“Not yet.”
Something in his voice had signaled to her that the subject had been changed. She opened her eyes again. “What is it.”
“Something else.”
“How much worse is this going to make me feel?”
“Some.”
She was trying to sit up now, but he put a hand on her hip and gentled her back down under the sheets. She lay facing him, frightened.
“I drove your father to the docks,” he said. “That morning. He asked me to and I did.”
She blinked a few times, even smiled at him. “What do you mean?”
“I drove him to the ferry, Bridget. I picked him up at your mother’s house and took him to the lake. We’d arranged it the week before, and if he didn’t call me to say he’d changed his mind, I was to pick him up at seven in the morning and take him down.” He saw how hopefully alert she was to the possibility that she’d somehow misunderstood what he was saying. He saw her memory of the day dissolving and this utter dread shape replacing it. He’d arrived back at the apartment with lattes — so early for him. He couldn’t sleep. This is what he had told her, and he’d seemed a little unwell to her. They’d gotten back into bed.
“We made love, John . . .” Tears pooled under her cheek.
“I know.”
“How could you?”
His hand lay on her hip, such a quiet intimacy but for the violence he was doing to her. “I was terrified.”
“God, John.” She pressed her face into the sheets, rolling toward him as if dead.
“I loved you so much that morning.”
“Oh my God,” she said, and she threw the covers back and ran into the washroom. He lay there, staring at the space where she’d been, the imprint of her body slowly vanishing. He lifted his eyes a degree and saw Marianne watching him from the other bed.
“What did he say to you? On the drive.”
“Marianne . . .”
“I’d like to know.”
He listened to the water running behind the wall. “He said he’d woken you. But that you fell back to sleep before he left.”
“Yes,” she said. “I slept through his death.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“No one knew how it happened,” said Marianne. “The police checked with every dispatcher in the city. We knew he must have gone in a private car, but we figured he’d hitchhiked and we’d never know.”
“I was with him.”
Marianne regarded him silently for a long moment. “Good.”
“Good?” Bridget’s voice came from the foot of his bed. John kept his focus on her mother.
“We have it all now,” said Marianne. “The drive, the woman at the docks who unwrapped a chocolate bar for him, the ferry captain.” She looked up to where Bridget was standing. “And now we have John.”
“Who agreed to drive your husband and my father to his death.”
“He would have gone anyway,” said John. “Without me, if he had to. You know that.”
Marianne sat up and slid her legs over the side of the bed, facing him where he lay. “Tell me what he said.”
He turned on his back. The ceiling had swirls of sharp-looking stucco on it, and it looked to him like the surface of water, moving, shifting. He spoke as quietly as he thought he’d be permitted to. “He wanted only to talk about the morning. The places we were driving through. We didn’t talk about — I didn’t say anything. I wanted to buy him breakfast, but he wasn’t hungry.”
“He was never hungry,” said Marianne.
“He just wanted to stay in the car.”
“Was he frightened?”
“No.” His mind drifted back to the morning and he saw the sun on the road, felt the warmth in the car. The last of the morning’s coolness leaching away. “We drove down the Bayview Extension and the sun was on the water. He talked the way he would always talk to me — noticing things, being reminded of things. I think I was the only one who was scared. I’m sorry.”
There was no sound from the other bed. He was going to go all the way now, this was what Marianne wanted from him.
“Why are you sorry?” said Bridget.
“When we got to Lakeshore, I was suddenly angry at him.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“Why were you angry?” said Marianne.
“I just was,” he lied. “I felt there was nothing I could do. He wouldn’t let me get out of the car. He touched my face and got out.” He breathed out heavily. “He told me he loved me.”
“Come here,” said Marianne, and he raised his head and saw her holding her hand out to her daughter. Bridget took it, soundlessly weeping, and got into bed with her.
He lay back down. “I watched him walk to the booth. I had to back the car up to see. He was walking slowly to the ticket booth. He bought his ticket. He leaned against the iron railing while he waited for his change, and then he went through the turnstile.
“I stayed there, waiting for his ferry to come in to the city. One started over from Hanlan’s — it was small against the island, coming out. I wanted it to take forever, but it got there in ten minutes and it docked.
“When it pulled out again, I got out of the car and bought a ticket, and I went through and stood behind the gate that goes to the wharves and watched the ferry going over. It was the size of a toy when it was in the middle of the lake.”
