Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  Then, “Yes, me too.”

  The third night in her father’s bed was dreamlike, due, she suspected, to the narcotic effects of the OxyContin. Well, how not? Typically Verna did not waft, but she had that night. Wafted upstairs. Wafted out of her clothes. Wafted into bed and into sleep, where she had bobbed upon a sea of dreams until twittered awake by tightly wound warblers already busy about their day. Hell, she had even wafted awake! Actually, materialized was more like it — a gentle marshalling and then a commandeering of those vibrant molecules that added up, in this particular configuration, in this particular dimension, to Verna Macoun Woodcock.

  A scratching sound. She turned her head on the pillow — a larch clawed at the window. I’ll have to speak to Winonah about trimming that back, she thought. Is she even coming today? Did we make arrangements? Oh, yes. We did. That’s right. That’s good. Verna had difficulty remembering past the previous evening, spent in a distinctly altered state on the screened-in porch with Romy and Lionel and Jude, of course, always Jude, but possibly others, as well. Not Bob, however. Thank God for that. Lying there in the belly of the bed, she felt a momentary pang of guilt at having disposed of her husband’s … well, his “cremains,” so cavalierly. Or maybe it was indigestion that she felt. In any case, it passed quickly. She sat, stood, and, floating over to the window, peered out past the insistent larch towards the lake, which exhaled mist like frosty breath into a sky of heartbreaking blue, its wind-rumpled skin cerulean.

  “Perfect morning for a swim,” she announced. Then, realizing what she had just said and the fact that she had spoken earnestly rather than sarcastically, she clapped her hand over her mouth. “Where did that come from?” Was she channelling someone? Her father? Because that was just the sort of crazy thing he would have said on a brisk May morning when jumping into the lake was like jumping into an ice bucket. And then he would have done it — jumped in. He had always maintained — not with an air of superiority, but with a grateful wonder — that he owed to this regimen his longevity and general good health and, indeed, he had remained more or less hearty until death had flipped his switch at eighty-three. “This is getting creepy,” she told Jude. “Am I becoming my father?”

  The dog blinked up at her from his dugout on the rag rug.

  “And look at me! I haven’t changed my clothes since Tuesday morning. My underwear is three days old, Jude. Do you know how disgusting that is?” In fact, now that she thought about it, she had yet to do anything beyond splashing water on her face since she had set out from Toronto. What must Carmen have thought when she saw her at the Pump and Munch? She looked like a homeless person. Mind you, Carmen had looked like she’d had a serious run-in with a plate of poutine, but Verna was reasonably sure that the realtor was wearing cleaner underwear than she was. “I am so going to the dogs,” she told Jude. “No offence, but I’ve got to get cleaned up.”

  Jude thought this was a good idea. He beamed, then panted, the big pink triangle of his tongue lolling.

  Verna picked her jeans up off the floor and hung them over the back of the rocking chair. She pulled off her T-shirt, bra, underwear, and tube socks, balled them up and threw them onto the seat of the chair. Then she dug into her suitcase and extracted a pair of overalls, an orange T-shirt (overalls ≠ bra), and a fresh pair of pitters, which she laid out on the counterpane. “But first a bath,” she told Jude and, taking from its hook on the closet door Donald’s old flannel bathrobe — muted browns and grays embroiled in plaid (she sunk her nose into it — wood smoke) then put it on and tied the sash. She opened the door to the hall and peered down it to the bathroom at its end.

  The door to Fern’s bedroom was open. Was Romy still asleep? What time was it, anyway? Didn’t young people sleep ridiculously late? She had heard they slept until noon sometimes. Would she wake her by sneaking past her door? Did she care?

  Jude, however, had his own agenda. Coming up from behind, he squeezed past her into the hall, scrambled towards the stairs, and then toppled headlong down them in a barely controlled fall.

  Verna winced. Of course. He needed to be let out. He needed to be fed. She tiptoed gingerly down the hall, making a wide arc in front of Fern’s open door and deliberately not looking in, lest eye contact be made with a possibly awake niece, sparking a conversation that Verna, at this early hour, did not feel remotely up to. Not yet. Not without serious reinforcement and certainly not without coffee. She found Jude looming over his dish in the kitchen, every fibre of his being taut with anticipation. Below his juicy muzzle, a sea of drool expanded across the linoleum squares.

