by Laure Baudot
Later, at her kitchen table, Alison slumps over on her forearms. “I didn’t know what to do.”
I touch her shoulder. “It was never your fault.”
One in three women have miscarriages. About them, I have little to add. The blood, the cramps, the shame. Was it that beer, the one I had before I knew I was pregnant? Finally, the forgetting: you find yourself still mentally ticking off baby names, until you remember.
After the second miscarriage, I joined an online support group. I entered my grief idly onto the screen and felt immediately better. Once, an anonymous user typed: Did you drink coffee during your pregnancy? That could have done it.
That evening, while Archana sleeps, Peter and I talk in our living room.
“It’s all about luck, isn’t it?” I say to him. “The whole pregnancy thing. The babies.”
“I never thought otherwise.”
“And Malcolm walking. Just good fortune.”
Peter taps his fingers on our coffee table. “There’s a problem with your thesis. It eliminates the need for action.”
Just outside the corners of his mouth are small grey-green shadows of disappointment. They’ve been there since I told him I no longer wanted to adopt.
He asks, “Did Alison take Malcolm for therapy?”
“I don’t know.”
“She should have.”
In the streets of Addis Ababa, children gathered around us. They butted against our legs like moths, chanting the name of the tissue brand they were selling: “Softies, softies.” Their thick-lashed eyes widened at the prospect of our wallets opening. And perhaps each one of them was thinking — viciously, competitively, or maybe only warily and willing himself not to care — that, among the others shuffling their wares, he alone would be chosen.
Inheritance
What is that instinctive terror gripping Josie when a shape makes its way toward her, parting the water in which she swims? A slim, oblong body; a short head with a blunt snout; an unhappy-looking mouth. The grey fish with a white belly undulates toward her in the way particular to its kind, and Josie knows it for what it is.
“Leo!”
She spins in circles, her legs egg-beating. She was enjoying the snorkelling, a surprising fact given that she usually feels uneasy in natural settings. The water had been cool, and the explosion of colourful fish schooling below the surface had startled her out of her initial unease.
Now she’s seen the shark, though, and her heart accelerates.
“Interesting, the way they’re attracted to a motor’s sound,” Leo says from behind her. “They came because of the boat.”
Josie whirls around. “You scared me!”
His eyes are hard to make out behind his snorkel mask. “I was under.”
“I didn’t expect sharks,” she says. The boat is far away, its white sail bobbing like a buoy, peeking now and then above the mild grey surf. Her voice wavers. “This guy looks hungry.”
“It’s instinctive,” says Leo as he treads water beside her. “Something in you knows it’s a natural predator. This is one of the gentler species, though. A whitetip. Only three attacks on the international shark file.”
“There’s a file? Well, that’s comforting.”
He ignores her sarcasm. “If you consider the number of people swimming in oceans, even off this peninsula alone, the number of shark attacks is statistically negligible. Let’s assume there are one hundred people a day in this area. Last year there was one shark attack. So you have a one percent chance of being attacked.”
Unlike Josie, Leo is not breathing hard. Already an excellent swimmer, he became an even better one last summer, which he spent in Nova Scotia working in a marine biology lab. He’s about to start graduate school so he knows what he’s talking about. Because of that, and his scientist’s approach to the world — devoid of irrational fears — Josie would norm-ally have total confidence in him. But a sensation that he’s not telling the entire truth itches her. Since they boarded the boat after lunch, he’s been keeping his distance.
The Leo Josie knows is a person infused with contentment. Once, as they were walking home from campus, he said, seemingly apropos of nothing, “Isn’t life amazing?” And it is, for him. He’s happily on his way to a career he loves, he has a girlfriend, and — for the moment at least — they have no petty cash-flow problems.
Leo doesn’t seem to have a temper, either. Once, she’d kissed another guy. It had happened at a house party, at the home of a friend of a friend. The guy had kissed Josie in the corridor of the overloud party. His kiss was wet, over-vigorous as it always is with good-looking men, who are too egotistical to consult women about the quality of their embrace. That night, she joked with Leo about the guy’s over-productive salivary glands. It was so early on in their relationship — she and Leo had not yet moved in together, and she was only spending weekends in his low-rise apartment — that she made nothing of it. Leo’s reaction, in the days following, was the only time she’d seen him angry — and even then, his was such a discreet resentment that she could have been imagining it.
Leo is the son of German immigrants. His father is a retired engineer living in Elmira, Ontario, and his mother is the stay-at-home variety, and a church volunteer. His father is a dour man, probably because of the war, during which he lost six of his eight siblings. Leo thinks his own cheerful streak is inherited from his mother’s side. He considers his happiness a dike in the face of the slow trickle of his father’s grimness.
Leo has come to see Josie as an integral part of his life — a well-deserved one. Since meeting her, he hasn’t for a second considered seeing anyone else. Why go elsewhere when you’ve already found what you want? He pictures life without Josie and feels empty.
He looks at her now, in the water. Her medium-length light-brown hair is slicked back off her face and she still looks beautiful. That square jaw and just slightly too-wide face. Those hazel eyes. He pulls down his mask, so he can see her properly, and grins. “Isn’t this wonderful?”
