‘Why are you cutting the tree?’ she asked. This was the tree, she remembered, he was going to get rid of years before, around the time Nora left.
‘I like the smell,’ he said.
‘You’re cutting it because you like the smell?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to cut the whole thing down?’
‘Just these lower branches. Lets more sun into the house.’ Sweat dripped from his nose and he wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.
* * *
When Anouk came back into the kitchen after doing her physio, for which she now used a tight, motorized vest which shook and agitated her chest to dislodge the mucus from her lungs (The Cheese now relegated to the shed, too sentimental a piece to throw away), Fraser and Red were sitting together at the table, both with plates of eggs and bacon, both with a bottle of beer.
‘It’s not even nine in the morning,’ Anouk said, nodding at Red’s bottle.
‘I’ve been up since five,’ said Red, taking a swig.
‘Ah.’
‘Fraser’s been telling me about the priest and the mountain.’
‘The monk and the mountain,’ said Fraser, his mouth full of eggs.
‘Get a load of this,’ said Red. He patted the chair next to him and Anouk sat. ‘So there’s this Buddhist monk or whatever, he starts climbing a mountain at sunrise, he wants to get to his temple at the very top. Sometimes he walks quickly, sometimes he slows down. He takes breaks. Maybe once or twice he has a nap. He’s a monk; there’s no rush. Eventually he gets to the top though, just before sunset. He stays up there maybe a week, and then when it’s time to go down, he leaves again at sunrise.’ Red stopped, hand aloft and hovering by the temple at the top of the mountain, and looked at Fraser. ‘He stays about a week?’
‘Doesn’t matter how long he stays.’
‘Right. So when he’s ready, he leaves again at sunrise and walks back down to the bottom, average speed faster because he’s descending.’ Red stopped talking, took another sloop of beer and grinned at Anouk.
‘So?’
‘So,’ he said, ‘Fraser showed me the solution to prove that there is one spot precisely, along that mountain path, one spot the monk will have occupied on both ascent and descent, at the exact same time of day. You think it’s impossible, right? Without knowing the monk’s speed or the length of either journey?’
Anouk shrugged. Her father’s eyes sparkled with nonsense and she was confused. She looked to Fraser for help, but Fraser was folding bacon into his mouth and offered none.
‘He proved it with a graph.’ Red reached across the table, and pulled towards him a napkin on which was scribbled a series of black lines. He waved it at her. ‘Bisecting lines and some calculus that I vaguely remember from school.’
Anouk raised her eyebrows at Fraser.
‘I’ve been reading a bit of mathematics,’ he said, without apology. ‘You guys got any ketchup?’
‘In the fridge,’ said Anouk.
‘You’ve gone all moody,’ Red said. ‘Is it because of the tree?’
‘I don’t care about the tree,’ she said.
‘Fraser, tell her the rest about the monk.’
Fraser rummaged in the refrigerator door and sat back at the table with a bottle of ketchup. He held it above his plate and turned it over, slapped its base definitively with his palm. ‘If the monk were two, if you could track his original journey up the mountain, as if there were an apparition of him hiking up from the bottom at the same moment the real guy hikes down from the top, the monk and his apparition would have to cross paths at some point along the path, regardless of their variable speeds, proving there is a point on the mountain he would occupy at exactly the same time of day on both trips.’
Red leaned back in his chair and clapped. ‘I love it,’ he said. He reached for his beer and tipped the bottle to his mouth, then rested the bottle on his stomach. ‘It seems really complex but it’s just so simple. Two guys crossing paths. One the shadow of himself.’
‘Where were you last night anyway?’ Anouk asked.
‘One the memory of himself,’ said Red, picking at the label on his bottle with quick, tiny scrapes.
‘Dad?’
‘Eh?’
‘Where were you last night?’
‘Karaoke night at The Harp.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yep.’
‘Look,’ she said, and gestured with her chin to the counter where the newspaper still lay. She got up, grabbed the paper and dropped it in his lap. She draped her arms around his neck and leaned over his shoulder while he smoothed the pages.
