The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  †

  It was Thomas Coleman who knocked on Janna’s door and took her away from the room she’d spent two days cleaning, forcing herself down on her hands and knees to wash the floor, forcing herself to stretch to reach the corners of the high window, the broom searching the ceiling for cobwebs that weren’t there. Taking a shower every couple of hours with the lights off so she couldn’t see the bruises. Wearing long sleeves and a scarf, a towel hung over the big mirror beside the door so she didn’t surprise herself. Telling herself that she wasn’t really hurt, this was how a rugby player felt after a rough game. But she had to struggle not to cry when she opened the door to Thomas Coleman’s big grey eyes blinking behind his thick lenses.

  He opened her closet door, handed her a sweater, her scarf, and her jacket and took her away from the smell of bleach. She’d told herself she wasn’t hungry and believed it until he sat her on a bench in the pale February sunshine and gave her a slice of cheese, crackers, and half a pear. A flask of strong coffee. While she ate and drank, he explained that he’d very much appreciate it if she could come to some accommodation with her family and friends because his house had become the conduit for communications about her state of mental and physical health and he preferred people to have data to support their speculations. Apparently she’d upset Amy somehow and his wife was muttering that it was none of their business, but damned if they weren’t all yammering away about her and disturbing his peace. And here he finds her limping around with a split lip.

  She found herself telling him some of what had happened. He gave her a large handkerchief and when she was finished crying took her to the campus rape crisis centre. He was gone when she came out into the quiet reception area and stared, bereft, at a poster describing the symptoms of STDs. She wanted to talk to him, to get away from the doctor with her warm hands and kindness, the suggestion that she fill out a police report, the request for names and addresses of family and friends. Could she put down his name on the forms, she wanted to ask. But he was gone and she was left with prescriptions for painkillers and tranquilizers with a promise of antidepressants if she wasn’t feeling better in a couple of weeks. The door opened, the poster disappeared, and there was Amy. Her hair was tied up in little pigtails, her ears, eyebrow, and nose glittered with silver rings. She wore a bright vest over a heavy wool dress hanging down to her knees, high wool socks, and hiking boots, and drew Janna into an embrace that dug loops of orange and red prayer beads into her bruised breasts.

  “Stupid twat,” Amy said, “you need Friendship 101 for Christ’s sake.” She drove her to the high-ceilinged house she shared with three artists, the entrance half-blocked by blue recycling bins and dozens of shoes and jackets, the big front rooms empty of everything but a couple of benches and huge fabric hangings. She sat Janna down in the kitchen clutter, heated a bowl of thick soup, and waited while she slurped down its strong tastes of curry and cilantro. Even as she opened her mouth to speak, Janna realized that she hadn’t cried in front of anyone since she’d left home promising herself never to look or sound like her wailing, angry mother. Until today. And now, for the third time.

  She told Amy about David, Professor Coleman’s nice little protégé, about how she’d spiked his coffee.

  “You moron,” Amy said.

  “I’m not a very good judge of character, I guess.” She tried to joke. “Look at my friends.”

  “I must have missed him.” Amy said. “Thank God. He sounds like a dangerous creep.” She’d ask around about him, she said. He needed to be stopped.

  “I think he’s had his fun. I don’t want him coming back at me.” Janna didn’t want to talk about how afraid she still was, how she didn’t want to go outside. She didn’t want to turn a corner and run into the immaculately dressed David Miro and see his venom.

  “Yes,” Amy said, “you’ll have to be careful. We can keep you here. Or you can stay at Greg’s. It’s closer to the campus. And we can doctor you up a bit.”

  Two minutes into Amy’s description of a Mayan healing ritual, a sudden yawn split the cut on Janna’s lip and she couldn’t stop yawning even as she dabbed at the blood with a tissue. Amy took her upstairs to a small room and a futon heaped with blankets. Janna burrowed under the covers into the warmth of her exhaustion, an exhaustion and release so profound it rocked her with the movement of a boat on a calm lake, the faint motion nudging her in and out of consciousness even as she sank deeper and deeper into a sleep peopled with the sound of voices, footsteps, doors, and running water. Somewhere at the bottom of the night, she dreamt she was in her bedroom in Smithers, the house shaking as a train rumbled past. The squeal of metal wheels slowing on the metal tracks and the final whoosh of the train’s stopping. She woke to find herself standing in the doorway to Amy’s room, Amy propped up on one elbow in her bed, blinking at her.

