Aftershock

by Alison Taylor

  I dragged a mattress from the bunk room over to the wood stove and stared into the flames as I ate, listening to the spit and crackle. Dryness was seeping up my sleeping bag, so I put one edge over my legs and lay down.

  NIGHT CREATURES TAUNTED me. Lizzie, looking an age she never was, standing at the top of the hallway stairs, Look, she said, and spread her arms wide and took off, flying, but I wasn’t sure she was Lizzie anymore, she was Char, and then she was gone, I heard a long and rustling fall in the distance, and then Mo-mo stood in front of me, holding Eloise, my stuffed elephant, asking me why the trunk was wet. I cried, I didn’t know. We were just playing. What did you do? Mo-mo demanded, her face stretching ghoulishly, her voice echoing. I’m gonna call your mum, and she reached into the ocean and pulled out a cellphone. Then my Grandma Nan walked in, saying, Your mum can’t make it, you’re coming with me.

  I woke up shaking and freezing, the fire now embers. My sleeping bag was still damp, but I pulled it up higher anyway and lay clenched against the cold. My heart pounded in the pitched silence. It was hard not to feel like I was being punished for something.

  The dreams didn’t help.

  When I was younger, David had been there, often enough, when I woke. Or would come when I called. Later, with just Jules, I wouldn’t bother to call. Jules would be too medicated in her sleep to rouse easily and was useless at offering comfort. Sometimes I would picture Lizzie as a person in my life, as the sister who shared my room, who knew when I needed her, who would slip out of bed, pad across the room and crawl in beside me, hugging me for a few kinds of warmth.

  The sister that wasn’t, the sister that was. And now Char, her immediate and blithe trust in me when she led me upstairs to her room. The look on her face when I suddenly left her there. The disappointment I would never stop delivering.

  I’d seen that look before. The day I went to my Nan’s house for the last time, with Jules. The power switched off, everything smelling faintly of mildew, the stale air coating my palate in dust. Nan had died in the hospital, but only after deteriorating in her three-storey house for several years, declining mobility first limiting her to two floors, then one. So that everything on the bottom floor had been sitting dormant for a few weeks, but the farther you ventured, into backrooms or upstairs, the longer objects had been sitting, unused, waiting for her to get better.

  An old newspaper, unfolded and fading, lay on the bed, unmade. As though one day she had gone downstairs in the morning and never made it back up.

  Jules had cried that day, for the second time in my memory, as she sat on the edge of Nan’s bed. Her late ex-mother-in-law. I came upstairs and found her there, and just like the first time, it shook me to see her emoting so candidly. Jules saw me, hastily wiped her eyes and tried to smile. Your Nan was a real pain in the ass, she said, which I knew meant she’d really loved her. I turned and left her to it, not saying a word, pretending not to see the hurt on her face. Even now, the memory held as much anger as guilt. Anger that once again it was all about Jules’s grief, with no room for anyone else’s. Guilt—and regret—that the one time Jules had reached out to me emotionally, I’d walked away.

  IN THE HUT, it was so quiet my ears rang, the ocean a distant under-hum, the night birds holding their breath, waiting for who knew what. I felt the endless space around me, the infinite distance of darkness and stars, night and solitude.

  I got up as the sky greyed, and after instant coffee and a soggy peanut butter sandwich, I acknowledged aloud that two more days with wet clothes, damp sleeping bag and sodden food was going to suck. Especially if sleep kept getting away from me. I was supposed to hike twenty kilometres that day, but I already felt totally depleted. It seemed impossible.

  The map posted outside the hut said it was seven kilometres to the nearest side trail, which would lead me three kilometres out to a park access point where I could catch a bus. Okay. I could do the half day to the early exit. Not that I had much choice.

  I heaved my pack onto my back and started hiking.

  A COUPLE HOURS in, I came to a long, flat beach, hard-packed in the sunshine, and I saw a sign for the access trail up ahead. Now, with my jeans almost dry and the burn in my leg muscles easing on the flat ground, I thought I could probably manage the extra day and a half it would take to reach the trailhead. But: if it rained again, my sleeping bag would never dry. And the remaining kilometres might be even more difficult than the ones behind me.