‘It’s out?’ he said, scanning the page. He found her name and moved his finger over it, as if it were braille, as if it might disappear. ‘Well, fuck me,’ he said, swallowing hard, his voice wet.
‘Are you crying?’
‘Of course I’m crying. This is stupendous.’ He folded the paper carefully and turned it towards Fraser. ‘Look at this.’
Fraser looked.
Anouk hugged her father tighter and he felt too small in her arms.
* * *
On Saturday, Red asked Anouk to do a dump run for him, something she’d never done on her own before. He was worn out, he said. After an early dinner, after her meds and physio, she loaded the flatbed with the stuff Red wanted to throw away: a stack of boxes and her old tricycle, rusted. A defunct computer keyboard, a broken clock, a broken radio, the wasp trap that once hung from the back porch. She drove half an hour to the dump road, a hard-packed track that led off the concession road into the bush. She could smell the dump before she could see it: sour, faecal. Up ahead, carrion crows swooped and hovered, dirty against the darkening sky.
She parked the truck in a gravel lot and went into the office, a white trailer on concrete blocks. Inside, Canadian pop music on the radio. Anouk dinged the dome bell on the counter and waited. On the wall opposite the counter there was the mini taxidermy museum that never changed, pet project of the man who used to manage the dump: dusty glass cabinets displaying the yellowed skulls of deer and marten, bear and squirrel, some intact and others decrepit, as if moth-eaten. There was a collection of birds’ nests, twiggy and feathered with bits of string and moss and shards of pale, spotted shell.
Holding court on top of a wooden barrel in the corner of the room, a wolf. Claws yellow and chipped, brittle fur, the stitching showing through in places on the black hide. One paw was raised as if the wolf were about to say something important.
A woman came in through a ply-panelled door, and gave Anouk a key for a trolley and told her to watch out for bears. She told her to load the trolley and weigh it on the scales and then dump in an area marked B.
* * *
On the other side of a heap of broken and discarded armchairs, atop an eroding mountain of garbage bags, three scruffy black bears. A few hundred metres away from where Anouk now stood with her trolley of junk. Administrative in their movements, the bears looked as if they were employed by the municipality to sort through the garbage, item by item. They expertly pulled at plastic, systematically discarding what lacked potential for the more luxurious items. Spoiled for choice. All at once, answering some silent communication, they stopped what they were doing and gazed at Anouk. Even from a distance she could see the resignation in their eyes, which were as lightless as coal. These bears were corpulent and old, habituated and made lazy by this food source. They were not beautiful.
The dumping area marked B would have brought her closer to the bears, so she ignored her instructions and jerked the trolley around, difficult with one dicky wheel on the uneven ground, and headed back closer to the truck. Some of the boxes were flimsy, poorly packed, and fell apart as she unloaded them. Papers and school folders and old scrolls of artwork on faded construction paper, flaking with powdery pre-school paint, fa
nned to the ground. Among this detritus, a large Manila, bubbled envelope, creased and softened with years. Unopened. Anouk’s name and address on the front, written in her own, years-ago handwriting. She picked it up and balanced it in both hands, remembered Mr Chester and his soft shoes. Remembered an X-ray but nothing else. She tossed the envelope on to the passenger seat of the truck and finished unloading the rest of the junk.
The only light on in the house when Anouk got home was a reading lamp, directing its yellow glow on to her father, who slept in his armchair by the living-room window. Three empty beer bottles lay at his feet like discarded toys. Another, mostly full, rested in between his legs. His head was thrown back and his mouth sleep-gaping. The skin of his neck, unshaven, sagged in a way that made him look old, and his glasses hung, monkey-like, off one ear. Anouk eased the bottle from the half-curl of his grip, and went into the kitchen and poured the beer down the sink.
