The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  She stood and walked over to the window. “On the other side of the trees, across that road, there’s the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Some quiet evenings I can hear the waves washing in and I wonder where they came from. Japan? Hawaii? Kamchatka? How long does it take a wave to cross the ocean?”

  “Do they cross all that way?”

  “In a river the water travels and the wave stands still. In the ocean the wave travels, but the water stays behind. God finds different ways to move us.”

  He retreated to the safety of politics. “The government used to quote Mao of all people — they’d say the campesinos of Guatemala were like the water the guerrillas swam in. To get the guerrillas, they said, we had to remove the water. Over two hundred thousand drops of water in the end. Dead.”

  She shrugged, bitter. “In the world’s eyes, a mere cup or two.”

  He pushed himself up from the chair, feeling the tenderness that never left his knees. He could no longer run any distance. He could only press iron and punch the canvas bag.

  He stood at the door. “Do you have children?”

  “None of my own,” she said. “But I am expecting a couple of the residents to show up right about now.” She handed him a card. “Phone if you want to try this. My office isn’t far from the provincial house.”

  He nodded and walked out the door, down the stairs and out into the street, into the weather of the world where the wind blew, rain fell, and birds lived and died. Something had been tossed to him and to her. A milagro, perhaps. A sliver of tin. She may not have noticed but he’d felt it slip between his ribs and lodge in the meat of his heart.

  9

  A guy sat on the floor, his back against the lockers lining the hallway. He grinned up at Janna as she slipped out the side door of the classroom. His dirty blond hair was cut medium short; his pale shirt hung out over tan pants. No socks in his running shoes. Either a thrift store dresser or grabbing whatever he found in the heap on his bedroom floor.

  “Reviewing the inventory supply system not turning your crank?”

  She’d seen him before, in earnest discussion with a couple of the profs. Gesturing wildly, but fixing their attention. Greg something. Some kind of math genius.

  “I like systems, actually,” she said, trying to shut him out. “So practical. Will the cloth arrive at the factory on time? Will the summer dresses be in the stores by February?” She swayed a little, one hand against the wall. “But there’s something about the lights in there. The canned air. It’s making me woozy.”

  He pulled his long legs out of her way. “End of term exhaustion. The synapses stretch. The connections get jittery.”

  She wasn’t sure she heard him right. The ringing in her ears grew and he got further away, sliding down the wrong end of the binocular lenses, shrinking into a cartoon figure, mouth opening and closing. She had to get outside. She put one hand to the lockers and tried to walk in the direction of the stairs. Her hand hit the elevator buttons. She pressed them all and leaned against the wall. She slid down until she was sitting on the floor.

  The next thing she knew Greg was in the elevator with her, one arm around her shoulders, a hand under her elbow. He smelled like an old hairbrush, like he didn’t get his clothes all the way dry.

  “Please get me outside,” she whispered as the elevator door opened on the ground floor.

  There was a bench in a sheltered alcove just outside the door. She watched her shoes shuffle through the leaves littering the grass. She sat down on the cold stone, welcoming the chill seeping up her spine, the icy air in her lungs. Greg sat beside her, uncertain. She leaned against him, feeling the warmth of his body. He turned her toward him and took her hands. He was asking where did she live, could he get her home, should he call security for help. She stared at his big hands with the blond hairs growing out of the knuckles. She looked down at the leaves around their feet. Some of them were slivered green around the base where the stem joined the leaf, green veins not yet submerged in red.

  She bent, reaching for one of the leaves, wanting to feel its veins between her fingers. She remembered laying out leaves carefully on her mother’s kitchen table and spreading a huge sheet of paper over them, the two of them working with charcoal to make rubbings. The outlines appeared, leaf by leaf, until perfect imprints from plants growing in Isabel’s garden covered the paper. Together they labelled them: Golden Jubilee, Red Butterfly, Blue Angel, and Morning Glory. Nasturtium, lavatera, luneria, and Riviera rose. Isabel had taken Janna’s hands in her own, turned them over and looked at the dark lines the charcoal had drawn in her palms. She’d traced a line running from the base of Janna’s forefinger in a clear curve down and around the base of her thumb, telling her she knew she’d have at least one kid to take care of her in her old age.

