Hellgoing

by Lynn Coady

  We’ll call it — I’m so sorry, what’s your name again, dear?

  Erin, said Erin.

  We’ll call this “Erin’s Tree,” announced Frank.

  She watched as he negotiated another dune and then, for no obvious reason, fell over into the sand.

  The dogs went mad and leapt upon him.

  Oh my God, said Erin, darting forward, holding her arms out as if to pick him up.

  Frank writhed in the fake white sand, fending off the ecstatic dogs, who licked him as if he’d dropped to ground precisely to give them this opportunity. With gratitude and abandon.

  I’m all right, Frank assured her. I have a bad hip. It just gives out sometimes — poof.

  But Erin could see the reality of pain in Frank’s face, there was real pain there now, clouding up the sunny madness, pain the dogs were doing their best to lick away. Frank’s hat had been knocked from his head and he lay there, bald and bejewelled, looking more like a helpless infant than ever.

  ERIN WENT BACK to the hotel room to find Sean and see if she could talk him into a quick pre-wedding spanking. He’d refused to raise a hand to her since they arrived, for fear a chambermaid or relative would overhear and get the wrong idea. I need you to spank the weird out of this place for me, she told him.

  Sean said he was too self-conscious. The walls were like onion skin.

  So Erin went for a swim and five minutes into it came face to face with a small stingray. She’d petted one when they’d gone snorkelling a couple days ago, but that time the guide had been holding it still for her.

  And clambering up onto the dock to escape the stingray, she tore her thigh open on a spike. What was the spike doing there? It was errant, poking out at an impractical angle, and the only such spike on the dock, but Erin had found it.

  SHE DIDN’T END up needing stitches but Sean told her, a few minutes before they got married, that maybe to be on the safe side they should ask one of the waiters to strap her to a trolley and wheel her down the aisle.

  I like the being strapped down part, she joked back. Do I get to pick my own waiter?

  She decided not to let Sean know how angry the comment had made her. At this point, she just wanted to limp down the fucking aisle, say the stupid vows and get drunk and then get on a plane home so they could be together in the way they always were. Belize was a mistake. Accepting the resort package as her father’s wedding gift — which had made her feel so mature at the time, so above it all, so water-under-the-bridge — was a mistake. It had become a TV wedding. The waving palm tree fantasy of some fourteen-­year-old daddy’s-little-princess.

  She’d been kidding herself. She thought this as she kissed Sean at the reception, after everyone began tinking their forks against their glasses at them for what had to be the twenty-seventh time. She hadn’t exited the field of battle with her father. She’d surrendered.

  SEAN GOT DIVORCED at a Starbucks. He and The Beast met every week at the Starbucks at the West Edmonton Mall, the biggest mall in North America. They had a DIY divorce because Sean was still, at the time, his own special kind of idiot. Why not part amicably, he thought. There was no need for a lawyer — a lawyer was cold and impersonal, a lawyer would introduce an unnecessary adversarial element to the proceedings and why do that? Hadn’t they had enough of being adversaries? Good faith, therefore. Plus it wouldn’t be fair, because he could afford a lawyer and The Beast could not. So he and The Beast hashed a deal out together, at Starbucks, using documents from the internet. She drank Frappuccinos and he drank whatever the featured brew happened to be that day.

  The Beast was unemployed except for the knitting lessons she gave and the crafts she sold every summer at the farmers’ market and online. She came up with some impressive stuff — The Beast could knit food, perfectly recognizable olives and hamburgers and ice cream cones. Years ago, he had encouraged her in this; he made good money at UPS, so why shouldn’t she follow her dreams, quit her soul-killing administrative job and knit food all day?

  And now, therefore, it was his fault she had been out of the workforce for so long. Out of guilt, and a desperation to get away, he gave her everything.

  DON’T BE SO hard on yourself, Erin told him, on the plane back to Canada. It seemed like there was no other way of dealing with the terrible wedding on the fake white sand against the swimming-pool ocean, not to mention their hangovers, but to talk about how terrible their previous relationships had been.

