Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

  “Oh, the hazards of having an English teacher for a mother. Here’s one for you, for right here, right now. I must lie down where all the ladders start.”

  “Well, I hope not, because we’re only halfway there. But can you finish it?”

  “Sure I can. In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

  Deirdre doesn’t answer. They both think quietly as they head towards orange buoys hanging at the entrance of the forest trail, then turn into the humid lush forest.

  “Do you know why he did it?” Zoe asks.

  “Yes and no.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “I heard something about that. My mother must have read it, but I doubt she kept it.”

  “So you don’t know why.”

  But Deirdre does know why and knows that whatever the note said, it wouldn’t have held the key to any reason. There is no reason at that point. During the fleeting highs of his illness, everything was possible, but the lows of his manic depression were more hopeless than anything she’d ever experienced. The lows lasted a long time until something had to happen to break them.

  “I see it now as a failure of love. His love for us. But also his failure to be able to receive love from anyone else. He used to get this look on his face when we were at a restaurant. He’d be watching the people at some other table laughing, having fun, and he would look so sad. He was just a lost soul.”

  BY THE BEGINNING of the fourth day, Deirdre is used to the ladders. She finds her pace, and is able to respond to the beauty of the trail as they move south, weaving in and out of rainforest, dodging around surge channels once the tide had receded enough for them to attempt crossings. The first cable car over a river is a funhouse slide towards the centre of the river. They are swinging in the wind, laughing and looking down at the green water rushing over stones when they realize that the tide has been going out all day and they easily could have waded across. Every time they start to pull themselves clumsily, hand over hand, to the other side, they slip back towards the middle again and laugh too hard to try again for a couple of minutes.

  They slide back three times and Zoe says, “I wonder how often they’ve had to rescue people who are stuck on this trail because they’re laughing too hard?”

  Eventually, they figure out that if they put on their thin gloves and stand together, synchronizing their movements, they can jerk across to the other platform.

  After climbing down through the rainforest, they emerge into strong light. The beach stretches out ahead of them, framed perfectly by the stone arch that marks the halfway point of the trail. They stop in the shade of the arch, pause to smell the wet exhalation of rock and inhale the brief silence before they cross into hot sun and waves and the tumult of gulls in the wind.

  “What about you, Mom.”

  “What about me?”

  Zoe is turned half away and asks, “Would you do that?”

  Maybe Zoe has been waiting all the years since she was three years old to formulate this question. The answer has to be perfectly honest and Deirdre chooses her words carefully.

  “I’ve never felt that alone, although I’ve had glimpses of what that could have been like. But only glimpses. I’ve been lucky. I’ve always wanted to be with you and Dad, to be alive.”

  She thinks of Luke and the way he carries more when she can’t. “Your Dad makes a big difference. He’s strong, and I borrow from him when I have to.”

  “I know what you mean. I think all those great flying dreams I have are from how he used to carry me up the stairs to bed every night when I was little.”

  “And he’s always been able to make me laugh,” Deirdre says.

  “Sometimes in the morning, I would lie in bed just listening to the two of you laugh in the kitchen. It was so cozy.”

  Leaving the headland behind, they find the trail marker, colourfully painted buoys hung in the branches, and start the climb up to the swamp, the muddiest section of the trail. Carefully at first, they ease around each mudhole, balancing on exposed roots and inching along, but it is exhausting to balance and lean with such weight on their backs. The cedars around them are stunted, casting no shade. Whenever they encounter hikers travelling in the other direction, the weather is the topic of conversation. How incredible this sunshine is, how lucky they all are, but Deirdre is finding the sun too intense, too hot.

  Over the course of the afternoon, her light-headedness returns, along with the sense that everything is unreal. She stumbles and falls. After that, she stops trying to avoid the worst of it. Zoe is still balancing like a dancer on the exposed roots, clinging to the trunks of trees and easing carefully forward to keep her boots clean, but Deirdre plods right into the middle of each hole and drags her feet through the heavy shin-high mud. Every so often an eagle circles overhead looking down on the two of them struggling through land that has suddenly become ugly. Deirdre sits down on a root without warning.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Just a little overheated.”

