Viaticum

by Natelle Fitzgerald

  Annika turned to look at him now, tilting her head in a curious way. There was so much he didn’t understand about her, so many hidden things. “You’re not entirely wrong. Hamish did come from a traditional, rural family, although they weren’t Amish,” she explained, as if there was some way he might have known this. “On the surface, he was an urban, modern guy but in lots of ways he was still very traditional.” Now she looked back at the window and added darkly, “A wayward farm-boy looking for redemption.”

  “Redemption? Redemption from what?”

  She turned, as if startled away from some internal conversation. “Oh, sorry. What I mean is that Hamish still really ­wanted to please his family. He’d moved away; he was living a different lifestyle, but deep down, he wanted back in. He wanted all the milestones. That’s why he got married, I think. That’s why he chose me. Unfortunately, there was one pretty big milestone I couldn’t provide.” Again, she turned to the window. Again, that darkness, that strange tension in her voice. He didn’t understand any of it. He chopped celery, irritated, unsure of how to respond.

  Now, she sat down across from him at the table. “And how about you? Why didn’t it work out between you and your wife?” she asked.

  He looked down at the cutting board. Suddenly, Jen and Jacob were right there in his mind. He could picture them at home in their clean, modern house. It would be bedtime now, he realized. Jen would be in Jacob’s room, sitting on the bed in her pyjamas, reading stories with Jacob nestled close beside her; maybe she was explaining how Daddy went away for a few days, but not to worry, he’d be back.

  “Why didn’t it work out?” he repeated abruptly. His voice came out too loud. Aggressive, somehow. “She had an affair, that’s why.” He didn’t know why he said this, why he felt the need to be brutal, why it somehow felt true. “She and my best friend were hooking up behind my back for three years,” he elaborated. “I caught them together in the shower. They were naked. Fucking. Just going at it.” Each word felt raw, ragged, pressing down.

  Annika looked confused, “That must have been terrible,” she said quietly, then put her hand gently on top of his. He slouched and looked away, hating himself yet unable to break out of the angry, sullen role he’d suddenly slid into. All supper, he felt himself going deeper and deeper.

  Then, later: her kisses tentative, asking, wondering, and him, taciturn, insensitive, until he felt himself harden, aroused by his own anger, by the possibility that lived in it, the what next? what next? even if what was cruelty, even if what was disaster, the awful daring drawing him on. Soon, they were naked and he was on top, pushing towards something he couldn’t quite reach and she, clinging, arching beneath him. Was this making love? Fucking? Just fucking? Each thrust felt frustrated, like a doomed plea for understanding: This. Is. Not. Who. I. Am. Everything about it felt wrong.

  Afterwards, he lay awake, the silence around him grown monstrous, like a physical presence crouching in the shadows of the frigid room. He felt horrible. Annika was curled up beside him, sleeping. He ran his hands over her back and shoulders. Her frailty, her isolation, the monstrous quiet . . . was the lie, the thing he didn’t understand, really so hidden? Was it really such a mystery? Or was it right here? Were the answers to his questions right here, in the quiet, in the painful thinness of this woman beside him? He shivered, pressing close to her to feel her warmth, to shield her sleeping body from the monsters that were lurking in the corners, in the quiet. He stroked his hand over her sleeping brow and whispered, “Forgive me.”

  The next morning, he left while she was at the café opening. He didn’t tell her he was leaving or leave a number for her to contact him, he simply drove away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Months went by and Annika never heard from Michael. She kept telling herself that he wouldn’t contact her; yet she still jumped when the bell jingled above the café door and often found herself wandering down roads where there were properties for sale, thinking about him. Forgive me, he’d whispered, stroking her hair. Had she been dreaming? Imagined it? What did it mean? She wanted so badly to see him again, to talk to him. Each night she lay in bed and listened, holding her breath at the top of every inhale, scanning the silence for a car in the drive, for footsteps on the path, for a soft rap on the door, and each exhale was a disappointment and these piled up and up inside.

