Watermark

by Christy Ann Conlin

  The car noise fades and then it’s just him snoring in her ear and then more “Lister, Lister, Mister Lister” — the lady’s voice rising and stretching on each Lister as though Lister might be sitting in a treetop and she must throw his name up through the leaves. But outside, the cat does not come.

  Inside, the snoring does not stop. She nudges the doctor awake and he snaps upright, rubs his temples. Lies back down. Pulls her to him. “You should drink less coffee,” he whispers.

  “It’s always like this,” she says. “I am a creature of the night.”

  “Poor you,” he says. “Poor creature.”

  “Poor you,” she says. “What about being on call and not sleeping?”

  He mutters, “That’s different — hospital’s air-­conditioned.”

  His breath on her neck, hands moving slowly over every curve of her body, the heat of the night melting them together, her face pushed into the damp pillow, every part of him hot inside and outside of her. His lips on her spine, pulling her hair, her head back, her hips lifting off the bed, gasping. “Shush,” he whispers in her ear.

  * * *

  She sits on the back deck, her naked body drying rough with salt crystals. The smell of their sweat is acrid here, where the air is cooler, but the smell is lost as the scent of the night bloomers rises from her verdant garden, the fragrant evening clematis running up a chain-link fence and sealing off this urban Eden.

  The cat lady calls out again, each syllable so elongated the young woman knows her hands must be cupped like a bullhorn. The voice breaks, then stops. Far-off traffic sounds drone and laughter floats over from a neighbour’s rooftop balcony. She loves the city on the hot summer nights when she cannot sleep, slipping from the confines of the house, sitting outside in the dark. The house a veritable sepulchre for the winter insomniac, the snow dampening the nighttime sounds of life, when the window can’t be opened, sealed in from the cold, sealed in from the world.

  * * *

  She always walks quickly across the Commons. It’s dangerous. She knows this. She always says never again, but each time she slips back, safe, into the house, she knows she will cross over again, in the dark when it’s dangerous, when the night city is alive and mysterious.

  She had slipped inside the house from the back deck and into a dress and sandals, pulling her hair back in a ponytail. Then quietly out the front door and down the steps, the man in her bed still asleep. The old neighbour, dark as night, sitting on his front step.

  “Evenin’,” he said, dragging on his cigarette. “Shouldn’t be goin’ out alone. You know it, girl.”

  She knew it. “Insomnia,” she said. “Going to get a movie.”

  He shook his head and she walked past him, down Maynard Street.

  Then she was moving fast — as she is now moving fast, halfway across the Commons, running even though there is no one around. Scared and excited. Her sandals clipping on the path. In the winter she’d be in the tub, hoping the water and candles would bring sleep. There is no traffic crossing Robie Street, but a police car drives up as she steps onto the sidewalk.

  “Problem, Miss?” the cop in the passenger seat calls out the window. His head is shaved.

  “No, no problem.” Shit, she thinks. “Looking for my cat,” she says. “Lister.”

  “Now, you know, dear, it’s not safe to be out in the neighbourhood at night. Cat’ll show up in the morning looking for breakfast.”

  Do they think she would be safer on some quiet South End street, she wonders? What they think is that they should drive her home, but she says she lives only a block away. They sit in the car with the engine purring, watching her walk up Compton Avenue. She turns around and waves at the police and then walks into someone’s dark driveway. When the sound of the car fades off, she runs back out to the sidewalk and to the bright lights of Quinpool Road.

  Dripping sweat at Video Difference — open twenty-four hours, for shift workers and insomniacs. She’s looking for a movie to start the delta waves in her head, the brain waves which relax you and summon sleep. There is no cable in the house, not even a DVD player, only a VCR. She finds Marathon Man, a “retro” movie, the girl at the cash calls it. It’s almost always the same girl on the graveyard shift, a girl who says she moved from the Valley to the city. Her hair is window-cleaner blue. She says she has insomnia too and when she does sleep she has nightmares about her brothers, one dead and one who may as well be. The clerk makes change while she puts a quarter in the bubble-gum machine on the counter.

  She blows bubbles as she heads back across the Commons. Under the sallow lights of the park. In the east, the sky is lightening. Soon birds will chirp, traffic will roar, people will parallel park on the street in front of the house and she will be in bed with a stranger, searching for a few early morning hours of sleep before she drifts through a hot day on iced coffee and fatigue.

  Her neighbour is still out smoking as she comes, gleaming with sweat under the streetlight on Maynard Street. Home. She wipes her forehead and tightens her ponytail. This sweat is from relief, and she can smell the difference. She sees the old man from the corner. She waves as she steps from the curb, and her toes poke warm fur.

  * * *

  The old neighbour watches her, white and sweaty and kneeling on the road by the skid marks. He hobbles over and shakes his head. They pick up the big cat together. Its head lolls, neck broken, eyeballs bulging from the sockets. She cries and he pats her shoulder.

  “Poor old Lister,” he says in his love voice. “Lister, my boy, you shoulda stayed in tonight . . . you know it, Lister, my poor old boy.” He strokes the cat, fur soft as pussy willows.

  “It’s hard,” she cries, “so hard when you can’t sleep.”

