Notes Towards Recovery

by Louise Ells

  “Darling, this is a treat for us. I didn’t think we’d see you again until Easter. I’ve put the kettle on.” Her mother hugged her and her father patted her shoulder and asked her about the drive up from Toronto. How long had it taken her, were any trilliums were in bloom down south, had she seen anything interesting? No mention of the email in which Bea mentioned hour-long sessions in a therapist’s sage green office and hinted at the mandated leave of absence. Instead a cup of tea and a slice of fruitcake which Bea ate as she always had, uncurling the layers of pale marzipan and icing to save for last. A roundup of the local news, a report of the last few weeks’ weather and a mention of her father’s upcoming talk to a group of geohydrologists in Montreal. He no longer made the four-hour round trip to Sudbury to lecture university undergrads, but continued to supervise post-graduates and speak at conferences, in places he wanted to visit, on topics he found interesting.

  “So you’ll give your speech in French then?” Bea teased. Her father’s grade eleven report card - a bold F next to French - was a standing joke. Despite living in a Franco-Ontarian community and teaching at a bilingual university, he’d never mastered more than the very basics of his country’s other language. “Darcy’s Law,” she said. “Q equals minus k over viscosity. What’s ‘viscosity’ in French, I wonder?”

  Her father chuckled. “It’s a variation on a talk I’ve given before, about Leda landslides.” One of her father’s areas of expertise, the salt water clay - remnants of the ten thousand year old inland sea - with such unstable molecular structure that it led to silent, instant, deadly landslides. The previous spring a house just north of Montreal had disappeared into a crater in moments; the family of four were found still sitting on the sofa in front of their television.

  “You’ll want to stretch a bit after that long drive,” said her mother. “Why don’t you and Dad go for a walk before the light goes.” It wasn’t a question; her mother believed in the curative power of fresh air and exercise. So while her father tidied up his work Bea found a pair of fur-lined boots and hung her fashionable city coat on a hook where it would stay until the day she drove back, pulling on in its stead a pair of ski pants and a down-filled parka, knitted hat with ear flaps and thick gloves.

  They set off along the shore. Tradition. The first walk when she came back was always this one - along the lakefront to Sampson’s cottage on the rocky point, then up the hill and back home along the top of the escarpment.

  “Mum’s hip looks sore,” said Bea when they were on the beach, crunching over ice-crusted drifts.

  “We’re getting old,” her father said. “Always something falling apart.” He poked his walking pole at a jagged edge of black ice and the ice shattered. “Such a mild winter. I don’t think we’ve had more than twenty days of worthwhile skiing.” He looked up into the sky and Bea knew he was considering the possibility of snowfall that night. And knew too that whatever he predicted, he’d be correct. He only had to look at the clouds, gauge the wind patterns, or smell the air and he’d know how to dress, what ski wax to use.

  Her mother had referred to the lack of cross-country skiing in an email to Bea, but not with regret. She’d reached an age, she said, when she enjoyed pottering about on skis far more than the long-distance routes their father was still fit and agile enough to tackle.

  It might have been a mild winter, but Bea hunched her shoulders against the wind blowing across the lake, and was glad of the layers of heavy clothing. Everyone in Toronto complained of wind from Lake Ontario whipping up Yonge Street, but that was nothing compared to this bitterness. And out here there was no respite, no sudden rush of warm air as someone opened the door of a coffee shop, no upward whoosh of heat from a subway tunnel. But the crystal glints of the untouched snow against the washed out winter-blue sky helped compensate for the cold and Bea took a deep breath, imagining her lungs filling with the clean, northern air.

  Her father stopped, pointing at the skeleton of an ash and passing her binoculars from his pocket. It took her a moment to bring the right tree into focus and search along it until she found what he’d seen: a Black-backed Woodpecker, its black and white body almost camouflaged against the winter landscape save for the yellow dot on his head. As she watched, it stripped a piece of bark, and pecked at the tawny exposed trunk. “What do you think he’s looking for?” she asked.

