Street Symphony

by Rachel Wyatt

  “We could have scattered him on Lake Muskoka for heaven’s sake, and had a weekend in Huntsville. How many of us believe that the dead know whether we do what they want or not?” Belle said.

  “‘While you’re there, go to Pointe du Raz.’ I can hear him saying it. He said it more than once.”

  “When I’m dying, I might say, ‘Trek across the Sahara on camels. Here’s the money.’ Will you do that?”

  Dawn tuned out. Whatever dumb thing Agnes and Belle wanted done with their cold remains, they should keep to themselves. The opportunity might come sooner than expected. Watery graves could be theirs without the option. How tidy that would be. Except that Ben would be motherless and Jack might marry again and then Ben would have a stepmother who disliked him and would drive him to drugs and life on the street. I will be home soon, guys. She took a deep breath of the salty air and tried to will herself back in their house in Riverdale. It didn’t work.

  What group or single other would I have preferred to be with in this predicament? Who could have made me feel fine while exhausted and uncertain of return? Pick one. For simple hand-holding, Bernie, next door neighbour, affectionate would-be lover, rejected but not bitter about it. For laughter and encouragement, we-will-survive Marcia, teenage cheerleader grown up into teacher and colleague. For everything else, including perhaps some desperate last sex, Vladimir Chevadnatze. He’d sung “Una furtiva lagrima” in a way that brought tears to her own eyes. The subscription was a birthday gift from Jack, a single seat because he didn’t care for opera. But the beautiful tenor belonged to another world, and Bernie had found a girlfriend.

  “I told them I’d be back in the office by Friday,” Agnes said.

  “Good God! We’d better be home before that.”

  “Start rowing then. Ask for a lifeboat and some oars. Be the first thirty-nine-year-old woman to cross the Atlantic solo. Canada is probably over there.”

  Dad had taught them geography, pushed them through math, watched over their homework. Yes, Dad, I’ve read the books. Done the exercises. Let me check. Your last report card. No slacking for the Fremmer girls. He had, though he mentioned it rarely, set aside a possible career in music to devote himself to his salaried job at the bank and to them. To friends they heard him say, “It’s not easy being a single parent.” The reverse of that had never crossed his mind. Pressure? They were pressed. Close to oppressed. His girls had to be top girls. Agnes had delighted him by her rise in the corporate world. Belle’s decision to stay home with her child and write columns for a household journal had mystified him. From Dawn he had expected no more, no less: She was the designated teacher.

  “No signal,” Agnes said, shaking her BlackBerry for the fifteenth time.

  A passenger took the microphone from the captain and said, in French, that he wanted to make a statement: “People who are on this boat by right, had reservations, should have first claim to the food and the accommodation below. Those who have been taken on because of the volcano must wait.”

  “What about the lifeboats?” Belle asked.

  The captain took the microphone back but could no longer be heard through the murmurs of translation and the uproar of argument.

  “Well, there you are,” Agnes said.

  “There we aren’t,” Belle replied. “We are nowhere. And I think, sister, that I was the one who said this was a ridiculous idea in the first place. And we are most likely going to have to pay for new plane tickets.” She pushed her hair back from her face.

  “You didn’t have to come along.”

  “And who looked after him all last year? I repeat, who looked after him all last year?”

  “‘Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.’ You see? It does mean something.”

  “I truly don’t think that bringing our father’s ashes here provoked an unpronounceable volcano in Iceland to erupt. You are out of your mind.”

  A couple with a child in a stroller walked by. The little girl was asleep. Her parents were holding hands. Were they having a Titanic moment and simply, peacefully, affirming love? Three boys were throwing a ball to one another, laughing as they ran to prevent it going over the side. Three weeks ago, thinking about this journey, Dawn had considered that it might be dire. Travelling with her sisters was rarely a treat. But she’d seen the trip as a chance to enjoy time in Brittany, to distance herself from home, to think, to consider whether the future held anything for her other than moving eventually into the principal’s office at Jordan Street High, and growing old in lockstep with her affectionate husband after Ben moved out.