She sat at the kitchen table under the hanging lamp, and pulled the Manila envelope towards her and slit it open with her little finger. First, she pulled out the chest X-ray and held it up to the light. A silver-and-black impression, a shadow; her chest her bones her arms spread wide. A ten-year-old girl lying on a hard slab under a suspended box that whirred loudly with the mechanics of medical investigation.
Black lung cavity. The areas of scar tissue, as insubstantial as cottony wisps of cirrocumulus cloud. Now, her X-rays revealed more damage, like water stains from rising damp.
Next, she pulled out an empty pill bottle that once held, she remembered, river water. Other objects: a desiccated leaf, brown and brittle and flaky as dried blood. A pin badge with a red heart on it, which meant nothing to her now, and an ammonite fossil in a plastic case. A rough grey rock shaped like an ear with a coil relief. Pressurized stone. Mineral-rich water had once filled the cast left by the disintegrated skeleton of some small beast, and then there was great pressure and aeons of time and then there was this fossil. She’d forgotten all about it.
She went into the living room and woke her father and sent him shuffling up to his bedroom. Halfway up the stairs (stairs which were rough and splintery and without carpet, the carpet still not replaced after having been ripped up, years before, by Nora) his glasses fell from his ear and he stepped on them, breaking an arm off the frame. He didn’t stop to pick them up. Anouk found a spare pair in their old leather case in a kitchen drawer, and left them out on the counter in front of the toaster. She went out to the porch and sat. Time passed. Time was passing. Something was changing. There was the sound of crickets and frogs and the titch and scratch of some small, sharp-clawed rodent.
And the wind in the trees was the sound made by the currents of the earth.
* * *
In the morning, Anouk got out of bed close to dawn, woken by a snag: she should have been feeling good about having a story published in a newspaper, but she was not feeling good at all. She was groggy in the lungs. Creaky in the bones. Anxiety like an up-note, unresolved. She wanted to get up and walk out of the house right now, walk out of the kitchen door and barefoot it down the grassy slope to the sand. To the water. But cystic fibrosis owned the first hour and a half of every day. So before anything else, she did all that.
By the time she did get outside, around eight, the sun hadn’t yet had the chance to take the night’s coolness out of the air, out of the grass, and the grass was still dew-wet. Goosebumps rose on her arms. There was the mossy smell of river water, of rich dirt and cedar resin. This was the particular smell of the morning and it existed nowhere else but here, at this hour. The oak leaves – that tree where her tire swing once hung – the leaves on that tree were clapping now in a cool blue breeze. Not enough wind to touch the river though; its surface made only of light.
The phantom call of a loon echoed as if there were no echo in the world until there were loons in the world.
Somewhere in the trees there was the unsettling chirp of a bird that sounded like the snip of scissors cutting quick, short pieces of stiff ribbon. The lament was incessant and followed Anouk to the river.
She wanted to be in the water but the rasp in her lungs told her she probably shouldn’t, and experience had taught her, at last, to listen. So instead she dragged the cedar canoe from its resting spot on the grass and rolled it over and pushed it into the water, stepping in with one foot in the centre of the hull as it launched off the sandy bottom. A daddy-long-legs rode on the canoe’s gunnel, its prancing, articulated legs as delicate as fibres, the sun reflecting butter-yellow on its grey, speckled back. She tried to catch it. But the spider was agile, and escaped over the gunnel and down the outside of the curved hull. She leaned over, hunting it, and saw that it clung to the hull by the stern, out of reach and just above the surface of the water.
‘Fucker,’ she said.
* * *
‘I think we should go picking,’ said Red. He’d come out on to the porch, where Anouk now sat with a bowl of yoghurt topped with discs of banana and a cowlick of peanut butter.
‘Now?’
‘Just up the road.’ He wore his Jays cap and his glasses, the broken ones. They hung crooked and to the left.
‘I left your spare glasses out,’ she said.
‘Don’t like those ones.’ With one finger he tried to straighten the glasses, but they slid back to crook. He swung an empty ice cream container from its plastic handle. ‘Don’t bother with your shoes,’ he said.