  “Some sort of beetle. Let’s hope it’s not an emerald ash borer.”

  “Is the Hairy Woodpecker still nesting in the yard?” That was the one that was easy to spot because it was so often motionless, feeling for the movement of insects under the bark. Bea kept the glasses to her eyes, watching the woodpecker continue to tap away at the tree. Baby steps, her therapist was fond of saying. Baby steps.

  When they reached Sampson’s cottage they cleared a patch of snow from the sloping deck and sat. From here, her parents’ house was hidden, so she turned to look in the opposite direction and saw movement in the next bay over; a red truck was pulling an ice fishing hut to the shore and from the snatches of voices which were carried back, the operation wasn’t going smoothly. She scanned the rest of the lake that she could see, pausing at the expanse of dark water. The hole was bigger than she’d originally judged, large enough for whitecaps to sweep across the angry surface, and she averted her gaze, focusing instead on the patterns of wind-blown snow at the lake’s edge. When she was too cold not to move on she stood, and they turned inland and made their way up the hill, wading through the deep snow and weaving between spruce trees and cedars. It was hard going and they were both quiet until they reached the top, with its reward of a view all the way down the lake to the cluster of islands locals called the Binessiwi Mekuna. There were more than sixty islands, some only a few feet across, others as large as two acres and from here they did look like a negative image of the Milky Way, the dark islands dotting across the ghostly white lake.

  Bea saw a flash of light from one of the smaller islands, and raised the binoculars to her eyes. All was still, save for a plume of smoke rising from the chimney of a grey weathered cottage.

  “How many year-round residents left, Dad?” she asked.

  “Only three this year,” he said. Their names meant nothing to her. She looked one last time before they started for home, wondering at the people who didn’t mind being trapped for weeks every fall when the lake was not yet frozen enough for skis or snow machine and again in the spring when it wasn’t thawed enough for a canoe.

  “Your mother worries about you.”

  Bea knew. Forty-three years old with a history of failed relationships and menial jobs, facing another stretch of unemployment and little hope, now, of the child-filled happily-ever-after she’d been raised to believe was everyone’s right. I worry too; but she said nothing, just looked up at the trees above her.

  They saw the owl at the same time. Perched on the branch of a jack pine, its beady yellow eyes stared from the mask-like face, which, ringed with black, looked like it had been stuck onto the round head as an afterthought. Bea slowly lifted the binoculars to her face and watched the owl watching her, its intense stare never wavering. She passed the glasses to her father without taking her gaze from the bird and they stood until it slowly spread its wings and flew, circling once, twice around the tips of the trees before soaring off.

  “A Great Grey,” her father whispered. “Well.”

  At home he reached down the field guide from its shelf in the kitchen and read aloud the description. Rare to uncommon in this area. “Rare to uncommon,” her mother echoed as Bea opened the family log of interesting sightings. During her childhood she and her cousins had competed to see who could write the most entries; two years ago she’d re-read them all, laughing at their earnest language and enthusiastic attention to detail. Her parents’ more sporadic notes still appeared - the most recent entry reported a pair of peregrine falcons. Her father had written it but her mother had added three words at the end: Peregrine - means wanderer.

  “I didn’t k
now that,” said Bea. “That Peregrine means wanderer.”

  “So does Deirdre,” said her mother.

  A sharp stab of shame. “It was a canoe trip . . it went wrong,” she said. “We tipped and I got caught in an eddy.” She’d almost given up. “I was so worried that you’d lose another daughter to drowning.” But even then she hadn’t had a moment’s empathy for Deirdre, and that made her feel guiltier than all the rest of it. Now she needed to not cry, so asked how she could help with dinner.