  Janna had tried to pull her hand away from the tickle in her palm, but Isabel held on. Now, on the bench outside UBC’s business administration program building five hundred long miles south, Janna remembered her small hands resting inside her mother’s, their shapes so different, and she could hear Isabel saying, “You’ve got your father’s beautiful hands.”

  Janna leaned against this strange boy’s chest, crumpled the leaf in her fingers, and sobbed.

  †

  When she woke up in her own bed, it was dark. Her shirt was twisted up under her arms. Her panties were still on, but her slacks were hanging over a chair, damp from her sitting on the cold bench. Her socks were tucked in the damp shoes beside the bed and her pack was on the desk. Vague memories of a slow walk to her residence and handing him the pack to find her key. Stumbling into the room, the blast of heat. Did she sleep with him? she wondered, feeling between her legs. Her thighs were chafed and sore. Surely she’d have remembered that. Then she did remember. She sat up, stiff and thirsty, reaching for the cup he must have left beside her bed. The chafing wasn’t from him. It was from the other boy. David.

  She gulped cold tea. A knock on the door brought her out of bed. The floor rep stuck her head in, saying her friend had asked her to check in. She’d been sick?

  She’d just skipped lunch, Janna told her. After eating, she’d feel better. You know how it gets this time of year. She stood blocking the door, not wanting her to come in. The rep was already bored, turning away. Half the girls in residence were starving themselves.

  Janna looked at her hands pushing the door closed, sliding across the brown paint and the semester timetable she’d taped there back in September. Her small brown hands with their slender fingers, the nail beds long and set deep. The skin puckered at the knuckles and stretched across the tendons and the wrist bones. She moved her fingers across the smooth wood, recalling the warm skin, a paler shade of brown, and the long angular body of the other boy. David Miro.

  She had planned to spend the previous weekend studying, but found herself distracted by the sounds around her: the coughs, the doors opening and closing, the voices in the corridors. She usually loved this time of year. Printing out the crisp pages of final reports and reviewing computer screens of notes, distilled to the essence. Everything organized into desktop folders, carefully backed up on disks all lined up in their cases. Like having all her clothes pressed and organized in her closet — shirts, slacks, skirts — the shoes tidy below.

  She’d been heading for the library when a downtown bus pulled up at the stop, blocking her path. She slung her bag over her shoulder and jumped on, wondering even as she did so, why? She claimed a single seat and leaned her face against the cool glass, staring out into the grey rain. The bus lurched and swished its way along the wet streets, past all the soggy gardens and empty afternoon houses, between the stores and cafés clustered around intersections, down the endless tedium of Fourth Avenue and finally across the bridge to the glass and glitter of downtown. Golden lights sparkled in the bare branches of delicate trees.

  The bus stopped across from a big hospital. People waiting for the bus to come the other way all turned their heads in the same direction. Behind
them, dwarfing them, a garish display of lights blinked and shivered on the front of the old building. A sign invited people to buy another light for the Festival of Lights, and a huge thermometer measured the amount of money raised so far.

  People crowded onto her bus, their wet coats, packs, and shopping bags pushing against her as they forced their way down the aisle. One man breathed noisily, a tube coming from a pack on his back to a little butterfly taped under his nose. Another wore a bandage around his neck, the front yellow with ooze. As the bus pulled away, she saw, through a break in the traffic, two little blue elasticized hospital slippers set neatly in front of the bench inside the bus shelter. They sat there as if someone had just stepped out of them, perhaps climbed on a bus and disappeared.

  The bus rounded a corner and stopped across from a building with columns like a Greek temple. A big vertical banner flapped outside. Totem poles. Emily Carr, she read. At the art gallery. She struggled to her feet and pushed through the raincoats and rolled umbrellas.

