Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

  “Who are all these young men?” she had asked him, and he turned towards her, alarmed. Then he recovered his composure, smiled at her.

  “We all went to St. Francis Xavier together.”

  “You’ve kept in touch with all of them?” she asked, surprised because she had never seen the photographs or even heard him mention his classmates before. But she noticed that he had recently begun wearing his school ring, with the ominous black X raised on the gold, visible from across the room. Like he was marked and found wanting. He must have dug the photos out of the old storage trunk with the broken hinges. Although they didn’t smell musty. The frames looked new, silver and gold, probably from the Zellers close by. She was sorry that she had come downstairs. Obviously, this had become a private space where he could feel safe with his inner life that had no place in the upstairs life of her family. So she was surprised when he answered.

  “I read about them in the newsletter. These ones are dead,” he said, pointing to the table holding the largest number of images. “And these are still alive,” indicating the photos on the desk.

  “I move them over from the desk to the table when I see their obituaries,” he added.

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs after his funeral, she sat in her father’s chair between the living and the dead. Her father’s photo was not included in either group, even though he had been trying to die intermittently since her late childhood. She felt his absence for the first time, and realized that he would never be here again. It occurred to her that she should find her father’s graduation photo and place him with the dead before the pattern he had created was swept away, his clothes, photos, books boxed up and given to the Salvation Army. It was all anyone could do for him now.

  THEY CAMP AT PACHENA BAY. She is still a little light-headed from all the travel, first across the country by air, then a quick sleep simmering with dreams followed by a ferry, then a van shuddering over logging roads. The beach, headlands, tall hemlocks and Western red cedars are silvery and unreal. Mist moves from the ocean onto land, dissolving the tops of trees that are leaning away from the indistinguishable void of water and sky.

  They set up their little dome, purple and turquoise, assertively optimistic. Zoe seems to be watching her, which is an improvement from the obvious shock at her mother’s appearance when she met her incoming flight. They walk along the arcing beach of the softest white sand, composed of millions of shell fragments. The swell is slow and gentle.

  “You didn’t tell me how sick you were this winter,” Zoe finally says. Deirdre has been waiting for this since the day before.

  “I knew you didn’t want to talk on the phone for long. I thought you were sad after what Grandpa did. But you’ve lost twenty pounds at least.”

  Deirdre first thinks of minimizing things, but this hiking trip will be too challenging. They will have to be able to trust each other and rely on one another.

  “I didn’t want you to worry.”

  “Maybe I should have been worrying more. Maybe I should have come home.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted that. I know how things go with this illness. It’s a matter of waiting it out.”

  “Grandpa didn’t wait it out.”

  Deirdre hears the little girl in Zoe’s voice—the little girl of three she was when Deirdre had her first episode of major depression. Deirdre, herself, at that time, couldn’t believe that the terrible static in her head, the restless, sleepless zombie-state that had quite suddenly overwhelmed her wasn’t a fatal illness, which it was eventually for her father. She had made it through the worst sadness of losing their second baby. Just when she should have been able to turn her attention outwards again, the illness hit her hard, and she literally couldn’t stand up for weeks.

  The nursery school teacher had told Luke that Zoe had repeatedly asked her, “Is Mommy all right?” The reassurance she was given only lasted five minutes before she would ask again. Once, Zoe had escaped the church basement where the nursery school was, climbing the stairs and making it out to the street. She was found by a woman passing by on foot. Zoe had been standing on the edge of the construction site, looking down into a deep hole in the road where giant backhoes were unearthing ancient pipes. The woman who found her brought her inside and yelled at the teachers for their carelessness, her loud voice making Zoe wail the way heavy machinery had not. A report had to be filed. She could have been killed. Deirdre knew, though, that it was really her fault. Zoe had been trying to get home to her, to make sure she was all right. Her worry was so intense, Fort Knox couldn’t have contained her.

  “No, he didn’t wait,” Deirdre says. “But he wasn’t a patient man.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, they fold and roll and press everything into place in their packs, find a stream and filter drinking water for the day. They prop their full packs onto a fallen tree, waist high, and secure them. The weight is still daunting, but feels lighter than the books. All the things they need, clothes, dehydrated food, fuel and shelter, mold to her body better than anthologies of poetry.

  She did the preparation for the two of them, measuring out and packaging everything in zip-lock bags. As she was counting mango slices, Luke had reached out to grab a slice from her neat piles and she slapped his hand.

  “What will you do when Zoe begs, ‘Please, Sir. I want some more.’”

  “I’ll slap her hand too,” she said.

  “Spoken like a true mother,” he said and they both laughed. But she was determined to do this well, carry only what they would need, nothing extra. She had taken the winter off and had only this to concentrate on. She hadn’t yet reached the point of health where she could lose herself in one of the books she had loaded into the pack for practice.

  They weave through a maze-like wooden entrance designed to stop all but hikers. Then they do it again, freezing in mid-step to take each other’s pictures crossing the threshold. Action shots, holding their feet at weird angles, laughing. Then, finding a rhythm, they walk side by side. The first day of the trail will be the easiest. They follow what used to be a dirt road that is returning year by year to rainforest. The air is warming by the minute and wraps them in a lush blanket of scent, fungus and moss, green exhalation.