  “It is, so it is,” says the neighbour, patting her damp hand.

  And they hear the lady calling again, over on Creighton Street, each syllable shooting out like gunfire, a tiny pause as she reloads with air and resumes, relentlessly now: “Kittykittykittykittykittykitty.” The lady is standing on her step, fat and old, wearing an orange nightie and pink slippers, her hand clutching the railing. She screams. The eastern sky is forget-me-not blue. Here, in the city, the summer morning breaks through the last film of night as the transient insomniac and the old man slowly cross the street with the slack bundle of fur and bones in their arms.

  Desire Lines

  greetings and salutations from the mists, my fellow wayfarer!

  That was how the email began. He was obviously still living out east, in the same place on the North Mountain. He assumed I would be happy to hear from him. He didn’t use my name, but as I read on I realized this wasn’t some kind of promotional email or solicitation. It was meant for me and me alone. He was in Vancouver and did I want to get together?

  I wasn’t expecting an email from my father. After all, I was thirty-eight years old and hadn’t seen the man in thirty years. I had just biked home through Pacific Spirit Park after teaching a class at the university. The paths in the park are carefully maintained and marked, unlike the wild country trails and pathways I knew in my early childhood. It’s part of what drew me to civil engineering, my interest in the paths we create as opposed to paths which are prescribed. My husband was picking up the boys from school and I’d decided to use my last bit of time at home to plod through a backlog of work correspondence.

  My father asked in his email if I remembered when I lived with him at The Mists, or the magic of the North Atlantic landscape which I’d been away from for so long. You were very young, he wrote, so you probably don’t remember much from your early childhood. It was a long time ago. We all move on and I can see you have done so very nicely. Congratulations on your great job! I’m so proud of you.

  One fact I’ve learned as an adult is to never assume my children won’t remember what happens. And not to assume adults can control which parts children remember. Childhood memories are like photo
s that have tumbled out of an album, snapshots that don’t provide the complete picture. But we remember stories we’ve been told, and stories we’ve overheard. We take this information and the episodic memories we have and string together a story. Even as adults we try to complete the childhood story. We never stop trying to find the ending.

  * * *

  We moved to the North Mountain the summer I was four and my mother was pregnant with my little sister, Morgaine. They had bought one hundred acres of land near Lupin Cove. My father made the house himself and we lived in a tent pitched in a meadow surrounded by forest while he built it. My mother told me this. I remember the tent was green and there was a path through the meadow to the house. I loved this path that cut through the tall grasses. In the meadow, purple vetch threaded up through the grass stems and touched my mother’s round belly. The grasses grew so high they were taller than me, but I could look up and see how they touched my mother’s breasts. I drew pictures on her stomach with icing coloured with beet and carrot juice. Then she’d let me lick it off. The acreage was mostly forest, except for the clearing around a large, rickety barn. They put a sandbox in the clearing where I played with my pail and shovel.

  There was also a path through the woods. It was a twisting path my father had cut through the pines to the clifftop jutting out from the trees over the Bay of Fundy. He called the path “the labyrinth of life.” It snaked through the forest to the perilous brink of the cliff. The path was difficult and winding, with sharp turns where you had to slow down. My father said this was the main purpose of his pathway — everyone was forced to stop hurrying and consider their journey as it unfolded. People needed to be open to sudden turns and trust the way ahead. Being in the moment would take over and time would lose meaning.

  Before you knew it, you would arrive at your destination, and le voilà, enlightenment, or éclaircissement, as the French Acadians say, when you reached the bench of wisdom! Every age had an awakening, my father said, with people like him called to be its prophets, ushering in the awakening.

  On a clear day you could stand at the edge of the cliff and see all the way down the bay toward Maine, which was four exhilarating hours away by boat as the crow flies or a long, boring two-day drive by car, as my father explained.

  The bench at the edge of the crumbling cliff my father had made from driftwood cast to a silvery white by the elements. He encouraged us to sit on the bench and look for water nymphs and selkies. He insisted people had been spotting them in the bay for generations. They swam in with the tide, he proclaimed, as though he were a marine biologist with a peculiar specialization.

  My mother’s rule was we were allowed to sit on the bench only if an adult was with us. My father said my mother was too protective, she’d ruin us. Driftwood was cured by the salty bay and the wood was endowed with a strength which milled lumber did not possess. The full baptism and sculpting by the breakers and rocky beach made the wood enduring and rugged, he told us. The bench would protect us. Humans could only hope for the same combination of splendour and toughness. My father wore a long leather necklace with a tiny piece of driftwood dangling near his heart. His talisman, he called it.

  I remember how excited I was when the house was finally ready — if you could call it a house. I was too young then to know my father wasn’t much of a carpenter. It was tall, almost rectangular. My father, or Ocean, as he insisted everyone, including his children, call him, named it the tree house even though it was not near any tree, but in the centre, the heart of the field. He described the building as a salute to the trees. He believed the names of people and of objects and buildings should reflect their true nature.