  But wasn’t that the point? To fling myself into the unknown, and be tested against its challenges?

  I could hear Jules’s voice telling me a million times, Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Which rankled.

  It’s good to take risks, I said aloud, as though she could hear me.

  I shoved my hands in my pockets, and my heart tripped as my finger tore through wet paper. I dropped my pack where I stood, carefully turned my jeans pocket inside out and peeled away the inky scrap bearing Lee’s email address. It was smeared to illegibility, but it didn’t matter. “Surfmonkey99” was burned into my brain.

  Immediately, I wanted nothing more than to see her again. I cringed to remember my cold dismissal of her invitation to go north, my knee-jerk jealousy, my cruel comparison of her to Jules, and wondered if I’d still be welcome.

  The obvious temptation was to take the access trail, get out of the park and go find her. But I winced to imagine telling her I’d given up after one night out here, when what I wanted to do, what she made me want to do, was impress her. Not just that, I wanted to impress myself. And cutting short something I had challenged myself to do, to go chasing down a girl, would not make me the person I wanted to be.

  A shell caught my eye, glinting, perfect and blue as Neptune. It seemed like a sign. I pocketed it with lightness and a new resolve.

  I was doing this.

  I mock-saluted the sign for the access trail on my way by, and continued up the coast, my chafed shoulders, my blistered feet and the brutal hills less noticeable with every step.

  THE SECOND NIGHT passed more easily, and by my third day I fell into rhythm with the trail. I felt the hike changing my brain, stretching it into new shapes, unexpected and inexplicable. Landscapes, inner and outer, rendered the familiar strange. My aloneness in the world took on the colour and shine of a brightly wrapped gift. I filled my lungs with air that tasted of lush forest, of succulent fruit, and released it slowly, reluctant to let it leave my body.

  As I felt the mapping and marking of one, and then twenty, and eventually sixty kilometres in my very bones, in the torn skin on my feet and the sunburn on my neck, I thought about human smallness, the distances we must travel to find each other and the minute odds of paths crossing. Meeting someone like Lee was not something I should take lightly. Being away from her was bringing my feelings into sharper focus, making what I’d had with Jill seem insignificant in comparison. When I was with Lee, I felt like I might not be alone forever. Of course, everyone leaves eventually. But the very fact that I could feel that connection with someone gave me hope that I might have a place in the world.

  I imagined apologizing to her, for everything, but even as I did, I felt the sinking, sick feeling I used to get when I thought Jill was into someone else. Lee hadn’t gone north alone, she’d gone to some surfing competition with Talda. Maybe I’d already driven her away.

  MY THIRD NIGHT, it was so warm I didn’t bother with a fire. After eating the last of my damp bread and salami, I followed my flashlight beam outside to the clearing around the hut and turned it off as I lay across the top of a scarred picnic table. I had seen the stars from Lance’s boat, but it was different to view them from here, days out from any human contact, the dark jungle around me. The moon wasn’t up yet and the night was clear. At home I could have picked out Mars, but here it was only a guess. Picking out Neptune was pretty much impossible, but I imagined I could see it to the right of maybe-Mars. I thought of Char, drawing a spaceship to get us there. No matter how much of an ass I’d
been, I couldn’t deny that we were sisters, that there were things that connected us, and that by shutting her down, I was only doing exactly what my parents had both done to me. David repeatedly. Jules perpetually.

  I thought about how many times in my life I’d wished I could have saved Lizzie, saved the house from falling down around me, saved Jules and David from everything that came between them. I heard Jill’s persistent voice, or maybe it was that long-forgotten grief therapist, asking me: Who was there to save you? And I’d always answered: No one. I don’t need anyone. My guilt preventing me from admitting otherwise.

  Jules once told me—one night when I came home late from a game and found her with her laptop and a bottle at the kitchen table—that after Lizzie died, David had suggested adopting another child because he knew she couldn’t go through another pregnancy, another childbirth. And he was right, Jules told me, I barely survived the first two. But he thought you should have a sibling.