  “How did he do it?” Zoe asks.

  “Who?”

  “Grandpa. You never told me what he did to himself.”

  “I didn’t want that image to haunt you. I wanted you to remember him alive.”

  “Mom, that wasn’t so great either. What I remember is the food dropped on his shirt. I remember him sleepy and drunk.”

  Deirdre still doesn’t answer.

  “It’s harder when someone just vanishes. They are there and then they are not, with no reason,” Zoe says. “I need to know, to complete it in my head.”

  Deirdre knows this only too well. She thinks of the daughter they lost, Lily, born when Zoe was close to three. She had been with them such a short while, Zoe didn’t even seem to remember her. Just a few weeks, when Deirdre found her still and unbreathing in her cradle. She had overslept a feeding, it had been Deirdre’s sore breasts leaking into the sheets that woke her up that morning. She carries this sensation with her from her other daughter’s short life, this painful weeping from her chest, and the heaviness of the still body in her arms. So much heavier than she was in life. There, then gone, called back into nothingness as though her whole life had been a mistake.

  “Do you remember Lily?”

  “Mom, you’re changing the subject. Of course I remember Lily.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Her little fingers closing around my finger. The way she could cry so loud I had to put my hands over my ears. I could remember that morning, but I don’t choose to.”

  “You can choose?”

  “I can try.”

  “Your Dad can do that too. It’s just as well that you take after him.”

  They stop talking for a while as they climb a hill. The trail has become twisty, with roots sn
aking out of the ground and across their path, so they have to watch their feet. Veils of gently waving moss hang from the branches. The forest is heavily layered, life upon life, life upon death. Never has she seen such a profusion of greens. Moss growing on the sides of trees like tree spirits emerging face first, ferns sprouting high above their heads in the forks of branches, nurse logs, bumps of fungus covered over with soft green. They pass by the amazing open invitation of the skunk cabbage, up to their knees and wide enough to swallow one of them, huge emerald leaves spread wide.

  “There could be dinosaurs here. Everything’s so oversized and tropical,” Deirdre says. “Some of the ravens circling overhead are as big as pterodactyls. I hope they’re not hungry.”

  “Well, I am, although it’s not because of this lovely aroma.” Zoe squats next to the skunk cabbage, poking the huge waxy yellow flower with its spiked warlike centre stalk. “These remind me of the plants that spawned those slimy pods in that horror movie.”

  “Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All those innocent tendrils sending out feelers.”

  “And then watch out. Nobody is who you think they are. That’s the scariest part. The way people can sense strangeness but be unable to convince anyone else.”

  Deirdre notices that their conversation, no matter how casual, circles back to the same things. Disappearance, the strangeness of fate, forces stronger than intimacy. How difficult it is to know or trust even those closest to you.

  Ahead, they can see intense light, an opening in the rainforest showing blue sky and sunshine. Under the tall canopy of Western red cedar and the younger hemlocks and firs waiting for a chance to plunge upwards and plug any hole created by a storm, they can’t see for sure that the cloud and mist have cleared.

  They emerge onto a freshly cut lawn sloping down toward three white clapboard houses. This is the first lighthouse on their route. The 1950s orderliness of the bordered flower gardens of petunias and marigolds, the chain-link fence and gingham curtains hanging in the windows make them squint, being such a shock after the humid dim humming of the forest. Children have set up a table and are selling lemonade and home-baked brownies, but the prices are exorbitant and they’re not carrying much cash.

  “This is surreal,” Zoe says.

  As they pour their drinks, the children tell them they live here year round, can walk the ten kilometres down the trail to town for groceries if they want. There is also a helicopter landing pad for emergencies. They say summers are fun, with all the hikers passing by.

  “Don’t you mind being alone here?” Zoe asks the children. “Don’t you wish you could go to school?”

  “Oh, no,” the oldest boy answers. “This is our school.” He waves his arms in the direction of the rainforest pressing in on the little enclave of suburbia.

  “That’s the pioneer spirit,” Deirdre says.

  “With a little Donald Trump thrown in,” Zoe says once the children are out of earshot. “They must make a killing with hikers. Nobody has room to carry empty calories in their pack, but that little taste of heaven … Especially since it takes you by surprise.”

  They sit at the base of the lighthouse sipping their drinks and finishing their brownies, looking down on sea lions sunning on the rocky headland below. Every so often they hear one of them bellow.

  “He drank his death.”

  “Grandpa?”

  “Yes, poison, in the garage.”

  “What kind of poison?”

  “Herbicide. He cut it with ginger ale, and drank it out of a glass. Maybe it felt more natural that way, given that he always drank to escape.”

  “Did he mean to?”

  “Yes. He was leaning against the wall, just feet away from the kitchen door. He could have easily crawled to the door if he changed his mind.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Yes.”

  Zoe accepts this quietly.