Josie watches his reddish beard, which has grown to an impressive length, dip into the waves. His blue eyes squint. A clean smell of fish hangs in the air. From high in the blue sky come the squeaky laughs of gulls. Josie’s and Leo’s heads are close. Josie is glad that she came. Maybe there is time to regroup, after all.
Josie is the type of person who moves toward stability even as she retreats from it. Her father, an unpublished writer, spent twenty summer vacations writing the same novel. Whenever he was writing, everybody knew it — they would try to talk to him, and he wouldn’t actually hear anything they said. It wasn’t as if he were deaf, it was more as if he were in a sepia-coloured photograph of a writer at work.
As a little girl, Josie didn’t mind his self-absorption, but as she grew older she became aware of the damage it caused. Her parents argued. Her mother, who as a medical secretary was the breadwinner, urged her husband to finish his book or abandon it — advice he found hurtful. Her mother died of breast cancer when Josie was fifteen. Josie believed that her father’s decades of spinning his tale and getting nowhere was possibly to blame for her mother’s stress, which had surely exacerbated her illness.
Though Josie tells herself she will never be like either of them, she knows there is part of her that is like her father — an aspect that obsessively explores possibilities. Josie is frightened of letting this part take over. One reason she fell in love with Leo is the fact that he never wavers from his goals. Another is that he succeeds in everything he sets out to do.
Sometimes, she likes to ask him about his work. But she doesn’t like to experience it. Insects and humidity were not what she pictured when Leo suggested that they take a holiday in a tropical setting.
Yesterday they took a walk through a mangrove forest. Leo talked her into it by telling her they would be walking on planks set up for the purpose; she wouldn’t need to g
et too close to the wet ground. The forest, which was really a swamp because that is where mangroves grow, was mottled green and grey, so thick were the mangrove branches. Mosquitos buzzed and bit. Sweat bathed their foreheads.
After they had been walking for some minutes, Josie noticed large spiders in the trees. She looked up and shivered. “Ugh.”
“Look at that.” Leo went off the planks, his hiking boots squelching in the muck. “Why do you think their legs are so long?”
“The better to scare us with?”
He looked at her. “Oh, sorry. Let’s get going.”
For a moment, she thought he’d lingered on purpose. He knew she hated anything that crawled.
A few years before, the day after the unwanted kissing incident, Josie had baked a cake in Leo’s kitchen. Since she was leaving for the library, she had asked him to cover the cooled cake, which was a golden upside down pineapple masterpiece. Covering food was a precaution they both took because the apartment building was infested with cockroaches. The following morning, she came into the kitchen and saw a thumb-long red bug hanging on the golden fringe, its antenna waving as if with pleasure as it nibbled.
“Leo!”
He came into the kitchen, rubbing his hair with a towel. “Oops.”
“Disgusting.”
He got closer. “Do you know that cockroaches will outlive us for millennia after we’re dead?”
“Can you help me get rid of it, please?”
But he was already backing out. “I’ve got a class.”
Back then, she’d wondered if he’d relished her disgust. She wonders this again.
Every once in a while, Leo experiences a deep fury at various happenings — and also at people, especially when they disappoint him. He’s surprised by this powerful emotion, and, in the few hours it takes for his anger to ebb away completely, takes time to examine it. Last summer, when a fellow student made a calculation mistake during the course of one of their spatio-temporal analyzes of green crab, Leo was so furious that he imagined himself grabbing the student by the shoulders and shaking him vigorously. He left the room to settle himself before speaking to him, and noticed that the student seemed afraid. When, later that night, he considered the incident, he thought to himself that it was his innate perfectionism that had caused him to lose his temper over such a small mistake — after all, their supervisor would have caught it later that week. He thought about how scared the student had been, and concluded that he was someone who had been coddled and was unused to criticism, and so had reacted strongly to Leo’s angry tone.
He speculates that it is not his own anger that he’s feeling but, rather, his father’s. Leo once read in a newspaper that researchers in the field of epigenetics may have found evidence of what trauma survivors have suspected for years, which is that emotions can be inherited, passed down from one generation to the next. Leo knew that his father had suffered war trauma, and perhaps his feelings — his despair and anger at the conscription and subsequent death of his six brothers — had slithered their way into Leo’s genes, like a seemingly benign snake that turned out to be poisonous. Leo is satisfied with this hypothesis. If the emotion isn’t his, he can learn to control it. He can observe the phenomenon, as he does marine life, take note of it, attempt to analyze the conditions under which it arises, and strive to eliminate them.
The trouble is that it’s so hard to become a detached observer. When Josie was careless in the past, it set off a slew of feelings in Leo, from grief to fury to anguish. But her unpredictability is what draws him to her. She startles him with her questions about identity and lifestyle. She’s smart. She asks him about his work in a way that shows him that over the five years they’ve been together, through his undergraduate career and into his graduate studies, she’s actually listened to him and understands his work.