  She walked up the steps under the columns, looking for the way in. Three wet teenagers, their feral faces grinning at her mistake, asked for money. For smokes. One pointed around the corner to the gallery entrance. Once inside the echoing grey foyer, she hesitated again. Two lean and elegant women came out of a back room and pushed through the doors that led to the exhibits. She went to follow them but was stopped by a man in a blue jacket, asking to see her membership card. Explaining the entrance fee. School trips to the tiny art gallery at home had been free and Janna hadn’t been inside one since. This had better be good, she thought, stuffing the pamphlet he gave her in a pocket.

  She immediately got lost in a maze of rooms hung with Japanese prints. Ruptures in the Floating World the sign said. Whatever that meant. They were like storybook drawings or weird superhero comics full of men in armour and swords with bulging calves and thin pigtails. She leaned closer to look at a flute player, his cape blowing around him, bare feet firmly planted in sand. There was no water, but she knew it was just beyond the low mound of the dune. She could imagine the sound of the waves rising and falling behind the music of the flute and the wind rustling through the grass at his feet. The blues of the sky changed as night descended. Another man crouched in the grass behind him, a huge sword in his hand. Was he a menace or was he hiding from the flute player? The music would tell and she could hear the music. Not the individual notes but the idea of the music, and if she looked at the picture long enough she would be able to hum the melody and she would creep under his wind-filled cape to lean against him; she would place herself between him and the swordsman and let the sword cut into the soft muscle of her shoulder just so she could listen to the music he was playing even as the blood leaked out of her veins.

  She didn’t realize she’d put out her hand to touch it until a guard cleared his throat and touched her in that same spot on her shoulder.

  “Please don’t touch the prints, Miss.” A tall guy, probably in his forties. Thin red hair. Blue eyes. Something wrong with his skin. He got to stand here all day and look.

  “How much would this cost?” she asked, peering once again at the brushstroke outlining the thigh, the way the wind bent the grass.

  “I don’t think any of these are for sale,” he laughed.

  He waited beside her while she bent to read the name: Fujiwara no Yasumasa Playing the Flute by Moonlight. She wrote it on the palm of her hand.

  She made a further fool of herself by asking him where the totem poles were. Paintings of totem poles, he said, looking at her with the same pity as the kids outside. He pointed to a huge flight of stone stairs. An old woman hobbled down, one hand on the banister, the other holding a purse firmly to her hip. Janna climbed past her, climbed and turned, climbed and turned, until she saw the name: Emily Carr. She caught her breath at the paintings. Here they were, the poles she’d played among down by the Skeena River, the old wood warm under her hands. The Kispiox River in flood. She looked at them until the greens, dark reds, and browns were blurring along the wall, until another guard told her they were closing in five minutes. He led her outside and opened the door into the December darkness, the rain sweeping the streets. She stood on the wide steps and closed her eyes. But the poles were already fading, the northern rivers’ roar lost in the sound of tires on the wet streets. And she was going to get soaked.

  “Hey,” called a voice behind her.

  She turned. It was the boy from that party Amy had dragged her to. David Miro.

  “Did you like the show?”

  “The show?”

  “The Japanese prints.”

  She nodded, and showed him the lettering on her hand.

  He was impressed and she suddenly wished she wasn’t wearing old fleece sweats and a Prince George Cougars sweatshirt under her jacket.

  “That Coleman guy is quite the collector,” he said. The prints were mostly his, he explained. It had taken him a long time to talk him into lending them to the gallery.

  “You work there?”

  “It’s a co-op job. In collections.” He started to explain the difference between permanent and collections and loans, between the work that was hung and the work that was stored, and Janna wondered if there was anything in this city she wasn’t ignorant of. Standing on the art gallery steps, the blurred lights spidering out along the diverging streets, she felt an unexpected longing for home, for the small collection of roads and houses and stores where people she knew lived and worked. From the ski hill you could see the whole town: the houses and schools, the sawmills, the railway tracks, the highway, and the river coiling under the bridge and through the nearby farms. You could see the mountains beyond the town, marking its boundaries. No one lived up there in the bush, no one who knew any secrets she wanted hold of.

