Notes Towards Recovery

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by Louise Ells


  Our town was surrounded by farmland - the odour of alfalfa, corn and hay, and the stench of manure were always there; after I moved to Toronto I was surprised by the smell every time I went back to visit. It was only a fluke that we had a cathedral and thus official city status; a cathedral gifted by a man whose only child, a daughter, had sacrificed her inheritance when she eloped with an Indigenous man. Ironically, the plain brick building was most famous for a series of Indigenous paintings in which - according to the mimeograph leaflet produced by The Friends Of The Cathedral, copies of which I kept on the lopsided rack beside my Tourist Information desk - the creation myth of Gitche Manitou was depicted alongside the life of Christ. Having grown up in one of the few families that didn’t sit in those pews every Sunday, I delighted in visiting, tipping my head back to look up at the pictures.

  Frank Tooley made the town an exciting place, if only for fifty-five minutes. I took the tour several more times, never telling Sally, because I didn’t want her to tease me about having a crush on Frank, which I didn’t. I loved being a tourist, a stranger, in the place where I’d been born and lived my whole life, hearing stories about buildings I’d never really noticed and spying over walls. The first time I saw the statue in the Chaput’s back yard, a naked man and woman entwined in an embrace, I lowered my eyes, felt my cheeks growing warm.

  I could see over Judge McIntyre’s brick wall too and down into the garden with its private swimming pool, the only one in town. Aileen was there once, with her brother Rory, the Golden Son, home from his American University where he was playing scholarship hockey. I thought Aileen made eye contact with me, she grinned and waved, and then Rory shouted hello at the whole busload of passengers. “That’s the home of Rory McIntyre,” Frank ad-libbed. “This area has a history of hockey players who’ve reached the minor and major leagues-” he listed them all.

  I studied the people on the bus that I would never see again. I’d never know what they would become. A young couple with three children and clearly a fourth on the way. A petulant teenager, seemingly determined not to enjoy a moment of the holiday with her parents. And an elderly man, apparently quite deaf - where was he headed that he’d stopped in our town and taken this tour? I felt sorry for him, the flakes of dandruff on his wrinkled collar made him look frail; I smiled at him and helped him down off the bus. For a moment I considered offering him a coffee, some conversation, at the soda bar in the pharmacy. But perhaps he didn’t feel as lonely as he looked; maybe he didn’t care about his old-fashioned suit and outdated hat.

  It only took a couple of weeks for Sally, working outside, to perfect her tan and become part of an in-crowd I had no contact with. The strain between us grew into a rift when she asked me to go with her to the Summerfest dance and I said no. I tried, but couldn’t, explain to her that it was easier for me not to go than to suffer the inevitable embarrassment of wearing the wrong thing and dancing the wrong way and saying too much or too little.

  “Please, come,” she said. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You won’t be.” We both knew that was true; all the bypass workers would be there as well as the kids we knew from school. “Tell me all the juicy gossip when I see you the next day.”

  But I didn’t see her the day after the dance, or for several more after that. When we did meet I was standing on the sidewalk on my lunch break, talking to Frank Tooley. She winked at him, then needled him, asking why he didn’t include the Hermit’s Shack on his tour, that was one interesting thing in this old town, she said.

  “Derrick Lavalle. His name is Derrick Lavalle,” said Frank.

  Everyone knew the man paid kids a nickel a punnet for frog’s legs and that’s what he ate, along with squirrels, rabbits, and maybe a deer or moose if he was lucky. I didn’t advertise the fact my mother took him fresh vegetables through the summer and hot meals every Saturday. She fretted about the still he kept behind his hut, but my father excused the man’s drinking. It’s to our shame, our shame, he said. Our country used him, damaged him and then abandoned him.

  Frank felt the same way. “He’s a war veteran, not a tourist site,” he said to Sally, before leaving. I can’t imagine he would have talked about poverty tourism, but the first time I read that term I heard his voice. We stood in awkward silence, Sally and I, until I exclaimed at the time and went back to work to reorganize the piles of leaflets on the rack and scrub the desk top.