  And somehow, life went on. She worked hard to keep the café going. She went to Healing Journeys once a week and did breathing exercises at Marion’s advising. She went for walks. She hosted jam night. At Christmas, she baked a turkey for Barry and Kat and her little cottage was filled with light and laughter for a night.

  In January, she caught a cold that lingered for a while and wouldn’t go away. It was the weather, people assured her. It was the greyness. A lack of vitamin D. Yet it woke a fear in her and each morning, she scanned her body, breathing deeply, trying to decipher if the hardness had returned. Every ache, every pain, frightened her, yet she never got any worse. It was just a feeling, a nagging sense that something was wrong.

  Then, one day, out of the blue, Beverly called the café. Her familiar, dramatic voice seemed to smash through the fog of winter and Annika was glad. She held the phone to her ear and ­listened in amazement as Beverly launched headlong into a long, convoluted narrative about signing up for a marathon then having to withdraw because of a strange illness, then having her iron levels checked by several different doctors.

  Almost immediately, Annika guessed it and she smiled to herself as Beverly circled around the real reason for her call; the way she danced around it reminded Annika of her father’s dogs growing up: how they’d slink down the drive to greet her when she came back from school, ears pinned back, their bellies brushing the ground, as if their pre-emptive display of guilt would ­mitigate her father’s rage when he saw they’d left the property.

  “And so . . .” Beverly trailed off.

  “And so what you’re saying is that you’re pregnant?” Annika concluded.

  “How did you know?”

  “You can be excited about it, Beverly!” Annika laughed. “I’m not secretly pining away for a baby.”

  “No! No! I don’t think that at all. I just, you know, I wanted to be sensitive because I know that there was a time when you and Hamish . . .”

  “There’s a lot of water under that bridge,” Annika said and, at the same time, she realized it was true. She hadn’t given Hamish so much as a thought in months. It seemed impossible to her that a situation at one time so consuming could eventually become just a fact of your life, that the years could pile on and press out all the pain. “I’m really happy for you,” she said and meant it.

  “You are?” Beverly asked hopefully then launched in again with her excited chatter. “We’d stopped trying so I didn’t expect it, but you should see me now, I’m huge. I just can’t stop eating. I used to care but now I don’t even bother. I’ve surrendered to it: that’s a term they’re always using at these birth classes Al roped me into. Surrender. I quit smoking and I quit coffee so I might as well surrender to ice cream, right? Anyway, Al and I are having a party, I don’t want to call it a shower because I hate those things, that degrading needle over the belly thing and whatever else they do, so we’re having a kind of pre-baby celebration instead. I wanted to invite you. I’d really love it if you could come. I miss our chats.”

  Annika looked out at the water and the slow grey day outside. Her throat grew thick with emotion. It surprised her.

  “Will you come, Anni?”

  “Yes, of course I’ll come. I’d love to.”

  Several weeks later, Annika took the ferry back to Seattle. It was a clear, cold day and she was full of good intentions. She was looking forward to seeing all her old colleagues, even to seeing her old haunts again.

  On the ferry, she sat out on the deck despite the bitter cold. She sat wrapped her arms tight around her and watched
the blue shapes of the islands glide across one another, blue on blue then paling back to the ghostly solitude of Mount Baker on the Eastern horizon. Such a beautiful, magical place! she thought. What did it matter how she’d ended up there? She was here. She had her life to live.

  Halfway across the strait, a school of porpoises appeared alongside the boat and she watched their taut, glistening bodies pop up then dive back down into the black water. The cold staccato puffs of their breath were audible even above the sound of the ferry, and they seemed to her an affirmation of the great gasping effort that life took, the sheer energy that was required. She breathed deeply the cold clean air. She would forget about this Michael, she vowed; she would forget about the cancer and get on with living. What else could she do?

  Her sense of purpose did not last long, however. As she drove southbound into the Seattle traffic, her stress levels began to rise almost immediately. Everything around her seemed too bright and too loud, the concrete tentacles of the Interstate too narrow, the cars too fast.

