Even gathering the stained gauze pads together to drop them into the waste bag, her fingers moved reverently.
HER SON TOM CALLS HER on Skype.
Where are you now? she asks.
Nepal.
She never knows. He has called from Botswana, Laos, Peru. And once from Vancouver, only an hour’s flight away. He had zipped back to renew his passport, wasn’t staying, wouldn’t see her.
The video feed isn’t working well; she gets only frozen, pixelated aspects of his face.
The last time he had visited, he had been jet-lagged, had slept through the first two days of a three-day stay. She had left him alone, but at last had crept into the room to look at him, and had seen how, in his sleep, the flesh slipped from the side of his face, hung from the bones, as if it were melted wax. She had tiptoed out. Wished she had not seen that. His youth gone.
He asks how she is so casually that she might think he hadn’t heard, if she didn’t know him so well. She wants to say, come home to me, my son, but that is not a language either of them speaks.
He says, Maybe they’ve made a mistake. You seem pretty lively.
Oh, I am well, she says.
Still painting? he asks.
Well, you know, she says.
He says he will fly her to Kathmandu. She can go for guided hikes in the Himalayas. She can paint the famous rhododendrons. She believes, while he is speaking, that she will do this. That is Tommy’s gift: He travels the world selling belief – in himself, in possibility.
When he was a boy, when they were driving somewhere, he would sometimes say, urgently, putting his hand on her arm: Dad can’t speak to you like he does. I will make him stop. And once: Mom. We should move out. She had, at those points, felt it possible.
In eleventh grade, the first day, he’d come for supper laughing. He’d said that he had gone to school, was standing in the schoolyard with his friends waiting for the bell to ring, the doors to open, and it had occurred to him that he was now sixteen years old, and not legally obligated to be in school, and he had laughed and walked out of the school grounds, walked downtown and got himself a job.
He would please himself from now on, he said. If they didn’t like it, he’d move out.
Hal didn’t like it. She had not interfered. She had let Tom go.
She had been so in the throes of her own need to escape that she had barely lifted her head to wish Tom well.
He’ll come back in September, he says. He’ll come back for her show.
Yes, she says. That will be lovely.
She wants to see him, now, with the ache of roots for underground water. She peers at the screen, but the pixelated image disintegrates, and there is only grey.
If she said: Come sooner, come in the summer. But she must not. If she does, she’ll give herself away, she’ll lose her plan. She must let go of him now.
SHE TOO HAD ESCAPED, but not with Tommy’s éclat or poise. She had made a mess.
When the college had opened, in the early seventies, she had enrolled. Hal hadn’t wanted her to. She’d thought it was because he lacked imagination, but really it was that he knew too much: He had foreseen what would happen, that she would find there her exit. That the more she learned, the more she would outgrow the pocket he reserved for her.
In painting class, her instructor had said: Don’t be afraid to make a mess, and she had made a mess. She doesn’t approve of this kind of leaving, though she understands now that it is sometimes all that can be imagined. It is the only landscape into which women can conceive of disappearing, sometimes: the only one they know.
It is better than chewing off one’s own hind foot.
ON HER WALKS SHE GATHERS FLOWERS to dissect and paint. On the canvas, blown up hundreds of times, they become something else: a trick of scale. The something else from her own perception, her mind, her life.
Here is the locoweed blossom, now: its downy sheath, its lobes and clefts, its colour of clotted cream, its scent of butter. She uses the magnifying glass; she sees the petals pursed like closed fingers, the pistil like a periscope with eyelashes. One doubled petal has dark green eye spots, but they can’t be seen unless the flower is pulled apart. A flower that secretly watches. The field pussytoes, dry as paper. Each toe a mass of tiny flowers, so small they can’t be made out without the magnifying glass. What is hidden, unsuspected. Each petal the size of a split second. Each stamen like a nerve ending, a neural thread.
The pussytoes, her field guide says, can produce seeds without fertilization. Each daughter plant will be genetically identical to the mother.
