* * *
I don’t know precisely what time it was when we got to the town near our lake, but it was that golden part of the day when the sky would hold the summer sun just under the lip of the horizon very late into the night. We stopped at the market for milk and fruit, potatoes and bread. We bought a chicken and a side of cured pork from the butcher, and then crossed the centre of town and on to a wooded, winding road that brought us to our lake. At the north end of the lake, we turned on to the gravel road, potholed and meandering through a mixed forest of birch and alder, willow and pine, the western faces of the trunks a jewelled orange with the setting sun, small stones pinging the windows. This road took us higher and higher until we reached an even smaller track, so unused it was more like the ghost of a road, which you would be wary of following if you didn’t know where it led.
My grandfather’s koie. He built the cottage himself when my father was a little boy. We’ve sold it now, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, Bear. But I’m sure you would understand. We couldn’t go back there.
But I remember everything about the place. When you came to the end of that rough track there were the first glimpses of the lake in the distance and the purple hills beyond the water, then the trees familiar and the tall grass and wildflowers, and finally the koie itself, that tiny cedar building constructed by my grandfather’s own boat-rough hands. Grass-roofed and A-framed with a crooked iron-pot chimney. You were asleep in the back of the car so we left you there while we unloaded, Tilda running from the koie to the car and back again, getting in our way, throwing her dolls on the single top bunk at the back of the koie. You, your mother and I would sleep on the bottom bunk. It was big enough for the three of us. We’d always thought we wouldn’t have to worry about bunk space until later, when you grew too big to share.
We hadn’t yet made it there that summer; it was our first visit, and your mother began the week as she always did, pulling back the curtains, clearing away from the windowsills the dead, grey spiders, their carcasses like paper, like dust. She wiped the winter settlement from the long wooden table, swept the floors. There was evidence of strangers having used the cottage: an oily candle stub on the windowsill and an unopened can of sardines that wasn’t ours on the counter next to the sink. But we didn’t mind. The koie provided good shelter, with a large wood stove and soft beds. Off-season walkers relied on this refuge. And these visitors hadn’t done any damage, nor had they burned any of the wood we’d left piled neatly next to the stove.
When everything was unloaded, the food and blankets, oil lamps, fishing rods and clothes, I woke you and carried you, cocooned in a blanket, from the car over to a lichen-covered slab of rock behind the koie. We sat together and looked over the descending wood to the lake below. You weren’t fully awake, and you curled your body into my chest and whimpered, displeased with having been disturbed. I rocked you back and forth and spoke about the fish we would catch in the morning, the fish we would catch before your mother and sister had even left their beds. I described how we would motor out on the glassy water to where a creek emptied into the lake, where the water was cool and shallow and where the trout, golden-green and spotted like leopards, were sure to be. You asked me if a fish knows it’s been caught when it’s been caught and I told you I didn’t think so, and you asked if you would be allowed to hold the rod all by yourself and I promised you that you would. We sat together on the rock until your mother called us in to eat.
Dinner was chicken and potatoes cooked in the fire pit. Your mother put you and your sister, both silly with exhaustion, to bed at ten. She lay down with you and told you a new story about the girl all three of you had invented together. A girl named Anne who lived on an island that was shaped like a boat. This girl could climb trees without making a sound. She was the master of wasps. When it suited her, she could transform herself into a fish.
I wasn’t yet tired. I lit candles and arranged them on the dining table, poured two glasses of wine and sat quietly, shuffling a deck of cards, waiting for your mother. Her storytelling voice was one of my favourite sounds: somnolent, but punctuated when there was tension, melodic when the dilemma was resolved. My attention was half on the story but also taken up by the night sounds of the koie and of the forest. Wind speaking through the pines, an owl. The pulse of countless crickets and night creatures.
Sometimes, out there, with the air so pure, it seemed possible that if we knew how to listen, we might hear the sound of the stars cutting across the sky.
Your mother’s story was over yet still she didn’t come. I waited, my hands lost in the rhythm of shuffling cards, then softly called to her. My voice hung alone in the middle of the room. She had fallen asleep, so I took a pack of cigarettes and my glass of wine and went outside to the rock I had shared with you, a few hours before. I was hoping for a show, for the soft glowing dome of northern lights, but they never came.
* * *
Cold, when I woke up in the morning. Condensation dripped down the window next to where my head lay. I slept with the alarm clock tucked in bed next to me so I could silence the squawk as soon as it rang. Didn’t want to wake your mother and sister at five in the morning. Your mother turned in her sleep and pulled the blanket up over her shoulder. You. You were tucked closely into her body like a snail in its shell. Your white eyelashes lay on your cheek and you were safe. I didn’t wake you up, Bear, as I had promised, not because I didn’t want you to come with me, but because I didn’t want to peel you away from where you slept. The moment was precious and I didn’t want to break it, and I thought that I could take you out again in the evening. True, the fish that bite in the evenings are usually the bottom-feeders, the long-whiskered, flat-headed catfish, and though inedible, though they taste of mud, I thought you would have had just as much fun catching and releasing them. So I decided to go without you.