  David and Jules had both been only children and David thought it had made things harder, for him at least, socially.

  But Jules said no to adoption. She thought he was trying to replace Lizzie. She just couldn’t. And he never brought it up again.

  You’re telling me this why? I was tired and sore and had school the next day, and Jules’s drunken rants could suck the energy right out of a room. But I felt a surge of resentment that he thought he could replace Lizzie like that, like all our grief meant nothing.

  It’s too bad he moved so far away, Jules had answered. He was the one who really wanted kids.

  Only weeks after that conversation came the phone call from David, You have a new little sister.

  I imagined Char being faced with what I had faced, and I ached to protect her, and seethed, consciously, for the first time I could remember, at the adults who hadn’t been there for me.

  I want to be better than them, I thought. That smart little kid needs someone better.

  I DIDN’T DREAM that night. At noon the following day, the trail finally spilled me onto a grassy stretch along a park road, where a bus shelter and a few other hikers waited. I dropped my pack and collapsed onto a bench.

  How’s your head? someone asked, and I recognized two of the Belgians from the surf lodge in Kaikoura. They’d been hiking the northern portion of the trail, travelling south to this midpoint. Their friend popped out of the bushes a few moments later, zipping his fly. Oh dear, he said when he saw me. It was the kid whose board had brained me, and he offered a sheepish apology for the fifteenth or twentieth time since I’d come back to the hostel with stitches.

  Dude, I said. I never said Dude, but it seemed appropriate now. It’s the chance we take. We’re both squids, right? So, whatever.

  Yes, but I did not hit my head. He was my age, or maybe younger, and obviously still felt terrible about it. I felt bad for him, and was tired of other people’s guilt, so I said he could totally and completely make it up to me by giving me one of his cigarettes.

  See? I said, lighting it, inhaling. I’m responsible for my own self-destruction.

  House.

  What the actual fuck?

  Jules leaned forward between the front seats and thrust Declan’s pamphlet through the gap. For two days, she’d been picking it out of the garbage, reading it, throwing it back in disgust. Finally, when Drew said they would take her to her house, to pick up some clothes and whatever else she needed (within reason), she’d pulled it out of the garbage one more time and shoved it into her purse. Now it was badly crumpled, and Farzan had to iron it out on his thigh to read it.

  Ah, he nodded, and held it up so Drew, driving, could see what it was. Drew’s fluid motion snagged for a beat. A quick eye-flick up to Farzan’s face, to Jules in the mirror, and then he was suddenly concentrating very hard on exiting the highway.

  Sensory deprivation, said Farzan. A big tank full of salt water, and you just . . . float. It’s completely dark and soundproof and you’re super-buoyant because of all the salt.

  In a surge of motion sickness, Jules leaned back against her seat.

  I thought he was an actual doctor.

  Well, he is. An anesthesiologist. But he also does research into alternative pain management. He has like a PhD or something.

  He said his wife used to do this.

  Farzan and Drew glanced at each other, perhaps surprised that Declan would have shared this with her. Right, Farzan said. Right. And it really helped her, right? I mean, she still . . .

  Died, said Jules.

  Right. But it eased her symptoms, I guess. Helped with the pain. So then he got on board at the clinic and now he’s using it therapeutically. Says it’s good for depression, PTSD. Addiction issues. Because you can’t feel . . . anything . . . while you’re in there. And your brain . . .

  He spiralled a hand in the air to show where her brain would go.

  It really helped me over the summer, when I was having problems with this. He rapped on his right shin, the hollow sound indicating his prosthetic. Drew reached over and patted his thigh.

  Good thing, too, or we’d never have met.

  Farzan flashed Jules a quick, bright smile. Declan introduced us.

  Anyway, said Drew, we just thought it might help.

  Jules rammed a thumb and forefinger into the tops of her eyeballs and pinched the bridge of her nose against a frontal lobe headache.

  What would I find helpful? Not that anyone’s asking. Is a diagnosis. Not some 1960s New Age bullshit. I want someone to tell me what the fuck is wrong with me. And make it better.