DOLORES, HER MOTHER, never had said who Lilah’s father was. One of her cousins had said to Lilah, after she’d come back to live on the ranch, when, as teens, they’d ride up to one of the lakes, brave the leeches and cold to swim and lie on the baked, cattle-churned mud, smoking and trading sexual information: You were always supposed to be the child of immaculate conception. She’d understood it was the adults joking. She’d already noticed that she looked exactly like photographs of her mother, in the photos of Dolores as a child. Not a little like, but exactly.
She’d believed that she had sprung from Dolores spontaneously, as Athena from the head of Zeus. Only once, at a family gathering – her grandfather’s funeral, likely – that had brought Dolores back to Canada, back to the ranch, she’d seen the bodily ease between Dolores and Sim’s father, Dolores’ first cousin, Derek. She’d been old enough to see it: the way they aligned, walking, talking, sitting, as if they were two halves of something. Her grandmother had said, those two were always thick as thieves, but Betty, Derek’s scrappy Liverpudlian war bride, had smoldered, then found occasion to attack Dolores. There had been scratching, hair-pulling. It was clear that the interaction between Dolores and Derek caused Betty some misery, at any rate.
Of her first years Lilah can only remember always rushing to catch trains. When she was older, Dolores, visiting, would say: Don’t you remember that funny man in the ChampsÉlysées, or, that café in Madrid, or Trieste? Things like that. And Lilah didn’t, though perhaps this was willfulness. When the war had broken out, Dolores had taken her to Scotland for a couple of years – there they had lived in a castle. She doesn’t remember this. She imagines, because it is necessary, that Dolores fought to give birth to her, to keep her, to keep her safe. After she’d been deposited at her grandparents’, Dolores had joined the Wrens, gone back to Europe. Lilah had met her only as a stranger, then: Delores a glittery, glamorous woman, out of place on the ranch, in Canada, with her French magazines, her whiskey, her cigarillos, her scorn for anything conventional. (Always, in Lilah’s memory, wearing a green velvet turban pinned with an amethyst orchid-shaped brooch, though that can’t be accurate.)
Dolores had not kept her wicked insouciance to the end, but, as she had floundered from surgery to surgery, had become increasingly bitter. She’d had parts of her lungs removed three times; then of her stomach and bowel, and her toes. Her vision had failed, then her kidneys. Her heart had kept working, though: She had lived years, in what must have been constant pain.
You wouldn’t let a dog suffer like this, she’s said to Lilah, or to the caregivers the family had employed, when she’d moved back to Canada, not to the ranch but to the town. You’d shoot it. You wouldn’t let it linger in agony.
At Dolores’ funeral, Mercedes, who had nursed her, said she was a grand old lady with endless spirit, and Tommy said that she’d given him a shot of whiskey every time he visited, from the time he was eleven. Lilah herself had not spoken at her mother’s funeral, but had thought, at last, to admire Dolores’ core selfishness. She was not a good citizen. She was as natural as coyote scat, full of hair and small bones. That was something better, perhaps.
Not sprung from the head of Dolores, but from the land itself, the rangeland cared for by six generations of her family. The Allinghams, English squires, and the Coogans, cattle rustlers and train robbers. One Coogan ancestor had married a Secwépemc woman, so they h
ad even that longer claim to the land.
MACHINES AND WIRES to eavesdrop on her heart. Her doctor draws up a chair, shows her a printout: the confessions of her secret valves and chambers. What do they tell him, those lines of seismography?
You’re fine, the doctor says. You have the heart of a healthy fifty-year-old.
Is this a good thing? Does she want this? A high-performance motor in an aging body – is that supposed to be a good thing?
Days later, stripped and inserted into a thick-walled cylinder, like a deep-sea submersible. Beeps and lights: She must hold perfectly still. She is under investigation now: her brain being sliced into leaves, to be read like a book, not for pleasure, but critically.