  “Pavlov’s dog had nothing on you,” she informed him, picking up his dish and measuring out three scoops of kibble from the bag of Iams. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in suggesting that you chew.” She replaced the dish on the floor, closed her eyes and counted: “One-Mississauga! Two-Mississauga …” At “Six-Mississauga,” she heard the slurp of water — he was done. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go jump in the lake.” Wait a minute, she thought. Jump in the lake? Why was that ringing a bell?

  In the meantime, Jude, his eyes straight ahead and his expression fixed, was slowly backing his way out of the narrow passage created by the juxtaposition of table and counter. It was like watching an eighteen-wheeler cautiously negotiate a tricky reverse. Beep. Beep. Once in the clear, he wheeled around and bolted for the hall. Verna followed. She found him before the front door, vibrating. What was it that Donald used to say about dogs?: They have a great capacity for joy. “Your enthusiasm comforts me,” she told Jude, unlocking the door and pushing it open. She followed the Lab the length of the porch and opened the screen door. Jude burst out, ricocheting from one edge of the lawn to the other, his leg hiked, until, a bladder’s worth of urine spent, he bounded over the rock wall and into the lake.

  “I really should go for a swim.” Verna spoke the words out loud to see how they sounded — crazy or not so much? It was the Friday before the May 2-4 weekend, after all. Official start to summer. And how long has it been since I’ve swum in a lake? Years, probably. Years? Has it really been that long? Oh, she had been in the ocean down in Florida, but that was different. Lakes are different. Lakes stay put. Oceans are always coming in or going out: they are here and there all at the same time. Lakes, on the other hand, are predictable. And she had always liked them. That was right. She had. Had liked slipping into them like one slips into satin pajamas. Had liked the feeling of being enveloped. How had it happened that she had forgotten that? For what had she set that pleasure aside?

  Letting the porch door close behind her, Verna wandered out onto the lawn in her bare feet. The grass was wet with dew, the ground beneath, spongy. Jude barked as if to say, “Come on in! The water’s fine!” She laughed for no reason at all. No, there was a reason. It was the dog’s joy. It was infectious.

  “It’s too cold!” she called out to him, making her way across the lawn to the low stone wall separating the lawn from the cobble beach. Of course, her father and grandfather always used to swim in the lake at this time of year. And what about all those crazy people who belong to Polar Bear Clubs, who swim all winter long in freezing waters? “Okay, okay,” she told the dog, “I’ll stick my toe in. Test the waters. I’m not promising anything!” Verna negotiated the two-foot drop from the top of the wall to the beach and picked her way between the cobbles to the water’s edge. Crouching down, she trailed her fingers in the water — velvety, cold. What was it? Five degrees Celsius, maybe. Too cold? What was it Dad used to say? “Cold is just a feeling!”

  To which she and Fern would say, “Yes, a really, really bad feeling!”

  “Oh, what the hell!” she said. The only person in a five-kilometre radius was Romy and she was probably still asleep. And even if she wasn’t … Verna turned back to the lake. What is the best way to go about this, she wondered — by increments or all at once? She decided in favour of all at once. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  She walked down the beach, climbed the t
wo steps up to the dock, and made her way to its end. She slipped off her father’s bathrobe and was about to hang it over the back of the splintery Muskoka chair, bleached the colour of driftwood by decades of exposure to the elements, when she saw a battered leather case on its seat. She recognized it immediately — Donald’s prized German binoculars. He must have forgotten to take them inside when he had closed the cottage the previous autumn. Odd. Donald had been always so careful with his things. Then again, he had been forgetful towards the end; he had been an old man, after all. She picked up the case and opened it. There they were — the Carl Zeiss binoculars that had passed down from her grandfather to Donald — lightweight, brass under the finish, with a times-eight magnification. She held them up to her eyes and, turning, surveyed the lake’s opposite shore, a football field away — the view they gave her was sharp and clear. She could even make out what she thought must be lakeside daisy and Indian paintbrush dotting the alvar pavement. She replaced the binoculars on the chair and told herself that she must remember to bring them in with her when she went. She turned back to the lake. A slight breeze played idly with its surface, causing her to erupt in goose flesh. Hugging herself tightly, she closed her eyes and reeled off to one side and into the water like a gyroscope toppling off its axis.