  Jules—

  And in the meantime, I really don’t see why I can’t have the only drug I’ve found that makes my fucking life fucking tolerable.

  She did know why, but that wasn’t the point.

  Because you’re not in control, Jules.

  I am always in control.

  Okay. Well. You have nothing to lose.

  In the relative silence, she kept her eyes closed and tried to match the rounded growl of tires on asphalt with the pitch of her breath as it passed in and out of her throat.

  She felt the car stop. Their collective mental sigh.

  We’re he-ere, sang Drew, not quite pulling off levity.

  She opened the screen door, kicked away all the junk mail piled up behind it, unlocked the deadbolt and stepped through the tiny hallway into the living room. Drew, right behind her, let out a long, low whistle. She thought being in her own house would make her feel better. Or at least normal.

  Oh, sweetie.

  Oh my god.

  She’d forgotten, or maybe hadn’t before realized, the abandon with which she had wallowed in crisis in the days after Chloe left. Lying in bed, running out of drugs, her car in the shop, Rod angry. Withdrawal setting in.

  The table in the front hall was invisible under unopened mail, more random flyers. Loose tangles of clothes grew like vines across the sofa, chairs and up the stairs, the pyjamas she’d worn all that weekend, the clothes she wore during the accident, the coat she wore on Friday night. The mushroom soup she couldn’t eat Sunday night congealed on an end table, with an empty wine bottle and a residued glass.

  Well, it’s not so bad . . . Farzan brushed by her and picked up the dishes en route to the kitchen, where he reacted audibly. Oh man.

  Jules followed and gagged. She hadn’t closed the fridge door properly. The smell of rotten meat filled the room. After placing the dishes in the sink, Farzan swung the fridge wide open. The top shelf held a near-empty glass of milk and an uncovered half can of tuna. Both grey. Something unidentifiable festered in one of the drawers.

  I guess it’s good we came. Garbage?

  His cheeks puffed out as he dropped the tuna into the black bag Jules pulled from under the sink. He turned on the hot water and started flushing the putrid milk down the drain. There were only a couple dirty plates, but every glass she owned was half-full of something on the counter, and he started emptying those out too. Jules had just opened the cabinet where she kept
her booze and spotted the half-bottle of eighteen-year-old Dalwhinnie when Drew appeared at her elbow.

  Let’s go pack, he said. Jules sighed and followed him up the stairs of her own house. The contents of her still half-packed suitcase dominated her bedroom floor. More dishes and meagre, abortively eaten meals, de-capped pill containers and an empty Bowmore bottle crammed her bedside table. The bedsheets were wound tight, like she’d tried to make rope.

  Drew poked his head into her en suite bathroom. What happened here?

  The cabinet over the sink hung open, shelves stripped, every unfinished non-narcotic, non-opiate prescription from the last five years strewn on the counter.

  Jules eyed the pill containers the way she scanned data at work, looking for a nugget that would offer her solutions, but was filled instead with an odd mix of longing and shame. Drew intervened.

  I got this, honey. You round up some clothes.

  Jules turned back to her bedroom, faked a slow gaze around the room, then sidled over to the bedside table to see—just see—what was there.

  I’m right here, honey. Drew, now behind her, put an arm around her shoulders and veered her left, towards her closet. Reprimanded, she shuffled her feet through the drift of clothes to snowplough them back towards the gaping suitcase.

  Didn’t Marc say you might get probation if you met certain conditions?

  Jules didn’t bother to answer. She heard the crinkly hits of small objects landing in the shopping bag–lined bathroom garbage can. She stooped down to scoop and stuff clothes manually.

  I know you want to come back to work, Drew said.

  She kneeled on the hard clamshell case to bring its edges together, then zipped it shut. She loved the space-capsule look of the suitcase, its clean, impenetrable lines.

  Perching on it, she watched as Drew opened the cupboard under the bathroom sink and started pulling out baskets full of old herbal supplements, minerals and vitamins from the early years of her long journey down.