by Laure Baudot
The man nodded. “Sure. My legs were shaking but Kathy, she just about ran up.”
“Gotta envy that, eh?”
“Take advantage of it.”
At the top was a sign identical to the one that stood at the head of the trail: Since 2006, 6 people have died.
Now that we were committed, I wanted to get it over with. It would be a while before we attempted anything risky again, and there would be some time for me to breathe in some relief.
Paul pulled out Sam’s tiny harness, which fit between her legs and around her waist, and started knotting the cord attached to it. Sam stepped a few metres away and stared over the chasm.
“How you folks doing?” A man had emerged seemingly from nowhere, though possibly he’d been behind a bush. He had a wide-brimmed hat and a khaki uniform.
Paul looked up, his hands still working on his knot. “Fantastic day, isn’t it?”
“Folks, the path is off-limits today.”
Paul’s hands stilled. “This one?”
“The path’s washed out.”
Paul looked over at Sam, who was standing on a boulder overlooking the canyon, bouncing on her toes. “Sam, get down!” He turned to the ranger. “Is it really a problem or is it, you know, rules being rules?”
“Paul,” I said.
The ranger stared at Paul. “We don’t recommend the hike for kids under sixteen.”
“We have ropes.”
“Fact is the path is closed.” He took a bottle out from a hook on his belt and took a swig.
Paul’s body vibrated, as if he were a large cat ready to pounce.
Sam skipped up to us and I crouched down. Though I was annoyed on Paul’s behalf by the ranger’s ambivalence to his disappointment, I was also relieved. I tried to keep the elation out of my voice when I told her, “The trail isn’t open today, hon. It’s too wet.”
“Dad!”
Paul turned around.
“Sorry,” said the ranger.
“Whatever.”
Paul moved at a brisk pace, back toward Scout’s Lookout, and we followed him. As Sam tried to catch up to him, she kept saying, “But we have ropes!”
We came to the lookout as the other family was packing up their gear. The father looked up from tying his knapsack. “You all changed your mind?”
Paul gave a noncommittal wave and quickened his pace. His shoulders were hitched up to his ears as he crossed the plateau.
I felt sad for him. Paul believed obstacles were meant to be scaled, and he always scaled them. All except this one. My relief, however, was greater than my pity. I imagined a figure dancing a jig on top of a mountain.
After about twenty minutes, Paul slowed down, allowing me to catch my breath. Sam was a few metres ahead of us now, still sulking, studiously not talking to us.
Paul gave a low chuckle. “Oh well, all’s for the best. I was afraid we’d have to carry you out of there.” He smiled at me, and I smiled back.
The heat was letting up as we started back down the switchbacks. Some shadows hung over the path, and I could feel the day’s sweat drying, my body cooling off. We stopped for a pee break. On one side of the path were the cliffs; on the other, some step-like plateaus covered with crumbling boulders and thorny bushes. While we waited for Sam, Paul and I wandered over to the edge of the cliff, looking at the view. Beside us was a juniper tree. I could tell because there had been a picture in the park’s guide map. The tree was dying; it was split down the middle, having been struck by lightning. Marshmallow-white berries hung like earrings from its branches. Paul broke off a small branch and brought it to me. “Smell.” From it came the caramel scent that had followed us since earlier that day.
We sat down on crackling, dead pine branches. I put my head on Paul’s shoulder and dozed for a few seconds. Later, I would see this moment as a kind of stasis in the life of our family — a snapshot of what might have been had we stayed together: Paul and Sam blocked from doing the things that terrified me, and no one could blame me for it. Our family reunited through being thwarted. Years later, first when an acquaintance told me that Paul and Summer were living to-gether, and then when Sam turned sixteen and left me to live with her father, this was this moment that I mourned: Paul and I waiting, together, for Sam to return to us.
My eyes flew open. “Where’s Sam?”
Behind the boulders, on the slope, were crumpled toilet paper and a smell of urine.
Paul called her name, and his voice echoed.
“I’m going to kill her.” I followed him back up the mountain. Soon, sweat was accumulating again between my shoulder blades. I was breathing heavily. “You go ahead.”
All those things that you imagine when you have kids nagged at me. Those visions that wake you at three in the morning. You picture your child hit by a car or stung by a thousand bees. Or falling. Those thoughts were there, but I wouldn’t let them in. I started making deals with God. I won’t do these crazy trips anymore, I told him. I felt ridiculous engaging in that kind of negotiation, but I also hoped that God existed and that he heard me.
It seemed to take twice as long as before to go back up to Scout’s Lookout. At first I could see Paul bounding ahead of me, taking the path at a light jog, as if he were doing some cross-country running, but soon I couldn’t see him anymore.
As I approached Scout’s Lookout, I could make out people scattered on the plateau. I squinted hard to discern my husband and daughter among them. After a few seconds, two figures detached themselves from the others, and I recognized the red of Sam’s backpack.
Paul led her toward me with his hand on her shoulder. Sam’s hair lifted and fell in the wind, the braid that I had made in the morning having come undone. I sniffed hard and wiped my nose with the back of my hand.
“Mom! I climbed it!”