This new doctor, the specialist, is South African, and named Dr. Pontius. He shows her the image of the scans on his computer screen. There it is, the evidence, the shadow at the core of her brain, the unwelcome guest, the interloper. Her secret sharer. It cannot be extracted, he says, and she believes him. It blooms darkly, in its crevice, but will not spring from her head, will not be set free.
The brain is a little swollen, he says. There is pressure on certain areas. Lack of balance, he says. Possible blackouts. In the future, loss of motor control. Of vision. Significant impairment. He’ll give her steroids for the swelling and send her to a radiologist. The radiologist will use lasers to line things up precisely, and will shoot at the thing with invisible waves that will damage its cells, cause it to shrink. Though likely not to disappear.
He says she must not drive anymore and she has to call Sim to drive into town, and have Judith drive her and her station wagon home. Her fall in April, he says: temporary blackout. She can expect more.
SO APRIL WAS THE BEGINNING. April, the season of the massive, showy balsamroot, with its large fleshy cottony grey leaves (like old women’s underpants, she thinks), the tiny peacock flower and fringe cups with their thread-like stems, their exquisite petals, The vast difference in scale. For the specialist, it is a matter of problem solving, not personal tragedy. She appreciates that. It’s the way you look at it. Painters in the nineteenth century had considered landscape depictions flawed if they lacked a human figure.
It was Judith who called Mercedes, of course. It was a betrayal, but only because it went against Lilah’s wishes. From anyone else’s point of view, simply necessity.
NOW EARLY JUNE: paintbrush and penstemon: the figwort family. Lupins and vetches: pea family. Shiny buttercup-like cinquefoil and wild strawberries and feathery avens: the rose family. The wild rose in bloom. The deep, flagrant, fragrant pink. The rose scent. The whole open rolling plateau fragrant with rose. She walks, with the dog. She is training the dog, but not as a war-zone medic. She is training him to run home and wait. This is not easy: It is not in his nature.
She lies in the bracken that grows where the stream runs underground. With her stick she lowers herself onto her knees, and then to her belly, curls her legs. Go, Peter, she says. He whines. She gives him a small treat, a piece of liver. When he runs home to his kennel, he will find another piece. And he will trigger the new gate closed, so he can’t come back. It is taking a long time to teach him this. She has had to give the signal, then walk him back, many times.
She is training him to abandon her.
This is her second dog. She hadn’t wanted any dog, had resisted the first for many years, but Sim had said she needed one if she were to live alone at her age, and Donna had given her one of her pups, a border collie bitch. The dog had grown on Lilah. She had come to see her as a companion, to feel her feelings. When she was four years old, the dog had got into some coyote bait – she guessed it was that, though the stuff was illegal – and had become violently ill, writhing and crying and shitting. She’d called Sim to help her get the dog to the vet, but he’d been away, he and his wife Judith, on holiday. Donna hadn’t been home either. She hadn’t known any of her neighbours. The dog had writhed and cried. When she tried to bring her water, she had snapped at her, and she’d thought: rabies.
She’d wanted to kill it, then, to put it out of its misery. Had called animal control but they couldn’t get anyone out till after the weekend.
She’d tried Donna again but she still wasn’t home. She wanted someone with a gun.
She’d got it into her head that she could hang it. How? Thick gloves, rope, pulley. But she hadn’t been able to noose it: The dog had fought her attempts, though she’d kept up a low desperate pleading. Then she’d thought: blow to the head. But she’d been afraid that she couldn’t hit hard enough, small as she was: would only cause more suffering. Drowning. Asphyxiation. These were too slow.
The bitterness of being helpless in the face of suffering. She’d put the radio on loud to cover the crying, stayed in the house, the dog on the porch. Donna, back finally, had brought a rifle.
A person ought to be able to stop the suffering of something they care for. Someone.
She had not wanted another dog, but now he will be necessary. He will abandon her, as taught. Then, when it is time, he will lead them back. Sim and Donna, it will be, she guesses. A hard thing for them but they are part of this land; they will not be shocked.