  She let all the background noise fade and withdrew into her dream life: In the penthouse in Toronto that she’d bought since taking over the finance company and firing James, the sluggish CEO, she waited for her date. Ben, at an expensive school, came home on weekends. She was going to have dinner at Oro with a man she’d met at the opera, a man who knew Vladimir and was going to take her to New York. Her outfit, silk tunic and slacks, navy with touches of gold, cost three thousand dollars.

  Discarding that hedonistic fantasy, she moved instead to Africa and walked among poor children, children scarred by disease and fear. Her life now devoted to helping them to survive. Wearing jeans and a blood-stained shirt… And where was Jack in those scenarios? Did he too have a dream life? A script sold to Hollywood? Riches and blonds and Los Angeles? She preferred to think of him in a forest hut, alone with his muse. Only birds, the feathered kind, and his laptop to keep him company.

  Her sisters were quiet now, close together, probably murmuring reassurances to each another. They’d spent the first part of this journey admiring the ship: boutiques, a cinema, video games, slot machines. Everything you could imagine that helped to pass time. But when the engines stopped, the passengers, like a flock of birds, had come out onto the decks to chatter, to complain, to seek answers.

  The hypnotic ripples, white-topped waves, fathoms of unfathomable sea held Dawn entranced. “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” Words she might offer to her resistant students. She hoped the grade elevens would treat the substitute teacher with decent respect. Maybe the school was a myth, and home with its shabby furniture and overgrown yard another. She was here. She was nowhere. She was free, detached from all responsibility and suddenly she wanted to sing. What was to stop her, when they landed in England, from disappearing? Never again would she have to think about meals, meetings, difficult students. She saw a future in which green was the colour of life, where simplicity ruled and no one knew who she was.

  “You were in another world.” A man in a straw hat was leaning on the rail beside her.

  “It was a pleasant place.”

  “Only in the sunshine,” he replied.

  And her green and simple place was suddenly drenched with rain.

  “I just want to go home,” she said.

  “It could take days to get a flight.”

  “Please don’t tell my sisters that.”

  A shriek startled her and the shriek became a roar as other voices picked up the sound. A small ship had appeared to the south. Crackling sounds announced the captain. “When the ship arrives, we’ll have to ask you to wait till called. I have all your names. You won’t all be able –”

  Furious arguments began, and shouting. Agnes said, “Move towards the way out.”

  Belle said, “You mean the gangway.”

  “We’ll push our way through. We have to get on that ship.”

  Dawn murmured, “We don’t behave well in a crisis. It’s a goddamn me-first world, isn’t it? And I don’t like it.”

  The man in the hat touched her shoulder. “It’ll be a while yet.”

  “Is there a reason for this? Are we being told that our lives are ordinary and we could do better?”

  He looked at her as if he knew of all her escapist thoughts, her images of a different life, her imagined adultery. Then he said, “We need more adventures, that’s all. We’re not used to randomness. Our ‘ordered lives’ make us complace
nt. We should be dancing, singing. We’re too puritan. Look around. All these people are stressed out about something they can’t change. Why can’t they hear the music?”

  There was a shudder, a growling sound. The engines were running again. The passengers kept quiet, as if they could will the boat to move by collective effort, a great push forward. And then they cheered. The sea roiled in its wake as the ship moved on again towards Devon.

  So they would get back to Toronto. More waiting for another crowded train. Hours, maybe days, spent in an airport that would be just this side of hell. More fret. More standing around. But home, eventually.

  Dawn said to her sisters, “There’s still a way to go. Let’s get something to eat.”

  When they were sitting at a table in the restaurant, Belle said, “Do you think Dad knew it was illegal?”

  “I have a picture of that gendarme on my phone. ‘You cannot do that ‘ere’.”

  “If we’d only had the ashes in a yogurt container instead of that damn urn. I’ll never forgive you, Agnes, for shaking them out like that in a freaking parking lot.”