I dressed warmly in my wool fishing cap and multi-pocketed canvas jacket, and I packed a small bag with bread and cheese and an apple, and the pocketknife I always carried, my grandfather’s, for cutting the cheese and the apple. I collected my tackle box from where I kept it under the firewood shelter. A pale wash of light the colour of beach stones was just beginning to rise in the east as I turned from the koie and walked downhill to the lake trail. Inside the cover of trees, all was dark, and the trail was steep and rocky and crossed with roots, but I knew every rock and I knew every root. The darkness chittered and sawed with insects, and the deep echo and relay of dawn birdsong carved out the shape of the forest.
I found the key to our small boathouse in the place I’d left it the year before, the place it had been left every year, hidden in a tin box under a flat rock next to the boathouse door. Inside the boathouse, the sweet smell of petrol, of damp wood and old, hairy rope. Our small, square-nosed aluminium outboard sat snugly in its carpeted dolly, covered neatly in a thick, oil-stained canvas sheet. When I pulled the sheet away from the boat, releasing the smell of dust and winter, I upset a mouse that had built her nest in one of its folds, a mother capped with her row of pink and hairless, suckling pups. She sprung from the canvas and landed on the floor. A few of the pups still clung tenaciously to her but the others were left behind, a trail of beans. The mother ran out of the door and I stood there, thinking what to do. Thinking the pups might make good bait. A trout would go for them, no question. On one wall of the boathouse there was a long shelf where I stored tools, rope, fishing line, toy boats and buckets that belonged to you and your sister. I looked there for something I could use to collect the baby mice and settled for one of your wooden beach spades. I carefully scooped up the mice from the fold – there were seven of them – and checked the rest of the canvas for any more, and made a silent deal with mother mouse. I would lay the pups next to the boathouse door, on the flat key rock, and do the rest of the things I needed to do – launch the boat, load my rods and tackle box, see to the business of setting up the motor and servicing it if it needed to b
e serviced. If any of the pups had died by the time I was ready to go, I would take only those and leave the rest for her.
When I was ready, I found that two of the pups had died. I put those in my tackle box and left the others, wishing them luck.
The sun had risen beyond the trees now and cast a glow on the lake mist, which hovered just above the flat surface of the water. This is the best time to be on the water, when it’s so calm that you can spot the striders. So placid, water appears to be something other than water, like a surface you can walk on. When the water is settled in this way it quietly records all that it reflects, as if its purpose is to remember, to jot down the story of the world. The spray of pine needles. The arc of a passing hawk. Clouds. A man alone in a boat.
I untied the bow painter from its metal ring on the dock, pushed off with my foot and yanked the motor cord. The engine spewed a small burst of oily smoke and chucked into action, and I cut a lazy, wide turn away from the dock and headed across the water towards the mouth of the creek. I took my time, watched the V-shaped wake from my outboard spread and thin and disappear. When I got to my fishing spot, I dropped the anchor – a brick tied to a length of rope – and pulled my rod from its bag and assembled the parts, strung the line and fastened a hook to its end with a bowline knot.
I can’t remember now if I was thinking about you, Bear, or not. If I was feeling guilty for having left you behind. I don’t think I was. What I remember now is the feeling of a dead infant mouse between my fingers, delicate and yielding as an overripe berry. I studied it: a little bit gruesome, a little bit fascinating. Translucent skin textured like a scrotum. Purple shadows of organs and veins and tiny, clawed paws. Black buds of eyes sealed in milky skin, ears not yet unfurled, white filaments for whiskers. It was perfect.
I hooked the pup through the neck and cast the line.
My first trout was a good size, about a kilo. And the mouse was still intact so I used it again. And then once more. When I opened the tackle box to get the other pup, I found that it was alive, nudging its soft, blunt nose blindly into the side of the box. Maybe this was cruel, Bear, but I was a different man then. Stronger and more resilient. Not as prone to symbolism or prophetic thinking. Knowing that the lethargic movements of a live mouse would make even better bait, I hooked this pup through the hind leg and cast my line. I reeled it slowly in and, when I lifted it into the air to cast again, it arched its back and its legs clawed at nothing. I cast again and reeled and noticed that there was now a little wind blowing, skating across the water. I watched the lake’s surface change and darken, like something coming for me. I caught one last fish and, because I was beginning to feel hungry, turned the boat for home.
I was thinking about breakfast as I cruised sideways up to the dock, about how I’d fry the fish plainly with butter, salt and pepper. I knew you and your mother and sister would have eaten already. You would have had fruit and oatmeal, something like that. I would be eating fish alone.
I noticed something small and yellow bobbing in the water a few metres from the dock. It was one of your toy boats. I stepped up on to the dock and tied my bow up by the painter, and used an oar from the boat to retrieve your toy. In the little yellow boat were the remaining mice I had left on the rock, inching together. I figured your mother must have brought you and your sister down to the water for a play after breakfast, and that you must have seen the pups and thought them great passengers. You would have been delighted. I felt a little guilty, now being responsible for the death of an entire mouse family. There was no way the mother would care for these pups now, so I put the boat aside thinking we could use them for our evening fishing trip.
