Viaticum

by Natelle Fitzgerald

  When she got home she didn’t bother eat. She just sat on the floor in front of the fire as her mind replayed it over and over. The cottage, her beautiful cottage, was full of him: where he’d stood, where he’d kissed her, the way he’d stroked her hair.

  It was naïve, she thought bitterly, naïve to think you could outrun the past when sin stayed in the walls and in the air and all the choices after.

  Behold the sower went out to sow . . .

  And suddenly she thought of her father; she thought of her father and the men, the Rose Prairie men in their scratchy wool pants standing outside in the Church parking lot; those priggish uptight men with their tight-lipped judgment and medieval beliefs; those self-righteous controlling old men who would never, ever, not in a million years do such a thing as this.

  “What have I done?” she whispered. She started to cry but even in the crying Michael was there: his hands on her forehead, brushing her hair back when the emotion had come, when the floodgates had broken and the loneliness had burst forth, he was there in the crying now, his shhhhh shhhh shhh it’s okay and the fact that she’d wanted his comfort, and even worse, that she wanted it now.

  Later, she lay in bed and listened to the waves and the pitter patter of heat in the pipe getting further and further apart as the fire died and she found herself holding her breath as her heart counted out the silence, listening for footsteps on the gravel, for a car in the lane; each night she waited and no one came and that was worst of all.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Matt sat on the bed, watching his wife toy with her scarf in front of the mirror. He caught his breath. Something was different about her. Something had changed. What was it? The colour of her shirt that brought out the highlights in her hair? The way the light fell? A smell? A whiff of an old perfume she’d resurrected? Matt couldn’t say exactly what it was, only that Jen looked beautiful; she looked suddenly, impossibly beautiful.

  He came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face in the back of her neck. “Jen. My poor, beautiful Jen,” he whispered and there was a delicious coolness at her neckline, an undertone of something clean and earthy and cool.

  She turned into him and let herself be held, then she pressed the palms of her hands flat against his chest and pushed back so she could see into his eyes. “What’s gotten into you lately?”

  “Nothing’s gotten into me. You look good that’s all. I think you look beautiful.”

  Her eyes narrowed as if she didn’t quite believe him, then she turned back to the mirror and fiddled with her earrings. He sat back down on the bed. He wanted to grab her and shake her, to hold her tight and make her understand how much, how very much he wanted to make things better; instead he sat watching, saying nothing. She ignored him.

  She was going out without him for the first time in years. Some friends she’d met at her yoga class were doing a girl’s night at a local bar and he supposed he was happy for her. He supposed it was a good thing, yet he felt abandoned somehow, uneasy.

  “Do you remember that day we went out to Point Roberts Beach?” he asked.

  She held a pair of gold dangly earrings up to her ears, then put them down. “What about it?”

  “You had on that green swim suit and you just dove right in. None of the other girls went in but you went right in and swam.”

  “I grew up near the ocean, remember.” She was playing with the lipstick now, doing that smacking thing.

  “And that cook, what was his name? The creepy one? He tried to follow you out to the raft and practically drown.”

  “Jason. Jason Dupuis,” she said matter of factly. She had a memory for details. Names. Dates. She turned around. “Why are you bringing this up?” It was not an attack, but a question, as if she found it strange he would bother revive such ancient history.

  “I don’t know. It was fun, that’s all.”

  She picked up her purse, straightened her skirt and smiled at him quickly. “It was fun. It was a fun day.” She kissed him airily on the cheek. Again, he was filled with the urge to grasp her, to hold her against him and explain how he felt, to make her understand, but then she turned and went downstairs. “I’m going to be late.”

  He followed her down. She went into the den and said goodbye to Jacob who was watching TV, then she was out the door. He watched her walk down the steps. He watched her get into the car.