  The moment in which the lake absorbed her body was an attenuated one, a drawn out “now” in which she temporarily dangled, suspended, like a chunk of canned pineapple in one of poor dead Aunt Margie’s infamous molded salads. The water seemed thick, somehow, gelatinous; it solidified around her, holding her in place. Then, time reasserted itself (no dallying; now she must kick her feet to stay in place), and, with it, sensation: cold! However, she mused, now that it contained her wholly, it was both colder than she had imagined and less cold than she had feared.

  She kicked her feet once, twice, and surfaced. There was Jude, chugging laboriously toward her, his head lifted so that his chin just grazed the surface. He was a tugboat, not a diver; he only put his head underwater to retrieve. When he was within two metres of her, however, he did an abrupt about-face and headed toward the lake’s eastern shore.

  “Hey! Where’d you think you’re going?”

  Ducking underwater, she wriggled after him through the azure haze. Lake Marguerite was what geologists call a blue lake, not green with marl or stained the colour of tea by leached tannins. More light filters through a blue lake than a green or brown one, and to greater depths, making for an abundance of aquatic vegetation. Verna remembered the summer Fern and she campaigned for weed removal — their twelfth, when they became convinced that, if only the lake’s bottom were not so weedy, cute boys might come to swim. To no avail. Donald would hear nothing of raking or herbicide, not even if it promised to improve his daughters’ love lives. “Fish have to have something to eat, somewhere to hide from bigger fish,” he had reminded them. As if the needs of fish mattered.

  She came up for air and saw that Jude was heading toward a patch of shallow open water just a little deeper than she was tall, over which a colony of bullhead lilies was in the process of extending itself — a floating canopy made up of heart-shaped lily pads thrusting compressed balls of yellow bud up to heaven. This was about ten metres up lake from the dock. “Where do you think you’re going?” she cried. Then, when he persisted, “Crazy dog! You’re going to get yourself all tangled up!” Ducking underwater again, she snaked after him toward the forest of swaying root stalks. She had just about closed the distance between them, when, once again, the Lab did a one-eighty and veered off the lily-pad colony and back out into open water.

  “You’re leading me on a wild goose chase!” she yelled after him. “That’s it. I’m getting out!”

  She was about to turn around and swim back to the dock when it occurred to her that she hadn’t peered at the underside of a lily pad colony for over forty years, not since she and Fern had played at being mermaids in the forest of wavering root stalks — those long, hollow tubes through which oxygen flowed from the lake’s surface to the fleshy rhizome anchoring the lily to the silt bottom. She ducked underwater, and, reaching into the tangle of stalks, parted them. A rush of tiny fish blew past her like scattering wind. Dog-paddling, she peered around her. It was just as she remembered: the water was different here than in other parts of the lake — not blue, but green and slippery with nutrients. Sunlight flowed through gaps in the pad canopy, illuminating the hazy underwater world, showing her the thickly veined underside of the pads, the adventitious roots below the leaf base to which other rhizomes — these ones creeping and horizontal — clung to form a loose, vegetative weave. The veins were burgundy-coloured; the stalks smooth, a burnished gold. She was thrusting her face farther into the forest of root stalks when, suddenly, she came eye to eye with a huge walleye. Startled, she retracted her head and the fish exploded past her into open water. She surfaced, and, treading water, gazed around her at the expanse of floating leaves, the yellow buds as tight as fists. Beautiful, she thought. Peaceful. Not cold at all. Well, not so much. Closing her eyes, Verna allowed herself to float on her back, there among the lilies. The velvety water caressed her. It buoyed her up. With its fingers it stroked her hair — far more tenderly than any lover ever had, which was to say Bob, because there had never been any other. Lover, that is. Sad. That’s what that was. Just sad. Well, that part of her life was over and weren’t bullhead lilies supposed to be good for something? Some ailment? Oh, yes. Donald used to rub thin slices of its root on her and Fern’s childhood scrapes and cuts, saying, “This is how the Ojibway treat their wounds.” I am so out of my element, she thought. Floating. Floating …

  Her reverie was shattered by a shrill screech, “Auntie Verna! Omigod! Help! Help, somebody, help!”