  They’d heard each other’s stories many times before. They always ended up, these stories, with one of them telling the other: Don’t be so hard on yourself.

  But you guys weren’t miserable, argued Sean. You and Ames. You didn’t cohabit in complete and utter misery for ten years and just, like, stick with it because you figured it was the right thing to do. You stayed together because you were happy. And then you broke up once you weren’t happy anymore, like reasonable human beings.

  No, said Erin.

  Yes, said Sean, who had heard about it enough to feel comfortable contradicting her. Ames just came home one day and said he wasn’t happy.

  Yes, said Erin. But it doesn’t mean we were happy right up until that exact point.

  Well, that’s kind of how you’ve always described it.

  Erin looked past Sean out the window. It showed a wall of cloud the colour of cement.

  But I knew that he resented me, she said. For a long time. I just didn’t know what to do about it. And when he came home that day with the sunglasses, one of the things he said made him mad was how I resented his acting career. And I couldn’t figure that out, because I was the one who helped him get his resumé and headshot online, I was the one who found him an extras agent. I was always trying to find him work. So I didn’t understand what he was saying. And it wasn’t until quite a few months after he moved out that I got it. He wasn’t mad because I resented his career, he was mad because I was the thing that wasn’t his career — I was the anti-career. So he couldn’t imagine me doing anything but resenting it. I was the thing on the other side of the ferry crossing that had nothing to do with what he wanted anymore.

  Sean was beginning to fall asleep. He’d made the mistake of thinking this was another one of their lazy conversations.

  But you guys were happy, he insisted with his eyes closed. Up until then.

  I was, said Erin. I was the one who was happy.

  She seemed to sneeze in slow motion into her hands. Sean opened his eyes and sat up. The whole time he had known Erin, she had never done this. She wasn’t a crier.

  It’s just this whole past week, she told him. The wedding with all the family and everything.

  But it’s over, said Sean. He put his arms around her.

  When we get home, Erin whispered after a moment, I want you to beat the living shit out of me.

  They’d never gone a week without before.

  CLEAR SKIES

  People were laughing, afterwards. They laughed during, too, before anyone knew what was going on or what might happen. The thing to do upon landing was tell the story and make jokes. When Sara was up there, seconds after the boom, she imagined doing just that. She’d even rehearsed it a bit for future audiences.

  I was so scared. I thought an engine had exploded. I thought: well, this is it.

  At the airport, Terry was carrying a copy of Sara’s book for identification purposes. She saw him from a distance, peering down at the author’s photo every time a new arrival emerged through the sliding doors. His eyes went from her face on the book, to her face in real life, and still they passed right by her. She had to come and tap him on the shoulder.

  “It’s me,” she said, pointing to the book. It was her first book. The person in the photograph was nineteen years old. Sara’s tap had surprised him and he gave her an instinctive, hostile look. “What a tiny airport!” she added.

  “Oh!” yelled Terry, grabbing her hand. He asked how her flight had been.

  “The plane was struck by lightning,” Sara said.
She told her little story for him, watched his blue eyes widen. It was a good way to kick things off.

  They had to wait for Herb, the fiction guy, before making their way to the monastery, but his flight was not due for another twenty minutes. Sara went to the bathroom as Terry studied the back of Herb’s book, which was stamped with a gilded reminder of his nomination for a major book award the previous year.

  Everywhere she went in the airport, there were posters — on practically every wall. It was almost ridiculous, the number of posters. She saw such posters in her grocery store, and the post office. But here it was the same poster over and over again, the same pudgy, uncute face.

  “What’s with all the posters?” she asked Terry.

  He jumped again at the sound of her voice. I will get a little bell to wear around the retreat, Sara decided.

  “Oh,” he said, looking around. “Marie.” As if the girl in the posters were related to him or something, a colleague maybe. “She’s been gone a month now. Everyone’s desperate. Sad.”