  The whole shower/party had become unnecessarily complicated, too, she thought, irritated. First, she’d been asked to bring cinnamon rolls which made sense, seeing as she was Twisted Anni, but then it turned out that Karen really, really wanted to make her grandmother’s sweet bread and Ellen and Katie were both on the Atkins diet and didn’t even eat bread, so she’d offered to bring a veggie tray instead but Rehab got back to her and said that she was bringing veggies and dip so could Annika please bring a fruit plate? That was how things worked now and Annika wanted to be graceful about it, but, as she drove, she felt increasingly annoyed. She clover-leafed around the Northview exit, then turned the car onto the wide expanse of sun-bleached asphalt in front of the Super Value. She felt oppressed and put-upon.

  She parked far away from the store and sat for a moment before getting out. There were people walking across the lot from all directions, their angled trajectories converging on the doors as if they were being pulled by some magnetic force: a woman in sweatpants and puffy jacket; a little red-haired boy with the same thick-hipped body as his mother; a lumbering worker with the tongues of his great boots flapping; all pulled towards the door. High above, white puffs of cumulous moved steadily across the arc of the sky.

  Annika got out and joined the procession, feeling strange and out place amongst so many cars and people. It had been over three months, she realized, since she’d left the islands. At the entrance, two glass doors hissed open. A sign warned ‘Careful! Sliding Door!” She crossed the threshold and the doors hissed closed behind her.

  Inside, the air was dead and stale and filled with a dull roar, the ceilings looming high above the tops of the shelves, the vents and the pipes all naked and exposed, as if she was looking upwards into the guts of some great machine.

  An elderly man in a red vest was greeting people as they entered. “Nice to finally see the sun,” he said. “A little nippy out there today,” he said. “Just in time for Valentine’s,” he said but everyone just ignored him and walked past.

  Annika caught his eye. The way everyone ignored him made her feel bad. He reminded her of Marcus Wylie who used to stand outside the Church when he couldn’t farm anymore, making comments on the weather, only in Rose Prairie people shook his hand; it would have been considered a disrespect not to shake the hand of an elder. “Windy one out there,” Annika said.

  The mans tired face crinkled up in delight. “You be careful not to blow away out there dear,” he said.

  She wondered briefly why he would say it; if, perhaps, she was getting too thin. She’d lost weight in recent weeks. Don’t think it, she told herself. Stop. She shook her head and moved into the aisles, clutching the plastic basket while armies of boxes and cans snapped to attention all around her, so neat and orderly she felt feral and out of place with her wild tangle of hair that wouldn’t sit flat. She wandered around in a daze.

  When she got to the fruit aisle, there were several choices of pre-packaged fruit plates, so brightly coloured they looked fake. She chose one with an arrangement of melon and pineapple and strawberry, a plastic cup of pastel pink dip in the middle, all the while longing for the farm market in Saltery Bay, for the simple joy of slicing slowly through the skin of a spotted pear with her one good knife in the quiet of her kitchen.

  At the checkout, she fell in behind a woman and her two teenaged daughters, all three dressed in long-sleeved, pastel dresses and white socks in sturdy shoes. Their long blonde hair was twisted into shiny braids down their backs and their faces were plain and freckled, their eyelashes the colour of the sun. She smiled at them to show them she understood, to show that she too knew how it was to always feel judged, but they looked away and she realized how she must appear now: a slim woman in tight jeans with loose, wild hair just like everyone else. There was nothing in her appearance that would give them any evidence of her past. She was just like the people they warn you about: those other women, all the drinking, crying, needing, fucking people with skin on skin like a Band-Aid ripping, just like all the other people. A caustic bubble of shame rose to her face and she remembered the weight of his body on top of hers, his hands in her hair, his voice in her ear: Annika Annika Annika . . .

  Forgive me.

  She shook her head. The air was so stale in this terrible place with its terrible roar and the guts all hanging down. She studied the magazines: bail-outs and break-ups and baby bumps. Like love was a glass of wine. Stop. The Christian women moved forward. One of the strawberry blonde girls picked up a divider from the metal runnel alongside the conveyor and set it down. She smiled tentatively at Annika.