  A fun day. It hurt that she would be so dismissive of it, that day their life had changed. He remembered it so clearly:

  He’d been working nights at that time and partying a lot, maybe drinking too much; the majority of his days had been spent in a state of hungover exhaustion. He’d wake at noon to find the day half gone, the sun too bright, its unforgiving glare hunting out the squalor of his dirty little bachelor pad: the ­tangled sheets and take-out containers, the inside of his mouth tasting like his father’s house used to taste: sour and smoky. Somehow, life had gone stale. Everything felt dull and unhealthy, and then Jen had arrived. She’d been hired to work on the patio for the summer: a smart, beautiful girl in her first year of University. She’d been so different from the other waitresses: whispery and cool and healthy; she’d swum in the ocean; she’d simply jumped right into the frigid water, just like that. He’d felt something wake up inside him when he was around her, the desire to be better, cleaner, smarter; he couldn’t explain what it was. He’d known she was much younger than him but hadn’t thought it would be a problem. He’d actually imagined them being together, making a life together, despite her accusations that all he’d wanted was to fuck.

  That day at the beach, he’d felt alive, truly alive. He’d been funny and daring and full of energy, playing football and splashing with her in the ocean. He’d had so much fun that he hadn’t wanted it to end so he’d taken her out for a drink and then another and then the next morning they both woke at noon in his bed, in that hard light, with that stale breath he’d wanted so badly to get clean of. Shortly after this, there’d been a terrible crying scene in his bathroom, her voice behind his bathroom door saying: my life is over my life is over my life is over and that whispery coolness, that dark humor he’d been so attracted to, slowly disappeared. She was so different now, it sometimes felt to him like he’d killed her.

  He stood in the doorway and watched the red taillights of her car recede down the quiet street. The night air was cold on his face and he felt the wind pick up as he stood, then he heard the rain come sizzling across the pavement, running towards him on tiny prickling feet, closer and closer as if it might leap up out of the blackness at any second. He slammed the door and stood against it, his heart pounding.

  Jacob was standing in the hall, watching him. “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  “There’s nothing. Nothing’s wrong.” He forced a smile. “Come on, you dirty beast. Time for your bath.”

  He brought his son upstairs then sat on the toilet with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him; the warm, lemon-scented steam wrapping itself around him as his son splashed about in the great white tub. The white tiles, the white floors, the glistening white boy.

  Jacob held a green, plastic dinosaur under the water then let it go so it jumped up above the waterline and splashed down. “Pop!” Matt supplied and Jacob laughed then did it again and Matt said it again and Jacob laughed again and on and on it went. He must have said “Pop!” a thousand times and yet he didn’t tire of it as he sometimes did for each time it was beautiful and new and precious. Pop! Pop! Pop! He could sit and say Pop for all eternity he realized, just to stay here, to be here, and he ached for the moment even though he was in it, he ached for his own life even though it was right before his eyes. If only, he thought. If only and then, in the ache, he felt a cold pressing in; he felt a fog and a silence and then Annika, Annika . . . His mind rushed away.

  He clapped his hands. He stood sudden
ly. “Okay mister. You’re turning into a prune. Time for bed.”

  Jacob stood, his smooth, white belly extended over his dangling, pinky-finger of a penis, his limbs loose at his sides. So unashamed, so completely and utterly unashamed it seemed a goddamn miracle. Matt swooped in with a great, white plush towel and wrapped it around him and lifted him up and carried him; the warm, firm, living weight in his hands; the glistening, white, magical boy in his hands. He dipped his head down and kissed the top of Jacob’s head as they walked down the hall to the room, the warm, clean room. The lamp was on, the stuffed animals on the shelves standing guard. Jacob’s jammies were neatly folded in the top drawer, sitting there like a gift at Christmas. Again, Matt was struck with a sense of wonder at their lives, at the fact that this moment should belong to him. He read a story about a boy who could fly then stood in the door as the light slanted in across his son’s little blonde head and he was filled with a terrible ache inside. He closed the door and was alone.