  “He’s in Brittany like he wanted, Belle. And he’s round the trees at the side, not on the cement. Nobody’s going to drive over him. Besides, he liked cars.”

  Dawn reached out and took their hands. “Come on,” she said. “Dad loved us. We loved him. That’s what counts.”

  “And he only wanted the best for us,” Belle said, sniffling.

  Agnes handed her a Kleenex and said, “It’s a pity he never really knew what that was.”

  “But perhaps he did,” Dawn said softly. “Perhaps he did.”

  And then, at last, they began to laugh.

  Pandora’s Egg

  A single small red leaf caught in an air current danced up and down, spiralled and spun six feet off the ground, determined perhaps never to fall. At first Erin thought it was hanging on a thread, a leftover strand of spider silk, but then it dropped as the breeze moved on.

  “I’ll be back by five,” she said, and tried to tamp down that little imp of joy that leapt into her soul every time she was leaving the house to get away, even briefly, from him, from her husband. His face a child’s face, his body a man’s body. The previous Dan whom she’d married and loved was hidden from her now and might never return. The wise doctors said recovery would be a slow process. How slow? The damage of war, the menace, the killing, a deep wound; the words were reiterated as a kind of explanation.

  Her mother said Dan would emerge when he felt it was safe to do so, as if he were being self-indulgent and wanted to annoy them all. But she did drop by on Fridays after school to chat with him about the circumference of sparrows and robins and the impossibility of cardinals. They played snap on the computer and followed a Wonderland serial on TV.

  Dan looked at Erin now with those untroubled eyes and said, “I’ll be fine.” And she did love him. This version of him was easier to love than the previous brave, questioning Dan. But still she longed for the excitement, the arguments, and the rush of life that he used to bring into a room with him, and the rush sometimes to bed.

  “Your lunch is in the fridge, honey,” she said.

  “I know.”

  But how much did he know? Did he know that without her work she would go insane? Did he know that last Friday, talking to Mel, she’d cried when she’d had to pack up her laptop and leave the building on King Street? There was no reason why she couldn’t work at home, but the two days a week downtown and trips to the library for research that she could have done online were necessary escapes. Time spent dealing with other people’s words gave her the patience to consider Dan and what he’d lost. Sometimes she looked in on him as he measured pieces of wood and chose paint colours, and wondered whether, if he did return to his normal self, he would ever be as happy again.

  “I’ll be taking them in next month,” he said. “Before the snow.”

  Across the path, he’d bent a wire coat hanger to make a hook and had attached the twenty-third birdhouse, this one made of birchbark and shaped like a wizard’s hat, to the fence. Carefully, he copied the designs from the book his brother had sent him. The last one was yet to be made and he seemed reluctant to begin, as if perhaps a door would close when it was done.

  Passersby stopped and stared into their front yard at the ten hanging from the two maples on the lawn as if it were a special display. Two people had asked if any of the houses were for sale. Thoughtful neighbours stopped their kids from laughing and making jokes. He was a soldier. He deserves respect.

  “Creative work will help his recovery,” the doctors, all three of them, said, though none of them had suggested an end date; give it a year, give it a decade. “Avoid TV news.” They were agreed on that too. A sudden shock, they also said, could bring Dan back to normality, a trigger. Erin wished they hadn’t used that word. Now and then, she thought of dressing up in a freaky costume and leaping out at him or even, but she suppressed this quickly, of buying a toy gun and pretending to shoot him.

  The thirteen houses in the backyard, boxes, towers, cottages, remained uninhabited except for the first one, the yellow duplex with a floral design round the “doors” that was attached to the metal washing-line pole out of squirrel-reach. It had attracted a sparrow family last spring, and Dan watched the couple as they took grass and scraps to line their temporary home. He listened to their cheeps and chirrups and marvelled as they flew to and fro with food for their infant. In August, after the nestling had flown away, he climbed up the pole using his arms and legs like a chimpanzee and cleaned out the dwelling ready for the next occupants. It was important to do that, he said, because there could be residual mites.

