very proud of how all his children learned how to haul lobster traps and use a chainsaw. That we could tie knots and stack wood. We could wildcraft medicinal plants and shuck scallops. I was happiest sitting by the fire with my mother with a piece of warm brown bread slathered in butter and strawberry jam, but I could never let my father and brothers know. The teasing would never end. My adaptation was to force myself to do everything as well as they did before retreating to the house and hearth. Only my mother understood what I was up to. She heaved a lot of sighs over the teen years and said I would eventually have to figure out both who and how I wanted to be in this world. My brothers all live near my parents. I was the only one who left.

  A few passengers at the front of the bus are singing “I Saw Three Ships.” It occurs to me I could take a bus anytime I want and just head wherever I want, not a destination someone else gives me. My mother would be pleased. My father? Who knows.

  My father enrolled me in air cadets and I spent every summer in an air cadet camp program where we did physical training, mandatory outdoor survival courses, and studied celestial navigation. They insisted I learn to fly a plane. I was born for it, they said. My father was overjoyed when I aced my flying test. It never occurred to me I could say no. I just buckled down and endured. And yet I was still happier at home, drinking mint tea and baking with my mother. To survive the fear, I insulated myself and kept floating through life.

  I gaze out the window at the glorious mountain peaks capped in sunset-stained snow. I feel nothing. Where is the splendour of nature, I wonder? I’ve got a letter in my knapsack which came a few weeks ago in the mail. I haven’t had the heart to open this letter from Tara, or as I think of her, Back Fat. What does Tara want from me?

  You can never escape childhood friends — this floats through my mind. Maybe I read it in a fortune cookie or in one of my self-help books. Maybe it was on a church sign I passed when I drove my pickup truck from Nova Scotia to Vancouver when I was twenty-five, when I was moving out west for university. Or maybe my mother said this once, not to me, but to my father, after yet another person from her past looked her up, someone who had never been her friend, and who remembered their shared childhood differently.

  My mother has rheumatoid arthritis. She was late-diagnosed and can hardly use her hands now. That’s the problem with letting autoimmune diseases run wild. They eat away at you until it’s too late. She hid her pain from my father but not from me, when I had those cups of tea and treats with her. It was our secret and it got tucked away inside me along with her baking. My father wants me to be hale and hearty. He thought if he thrust me into a life of activity it would ward off disease. I couldn’t bear to disappoint him. My mother comforted me with cupcakes.

  Bob is waiting at the station, unwashed hair, rumpled clothes, bags the colour of tea under his eyes. I can smell hamburger on his breath. There’s a bit of meat stuck between his teeth. No one would ever guess he was a doctor. He is the kind of doctor who does not insist on health food. The boat waits in an industrial park. I can’t believe it. This is the spectacular marina? This is where he expects me to stay, even just part time? This is where I’m going to do my dissertation writing retreat?

  We walk to the boat. No car. He sold it. “How can I just head out to sea if I have a car?” he says. I open my mouth and say, “back fat.” I’m losing it. Bob looks at me and I say, “I mean, wonderful.” I smile. Queen Positive.

  We walk in silence through the industrial park, past a cedar mill. The “marina” is tucked down a steep embankment on the river, so the industry is hidden. In my mind I imagine rolling down the embankment, plopping in the water, and floating away like a log. A free log. Or a walrus.

  When we walk down the dock and I see the Snapper, I
say, “Oh, she looks fantastic,” even though her paint is peeling, the teak is rotting, and the sails haven’t been raised in months. It’s like a mobile home at dock, I joke. Bob glares at me. I’ve jarred the dream. The boat is made of ferro-cement. If it can float, I think maybe anything can. I ask Bob if he’s worried about Y2K. He kisses me on the cheek and says he’s counting on me and my survival skills to get us through it.

  It’s really quiet on the dock. Like, so quiet killers could be waiting behind every pole and mast. Bob says there’s one other couple living down here. He points to the boat beside us. A warm light burns deep inside. He says he’s never met them but he’s sure they must be friendly. Sailors are like that, he says, friendly sorts. You can count on them. Of course I think of Blackbeard and Dread Captain Ned Low, and the happy couple whose boat was hijacked in the South Pacific and who were buried in pieces on a beach on the Palmyra Atoll, written about in exquisite detail in And the Sea Will Tell, a crime book about an adventure gone wrong.

  Yes, you can always fucking depend on the salty types. But I don’t say that. Bob is so pleased with himself. He grew up on the Prairies. He doesn’t know pirates are real, people coming and taking away what you treasure the most, murdering you. I want to run screaming, but instead I smile. I giggle. I feign delight. He pats me on my cheek and gives my tit a little rub, leaving some dirt on my white jacket.

  We go inside the Snapper. She could be a wonderful boat if she were properly taken care of. It’s all toasty from a little space heater. Bob lights the kerosene lamp. It would be quaint and charming if it didn’t stink so badly — the little sink is full of dishes, slimy and abandoned. I’ve known Bob to just throw them out and buy new ones, when company is coming. But at least it’s warm. I sit down in the dimly lit salon and a dirty plate sticks to my jeans. I look around at the stacks of books all over the place, the dirty pots and pans stacked in the mahogany galley. Bob finds one clean pot and starts cooking up the broken bits from an almost-empty bag of spaghetti. I can see the moon out the little portholes, shining silver on the river, and the snow on the mountain.