  He went back downstairs and sat on the couch. He flipped through the channels then turned the TV off. When he looked up, his own reflection in the window startled him. He didn’t like how the rain blocked out the other sounds, how you couldn’t hear anything but the rain pounding down. It was stupid, he thought, for a grown man to feel afraid in his own house, and yet he did feel afraid. He didn’t know why.

  He went to the liquor cabinet. Since the incident in Saltery Bay, he’d made a concerted effort to cut back. He’d made new rules for himself: only the hard stuff now, in small doses, like medicine. But tonight, he felt lonely; tonight, he needed the burn to take him away for it was close now, what he’d done. He perused his selection, then took out the bottle of Chartreuse, poured a couple ounces into a brandy snifter over ice, then closed his eyes and tried to let the burn take him back to another, less complicated time. Chartreuse. He’d bought the bottle in France, as a souvenir. Thinking back, he tried to picture the monk across the wall. The monk and the gem-bright leaves and the silence.

  Jen hated it whenever he told people the story about the monk. She sensed a resistance in him, something unrelated to her or Jacob or their life together and she resented it: if she had to give up everything; so too, would he. Whenever he started to tell people about the trips he used to take when he was still single and working at the bar, she would cut him off. “It was a Contiki tour,” she’d say, “All they did was go around Europe and get drunk. They drove around in a bus, went to pubs and screwed each other. That’s all they did.”

  She wasn’t entirely wrong, either. He’d gone on a few tours that were like that. The tour where he’d seen the monk had an insane itinerary of five countries in ten days. They’d seen a few castles and museums but it was mostly pubs and nightclubs, the whole trip steeped in sex. At the beginning, he’d been on the front lines of the debauchery but quickly grew tired of it. By the end of the trip, he’d felt harried and annoyed. When they’d visit old castles and estates, he’d stop to read the information on the plaques, but only ever get halfway through before being rushed on by the tour guide or pulled away by one of the girls. He’d wanted to slow down, to stay in one spot and just breathe the air, to press his forehead against the ancient stones, but was not allowed to do so.

  His irritation had come to a head at the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the hill country outside Grenoble. It was the ninth day of their tour.

  The monastery stood alone in a forest of leafy trees, a large compound of old buildings surrounded by a great stone wall. Inside the wall, the monks still lived a traditional existence and visitors weren’t allowed inside, but there was a museum and a gift shop where you could buy Chartreuse and, after a long, winding bus ride, their sorely hungover little group had trooped across the parking lot and filed into the museum like a herd of well-trained, slightly onerous cattle.

  As a bartender, Matt had been genuinely interested in how the liquor was made. The story had fascinated him: a secret recipe handed down through the centuries, through wars and exile and political strife, an elixir of life made from 130 different herbs, this quiet castle in the forest . . . Afterwards, the guide had handed around tiny samples of yellowish green liquor that shone like budding leaves.

  “It has the funny side-effect of making everyone look like a woman,” one of his companions had snickered and then there was a flurry of Catholic molester jokes. Matt had felt so annoyed he’d taken off by himself for the time remaining.

  While the rest of the group nursed their hangovers in the shade by the bus, he’d walked around the stone wall. At first, he’d stayed on a trail overhung by trees, a kind of green tunnel along one side of the monastery, then he’d cut up into the forest and walked along a small rise at the far end.

  Above him, new leaves shimmered and danced in the sunlight, and, as he walked, he became aware of a profound silence, the whispering of the leaves just tickling its surface, drawing his awareness to something deep and powerful underneath. After spending so much time in noisy pubs and busy tourist attractions, he’d been almost overwhelmed by the desire to stop and sit for a while in that quiet forest.

  Eventually, he’d come to a place where he could see down inside the monastery wall to a small stone courtyard. At its center was a garden of raised beds with many flowers and fan-like trellises draped with vines. The monastery’s interior buildings looked down into this garden from three sides; its near end butted up against the outer wall.