  Was his hobby compensation for the destruction he’d witnessed and suffered and caused? Not being religious, Dan wouldn’t be able find solace in blaming a careless god. He did, though now and then, quote lines from his Sunday school days about falling sparrows and “whatsoever you do for the least of these”. But there had to be something else that prompted him to construct these careful shelters and decorate them with shells or symbols. Each one had to be perfect, no rough edges.

  “The last one’s for the apple tree,” he said.

  “Will it bear it?” Erin carefully asked. Planted last year, the tree was thin, no more than a sapling.

  “I’m using light material. It’ll be special, a surprise for you. And you’re not to look into my workshop.” He poured muesli into a bowl and sat down at the table. “Coffee?”

  “In the pot.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll clean up.”

  Erin almost said, That’s a good boy. Instead she smiled at the grey-haired, grey-eyed, six-foot-tall, forty-two-year-old kid and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

  She longed for a moment to return to her own childhood: the tones of her dad’s double bass groaning up through the floor from the basement as if they kept a wounded animal down there, Mom in the kitchen baking with her notes for next day’s lessons propped up against the cookie jar. In her teens, Erin was never sure which of her parents aggravated her the most. Then Dad took himself out of the running when he left with the symphony oboe player and went to join a Vancouver sextet. A sophomore at Western then, believing in filial duty, she’d gone home to console her mother but found her mother in a carefree space, drinking Riesling and rereading Jane Austen.

  “What are you doing next Sunday?” Mel asked as she was leaving the office.

  “Sunday?”

  “Day after Saturday. Day before Thanksgiving.”

  “Cleaning house most likely.”

  “I’m making brunch for the sisters and their kids. If you’d like to come, you and Dan, you’ll be very welcome.”

  “Thanks, Mel. Mom will be cooking something. She’s decided against a turkey. She’ll do something unusual.”

  “You’ve done something different with your hair.”

  “Are you saying ‘unusual’? My stylist decided I needed a change.”

  “You do!” He stoo
d there looking at her, a handsome, younger, undamaged man, hero of many a novel, and held his arms wide. It wasn’t fair to him that she allowed the embrace and called it a hug to make it innocent.

  “Have a great weekend.”

  “You too.”

  Her mother worried about Dan being alone. But he wasn’t going to set fire to the house, he had simply become – well – simple. He spent mornings in his workshop, watched endless game shows in the afternoons and slept like a child in the spare room on a nest he’d made from blankets and pillows. Erin had become his mother, as her own mother pointed out. Setting aside morals and possible unintended consequences for her daughter’s sake, Mom also pointed out that unless she, Erin, had a sex life, she would become bitter and cruel.

  Erin had pondered long on the cruel and knew she was not that – yet. Bitterness, though, was an occasional guest that hung around the house and left wet towels on the bathroom floor. Thoughts of if-only and why-me prolonged that visitor’s stay. But I am not cut out for adultery, she said. Who was? Would she take the shears one day, clip away all her defenses, and fall into temptation’s arms? As she so nearly had with Mel last week, in the elevator, for heaven’s sake! What fun that would have been for the people in the office, not to mention the guards who scanned the Argos-eyed CCTV screens. Long gone were the days when only an invisible god watched the world, and elevators and closets were likely out of his range.

  Charlie Chaplin hadn’t appeared in her dreams of late and that was a good sign. His cockeyed walk and hat and stick and those sad eyes were too close to home to be funny. At times she felt that she was living in black and white to a background of portentous piano music with words written like signals across her days: The Friday before Halloween, on her way home…

  Erin walked away tired from meeting an author whose manuscript, “in its current form”, was not working and had managed to leave him feeling upbeat and convinced of possibility. Outside, the noise of traffic hit her in the face. The city she knew and loved was trailing its garments in the dust. Drab, overused, dirt and litter on the street, she wanted to sweep a huge vacuum cleaner over it and suck up all the muck. A man shouting about Jesus tried to put a leaflet into her hand. Across the road a group of women in headscarves were holding up placards: Egypt! Free my father. They took a child’s teddy bear away from him in jail.