  A week later I saw her walking hand-in-hand with a guy I didn’t recognize, one of the road construction workers. I said hello, tried to be light and cheerful. “What’s new?”

  She turned away, as if she hadn’t heard me, but I’d seen an expression on her face. “Tell me. Tell me.”

  She let go of her boyfriend’s hand without introducing me and walked a few steps away. “Kathleen,” she said. “There are rumours.”

  I smiled, then waited. She couldn’t even look at me.

  “Rumours?” I asked.

  “About Deborah and Rory McIntyre.”

  “My sister and Rory McIntyre?” I laughed. “That’s absurd. I think I’d know if my sister was dating Rory McIntyre.”

  Sally’s cheeks were red. “Not- not dating, exactly,” she whispered, unable to meet my eyes.

  I didn’t understand what she was implying. “Anyhow, she’s in Europe for the summer, you know that.”

  “Is she?” Sally asked. “I mean, I’m sure she is. I’m sure it’s all lies what people are saying, that your parents sent off her to one of those homes for unwed mothers.”

  Finally I understood.

  “I’m sorry Kathleen. I didn’t know if I should say anything to you. A bunch of people were talking at the dance.”

  A university student. A hockey player. Four years older and so far out of my sister’s league. I knew my sister was wild, but I couldn’t believe that she’d been intimate with anyone, especially not Rory McIntyre.

  I didn’t know how to react and nor did Sally. I couldn’t blame her, but it was another wedge between us. Time with her boyfriend replaced time spent with me and as the July drought turned into an August drought with still no sign of rain, the blueberries, pinched and dry, withered on the bushes. Over before they began.

  Frank Tooley’s father owned three acres of overgrown evergreens. It had been one of his many schemes, this one a cut-your-own Christmas tree farm. But when it came time to harvest the firs, he said he couldn’t do it. So he left them for a few more years, the pines and spruce and balsam, and then a few more, until it was clear they were far beyond Christmas tree size. Twenty some years on the trees were a scraggly mess, fighting each other for sunlight and blocking out any brush that tried to grow beneath. Without Sally to hang around with, I took to biking along the gravel road past the cemetery with a towel and a book, and lying on the needle floor of that cool haven, pretending to read. I breathed in the smell of shade and groused to the red squirrels as they leapt from branch to branch far above me.

  “Unfair,” I said to the squirrels. “Unfair that Sally’s dating, unfair that when I go back to school in September for Grade Thirteen I will be exactly the same person who left Grade Twelve in May.” The squirrels paused, as if listening, but then scampered away and resumed their chattering. “Deborah has been gone too long,” I whispered. “I miss her.” I held my hand on my flat stomach, trying to imagine a baby growing in my sister. Wondering what it felt like, making a baby.

  Sometimes Dad and I went down to the lake after supper and swam away the day’s heat that clung to us. I told him my dreams of med school and then we went back to sit on the porch to play Scrabble with Mum. The night before Deborah was due back Mum mixed frozen bananas, coconut milk and sugar with black specks of vanilla bean. Dad got down the ice cream churn from his childhood farm, and we took turns cranking the handle and packing more ice and salt in the outer bucket.

  “I bought some root beer,” Mum said. “Why don’t you invite Sally over?”

  I didn’t think I could do it, just phone
her as if nothing had happened and invite her for a root beer float. “I don’t even know if we’re friends anymore,” I admitted.

  I couldn’t say Rory McIntyre’s name out loud, much as I longed for confirmation. On one my talks with the squirrels I had decided that as long as I said nothing to my parents then it was all just rumours that I could ignore. I changed the subject away from Sally, Deborah, Rory. “I was thinking, Dad, could we organize a work party this fall to give Mr. Lavalle a new roof? Is there a way to do that without him thinking it’s charity?” The three of us talked about the possibility while we ate bowls of the ice cream, thick and rich and cold.

  The next morning I still hadn’t decided how to greet my sister at the airport or what I’d say, if anything, when we had a moment alone.