  “But why —” Sara didn’t know how to ask the question without sounding callous. “I mean — there’s only one missing kid in the entire province?”

  Terry shrugged. He was supposedly a playwright, but Sara had never seen any of his work. “It’s one of those things — mysterious. You know, her parents are still together, so it’s not like one of them nabbed her. Just disappeared out of the blue.”

  Sara felt what she knew was a prissy twinge of annoyance, because the phrase was inappropriate. You didn’t disappear out of the blue. You appeared out of it, suddenly, like a holy bolt of lightning.

  It was a year in the world where people seemed to be dying explosively or else disappearing without so much as a bleat. She wanted to leave it behind, which was why she’d said yes to the retreat. She’d liked the sound of it: a prairie retreat. The brochure Terry’d sent her showed photographs like abstract paintings: one thick, vertical band of brilliant green topped by a second, thicker band of glaring blue. Your view, the brochure promised.

  On TV there was nothing but explosions anymore. In her city, in the past year, an abrupt slew of people had blanked from existence as if culled by hungry aliens. Pictures of people who had recently failed to exist were always on the front page of the paper. It was not like she ever bought the paper — front page after front page accosted her whenever she walked up and down the street. There was no avoiding anything.

  She had a brother in Duncan who, like her, was no longer in the family. They argued on the phone. Wayne always seemed to think it was natural and okay for he himself to have left, but scandalous and obscene for her. Plus, he didn’t mind the bombs. “It’s about time they started bombing something,” he opined. He called Sara a hippie, since he couldn’t convincingly use words like harlot and jezebel now that they were equally damned.

  They rolled along in Terry’s big white van. The landscape was just like the abstract painting in the brochure, only endless and on every side. Just when she was starting to feel panicky about it, hills appeared on either side of the highway, and then they were descending into a picturesque — there was no other word for it — valley. Terry gestured to one of the hills, and she and Herb looked. A crucifix loomed; a sprawling, one-storey building crouched behind it as if for protection.

  “There it is,” said Terry.

  “Oh no,” said Sara.

  Herb was sitting in the front seat. He had talked all the way from the airport, which would have bothered her if he wasn’t so likeable and engaging. A publisher’s dream — that’s the kind of writer Herb was. Now he turned and flashed his teeth at her.

  “Everything all right?”

  In the rear-view mirror, Terry glanced and squinted. He was thinking — Ten days with this person, morning, noon and night — and so she laughed.

  “I forgot about the God thing,” she explained. “The crucifix up there.” She grimaced and shuddered comically for them. Terry and Herb both knew about Sara — how she had made her name. She had been briefly famous, as a teenager. They laughed and nodded.

  THE FIRST MORNING of the retreat, her toilet backed up. It was the worst thing that could happen. She had used it, was the problem. She had used it right after breakfast.

  She flushed the thing as many times as she dared before slinking to Terry’s office. At the grim look on her face, he jerked himself to his feet and pulled the door shut — expecting maybe news of an unwanted grope from Herb, a veiled threat from a born-again student.

  “No, no, nothing bad,” Sara assured him. Cringing, she explained.

  “We’ll just call in the maintenance man,” Terry told her, managing to wink and look jolly.

  I shit, she had basically walked up to Terry and announced. Hello, strange man. There is something I’d like you to know about me and here it is. Sara floundered at the thought of the maintenance man. Would she have to encounter this maintenance man at any point? Look him in the eye afterward?

  “I don’t know what you were planning on doing this morning,” said Terry. “The groups don’t meet until after lunch. You could go for a little walk maybe, while he’s working.”

  Sara had been planning on having a shower — she hadn’t bothered when she arrived the night before. Her hair was pulled back tight and neat so that none of its greasy strands would be noted.