  Verna’s eyes snapped open. She craned her head to look down lake in the direction of the dock. There stood Romy, Donald’s binoculars hanging from their strap around her neck; she was wringing her hands and baying like a beagle. Verna squinted. Was Romy wearing sleepers with feet? She was — pale blue ones screen printed with white woolly lambs and crescent moons. What grown person wears sleepers with feet? “Romy! What the …?” she began.

  Romy gasped. “Auntie Verna!” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Omigod, you’re alive!”

  “Of course I’m alive. Did you think I wasn’t?”

  Romy nodded, gulping. Her eyes and nose were red, her yellow skin blotchy. “I thought you were dead. That you had drowned yourself. Like Virginia Woolf. She put stones into her pockets and walked into an oozy river.”

  “It was the River Ouze,” Verna corrected her. “And don’t be silly. Why would I want to drown myself?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because of what I said last night. About you being old and alone and all. And what about your Auntie Margie? She killed herself.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not my Aunt Margie.” Verna said. “At any rate, not to worry. I’m not wearing anything with pockets.” Righting herself, she began to wade through the lily pads toward the open water separating the colony from the dock. She felt like Godzilla with heat-rash chafed thighs — ponderous and clumsy. The lake bottom was gooey; she could feel with her toes the water lilies’ knobby rhizomes poking through the silt.

  Woof! Woof!

  Jude paddled out to meet her. My trusty dog, she thought. “Hi, there, Jude! How’s it going?”

  Extracting herself from the forest of root stalks, she stepped out into open water a little higher than her waist.

  “Eeuw!” Romy cried. “Auntie Verna, you’re naked! Totally gross!” She turned away, snatching up the binoculars and pressing them to her eyes.

  Verna chuckled darkly — cackled, actually. “Have I got news for you, kiddo! One day you’re going to look like this!” If you live long enough, she thought. If you don’t blow away.

  No doubt about it. Verna felt great. Better than she had in a long, long time. She stretched out her arms, making a V-for-Victory shape with them. She lifted her chin and thrust out her ches
t so that there was an arch in her lower back. She felt better than she could remember feeling for … well, forever, maybe. No mutinous knee twinges, no sulky stomach steeped in vitriol, no clicking, clanging jaw hinge or aching gums. An early morning swim in a cold lake. That was the ticket.

  “Anyway,” she said, “except for you and Jude, there’s no one around to see.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Still holding the binoculars to her eyes, Romy pointed toward a stretch of dusky woods on the lake’s opposite shore. “What about him?”

  Twisting to look in the direction where Romy was pointing, Verna shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted. She could just make out something that might be a person — or possibly a bear — silhouetted against the green backdrop of balsam fir and white spruce on lake’s opposite shore; the distance was too great for her to be able to discern anything further. She ducked down to cover her nakedness. “What is it?”

  “It’s a man,” replied Romy. “A creepy-looking man.”

  “Creepy? What do you mean ‘creepy’?”

  “Sneaky. Jumpy. Creepy.”

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” Verna said. “Get my bathrobe! There on the dock. That plaid thingy.”

  Jude, picking up on their agitation, went to bark and inhaled a big gulp of water instead. This made him hawk, “Aagghhh! Aagghh!” Verna grabbed the dog by his shoulders, turned him around, took hold of his hindquarters and pushed him, honking, ahead of her as she duck-waddled toward the dock.

  The sound of a car rattling loosely down the rutted laneway, its emphysemic muffler wheezing as it pulled into the parking space — unmistakably Winonah’s decrepit Impala. “It’s all right, Auntie Verna,” Romy informed her. She lowered the binoculars. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? Good!” Verna shoved Jude, still making elaborate retching noises, towards the shallows and clamored onto the dock. She took the bathrobe Romy handed her.