  As Matt stood, looking down into the garden, a monk had appeared in the doorway of one of the interior buildings. Unlike the hooded old priests of Matt’s imagination, this monk’s head was bare and he was relatively young. His blonde hair shone in the sun. He began moving about with a graceful, unhurried athleticism: crouching, kneeling, standing. Maybe he was able to sense Matt’s gaze because, after several minutes, he’d looked up and scanned the edge of the forest, his eyes coming to rest on Matt. Matt’s first impulse was to turn away but the young monk had regarded him with such a peaceful expression, he remained where he was.

  They’d stood, each on one side of the wall, looking at each other for some time. A strange sensation had come over Matt then; he’d never felt so powerfully towards anyone in his life as he did this young man. He felt as if they were almost the same person, differing only in their wildly different circumstances. He’d raised his hand slowly in greeting and the monk had raised his, then a profound feeling of calm had come over him. They were the same. He’d felt it with utter certainty. They were different; but they were the same. He couldn’t describe it, only that, for a moment, he’d felt less alone in the world. The feeling lasted only a minute, then he’d hurried back, excited to share what had happened, but when he told the group they laughed and called him Matty the Carthusian Brother Fucker. They kept teasing him about his spiritual awakening.

  Much later, when he’d tried to explain it to Jen, she’d scoffed and said, “You? You wouldn’t last a day in solitude.” And it had hurt him because he felt like he could live that way, or that he would like to try, but that no one had ever given him the chance.

  His face began to burn, even now, so many years later, when he thought about how he’d been ridiculed: Matty the Carthusian Brotherfucker. A Contiki Tour. All they did was fuck. He lay his head back and rested it on the sofa. He closed his eyes and sipped his Chartreuse, listening to the rain. Suddenly, he was back there again, in that cold, lonely cottage. In the greyness. In the quiet. It was never far from his mind now, all shames seemed to lead him there, no matter how unrelated: how he’d lied and gone down there, how he’d stayed, how, at the end, she’d fucked him like she was drowning and now these cold fingers clawing upwards from the dark whenever he was alone, groping at the bright spot of the burning on the roof of his mouth. Annika, he thought, what the fuck did I do?

  He got up suddenly, unable to sit with his thoughts any longer. He wandered the house like someone lost, then lay in bed but didn’t fall asleep until he felt Je
n crawl in beside him, and even then it was a fitful sleep, fraught with the sense of falling.

  Then there was an alarm. A sound. Something. He felt himself clawing towards it like a man trapped underwater, fighting up. Ringing. There. His phone. A glow in the fabric of his pants at the foot of the bed.

  Who?

  Jen was already going for it, her spidery shadow spanning across.

  He snapped to and grabbed her arm. “Don’t.”

  “Who is calling you at three in the morning?” There was a straining in her muscle but he held firm.

  “Well whoever it is can wait,” he said. The ringing stopped. She was above him. He could see the glisten on her eyes, black as stones.

  “Who would call you right now?”

  “I don’t know.” He lay flat on his back, heart hammering.

  “What if it’s your parents though? What if something happened?” she wheedled and began to move for it again and he snapped to again and pulled her down. Maybe it was rough, he thought later. Maybe it was too rough. Then he went to get it himself but it was a number he didn’t recognize.

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Matt! Who was it?” she insisted.

  He said nothing.

  “I want to know who it was.”

  A few nights later, he received a call from the same number and this time he answered. No one spoke but he could sense someone on the other end; he thought, maybe, he could hear waves sighing gently in the background. After that he turned his phone off at night.

  But Jen suspected him now. He’d barely managed to convince her that his lost three days were business, and now she was on high alert. The youthful beauty he’d marveled at retreated and she became hard and brittle, her voice like broken glass. He insisted he had no idea who’d call him late at night, but she could sense there was a lie somewhere; she could sense his fear of who it might have been and began rooting around during the days when he was gone, going through his pockets and his drawers. He felt under siege. He drank a lot. Things began to spiral quickly. Her snooping made him aware of other secrets, things he’d put off and downplayed but that were now coming to a head, secrets that were accruing interest by the minute.