She looked down to his bare, fish-belly-white feet, his hairy toes.
This was how they picked berries in the woods when Anouk was little, feet bare to the ground, stabbed by sharp pebbles and stuck by old coniferous needles, but cushioned by them too. The dread of thorns and acorn caps, nettles and goose shit. The mash of slugs or the stubbing of toes on exposed roots. But there was also cool mud between the toes and the gratification of the earth, the dirt, the rock, right up there in the bridge of the foot. It left the soles of the feet tingling with pain, but also scraped clean and raw and good.
The wild raspberries that grew along the side of the trail were no bigger than garden peas. Anouk and Red worked beside each other, hunched over the berries, which were abundant, causing the pickers’ progression along the trail to be slow. The raspberries were abundant and the pickers’ progression along the trail was slow. Each time Anouk filled her palm she rolled the berries into Red’s bucket, gently so they wouldn’t bruise, and they carried on this way in silence until the bucket was full. It was shady along the side of the road and a little cool, and Anouk wanted to go back to the house. She watched a corn-yellow butterfly land on a waxy chokecherry leaf, alight, circle, land. Alight again. A honey bee, its leg panniers packed with bright pollen, honed in on a violet honeysuckle horn, nestled, sucked, detached and bumped along to the next blossom. She wanted to go back. Something was happening, but she didn’t yet know what it was and she didn’t want to know. A ladybug left a thick trail of dark-orange shit on a fern plume.
‘Where have you gone?’ Red asked. He stood in the middle of the road, where sunlight pooled. His grip on the bucket handle was tight, and the bucket was so full that tiny raspberries tumbled over the sides like passengers abandoning a sinking ship. ‘You look lost.’
Anouk shrugged.
‘That was great, your story, you know. I can’t even tell you, how great it is.’ He tapped his hand to his heart. ‘You need to start the next one.’
‘I know.’
Red tilted his face to the sky. More berries fell from the bucket and bumped along the ground. A procession of tiny, decapitated heads.
‘You’re losing all the berries,’ she said. The world was beginning to tilt.
He lowered his head and took off his glasses and dropped them into the pocket of his shirt and, without his glasses, his eyes looked small and tight. ‘I’m not well, Anouk.’
These words, like storm wind coming towards her across the surface of the water.
‘I’m so used to it being you,’ he said. ‘This is a huge relief. You just wouldn’t believe.’ He smiled and his body seemed to relax.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your whole life, I’ve worried that I would have to watch you die. Finally, it’s me and not you.’
A horsefly cruised around her head and she swatted it away, but it only tightened its flight path, tenacious and mean.
‘I feel like, for eighteen years I’ve been stretching this rubber band tighter and tighter, waiting for it to snap. But you’re doing so well. You don’t need me. You’re exploding into this. Woman. I can breathe now.’
‘Make sense, Dad.’ The horsefly lunged at her shoulder, retreated. Lunged again.
‘I’m sick. Nothing they can do.’
‘They who?’
‘They who. Who do you think? Oncologists. Surgeons. Bunch of others. It’s the pancreas. Worst cancer you can get. Top of the charts.’ He smiled, his face apologetic and relieved.
She went to him and pulled the plastic bucket from his hand and swung it in the air by the handle. Released it and watched it fly into the trees. Berries soared. She turned and walked up the road a few paces to where it bent to the left and rose steeply; a sharp, short hill. She took the incline, grinding the balls of her feet into the hard-packed, stony grit of the road. The horsefly followed her. She stood at the top breathing heavily against the rasp of her pugnacious fucking lungs. Her pathetic lungs expanding and retracting, out of tune, a rusty harmonica. She put her hands on her knees and leaned over and took a deep breath and coughed and coughed and coughed, a sound like rocks tumbling in the dryer. Coughed again and spat a pearly globe into the dirt.
Coming Up for Air Page 22