  Zoe puts her hand on her mother’s forehead, unties her bandana, moistens it with drinking water and ties it around her forehead. “You look really pale, but you feel hot.”

  “Don’t waste the drinking water,” Deirdre protests. “This is the day we don’t cross a stream.”

  “It’s not a waste if you’re about to have heatstroke.”

  After a rest, Zoe puts on her own pack, then picks up her mother’s and slips her arms through it so that it rests on her chest. Her legs look as thin as twigs, holding up the weight of both. They travel through the rest of the swamp like this, both of them now covered with mud. Deirdre keeps her eyes focused on Zoe’s back, one reference point to ease her vertigo. They reach the ladders of Cullite Canyon. Deirdre sits at the base of the first ladder, and is ashamed to find herself crying. Zoe has gone ahead, but she can’t summon up the courage to even try. She will never leave this spot, and it won’t matter. The forest will absorb her, the way a decaying log becomes a nursery for new trees. After a while, the only sign that the older tree was ever there is the eerie alignment of new trees in the chaos of the forest.

  Then Zoe is at her side, saying, “It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay. I didn’t realize how hard this would be for you. You’ve been sick. Just follow me and it will be all right.”

  She has taken her own pack to the other side of the canyon and has returned to carry her mother’s up and down the ladders. So she follows, looking only at Zoe’s muddy boots, as they move rung by rung upwards and then at the top of Zoe’s head as they move down a succession of steep ladders. Although she isn’t wearing her pack, she feels heavy with the effort of moving her body through time and space, and is confused, seeing her backpack ahead of her, as though she is following herself. Her father must have felt this confusion, exhaustion, as well as encroaching indifference. The same indifference she felt for the first time in late winter. It wasn’t the sense she experienced when her illness first emerged years ago, that she was small and everything else was too large, too vibrant to bear, but almost the opposite. That she was the only thing that continued to exist. The world receded, everyone she loved shrank to nothing, nature was obliterated, and all that was left were her own thoughts, her own tedious self. She would have done anything to escape.

  But here is her daughter just a few steps ahead, now leading her across a narrow suspension bridge, only wide enough for their feet, the walls hemming them in with webs of rope. Her head is still spinning, she can’t even comprehend the gorge beneath them although the rushing water of the river far below competes with the white noise in her head. Zoe stops and reaches back when they are in the centre, touching her hand on the railing made of knotted rope.

  “Ignore the way we’re swaying,” Zoe says. “We’re safe. Just concentrate on my feet.”

  Without answering, she does, focusing on Zoe’s feet, one, then the other, moving with certainty. She can’t raise her eyes and take in the spectacular drop of the canyon wall with hardy fern g
rowing from the stone, the rainbow lifted into the air by river spray. The part of her that is curious wonders if she will regret missing out on one of the most famous features of the trail, yet she is grateful for the minute detail of her daughter’s boots that allows her to cross unharmed.

  The heat breaks after Zoe sets up the tent at the next cove. Zoe sleeps once the sleeping bags are unrolled, exhausted from her long haul of two packs through the swamp and up and down the canyon wall. Not to mention the ordeal of dragging her mother behind her, Deirdre thinks. The wind rises and ripples the tent, playing light across Zoe’s face. She lies on her side and watches Zoe sleep, amazed at her beauty, the unlined freshness of her skin, the rejuvenation of sleep without dreams. They lie like this for at least an hour. Then the strong wind blows another weather system in from the west and suddenly it is cooler and the wind dies. Deirdre feels her strength return and soon crawls out of the tent to find the sun already dissolved in mist. The tide is low and she walks out onto the rock shelf. Everything is covered with a soft emerald fur, slippery beneath her feet. She doesn’t need to squint. Everything is clear and sharply focused.