The purples and blues of the lupine, the penstemon, the wild delphinium they call monk’s hood, or aconite, the mariposa lily. The blooms in their glory as complex and original and exquisite as any cultivar. She is gathering the last, now: She has already planned out these paintings; she could finish them with no more harvesting, but it is an excuse to go out, to continue with the dog’s conditioning.
She walks back along the cattle tracks, employing her stick. Her house in the distance now, its blue metal roof a dried petal of sky.
To give herself up to the flowers, to the day. To know each day as unique, one in a procession. To claim one’s space in the day, the landscape: no more or less. To do the necessary.
Here is Mercedes, now, waiting in her driveway, foiled by the new gate. Waiting by her car. Mercedes frowns: You’re walking without the dog?
The dog is lying in his house, as she has taught him, waiting quietly. Good dog, she thinks at him. He thumps his tail against the ground.
He chases the ground-nesting chicks, she says. Mercedes has never driven up without telephoning, before. She’ll have to be careful. Double back, throw her off the trail. Distract her. Ask her for something, perhaps, that she’ll disapprove of. Put her off the scent.
To be prepared. To outwit, if outrunning is impossible. To nose out the hiding places. To have a back door, a secret exit, an escape hatch. To use subterfuge, to be alert, to have ears and eyes and nose tuned to the special frequencies of opportunity and the enemy’s stealth.
Tommy too. He’ll call again, he’ll propose a visit. He’ll decide to bestir himself early from Kathmandu. She’ll need to divert him: to give him an alternate story, to make him want to believe it, to look away.
Winter would have been better, but they won’t give her until winter. August will be fine, too: the sun for warmth, the land then at its most arid. She has what she needs. Between her mother and her new friends the doctors, she has what she needs.
To leave herself free recourse. To let her follow her nature. To walk surely toward the edge of the day; to let her cells pull shut the gates, not aimlessly tick down their last usefulness. To dissolve into purest matter, the stuff of infinity: calcium carbon nitrogen, those sparkling potent atoms. To return to the most minute, and to the infinite. To return to the dry hills what is theirs.
She unlocks the gate. She waits for Mercedes to drive through and park and get out of the car, and says: Come inside, now. We’ll have some tea. She moves toward her house, her pleasing house. It is still standing.
Mercedes will curse her: will send her off with a curse. And then she will let her go. She will make it as easy as she can: She has taken care of the paperwork, and she will say what has to be said. But that is not now; that is in the future, still. Not a problem for this day.
She holds out to Mercedes the
bunch of blue flowers: lupine, delphinium, penstemon. Her penance, her love. She opens the door.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Virtue, Prudence, Courage” was published as “The Island” in subTerrain Magazine 8.78 (2018).
“Clearwater” was published in Prairie Fire 38.2 (2017).
“Flowers of the Dry Interior” was published in Prairie Fire 37.3 (2016).
“Vagina Dentata” was published in Room Online, Winter 2016.
“The Burgess Shale” was published by CBC Canada Writes, CBC Website, 2012.
“The Canoe” was published in a chapbook by Okanagan College/UBC Okanagan, 2007.
“That Ersatz Thing” was published in Geist 14.56 (June 2005).
“Echolocation” was published in Chatelaine, November 1998.
I acknowledge the many hours of work donated by judges and juries of writing contests, especially the Okanagan Fiction Contest and Prairie Fire magazine. Thanks also to all of the editors who have loaned their sharp eyes for clarity and consistency, particularly Anne Nothof and Claire Kelly at NeWest Press. Susie Safford also gave helpful feedback to several of the stories in early drafts.
I am grateful to the office of Research and Graduate Studies at Thompson Rivers University for support in the form of sabbatical leaves.
Robert “Max” Metcalfe generously provided a paradise in which to write at his farm on the island of Öland in Sweden in the summer of 2014.
Many friends and family members have given me countless hours and kilometres of conversations and walks and that have inspired and shaped my fiction. I hope that my affection and appreciation will shine through any clumsiness in my efforts to create imaginative works.
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