Lately, his anger has reappeared. Leo has begun to notice Josie’s increased awareness of other men. Other women, too — something he first saw with a kind of startle, before realizing that, of course, it makes sense, it’s in keeping with her open-minded character. When he sees her attention wandering, Leo practises withdrawing from the anger that assaults him. The ire arranges itself into the shape of a man, a double of Leo. Leo observes this second self with a scientist’s dispassion. He is curious about what this second Leo might do.
Bobbing in the deep ocean on a brilliant afternoon, Leo instead focuses his attention on one of the great moments of what is, overall, a satisfying existence. Leo #1, as he has come to know the part of himself that withdraws from anger, believes that this trip will refocus his girlfriend’s attention to him.
He points his chin toward the water. “There are lionfish down there. Shall we?”
Josie adjusts her mask over the freckled landscape of her cheeks, and her hair catches in the elastic band. “Ouch.”
Leo #2, the double, is filled with a kind of satisfaction for her small moment of discomfort. His grin expands as if to take in everything around them. From about a hundred metres away, the captain of their chartered boat yells out that they’re halfway through their time in the water.
“What’s he like, the tour operator?” Josie asks. Having spent the boat trip lounging on the coiled ropes in the boat’s stern, she hadn’t met the guy.
“A fisherman glad for the extra cash, I think. Shall we?”
Josie shivers as if she’s reluctant to dunk her head in the water again. “Let’s,” she says, before placing the tube into her mouth.
Josie and Leo’s island is off most tourists’ maps. No one over the age of thirty comes here. Large hotels have not yet made an appearance. There is only one hostel, run by an expatriate German woman. She’s a single mother who had a child with one of the locals, a ten-year-old boy who has his mother’s dirty-blonde hair. The walls of the hostel are painted in pastel colours: blue, pink, and yellow. Iguanas are everywhere, their throats pulsing lime-green whenever someone approaches them to take a closer look.
The place is set up for loungers. There are paperbacks and rickety wooden tables. Old editions of Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide gather sand and dust on bookshelves next to seashells and sand dollars. There are dirty ashtrays, some half-filled with butts even at ten in the morning. Men and women in bathing suits hang out in this room. The men are usually shirtless and sunburnt. The women wear cut-off denim shorts over their suits.
The weather is almost always perfect, save for warm afternoon showers. Many of the hostellers spend their days going back and forth between the sandfly-ridden, narrow beaches that border the mangrove swamps. Many have been bitten by mosquitos because the tourists can’t be bothered to use repellent. The guests stay here as long as possible. Divers linger until the onset of hurricane season. Young people about to go home decide instead to take a gap year. Others choose to quit their jobs back home and settle on the island until their savings run out.
Leo would never, even for a second, consider staying for-ever on an island like this — unless there were an oceanic lab. He’s too curious, too in love with the life of the mind, to sit and merely exist. Josie understands this is precisely why she’s with him.
Once, Josie decided to try living the lifestyle encouraged by the hostel’s environment. She’s seen others spend hours in the outdoor-style living room, with only some cigarettes and an old moldy copy of The Road to sustain them. But Josie couldn’t do it. She sat in one of the sagging couches and read Pablo Neruda and, after an hour, she found herself drifting and irritable — not remembering a word of the book, itching to jump up and do something.
Josie appreciates being relaxed, but she also feels uneasy and needs to shake things up. Which is what she did yesterday.
As Leo was having a nap, Josie went downstairs to the open-air eating area for a snack. She was eating crackers and peanut butter when a woman her age came down the stairs and made her way to the communal hotplate. She wore cut-offs and
an emerald bikini, and had freckled skin and small breasts. Her red hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, and she had green eyes and eyebrows so pale they disappeared. Josie saw that she wore no makeup.
The woman joined Josie at her table and set a plate of scrambled eggs in front of her. After some chewing and swallowing, she said, “You were here with your boyfriend yesterday, right?”
“Probably.”
“You’re not thinking of making this place your home?” She arched her eyebrows in such a way that conveyed to Josie she was being sarcastic.
The day before, Josie and Leo had been discussing their plans for the fall. While Leo works on his graduate degree, Josie would study to become a teacher. Josie is enough of a grown-up to understand that money is important. Becoming a teacher will allow her to make enough to live on without sacrificing too much time studying. It would also free up her summers to do other things. Travel, for instance. Or to get to know other men and women. She still holds single life in the back of her mind, even while she suspects that Leo might have a very different view of things.
“I’m like you,” said the woman. “I have plans.” She pushed the rest of the scrambled eggs onto a fork with a crust of bread, then tossed the whole thing into her mouth as she rose to sit on a large stained cotton couch. “You’re not in a rush, are you?” She patted the seat beside her in an invitation.
“Who is?” Josie sat.
Her name was Marina, and she had a scholarship to the Emily Carr School of Art in Vancouver. She talked about her girlfriend, with whom she was going to live, though she had been with both sexes. “I’ve always said, I date people.”
As Marina spoke, Josie felt unable to say a word. There was a stone lodged in her chest. She became aware of the filaments of her nose hairs waving in and out as she breathed.