  Annika’s heart surged. “Thanks,” she said, relieved that her kindness had been recognized; her sympathy was real; she remembered what it was like coming to the supermarket as a girl; she remembered all the town girls smirking. Maybe there was still something about her appearance after all. She glanced down at the divider, a clear triangular prism with an ad inserted into it. She squinted and looked closer. There was a picture, a photo of a man in a blue sweater standing next to a sold sign.

  Michael.

  She shook her head then looked again. The text said: Matt Campbell. A name you can trust.

  She frowned. She was hallucinating. She must be. Seeing things that weren’t there because she was crazy and obsessed and couldn’t let things go. That was all that was happening. It was a tiny photo. It was a one-time thing. Hamish had always told her she had a problem letting go.

  She looked closer. He’d said he was a real estate agent, and, yes, it was hard to see but there, there was a little white scar on his eyebrow. She remembered it. And the name, she knew the name from somewhere . . .

  A drunken hook-up, that’s all it was.

  Matt Campbell was a common name.

  The conveyor moved forward. The girls twisted in their sturdy shoes in front of her.

  Then she remembered. Not Matt but Matthew. A bubbly, sloppy signature at the end of the letter. The letter! It had gone to Twisted Anni’s, not her house. He had come to Twisted Anni’s. He’d wandered in like he was lost, like he was looking for something. He’d asked about her health.

  Forgive me.

  Sound bled out of the world. The ceiling yawned upwards and the brightness of the lights seemed to increase and swirl and pound.

  Her mind raced. It’s not true; it’s a common name; it’s a little picture; it’s like ripping a Band-Aid: you just have to move on.

  And yet she knew.

  You were sweet.

  Far off, someone was speaking.

  “Would you like a bag for that ma’am? Ma’am? Ma’am? Would you like a bag?”

  The police had called her Ma’am once. When she’d parked in front of Hamish’s house on Christmas. They’d come and told her to stay away as if she were a criminal; a young officer, so handsome and young, had said “Ma’am? Ma’am, you’ll have to leave,” and she’d wa
tched Hamish draw the curtain closed.

  She walked towards the door in a daze. The sky winked back and forth, the brilliant blue sky hissing back and forth.

  “You forgot your fruit . . . Ma’am?”

  She went back to the car and sat there with the sound of the world turned off, unable to move or think or do anything but watch dumbly as the great beasts of the clouds continued their endless migration across the sky.

  She did not go to Beverly’s party.

  Matt Campbell was easy to find online. She went to the café and sat in the dark on the computer in the back room and found him. He had a web page. He was wearing the same blue sweater as on the divider, standing in front of a sold sign with a happy family. There were listings and blog posts and testimonials. She read it all, then read it again.

  “Matt Campbell guided us through the entire process, providing expert advice every step of the way. We’re so happy with our new home. Matt Campbell thought of everything. There’s even a playground for Mackenzie.”

  Annika began to tremble. You don’t know for certain, she reminded herself. You don’t know, and yet it all made sense: the strange letter, unanswered for several weeks, and then this strange man, just showing up out of the blue at jam night. And the way he’d acted at the end . . .

  “This stunning gem on the water excels at entertainment and recreational living.”

  Stunning.

  There were pictures. Here he was pounding a for sale sign into a lawn. His teeth. His hair. The endearing unsureness she’d seen at the café hadn’t made it into the photos; in the photos he radiated confidence. His teeth glistened.

  A stunning gem.

  She started to shake.

  “Matt Campbell has that wonderful mix of professionalism, business savvy and down to Earth charm that makes working with him a pleasure, not a chore. Highly recommended.”

  The way he’d waltzed in with his chest out and sat there at the crowded table with his legs spread wide underneath while the rest of them made room, folded themselves in half to accommodate him. She reached out and turned off the computer. Forgive me. She sat there in the dark.