“You think she’s kidding.” Paul moved beside me and placed a hand on my neck. I sniffed again and took out a tissue from the pocket of my hiking pants. Sam looked at me and squirmed, but she also smiled, as if she couldn’t help it.
“Where’s the ranger?” I asked Sam.
She shrugged. “Not sure. Anyways, it really wasn’t hard.”
“That was not smart,” Paul said.
“There are so going to be consequences,” I said.
“You should not put your mother through something like that.”
“And her father,” I said. “What about her father?”
“We’re going,” Paul declared, and led us toward the path that would take us back down the mountain. I glanced back once at the fork in the paths and saw the ranger hitching up his pants. He seemed to be rushing toward us, moving his arm as if to call us back.
“Let’s go.” I couldn’t vouch for keeping my temper with the ranger. Couldn’t he do his damned job?
We practically ran down the switchbacks, saying nothing to one another. As I galloped, anger gave way to rage, a fury beyond my control. I wasn’t angry at Sam anymore, but at Paul. Sam would not have taken this risk had Paul not encouraged her.
When we stopped for water, Paul asked, “Sam, was it amazing?”
“It was pretty cool. But I wasn’t looking down very much. I was holding on to the chain.”
“Jesus Christ, Paul.” My words came out in a kind of strangle.
When the park shuttle picked us up, we collapsed on seats apart from one another. After a while, Sam came to sit beside Paul. She put her head on his lap and fell asleep, her head bouncing with every pothole.
Once we got back to our hotel room, my anger — directed again at Sam — returned in full force, and I started to mete out some punishments. I felt like someone fiddling with a pressure cooker, letting off little bursts of steam so as not to let the whole thing blow. “If you think you’re going on another hike tomorrow, forget it.”
“Well,” Paul said.
I said not
hing. I went into the bedroom.
Later, as Sam was taking a shower, Paul came in and said, “This is getting ridiculous.”
“Seriously?” I paced back and forth between the living room and our bedroom.
He followed me into the living room. “Point is, nothing happened.”
“Something could have!”
“Do you want to be like that guy, that hotel guy? Don’t you want to live for real, not just exist?”
“That has nothing to do with it. Sam could’ve been hurt.”
“Children who don’t take risks become risk-averse adults. Like all those things you ban her from doing. Monkey bars, roller coasters. And crossing the street by herself. She’s almost nine!”
I stared. “Why don’t you tell me when you don’t agree with my parenting, then?”
“I do, but you don’t really hear.”
The reality was that he couldn’t promise me that nothing bad would actually happen in the future. And something stubborn was growing in me, something tied to my inborn caution.
Sam, in pyjamas, tiptoed into the bedroom. I was now sit-ting on an armchair, looking out the wide hotel window onto an enormous parking lot. She kissed me on the cheek and said goodnight. She smelled of the hotel’s cheap shampoo.
Paul undressed in silence and slipped into bed. Soon he was asleep, snoring lightly in the diminishing light of the spring evening.
I sat until the sun set, stripes of orange and red and mauve and then, finally, tar black. A glare came from the fluorescent parking lot lights. I could make out Sam’s hair, fanned out on her pillow, and her long eyelashes closed over her green eyes.
I rose and started packing. All the while, my husband and my daughter slept. I started with my suitcase, then tiptoed into the living room and packed Sam’s suitcase. As I packed, my anger gave way to sadness. Some being, other than me, I had tried to fend off for a long time, was winning. Whatever lay dormant in me had a personality of its own and could not join my husband and daughter in their search for, what? Whether it was risk or adventure, I still couldn’t make up my mind.
I saw Paul in a grocery store the other day. I don’t normally shop there, I had just decided to stop for groceries after an appointment in the western end of the city.
Paul was in the freezer section. His cheeks seemed slightly more hollowed than the last time I’d seen him, his hairline more receded. In the cart next to him was a child of about three years. He had overgrown brown hair, and the same green-speckled-with-brown eyes as Paul. For a moment I couldn’t move. Sam knows about his child, I thought. Why hasn’t she told me?
Paul was reading a box he held in his left hand. With his right hand, he was playing a game of pushing the cart away from him, then letting it go, then stretching his arm to catch it again. Each time he pushed it away, the child squealed.
I heard a clip-clop of heels, and a woman approached Paul and the child. Although she was wearing work clothes, and her forehead was more lined than it had been at the garden party, I recognized Summer easily. She placed a hand on the cart. “Where were you guys? I couldn’t find you any-where. You know I hate when you go off without a word.”
He smiled at her, his eyes crinkling in the way I remembered. My nose pricked, despite my satisfaction at reading worry in her. This was quickly replaced by pity, and then sympathy, which alleviated my chronic loneliness, if only for a few seconds. I pivoted on my heels, preparing to walk away as quickly as possible without seeming rushed. I hoped she hadn’t recognized me.
“We were here all this time,” Paul said.
The Bread Maker
Sandra doesn’t mention the discoloration on her son’s jaw, though she feels the bruise as a tightening under her own clavicle. It’s like when Glen was little and the boys would take against him, for no reason that she could see, and she was powerless to do anything about it.