I strung my catch through their cheeks on to a willow branch and carried them up to the house.
‘We’ll never eat all those,’ your mother said. She was peeling an apple at the table, the skin falling like ribbon in one, unbroken spiral.
‘We’ll eat the big one for lunch.’
‘And more for dinner?’
‘I can salt the others.’
She shrugged.
I put the fish in the sink and washed my hands. I wanted to show you and your sister how to gut and clean them, and looked in the drawer for my filleting knife. ‘Where are the children?’ I asked.
‘Tilda’s out back.’
‘Bear’s with her?’ I asked.
Your mother put the apple and knife on the table. The careful click of metal against wood, the knife being laid down. ‘Bear’s with you,’ she said.
* * *
Bear. It is a very long fall, from one life to the next. It’s hard to find the words. I want to communicate this to you, to make you understand how much. How hard. How. What I have learned is that the world can suddenly and with impunity open up and swallow a man whole. His stomach is the first to plummet, and there follows the rest of his body, his torso his arms his fingers.
The sound that came out of your mother when I pulled your cold body from under the dock was ancient. It was thousands of years old and it was the collective cry made by a history of mothers falling. Older than memory. If I made any noise, I wasn’t aware of it. Pink froth bubbled from your lips and when I wiped it away, more came. I stood in the lake, chest-deep, and continued to wipe the froth from your nose and mouth. I hoisted you out of the water and laid you on the dock and pulled myself up too, and there must have been a crooked nail jutting out from the wood because several hours later I discovered a gash in my shin that would have taken stitches had I cared to have it seen to. The scar, now white and shiny, is the speared and feathery shape of a willow leaf.
I straddled your small body and slapped your face. We both knew you were dead, but there’s knowing and there’s the heart and these two entities don’t always act as one. The dock rocked up and down as I threw you over my knees and hit your back with the heel of my hand, as if trying to dislodge food stuck in your windpipe. Your mother pulled you away from me and settled you into her lap, and I watched as the blue cotton of her skirt darkened with water. She was shaking you, and your arm bounced up and down and clear water dripped from the tips of your perfect fingers. This moment very quickly became a series of details. Your toes, bone white. Your hair drying quickly in the breeze. A stranger paddling over in a green canoe, his face a paper cut-out of a face. The toy yellow boat where I’d left it on the end of the dock with its cargo of dead mice.
25
Anouk
Toronto, 1989
Lake ontario was shrinking. At one time, when Toronto was still called the City of York, the shore lay several blocks north, in terms of the city. Front Street was named so because it originally fronted the northern shore of the lake. The Royal York, the finest hotel in town, was built facing Union Station, just by the water, but as the lake receded, exposing more and more land, the city developed until, lying between the hotel and the lake, there were two highways, more hotels, and a quayside shopping district.
East of the city, which, when Front Street was first established, would have been forest and farmland, there were the Scarborough Highlands, which later became known as the Scarborough Bluffs, sand cliffs bordering the lake that were more than a hundred metres tall at their highest point. They were compared to the cliffs of Dover by English colonialists, albeit a much smaller version, and they were eroding, little by little. In the 1940s, as Toronto’s population grew, it became fashionable to build large houses on the clifftops, where the air was fresh and the views across the lake incomparable. The construction of the houses increased the rate of erosion of the land they were built on, and, by the time Anouk’s mother moved back to Toronto in 1987, leaving Red without a wife and Anouk with a choice, an abandoned bluff-top cottage that once belonged to an artist had already crashed into the lake. The city was busily planting trees and boulders at the base of the cliffs to slow the effects of erosion, to save the homes, but the lake, and its shore ever-changing, was eating away at the bluff
s. Try as they might, they could not stop what the water was doing.
Anouk’s mother moved to the part of Toronto just west of the bluffs, where every street running north–south ended at the lake. Nora had always lived in this part of Toronto; it was where she was born. And this was where Anouk’s aunt Mel also lived. This was where the water was. But Anouk found the beach sand to be gritty with dirt, riddled with bottle tops and cigarette butts, sand that left your feet grey and dusty. It wasn’t a junkyard, it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t the same as home. Lake Ontario didn’t smell the way water should; there were no hints of cedar sap or mineral or dirt. It smelled more like cold tin.
Close to the water, the shore was stony – a slip and scatter of smooth, broad stones, perfect for skipping. And the temperature, even in the middle of the summer, was breath-taking cold. Red once told Anouk that this was because the lake was dead, nothing living in it to warm it up. But when Anouk told Nora this, Nora said that wasn’t true. Plenty alive in there. There were trout, catfish and carp. There were weeds. And in the middle, where the water was deep, there were eels.
Anouk’s mother left the family when Anouk was in the hospital with a lung infection. Just walked out, in the middle of the night. She stayed away for nine days. And then, she called, with a decision and a choice. Anouk chose her father. Anouk chose the deep winters, the sky, the river. All Nora asked for, out of everything the family possessed, were a few record albums, photographs and books, and the antler she’d ripped from the head of the buck she’d killed.
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