  “The trains,” she said.

  Amy yawned. “The tracks are just out back. Bastards are supposed to be quiet at night.”

  “Back home, when the trains woke me up, I’d crawl in with my mom.”

  Amy threw back the covers.” First good idea you’ve had in ages,” she said.

  “I miss her,” Janna said, sliding in, the tears coming again.

  “Of course you do,” Amy said, wiping Janna’s eyes with the long sleeve of her nightshirt. “We all do. Now go to sleep.”

  †

  Isabel swept the shards and puddling coffee into the dustpan, wondering what Alice and Álvaro had expected. What she had expected. Falling into each other’s arms? She swept and mopped, focussing on the broken glass. The open jar of peanut butter, the can of coffee, and the unbuttered toast, all went into the garbage. The litre of milk went down the drain. Every unbroken dish needed washing. Wiping and rinsing, wiping and rinsing, she ran the water hot and fast, trying to drown out the sound of Alice’s voice and Álvaro’s weeping in the living room. The dishcloth glittered and her fingers were speckled with little cuts. She rinsed out the kettle twice, filled it, plugged it in, and was making tea when Alice returned.

  “He’s asleep,” she said. “He’ll be all right.”

  “Thank God.” Isabel swirled the teapot, anxious for the drink’s warmth. Outside the snow had stopped falling.

  “I tried to talk him out of that entrance,” Alice said.

  Isabel nodded. Sunlight slipped through a crack in the clouds and the smashed glass glittered in the sink, on the counter, on the floor, even a sliver in Alice’s hair. When Isabel moved to flick it away, she flinched. Isabel dropped her hand to her side. She refused to apologize. Everything he’d said since he walked in that door had been an insult. Her anger made some kind of sense. But not his response. “Is he mentally ill?”

  Alice tried to explain what Eloise had told her about the torture, the flashbacks.

  “Why didn’t he go to the police?” Isabel finally asked.

  “It’s the police who do it. The police and the army. People up here have no idea.” Her face was old and tired, her voice weary. All those church conferences she went to, Isabel thought. All those bulletins she photocopied. Stacks of them at her house, in her car. Isabel oblivious. The whole world oblivious.

  “Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered in Guatemala — it’s as if half of the people north of Kamloops tortured, shot, or hacked to death the other half, one subdivision at a time. Children. Babies. Pregnant women.”

  Isabel felt cold on the back of her neck, as if someone dead was standing behind her, breathing. “Is that what happened to Soryada’s family?”

  “Yes. If she’d stayed, she’d have been killed. Or worse.”

  It was as if a needle was passing through Isabel’s skin, an umbilical cord of pain connecting her to the baby inside Soryada. “But that’s terrible,” she cried. “Why don’t they do something about it?”

  Alice poured them each a cup of tea. “They do do something about it. Father Álvaro was part of the group investigating the massacres. That’s why he was so badly hu
rt. So he’d stop.”

  “And he has stopped?”

  “Yes, I guess you could say he has. It made him ill. Something triggers it and he relives it. It’s like he’s there again. Not just remembering it, but there, getting tortured.”

  Isabel closed her eyes: the yelling, the broken glass.

  “He’s been getting treatment. It was going well, I guess, but then Janna walked into the house where he was staying. She looks exactly like his sister.”

  “You don’t think of a priest having a family, but, Alice, are they all tangled up with this?”

  Alice shrugged. “I don’t really know. He doesn’t talk about them.”

  Isabel had often imagined another life for Janna, one in which her mom and dad were together. Never here, in this house though. It was always somewhere else, away from all the small town talk. But she’d never had one thought for Álvaro’s family. Not one. Janna could have been down there with them. She could be dead.