  Her father lit a fire in the living room for their pre-dinner sherry. Supper was roast chicken with stuffing and gravy and creamy mashed potatoes, sweet buttered squash and broccoli with cheese sauce, followed by blueberry pie from the freezer, served with vanilla ice cream. Bea thought only briefly of the holiday pounds she’d struggled to lose, her freezer full of low-calorie meals and the hours she spent in Zumba classes, for what, she didn’t know.

  After supper they all read the newspaper in front of the fire. Bea knew she might be anxious to return to Toronto in two weeks, but for now, this was easy. So peaceful, to curl up on the sofa and catch up on the details she missed from her usual scan of the paper. When her mind strayed from the newsprint on the page she just stared at the multi-coloured flames as they slowly consumed the birch logs, watched the fire until it was only a hint of glowing.

  In the bathroom she washed her face clean of makeup, completing the last of her transformation. She started to draw the curtains in her childhood bedroom, then paused, pressing her face against the glass to search for any sign of light from the islands. Nothing but the wind through the trees and the groaning of the ice, so she took a step back, noticing her reflection, split into two across the join of the window panes. For moment her head looked as mis-matched as the Great Grey’s, not quite the right face for her body. And then she saw her eight year old self in the reflection. She raised her hands to her cheeks, feeling the skull beneath her skin and wondered how often her mother looked at her and saw flashes of Deirdre. She drew the curtains then, hiding the window, muffling the lake noise so the stretching and stressing of the ice became a song of distant whales.

  Her thudding heart wakes her. In a pool of sweat, she tries to call out for help but can’t speak. Her throat is closing in on itself and her hand shaking too much to turn on the lamp on her bedside table. Struggling for breath, gasping at the sudden sharp pain across her chest. Heart attack. She is going to die. She stops fighting. Not so bad a death: in her childhood bed, her will is up to date, her last day has been spent with her parents and her last bite of food a summer-rich blueberry pie.

  Her throat relaxed, she slowly stopped hyperventilating. She turned on the light and sat up. It wasn’t her heart, it was a panic attack. She ought to have recognized it as soon as she woken in so much fear. It was always the same, when she remembered that her will was in order and she’d told her parents she loved them, the terror of dying lessened just enough to relax her and then all the other symptoms subsided. The doctor had promised her it was normal, she wasn’t losing her mind. Bea didn’t know.

  She listened to the ice, still singing, and what might have been a wolf howl, and thought about the woodpecker, methodically searching for food, and the people alone out on their islands and the villages in Quebec and Ontario that disappeared twenty years apart, destroyed by Leda clay.

  She left the bedside lamp on, and picked up a book. Baby steps. Baby steps.

  It was mid-morning when she went downstairs. Her mother looked at her with concern. “You didn’t sleep well, Darling.”

  Her parents would never push and she hadn’t decided how much, if any, she’d share but when she opened her mouth she heard herself say, “It was stupid of me, just stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking.” Her mother passed her a cup of coffee and dished out a bowl of porridge, adding brown sugar and cream.

  “There’s a child whose father is allowed to visit twice a week, supervised access only. They have to stay in the playroom, chaperoned by an access worker. He went through an acrimonious divorce and his ex-wife claimed he’d abused their son. Later she recanted her allegations and admitted she’d lied but by then it was too late, the paperwork had been filled in and the process begun. Now it will take months, longer, to undo the damage.”

  “It had nothing to do with me, but every time he walked past the front desk on the way out he was crying. It broke my heart.”

  “And so-” She paused. “I found him on an online dating site.”

  “I just thought if I could give them one good day out together maybe it would make it less bad.” Less artificial. Bearable. And so she’d convinced him to let his ex arrange for a day pass, and she’d met the two of them, father and son, on a Tuesday with her canoe on the roof of her car and driven them to the Nith river. And it had been a good day, a great day: a gentle paddle and a picnic lunch. She’d started to believe in a real future for the three of them. But they’d gone one bend too far around the river and met an unexpected set of rapids, swollen by the spring run-off, capsizing the canoe. The boy and his father had made it out, but Bea had been caught in an eddy, pushed deeper and deeper. It was only luck that she was caught against a rock and propelled to the surface, then swept in to shore.