  “Their house was just like this,” Deirdre says, sweeping her arm across the short grass and boxed flower gardens of the lighthouse keeper’s home. “Everything looked so orderly and under control. But dig down a little … ” She trails off. Talking about this so frankly still feels wrong, even though Zoe has insisted. There are details Deirdre cannot tell anyone, especially her daughter. The way his body had tried to expel the poison, even after it was too late. Her mother had not entered the garage, having put up walls to defend herself from this years before. One look from the threshold was all she needed before she called 911. But Deirdre needed to see that it was over. Three times before she had hovered on that edge of life and death with him, seasick with grief. Somehow the toxins had cleared from his blood and let him live. They had all continued on without mentioning what he had done. But they also continued to be suspended above the abyss of his despair.

  “And you find swamp, right?” Zoe says. “A tangled jungle of rot. I never liked the smell of that house. But maybe it was just a feeling I didn’t have any other way of describing when I was a kid.”

  Deirdre is momentarily confused, not knowing what Zoe is talking about. She’s been lost in her thoughts, which have grown darker as she notices her fatigue starting to grow at an alarming pace. Her eyes are dimming a little, her feet heavy as in one of those dreams where she’s walking along a city street, but dragging her legs as through deep water. Forty-five minutes till they stop for the night. She keeps checking her watch, but time seems to have slowed down. She asks Zoe for another break, and keeps her face turned away, looking at the map, so that Zoe won’t see how drained she is. When she starts to feel this way at home, Luke can always tell by the waxy pallor of her face.

  They resume, and follow the trail along the edge of a cliff. Coves of unmarked sand are beneath them, cut off from human exploration by jagged headlands. Salal and huckleberry grew profusely along the trail, clouds of green in the air, giving them the illusion that they are more protected than they really are. The sun is angling, soft and golden on the rock face beside them. Soon they will need to descend the first of the long ladders to a beach to camp for the night. Although the crisis of faintness has passed, Deirdre’s legs are feeling weak. Then her light-headedness returns. When they reach the ladder, Zoe goes first, scrambling down to the first platform without difficulty.

  “It’s fun, Mom. Going down is a lot easier than going up.”

  Zoe reaches the bottom and Deirdre starts the climb down, but panics once she has descended five rungs. The cliff face reminds her of how precarious she has been all winter, clinging mid-air, and the weight on her back throws off her awareness of her own strength. She has to look below her to catch each rung with her foot, but all she sees is the vast distance there, how far she could fall. Vertigo begins its slow turning in her head and she leans against the ladder to steady herself. But someone is waiting at the top to come down.

  She looks down again and sees Zoe’s face turned up towards her, worried, framed by her dark hair.

  “Let the weight carry you down. Just let yourself go,” she yells up.

  Her daughter calls her down, step by step, and she obeys. It feels like the inner voice she yielded to in order to have Zoe, and then Lily. A calling, a longing, almost a homesickness deep in her body. After they lost Lily, Luke wanted to try again, but she couldn’t, and soon after came her first illness and the medications she would never be free of.

  The two of them prepare their camp on the beach, quietly, contrasting with the others around them who are jubilant from either their first day on the trail, or their last night before a hot bath. She can see that Zoe is preoccupied, withdrawn, and she knows that she is filled with doubts about Deirdre’s strength. She’s rehearsed this trail a hundred times in her mind and knows what’s up ahead. There will be a canyon as deep as a skyscraper to climb down and then up on ladders bolted onto rock. There will be mudholes and slippery crossings on countless logs and long torturous climbs over rocks and tangled roots. She can’t reassure Zoe because she has the same doubts.

  By the next mornin
g, she feels better, gets up before Zoe, lowering the food bag from the tree where they tied it the night before to keep it safe from cougars and bears. Most of the other hikers are gone, packed up before dawn. The sound of the waves has allowed them to sleep unaware of activity around them.

  When Zoe crawls out of the tent, she says, “I had a great sleep. How about you?” This question had a casual tone, but Deirdre can hear the uneasiness. Even though she feels stronger this morning, Deirdre hasn’t slept well, had endless draining dreams. The one she can remember best is of standing on the top of a tall office tower and being urged to jump to the next tower, with noisy traffic passing by below. Her shoulders are stiff and sore and she can’t tell if it is from the dreams or the weight of her pack the day before.

  “I slept like the dead,” she says before realizing how true this is. Her dead do not rest easily.

  “That’s good, because this will be the day the big ladders start.”

  They walk along a beach with loose-packed sand. Each step is pushed deeper by the packs on their backs. They stop to photograph the twisted rusted hull of an old shipwreck. Years of winter storms have shaped the metal into a fanciful rust-coloured curl, lifting up into the sky like frozen ribbon. One can’t even recognize that it was once a ship.

  “The map says this particular shipwreck is from the 1920s. I wonder when it will disintegrate completely,” Zoe says.

  “ The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Surely some revelation is at hand.”

  Zoe interrupts, “Surely the second coming is at hand. Yes, Mom, I know that poem inside out. My bedtime story.” She laughs.

  “You loved Yeats. You always asked for that poem,” Deirdre says.