  “Increase your word power: perturbation.” Dad smiled at me across the breakfast table in an attempt to cajole me into a better mood.

  But I was so restless that morning I reacted with silence, not even a sassy comment muttered under my breath, and in the end he drove down to Ottawa alone. I picked up a book, then put it down. Sat at the kitchen table and unfolded each section of the newspaper, pressing out the creases. Mum was making lemon meringue pie, Deborah’s favourite, and the innocent smell of the lemon zest made my eyes tear. We both started when the front door bell rang, and Mum, her hands covered with pastry flour, asked me to answer it.

  It was Rory’s sister, Aileen. “Hiya, Kathleen,” she said, as if we’d spoken only recently. “Can I come in?”

  I said hello, thought of the breakfast dishes I hadn’t cleared from the table, and the mess I’d made with the newspaper. “Mum’s baking and the house is unbearably hot, let’s sit outside in the shade.” I led her to the deck chairs under the maple tree in our back garden.

  “Busy summer?” she asked. “I saw you on that double-decker one day. I swear you looked just like Debs, even though I knew there was no way she could be on that old bus of Frank Tooley’s.” She laughed but all I heard was that, with the sun in her eyes, for just a moment, someone thought I was as pretty as Deborah. That and her casual use of ‘Debs’ to refer to my sister.

  Flustered by her easy manner, the way in which she seemed to assume we might have news to share with each other, I stuttered. “Uh, well, I’ve been working at the Tourist Office. How was your summer?” I couldn’t imagine what I could possibly have that she wanted and hoped she wasn’t going to ask me if I knew anything about my sister and her brother’s supposed intimacies.

  She shrugged. “I hung out in Toronto for a while. Boring otherwise. You know this town.” She smiled again.

  I heard the kitchen door open and shut. “Is it too early in the day for a root beer float, girls?” Mum sang out as she turned the corner. She was carrying two tall glasses, decorated with paper umbrellas and blue striped straws; she stopped when she saw who was sitting on the other deck chair. “Oh, I- Hello.”

  Aileen said hello, but I noticed she was studying her perfectly shaped, pale pink nails as she spoke.

  My mother passed her a root beer float, and me the other, and left. I could tell she’d guessed it was Sally at the front door, and I was suddenly sick that I hadn’t mended things with my friend. She should be the recipient of this unexpected treat, not Aileen McIntyre.

  I took a long drink, the soda fizzing on my tongue, creamy and refreshing at the same time. Aileen only looked at the glass my mother had passed her, then set it down on the grass by her chair.

  “I thought you guys didn’t eat ice cream,” she said.

  “It has to be gelatine-free,” I replied. Surely she hadn’t come here to talk about my diet. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the cool sweetness. When I opened my eyes she was looking at me. “I heard you got a car,” I said, to fill the awkward silence.

  “Yeah. I can’t wait to show Debs.” She looked at her watch. “I was kinda hoping she’d be back already. Will you ask her to call me, as soon as she gets in?” I thought I saw in her eyes a plea.

  I nodded and said sure and she stood then, knocking over her glass. The root beer disappeared into the lawn, the ice cream, already starting to melt, looked like a fried egg. I stood as well, and walked her to the end of the driveway, where she embraced me in a hug that took me by surprise. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much for not judging us. It is real, you know.”

  That was the last summer we lived with the dull background noise of machinery as it blasted through the rocky outcrops to the east and west. No one could have predicted the bypass would be finished three years ahead of schedule. And I don’t believe anyone, truly, had realized just what it was going to mean for our little city. No more tourists drove along our main street, big box stores took over the farmland, and a Tim Horton’s on the highway put three restaurants out of business, including the Swiss place.

  Frank Tooley parked his double decker bus down the dead end road behind the area, where it sat for years, slowly rusting into an eyesore, used by teens as a drinking and smoking hang out, until the town council declared it a danger and had it carted off to the dump.