  The rock is scooped out here and there with deep round tidal pools, every inch covered with life. The colours in the still water vibrate with intensity, lime-green of the anemones, old-blood hue of the starfish with its stitched sequins of outer bones, bubble-gum-pink coralline algae, blue-shelled mussels lined up shoulder to shoulder. She laughs to herself, wondering if mussels even had shoulders. Goose barnacles, white as bone, and the prickly purple sea urchin warding off touch in the crowded little world it shares with all the others. The only movements in the water are small fish darting so quickly that they almost seem like tricks of the mind.

  She sees Zoe approaching her on the rock shelf, and yells, “Watch your feet. The algae is really slippery.”

  Zoe doesn’t slow her pace. When she is beside her, she says, “Always the mother.”

  “I need to redeem myself.”

  “No, you don’t, Mom. You’re brave. I never realized how brave till today.”

  “Why? Because I sat down in the mud and cried?”

  “Because you’re here. No matter what, you’re here. But we don’t have to go on. We’re close to the river crossing. We could talk to the man who runs the ferry and arrange a water taxi out to the road.”

  “But I love this. I love being here with you.”

  “We could get a pedicure in Victoria, scrape these calluses off our feet. You don’t need to prove anything.”

  “I want to go on. I want to see what’s up ahead.”

  Zoe smiles at her, understanding what she is really saying to her. Then she looks away, notices the deep tidal pool and says, “Oh.”

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Deirdre says.

  “Oh yes. The water is so still. I’m glad we got here when the tide was out. We would have missed this.” She squats beside Deirdre and touches her finger to the cold surface of the water. “They are just suspended there, like souls waiting to be born.”

  “Or reborn.”

  “Yes. Or reborn.” They don’t need to say who they are thinking about. The tide will come in after the sun has set and all this beauty will still be here, hidden.

  Bliss

  SHE’S ASKED FOR FLOWERS BRAIDED into her hair. Months ago, when Deirdre was still at home, she stopped colouring it and now the grey roots are growing in. Her short French braids are a wild mixture of silver and white and faded honey brown, with the ends sticking out from the friction of the sheets. The hairdresser that comes to the hospice every week has pinned the flowers among the braids, mostly rose-coloured, bleeding to white and rimmed in sky blue. They are not real flowers but are cheap, like leis bought at dollar stores.

  “Didn’t you once have a fake bra covered with those flowers?” Luke asks her. “For your 50th birthday party?”

  She laughs. “I should wear that bra now.”

  For a moment they are bantering the way they’ve been able to through the best of their marriage and he forgets, just as he used to forget her other spells of pain and difficulty throughout their life together. It was her gallows humour that appealed to him from the very beginning, before he knew how brave this quality truly was in her.

  Deirdre smiles back at him, too wide on her fleshless face. The teeth are still very white. Her eyes are only half-open so that it looks as though she is leering. A wave of bitter grief overtakes him.

  “You could,” Luke says. She’s reminded him of her breasts, the right one swollen and lopsided with the cancer that she allowed to grow unchecked, the left just beginning to swell. Her sternum seems to be rising from her chest like the bony head of a prehistoric whale sweeping just below the surface. Although he’s not proud of it, he has to leave the room when the nurses wash her.

  “There’s more of me. You should be happy.”

  “Happy? You think this is a reason to be happy?” And he’s ashamed again. He’s disrupted the only normal thing left between them.

  Deirdre doesn’t have the energy to answer. He can see how tired she is as she shuts her eyes and says so softly he almost can’t hear her, “I’m happy. Just let me be happy.”

  He gets out of the chair and leaves the room, knowing even as he does, that it is a meaningless gesture. She is the one leaving.