  “Alice,” she said, near panic again. “What has happened to Janna?”

  †

  Álvaro woke out of a dream of la finca’s kitchen, of his mother putting wood into the firebox, the sparks bright in the dark afternoon, the rain clouds heavy over the mountains. Keeping all her secrets. She had been happy, they had told him when he went to her village after she died. She was very proud of her son. The fire in Isabel’s stove flickered behind the smoky glass. On the wall, a row of photographs, Isabel’s three children in each of them. The young boys holding Janna as a baby, the teenagers lounging at the imperious ten-year-old’s feet, the still older boys bending to help her blow out a dozen birthday candles. Then they were young men holding her, laughing, stretched out in their arms. One tall, pale, and angular. The younger one darker, stocky, his Indian nose flattened against his cheeks. And always placed clearly at the centre of their world, Janna, a cloud of dark hair around the face that was also Clara’s, the white streak above her ear.

  He had no rights. None at all. He knocked on the closed kitchen door. Chairs scraped the floor and Alice opened the door. Isabel turned from the sink, the water rushing down the drain with a great swooshing sound.

  “At least there’s one thing around here that works,” she said.

  “I’m sorry for what I said,” he wanted to get it out before he lost his nerve. “I had no right. I have seen too many damaged children and I’m afraid I’ve come to assume the worst.”

  “Well, from what Alice has told me, you’ve been damaged yourself.”

  He pulled out a chair and sat down. “Janna has no idea who I am, but you need to know what happened.” And he told her about the attack. About her refusal to go to a doctor. To go to the police. “These men, she seemed to know them. I didn’t understand it.”

  Hope drained out of Isabel and an emotion she could only identify as anguish constricted her heart.

  “I’m so sorry,” Álvaro said again. “Everything I tell you makes it worse. But I don’t know what to do. If I was just a stranger, I could help. But with this secret, I am terrified.”

  “You’re terrified? I left her a dozen messages. I bought her a plane ticket she never used. Half of Vancouver knows she’s in trouble but no one will tell her mother. No wonder you all think I pimped her out to my boyfriends or something, for her to treat me like that.”

  She grabbed a jacket from the hallway, stepped into some shoes, and opened the door. “What I want to do is park myself on her doorstep until she lets me in. But I tried that once before and it wasn’t very pleasant. Maybe you should do it. There’s probably a seat on the afternoon plane.”

  “You can go too,” Alice said. “I can buy your ticket.”

  Isabel shook her head. “I need some time to think this through. Right now it just seems I’ll screw things up more.”

  She walked out into the cold sunshine.

  †

  Janna woke to the smell of coffee and toasted bread and a house empty of people. The kitchen was sticky with the remnants of several breakfasts and she filled the sink with soap and water and dirty dishes. As she washed and wiped and tidied, she looked out the window through a dusty jungle of leaves into a backyard of knee-high grass and stalks of dead-looking vegetation coated with sparkling frost. Small brown birds scavenged at their roots, rising and falling in little waves. A crumbling cement path led to a sagging back gate that opened into a jumble of rusted metal and dead grass, a high chain-link fence topped by razor wire and the train yards beyond. Scattered throughout the brown and tangled mess, clumps of daffodils, their stalks hidden, poked yellow trumpets into the sunlight. She wanted to tidy up the kitchen counters, sort out the clutter on the back steps, and take a machete out into that wasteland. She wanted to phone her mother and ask her to come help clear away the weeds choking the flowers. She imagined Isabel at work, picking up the ringing phone from the square pillar behind the store’s cash registers and saying, “How can I help you?”

  A door banged open and Amy was there with bags, books, Greg, and a plan.

  “I was just going to phone Isabel,” Janna said.

  Amy stared at her. “Wow.”

  †

  That afternoon Isabel stood outside watching the snow freeze on the linden bracts. She reached up a finger and flicked a silver drop off the branch. It tinkled into the frozen compost. She did not want to go back into the house. Lance’s unasked questions. His tender distance.