  I chased those dreams of mine to the Big Smoke and discovered I was a better at being a doctor than a wife. Deborah and I grew closer when I finally realized what Aileen had been trying to tell me, what my sister had been brave enough to share with our parents, what a trip abroad for the summer had not disappeared.

  We are back in town, Deborah and I, for our mother’s funeral, and now that the house is sold I don’t imagine I’ll have much reason to return. After leaving the lawyer’s office on Main Street, we pass the pharmacy, long since shut. There is no traffic but I look both ways, out of habit, and just for a moment glimpse Frank Tooley, his high school self, standing at the corner.

  I blink; the street is empty.

  “What’re you thinking?” my sister asks me, turning to see why I’ve stopped in the middle of the road.

  “That summer,” I say. For a moment I forget she hadn’t been here. She never boarded the green bus. Landscapes of Our Past. She can’t imagine how surprised I was, always, at the end of the tour when I walked down the stairs and off the bus onto the sidewalk, this sidewalk. Always back in exactly the same place as I’d started.

  Scraping

  Staring back at the Nova Scotian shoreline we’ve left, I take shallow breaths through my mouth in an attempt to avoid the smell of engine exhaust and seaweed and the tub of dead fish for the puffins. Not a boat person, never a boat person - that was a love Daniel shared with Dad. I see him now, Dad, shaking his head and telling me to take deep breaths, focus on the horizon and look towards the destination, North Brother island, not the wind farm we’re moving away from.

  North Brother island is only a couple of miles off the starboard bow, but it’s too flat to see, and this isn’t a direct journey. A man from Parks Canada will meet this boat of puffin watchers when it reaches its port of call, over an hour away, and we’ll retrace this passage back to the Brothers. It was the best I could manage to organize. It will be worth it, I promise myself, lousy as I feel, seeing the roseate terns. So high on Dad’s wish list.

  “Well, well,” he’d said when he first read about it. It must have been in the quarterly newsletter he got detailing species sightings across the country. I remember the crinkly paper, pale blue, and my excitement every time I saw it our mail box. I read magazines online now, and scroll through social media, and feeling middle-aged, mourn the passage of that era when physical mail brought pleasure. “Well, well. I grew up not thirty miles from the country’s largest colony of roseate terns and had no idea. I’d very much like to go and see them, hear them.” That would have been fifteen years ago, I was in my fourth year, home for Thanksgiving. Mum decided it was coffee time and the three of us spent the next two hours looking at maps and books, planning how to get to North Brother, stops along the way, then researching the birds. The Humming-birds of the sea Audubon had called them.

  We all knew it was a fantasy, we all knew Mum wasn’t
going to travel again, but Dad and I refused to acknowledge the reality out loud. “June,” he said. “We’ll go in June for the hatchlings.” He kept a notebook in which he detailed plans for future birding excursions, and in his precise handwriting he filled in three pages for our roseate tern trip.

  And then, last year, when I’d asked Dad what he wanted and his answer had been vague, I’d remembered. “The roseate terns,” I’d said. I’d found that notebook with the plans we’d made that long ago fall day and read them out to him. Things have changed since then, not least the designation of protected areas, but Dad’s name still carries weight in the birding world so here we are, in June, Dad and I on our way to North Brother island.

  But here, now, I am alone. Everyone else has moved to the other side of the boat to photograph the porpoises which are following us out of the harbour but I can’t let go of the rail; gripping it feels like the best way to ward off the vomit I can already taste in the back of my throat.

  The deckhand does double duty as our tour guide, his voice crackling over an old PA system, giving a brief history of the geology of the islands we’re passing, basic information about puffins, telling us to look out for harbour seals.

  Two young girls and their father cross the deck and stand next to me at the railing, the girls’ excited chatter punctuated with likes and you knows. They soon lose interest in the view of the scrubby forest and wind turbines and go off in search of something, like, more exciting, leaving only their father and I. I look at him (roughly my age, he looks as ill as I feel) then at his hands, which are holding tight to the rail. Farmer’s hands with big fingers, rough skin, short nails. A kink in the baby finger on his left hand. Like Dad’s. I look back at his face.

 

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