  But even from there, she couldn’t see her father. That was a lesson she could find no way of learning, no matter how she studied it. Jason and Trevor each had his own father and, when she was little, she understood it to mean a man who took you special weekend and summer places, places Isabel didn’t go. It meant going for rides, because Isabel didn’t have a car. It meant coming home with a new bicycle or dirty from fishing. It was who came to pick you up when your mom was sick. For a while, Janna thought maybe only boys had them. Then Jason took to saying hers was the man in the long coat and leather hat who walked by their house on his way to the liquor store every Saturday morning. He lived in some shack between the sawmills, worked as night watchman all week and drank all weekend. His stride was already loopy by the time he walked back the other way. Jason would push her toward the road, urging her to call him dad. “How about a kiss for your little girl?” he’d sing out, the man never looking in their direction, his whole concentration bent on his destination.

  When Isabel overheard Jason, her anger was terrifying. The house felt like a cartoon drawing the way it bulged with her fury. When this happened the kids knew to keep quiet. To wait it out. But Jason said something at school about the bruises on his arm and he was gone and there were strangers at the house, Isabel white and rigid at the kitchen table. Trevor’s dad came in his big pickup and hoisted Janna up to sit between him and Trevor, her little backpack clutched to her stomach.

  When they were allowed back home, none of them spoke of Janna’s dad. Not in Isabel’s hearing. She’d cleaned up her act for a couple of years after that. Janna couldn’t remember what set her off the next time.

  Snapping open his umbrella, David Miro interrupted her reverie. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

  She nodded, realizing how hungry she was. She never ate breakfast and had skipped lunch. And now it was dark again. She ducked under his umbrella and followed him through a maze of stairs and shrubs, past fountains of water running down stairways. A huge glass building rose from the darkness, bright and empty inside, full of padded benches and closed doors.

  “Where are we going?”

  He took her hand and led her onto a quiet street and into a small coffee bar tucked in
to the corner of a huge office tower. It wasn’t fancy; its little glass case of picked-over pastries had a bedraggled look. The newspapers were strewn over the six or seven little tables and a few napkins were crumpled on the floor. But what a perfect location, she thought. Thousands of coffee addicts within a few vertical metres. After they ordered, they went back outside to sit at the one table under a glowing brazier. He lit a cigarette, some kind of dark thing that smelled like pipe tobacco. The street was blocked off and no traffic crawled along in the rain. She warmed her hands on her coffee and burnt her mouth trying to get past the foaming milk.

  “That’s where else I’ve seen you,” he exclaimed. “At UBC. You’re a business student?”

  She nodded and sipped again, feeling the coffee burn down her throat.

  He explained his program — a hybrid arts administration graduate diploma that included some business courses. “I have a couple of seminars and then I work at the gallery. I am going to advise the rich on their art collections.” He leaned back and blew smoke into the night. “Have my own gallery, if I can raise the capital.”

  She asked him questions about the art business, how much commission galleries charged, how much people paid for Japanese prints. How they decided what to buy. The returns on investments. She listened and rearranged her plans for the apartment she wanted when she landed that job in the accounting firm where she could crunch the numbers and bill big hours.

  She would come home to quirky lamps, a good stereo, and a clean kitchen. Chrome. A little Honda. Clean like all the cars in Vancouver were clean. She’d jog along the beach every morning. And it was definitely possible that she’d be able to hang at least one flute player on the wall. Sit on her beautiful couch, feet tucked under her, listening to the flute and the wind rustling the grass, the waves on the sand. She laughed out loud, wondering when she was going to start worrying about exams.

  “What’s the joke?”

  Janna shrugged. “The whole idea of art, really. It’s like any other business. Some guy working for almost nothing to make something rich people pay a lot of money for. Something that’s maybe beautiful, but its resale value is determined by whim.”