  My father loved talking about his quests on all sides of the continent. The high North had called him and he had journeyed to Whitehorse and onward to Utqiaġvik, which was surrounded on three sides by the Arctic Ocean. The sirens of the south then sang to him, and he journeyed to the southernmost point on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. My father stood with his toes in the water at the end of the world where the South Pacific and the South Atlantic swirled together, where the water met the earth. Here he took his spirit name. The ocean waves had called to the eternal flow inside of him. My mother told me this story when I was a teenager, one of the few times my father’s name came up.

  The house Ocean had shoddily built on the commune had four stories. The woodstove and kitchen were in the cellar, from which a spiral staircase led to the first floor, where the living room was, and then the second floor, with our mother’s workroom and a library. The third floor was where I slept, and the fourth floor, a loft, was where they had their bedroom with a balcony. It was in this room my mother gave birth to my sister. My father was determined she’d have a homebirth and apologized to me that I was born in the hospital and not on the land as Morgaine was.

  We buried the placenta together in the field. The maroon flesh quivered as my father placed it in the hole we’d dug. It was covered in a grid of arteries, the cord attached in the centre, an alien topography, a map to the secret of life. The organ glistened as the sun fell on it before we covered it in handfuls of earth. A woman’s body is miraculous, Ocean said. He patted my tummy as he said I too would one day create a miracle.

  Morgaine slept with my parents for the first two years, constantly breastfeeding. The baby, as we still called her then, started waking up crying when they would burn incense and massage each other.

  This is when they moved her into my room. Morgaine continued to wake up in the night and would crawl into bed with me. Sometimes I wonder if I remember correctly. We never had normal bedtimes, sometimes rising and setting with the sun and just as often staying up late into the night for Solstice or other High Holy Days, as my father called them.

  By day Morgaine was a chatterbox. At night she was quiet as we listened to coyote howls, the wind rushing through the trees. Then to the sounds of chanting and drumming once my parents started having people come and build on the other parts of the land to join the Community. My mother would put us to bed, but if we got up and ran outside, my father would tell her to let us be. We would watch the vesper bats dart through the twilight. We helped our father build bat houses.

  One day we heard the crows screaming in the trees, two of their babies on the ground below a nest. Ocean left the dead one to nature and took the injured fledgling to the barn where he fixed its damaged wing. When it was able to fly, he released it for the crow family in the trees to reclaim. But the bird had imprinted on my father by then and would soar down when he’d throw some scraps. It would perch on his arm.

  Ocean came home with a large tattoo of a crow on his forearm. “A murder of crows, Eve, although that word masks their wisdom, their humour, their loyalty and kindness,” he said as he showed me, black ink on red and puffy skin.

  Morgaine was repulsed by the diet of crows. “Yucky. They eat garbage and dead stuff.”

  Even though she was disgusted by how the crow pecked away at roadkill, the bird seemed to like her, never hopping away as it did from me.

  “A part of the life cycle, Morgaine,” our father told her as he picked her up and swung her to his shoulders. “You see, the crow is prehistoric. It will be here long after we’re gone.”

  Ocean told us people were scarring the earth, that one civilization after another had been wiped out because of arrogance, a sense of invincibility, forcing the ways of men and progress on the land. But nature would only tolerate so much. He’d explain how vaccinations were creating legions of zombie children, implanting illnesses, making us vulnerable to the coming plague.

  To the west of the bench by the perilous cliff was an old abandoned graveyard with toppled tombstones, people who’d died of the Spanish flu. It was a flu they caught in reaction to the First World War, Ocean said, their immune systems weakened by the horrors inflicted on humanity by powermongers.

  “And look at what’s happening in Lebanon now. The poor Palestinians
. It’s a mess, Apsara.”

  Apsara was what he called my mother, Sanskrit for celestial nymph. She would step in when he ranted, interrupting him with talk about her herb garden. She was growing meadowsweet and valerian and lemon balm. She planted sea buckthorn and it was growing steadily, covered in brilliant orange berries from autumn into winter. The garden was small at first but after a few years my mother expanded it. It thrived with her careful attention and by the time I was six the garden was thick and lush. When I came home from school Morgaine and I would play, chasing each other over the paths through the garden, our footsteps releasing scent from the aromatic creeping thyme which grew in between the stepping stones.

  My father wanted me homeschooled, and my mother wanted me at school. Ocean said school would brainwash us. And when the winter weather blew, we might freeze to death waiting for the school bus on the dirt road. It was then she had started to grow weary, the sleepless nights and constant tending to little children layered in with the endless cooking and gardening, and my father’s ceaseless ideas. She knew she would be the homeschooler, not Ocean. We didn’t even have a globe because my father felt it would give us a limited sense of the world. He would hold up his hands and say the earth was an endless expanse. We were pure energy.

  Sometimes, but not very often, he’d take us to see his mother when he went down the Mountain to town for groceries. My father usually left shopping to my mother, but sometimes she’d complain of a headache and he’d pack us in the truck. Grammy would stand in her apron on the steps of her old house, hands on her hips, telling him he should get a real job, how he was being ridiculous. He stopped bringing us down to see her. She wanted to take us to church on Christmas Eve. He called that “Yule.” He liked the Easter Bunny more than the crucifix. He was all for fertility, he said.