  She’d already pretty much lost Jason. And now it seemed she’d lost Janna too. And her half-remembered dream of Álvaro. Tucked away somewhere, under all the anger, her one true love. Isabel almost laughed, trying to imagine all of them sitting on couches somewhere, around a coffee table, passing a plate of sandwiches. She flicked another drop off the branch, then another. She hadn’t told Alice about Trevor and Soryada’s baby. The good news. Alice would be thrilled. A grandchild from two parents who loved each other, who seemed to know what they were getting into. She couldn’t imagine dropping her own little bombshell into the midst of that happiness.

  The back door opened and Perro ran to dance around her. Behind her, she felt Lance’s attention like the press of air against her back. She did not know if she liked the feeling or not. She wished it was morning again, that she was just setting the match to the fire. Before she realized Lance was courting her. Before Álvaro. Lance put a jacket over her shoulders.

  “Janna always wanted a dog,” she said. “I told her they were too much trouble. That I’d just be fighting with her to clean up after it.” She shivered now, finally feeling the cold. “She saw a man at the bus depot once, when we were picking up Trevor from some job, and this man had a dog hidden away in his shirt pocket. It was that tiny. A pink nose, whiskers, ears, and eyes poking out. A big man, loose-boned, you know, the way his shirt hung off his shoulders, a fisherman, I think, on his way to Rupert, and she just reached up and patted that dog, talking a mile a minute to it, asking it how it liked the bus trip and if it was hungry or needed a pee, just chatting away, she must have been about ten, her hair pulled back in barrettes, a little pink T-shirt that had a sparkly heart on it, pink shorts, and little silver thongs with a pink heart at each big toe, she’d flick those toes up and down to make the sparkles in the heart catch the light, and she was as happy to see that man and dog as if she was there to pick up her very own dad from the bus.”

  Isabel let the tears run. From behind, Lance put his arms around her. She stiffened at the strangeness of it, his height hers exactly, his body warm against hers. He held himself very still, just heat against her back and finally she said, “Where did she go? Where did that little girl go?”

  Behind them, in the house, the phone rang and rang. Neither one of them moved. A wind whistled through the electric wires strung along the alley. More frozen drops tinkled down to the ice below.

  “Now come inside,” he said, squeezing her once before letting her go.

  She turned and followed him up the three stairs to the back deck and into the house.

&n
bsp; †

  When the man’s voice invited her to leave a message, Janna snapped her phone shut.

  “No one there?”

  “Some man asking me to leave a message. Has she got a live-in boyfriend now?”

  “She’s just renting out your room,” Amy said. “Some guy with a girlfriend in Terrace. I met him at Christmas. You can try later. Now let’s go get your spirit back.”

  Greg dropped them at the path to her residence. The leaves were patterned with frost, and the girls’ breath hung in small white clouds. Janna’s running shoes were wet, her feet cold.

  “About here,” she said, pointing to the bare patch of ground running beside a hedge. Wooden fence posts stuck out of the foliage every few yards.

  A scruffy little path littered with cigarette butts, invisible to most of the residence windows. Under Amy’s directions, she built a small ring of stones around two large flat ones Amy produced from her shoulder bag. Amy crouched and opened her bag, pulling out sticks of kindling, a knife, dried grass, a packet of red powder, a small flask of clear liquid, and matches. Janna spread out the cedar fronds Amy had instructed her to break off on the way to the path.

  “It’s like church,” Janna said. Her voice was strained, almost a giggle. “Or like playing make-believe.”

  “Don’t you start,” Amy warned her. “Any kind of cleansing starts with intention and then incorporates smoke from sacred plants — we’ve got sage, sweet grass, copal, and the cedar. That ought to get things going.”

  Amy threw the match on the pyramid of herbs and wood. The liquor exploded into flame and thick smoke billowed up. Janna moved into its path as instructed and unzipped her jacket, letting the smoke drift across her body and up into her face. Keeping her back to the buildings, she unbuttoned her shirt and felt the cold air sting her nipples. Swearing when she saw the bruises, Amy fanned the smoke in her direction, saying her name over and over. Janna Catherine Lee. Janna Catherine Lee. Janna Catherine Lee.