  Walking down the hallway of the hospice, he can see the thin legs of other patients covered by handmade quilts, then just a glimpse of their sleeping bald heads. She should be bald too, instead of sporting that outrageous hairdo of braids and cloth flowers. He resents the fact of her hair. He can’t help hating the way it’s all woven together like children’s daisy chains, colourful flowers riding the wave right to the edge. Not drowned like Ophelia, but partyish, like a hairdo done up for a lark. She shouldn’t have hair. She should be bald like the other skeletons lying on their death beds. They could have had more time together but she threw that chance away.

  SHE WINCES WHEN she wakes up, searching with her eyes for something, then relaxing a little when she sees him back in his chair.

  “This reminds me of when Zoe was born,” she says. “You sitting there so stable in the dark. I loved waking up to you.”

  “Yes, it was wonderful,” Luke says. “Holding her and watching you sleep. You made the most perfect baby, I was in awe of you. It felt just as wonderful when Lily was born.”

  Her face becomes a little pinched, she retreats, and he sees how fragile her scaffolding has always been. He wonders if he noticed that enough through the years. He has to ask, “Did I support you enough?”

  “You couldn’t be here as much when Lily was born because of Zoe. I was so lost when you weren’t here. And the pain that time, after the C-section. My breasts were so sore and I felt lost without you there. The nights were long. All night, motorcycles raced up and down Avenue Road.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean,” Luke says.

  “She seems very alive to me. I feel her here, at night when you’re not here. I never would have guessed Lily would turn out to comfort me.”

  “So I guess I didn’t,” he says.

  “You didn’t what?” she asks.

  “Support you enough.”

  “Oh, you did, you did. The human condition. That’s all.”

  This had been their code phrase whenever anything difficult or unpleasant happened and often they found a way to laugh as they said it. “Zoe threw up in the backseat.” “Oh, the human condition,” she would say. The climbing rose lost to winter kill, two weeks without sunlight, and darker things too, a mosque stormed by armed troops, groundswell of a new pandemic, her father’s body poisoned on the garage floor. Her own long periods locked away in sadness and anxiety. The human condition.

  He watches the clouds pass across her face and wonders at her. What a mystery she is, even after all these years. The memory of the happy time of Zoe’s birth so much more haunting than Lily’s death or what she is going through now in this hospice.

 
“Doesn’t this hurt more?” he can’t help asking.

  She just smiles at him, and says, “I love you.”

  NOW SHE CAN’T GET ENOUGH of touch. His touch, or the nurses rubbing talcum powder onto her bony back after they sponge-bathe her. She reaches out her hand to him, the rings he placed there years ago sliding backwards so that the sapphire setting cuts into his palm.

  She moans with pleasure and he’s surprised that in this time and place he should be revisited by those distant voices. The antidepressants dulled her sexuality even as they failed to heal her emotions. But she was afraid to stop taking them. He remembers lying beside her on the bed, when lovemaking had failed and turned into talking.

  “I feel like I’m walking out on a glass floor,” she said. “Like that glass floor at the top of the CN Tower. I could plummet, but I don’t because there is this thin transparent layer. Still, I inch along, and it takes such effort, but I know the alternative.”

  He held her, sad for her, but also a little frustrated.

  “Is it worth it? This life where you inch along?”

  Deirdre didn’t answer, not then. Maybe she answered that question much later, in a way he could never have predicted. Maybe he should have waited longer for her to answer, without filling the silence with his reassurance.

  “You’re not your father. He was always out of control.”

  “And plummeting. Don’t forget plummeting.”

  Her father finally succeeded in killing himself soon after this conversation and he thought she might be set free because the worst had happened, as they always knew it would. But she remained haunted and frightened. And devastated by her own suffering through a long winter, maybe even more devastated than she was after Lily died so quietly, so mysteriously.

  SHE’S ASKED FOR THE BEST sandalwood essential oil, from a small city in India. The dusty sweet smell lifts from a small clay lamp lit by a tea light candle. Before he leaves at night, he replaces the candle, and she tells him it lasts until the sky just starts to lighten.