  A quiet drive home and a terse goodbye. He wouldn’t date anyone who would so recklessly put his son’s life at risk. (It also transpired that he hadn’t recognized her photograph on the dating site - had not connected her to the Children’s Aid office. So there was that lie too.)

  She had recovered from the hypothermia but not the nightmares. “Half-nightmare half-flashback, but all mixed up. I’m swallowing warm salt water, which makes no sense at all, and there’s something pink, as well as the green canoe.” Her biggest fear wasn’t losing her job. “I’ve never been scared of water, you know that. Now I’m terrified.” Even the swimming pool at her gym looked dangerous, menacing.

  “It’s because he’s an only child. I know how lonely that can be.”

  “You weren’t always an only child,” her mother reminded her.

  Bea sipped the coffee. “Children’s Aid has to fire me. I broke all the rules.” And she was only the receptionist, no social work qualifications, no skills beyond answering the telephone, using the photocopier. She was lucky, they said, the man in question wasn’t suing her for stalking.

  Silence, while her parents perhaps had to readjust ideas they held of their daughter.

  “You were thinking,” said her father, “that you’d try to brighten someone’s life.”

  Her mother agreed. “Generous. Well-meaning.”

  “But poorly executed.” Bea sighed, tried to smile. “What are your plans for today?”

  Her mother said she’d like to look for the owl and wondered if Bea would take her back to the place where she and her father had seen it the previous day. They took a shortcut, a thermos of coffee, and two deck chair cushions and found the trunk of a fallen tree to sit on.

  Her mother asked if the therapy was helping.

  “She suggests that it’s self-sabotage. That I make sure I find a way to lose a job, ruin a relationship.” These were things she excelled at.

  “Have you told her about the other time you were scared of water?”

  Bea looked at her mother. “But I’ve always loved swimming. I could swim before I could walk - you always told me that.”

  Her mother nodded. “And it’s true. It’s true. But the summer you were four you played on the beach all summer, you never once went into the lake.”

  “The summer I was four. After we came home from Italy.”

  “I wonder if these nightmares are about Trieste.”

  Bea had been three and a half when her father accepted a professorship in Italy and she recalled very little. A tiny car. A house with a courtyard. “Deirdre and I had matching swimsuits,” she said, finally. “Blue and white stripes with red straps. You took us down to the seaside every day.” Until.

  She knew the swimsuits were a
real memory because her father had taken the only photographs. In Rome, in Florence, in piazzas, with backdrops of terracotta roofs and olive trees and a pale rock wall. The sisters wore cotton dresses and posed with their arms around each other. There wasn’t a single photograph of those swimsuits.

  “You had a bright pink lilo,” said her mother. “You both loved it.” Something pink. Bea tried to conjure an image of a blow-up beach toy but couldn’t. She thought perhaps Deirdre, almost six, had tried to teach her how to swim, but maybe that was a single moment misinterpreted. She knew, she was sure, her big sister had played Teacher with her as compensation for abandoning her every afternoon when she started at the local school.

  And then one sunny afternoon Deirdre’s class had gone on an outing to the beach and the teacher had turned her back for one minute, just one minute, and Deirdre, either misunderstanding or ignoring the instructions not to go into the sea by herself, had drowned. An accident. A moment either way and it would never have happened.

  The family of three had returned to the safety of their small Northern Ontario town and Bea’s few memories of her older sister had grown more and more faint.

  “I didn’t do enough,” said her mother. “There weren’t any child psychiatrists in those days. Maybe in Toronto, but not here. I thought I could just love you well again.”

  Bea had shocked herself at the interview for the position with Children’s Aid by saying her family had never recovered from the trauma of her sister’s death and she wanted to help other families do better. She’d felt a surge of guilt as she spoke, as if she had played a role in her sister’s disappearance.