In the past she would have said something, straight out, about the bruise. That changed the last time he came home. She’d asked about his injuries right away and he yelled at her, crashed out the door, didn’t call her for months, and then after that only hi and how-are-you and how’s-the-weather-type conversations. All because she couldn’t bear to see him beaten up again.
He walks past her and toward the kitchen at the back of the house. Following him, she notices with surprise that there is a pale wedge on the top of his head, at the part, where his long, light-brown hair is starting to thin prematurely.
“Glen, what are you doing here?”
“Anything to eat?”
She moves quickly — tripping in her slippered feet, but recovering herself — and grabs the back of his shirt before he enters the kitchen. “Wait. I’ll get it.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Her eyes widen at his thanks, but she says only, “Why don’t you wait in the living room?”
As he walks away, she tenses. She has nothing in the fridge. Or next to nothing. She kneads the pinch at the back of her neck with both hands and then begins scrounging for something to eat. After staring at the near-empty fridge for a while, she takes out a piece of old cheddar and, gouging out a few craters of mold, she brings the rectangle to her nose. Sharp, but still okay. Using the same knife, which he had bought her with his grocery store money when he was eleven, she carves off some slices. Then she pulls out her fancy crackers, the thin ones with sesame seeds and honeycomb latticework, and puts everything on a chipped white plate: cheese on one side, crackers on the other.
When she enters the living room he’s sitting on the only chair in the room, the one with the orange plastic seat that she found on the lawn of the school when they were renovating.
His legs are propped up. “What happened to the other one?”
She blinks at what has been her table for the past few months, a sheet of particleboard on two crates. “I sold it.”
“Really?”
“I needed a change.”
She looks around, trying to decide if she should keep standing or if he’ll consider it hovering. “Here.” She hands him the plate, and catches a sour scent from her right arm-pit. She hasn’t washed in a couple of days. There’s no one to wash for, and not showering saves on her hot water bills. These days she only showers before her shifts at WellLife retirement home — and after the government cutbacks, after the union protected the old employees, the ones older than her, she hasn’t had regular shifts for ten months. She hopes Glen doesn’t notice the smell.
He chomps down on the crackers, bits scattering. She feels a rush of anger for the waste. Why does he have to eat them so fast? Soon it will be saltines only, with their saw-dust texture that leaves a sour taste in her mouth.
She’s on tenterhooks, not wanting to ask him again why he’s there.
As if reading her mind, he says, “I missed home.”
Which is bullshit. The minute he turned twelve, he began shutting her out. He would leave the house after school and come back hours later stinking of pot. At sixteen he left for Vancouver, as far west as he could possibly go and still get free healthcare. To get away from her, he’d have gone straight into the ocean if he could.
He swallows, starts coughing a bit.
“I’ll get you some water,” she says. When she returns, he downs the water in a few gulps. She makes to take the glass from him, but he holds it tightly to himself.
“I’ll get it, Mom.” He continues to sit there, though. “Haven’t been baking lately?”
“Not lately.”
“That’s a shame.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that, either. He hated her whole-wheat rolls, wanted store-bought white bread. Maybe he liked her cannoli, though. The ones she made when he was a child. The last time would have been on his eleventh birthday; the year after, they fought too much and out of spite she bought him a No Frills blueberry pie, with a crust that tasted like cardboard.
<
br /> Sandra catches Glen studying her, and realizes she’s wearing her old housecoat — the red and garish Chinatown one she once gave to her mother for Christmas, back when she had money for extras. Her mother gave it back after Robert left her the first time. She was stuck home with baby Glen then, wearing pyjamas all day, sticky with spit-up and caramel-smelling formula. Now, Sandra tries to put one foot behind the other so he won’t see her curling, uncut toenails.
“Not working Sundays anymore, Mom?”
“No, not anymore.”
“It was mean of them to make you go on Sundays.”
“It was good money.” She rubs her hands. The arthritis pain has grown bad and over the past year she’s developed this habit, as if by rubbing she’ll rub the ache right out.
Glen catches her eye. “How’re the hands?”
“Bad.” She used to run a kitchen at the home. Was good at it, too. Now she’s just a cook. On work days she takes an Advil, but only half, to stretch out the bottle.
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Christ, no. I hate how they look at you, with all that pity.”
He looks at her carefully. “They’re just doing their job. Sometimes people just want to help.”
She thinks he blushes then, or maybe it’s a trick of the dimming winter light. It always gets dark early in this east-facing house. But maybe he is actually embarrassed, as if he’s speaking from experience. He’d lived on the streets and then, somehow, ended up on the other side. For the last few years, he’s worked helping the homeless in Vancouver’s downtown east side, bringing them methadone and clean needles — surprising the heck out of her, considering how he was self-centred. Maybe that’s the way it is with kids, all kids are self-centred. It’s just that she’s shocked at the change in him.
“I just thought of something,” her son says. “Do you eat nightshades?”
“Night what?”
“Tomatoes, Eggplant. I heard they cause inflammation.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
He shrugs. “People say it.”
“You’re just naming things you hate!” She laughs, like the old days when they used to joke together.