  She went for a walk. She went to see the labyrinth. Last night Terry told them how much visitors enjoyed walking the labyrinth, and she and Herb and Betty, the poet, and Marguerite, the children’s writer, were welcome to do the same. It helped the students move forward with their writing, he said. Helped them to commit, to let go of whatever might be holding them back. They carried some object into the labyrinth with them that was meant to represent their problem, their block. They meditated as they walked and once they got to the middle, left the object there on the makeshift pedestal. Sara had walked straight through the labyrinth, stepping over its stone borders, to examine the pile of crap left on the pedestal, while everyone else remained outside, as if in respect. There were pebbles and sticks and small birds’ feathers — but also single earrings, grocery receipts and a tube of lip gloss.

  Now she circled the labyrinth, feeling resentful of it, the way she felt resentful of the crucifix. Last night at dinner she had said that she didn’t know much about Catholicism, but a labyrinth seemed, to her, sort of pagan for a monastery. She understood ritual was a big deal in the Catholic church — on the plane, Sara’s seatmate had yanked a rosary out of her purse after the boom, closed her eyes, fingered it bead by bead, whispering frantically. Still it seemed wrong to her, like Terry had led them through the bush to a golden calf.

  From the opposite end of the table, Marguerite the children’s writer contradicted her. She told Sara about the Catholic labyrinths at Chartres and Amiens, and how old they were, and Sara felt, as she often felt, the limits of her education. Still, she also felt like she was right and Marguerite was wrong. It was how she was raised. Christian or pagan, she wanted to say — pick one. It was like the photo in the brochure — a single slash of sky above a single slash of land.

  When she returned to her room, a man was crouched over her toilet, cursing. She smoothed her hair and left without disturbing him.

  AT LUNCH, THE instructors sat together shyly, having not had time to bond with their group members as yet, which it was clear they were expected to do. It seemed to Sara that Marguerite and Betty had the wrong jobs. Marguerite the children’s writer was serious, highly educated and dressed in prim, greyish woolies despite the fact that it was August. She looked, in short, like a poet. Betty was twenty-eight and wore a black minidress and a clattery sequence of bangles on either wrist. You could see the children’s writers yearned for Betty. Whereas the poets — many of whom had ten years or more on their mentor — raised eyebrows at each other every time the cafeteria shook with Betty’s overloud laughter. This happened so much that Sara started to worry about Betty. Betty laughed at everything she — Betty — or
anyone else, for that matter, said. It seemed compulsive after a while.

  They spoke about the missing girl, Marie. Marguerite and Terry both lived in the province, and it seemed residents of the province could think of little else — just as people in Sara’s city were preoccupied by the same phenomena, only in greater numbers. Here it was only Marie at the centre of the mystery. The mystery was Marie herself. In Sara’s city the mystery was Absence — here Absence was Marie.

  “Disappeared out of the blue,” said Terry again. Betty laughed. Sara wondered if she had picked up on Terry’s mistaken usage and was being indiscreet.

  “Well — the weather has improved at least,” remarked Marguerite.

  Betty laughed, and then asked, “Sorry — was that a joke?”

  Marguerite didn’t smile, but rolled her eyes in a gesture, perhaps, of self-deprecation.

  “No, I mean no more cloud cover,” Marguerite explained. “Clear skies. It makes searching easier.”

  Sara glanced up, confused. “Why?” she said before she had time to think and stop herself. “Do they think she’s up there somewhere?”

  Betty laughed, vibrating the water in Sara’s glass. At a table nearby, the poets drew themselves together.

  “FIRST OF ALL,” she said to her group after lunch. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. You guys could just as well have applied to Herb’s group. There is no difference between fiction and memoir as far as I’m concerned.”

  Nobody wanted to contradict her so early in the meeting, but she could see the scepticism behind their eyes. They were smiling at her but they were formulating objections.

  “I mean, okay, what — right off the bat — what would you say is the difference between the two forms?”

  Everyone knew, but no one wanted to say something so obvious. Also because it was clear Sara was planning to contradict the person who did. She waited them out until finally a woman her own age named Alison spoke.