He listened to them breathing in the bed. The room felt then like a huge, empty place to him, where any sound he might make would travel outward forever. A cry for help or a prayer drifting from him into heedless space. The silence was broken by the sound of one of the women rising out of the other bed, and he felt a weight on his own and a hand in his. He looked down the length of himself to see Marianne sitting beside him, her eyes looking toward the windows.
BY HALF-PAST-EIGHT the site was busy with men and women who had nothing to do with the excavation of the arena. The three of them took turns dressing in the bathroom and went down to the street with nothing in their stomachs. Just before they’d left the room, the phone had rung and Bridget answered it, saying, “What?” and “Who is this?” She listened to a voice and held her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you want to talk to someone who wants to know what you have against professional sports?”
“No.”
Bridget hung up. “We better get the newspaper.”
In the lobby, they had time to glance at the Sun. The headline, over a crisp picture of an apartment building, read TOT DIES AFTER FALL. Above it: SHE’S NO FAN — LOCAL WOMAN HOLDS UP CONSTRUCTION OF UNION ARENA.
Marianne whistled quietly.
“Should we get you to a safe house?” said Bridget.
“No. Let’s get out there,” she said.
At the gate to the site, Marianne showed a ministry representative the transfer order, and he let them through on the north side of the enclosure. On the other side, they stood at the periphery of the huge brown moonscape for the first time. The ministry had brought in a long white lab truck, and personnel went back and forth from the truck to the gridded dig carrying papers, instruments, and samples of dirt in small vials. Apart from the ministry crew, there were interested bystanders — members of the public — some with notebooks, others with cameras. John presumed that the major papers had sent out a few of their lesser stringers to cover the dig, but he doubted anything else would ever be written about the find. Marianne walked up onto the site and stopped in her tracks when the wooden rib came into view. John and Bridget joined her there, at the edge of the yellow tape that blocked off the work area. A man nudged John and whispered to him, “All this for a lost two-by-four.”
The activity within the closed area was organized and thorough. The cutters took the individual squares of dirt down a foot at a time, the sifters went through the dirt and recorded anything of interest. By eleven, thirty squares were down to the two-foot level and the cutters had approached the inside edge of the wooden rib. Near it, they found more rivets and bits of
wood. Six of them conferred and after ten minutes moved the markers to remake their rectangle, placing the remains of the boat in the middle. It was slow sport. John went to get sandwiches an hour later and came back to find Marianne standing on her own. Her eyes were fixed on the space in front of her, one hand splayed unconsciously over the middle of her chest. She silently took the sandwich from John and began eating.
“Where’s Bridget?”
“She went inside.”
“The hotel?”
“What?” She broke off her contemplation of the dirt. “No, the truck there.”
He let her return to her staring. “You don’t want to —”
“No, John.”
Under that ground, so unhallowed that it had been the repository of the previous century’s garbage, was the only thing that could hold Marianne’s attention now. He had an instinct that she shouldn’t be in a public place, but what was in front of her was happening exclusively in public. And the men with the notebooks, the curious few who’d been admitted just for asking, those who nosed around and dismissed it as a pile of dirt, and those who lingered — all these were gone from her view. It was her alone with this emergence, the inch-by-cubic-inch thing that was the post she’d tethered herself to. He put a hand on her shoulder and then left her there.
Across the site, the machinery they’d seen milling around for two weeks was parked neatly in files, shovels and sledges lowered to the ground like grazing cattle. There were no workers anywhere on the site, despite the fact that the excavation took up less than a twentieth of the area available. He presumed a better case could be made for damages if the work stoppage was total, and no doubt they’d raise insurance issues too. It was very quiet within the barriers, except for the sound of the rubber tread on one of the sifting machines.
He wondered how he would begin to tell someone what had happened to them here. After the death of my girlfriend’s father, I was part of other people’s grief.
Bridget came out of the truck with a man behind her. She introduced John to Dr. Jarvis, the dig chief. “I’ll go down and talk with your mother,” he said. They watched Jarvis walk down to the dig and start to explain something to Marianne. She listened, nodding.
Standing beside and just slightly behind him, Bridget said, “Do you want to know what he told me in there?”
“Just the conclusions.”
“The clay is dropping four inches per foot.”
He took his eyes off Marianne, who’d turned to Dr. Jarvis and was listening more intently now. “I have no idea what that means.”
“This is all fill,” she said. “Clay is underneath. There’s organic matter, then sand, and then clay — the lakebed. Dr. Jarvis says that if the grade at the old shoreline turns out to be really steep, then the boat might not be in one piece. It could have been cracked up in the storm, and if it broke apart then the heavier sections could be deeper. The stowage could be under Queen’s Quay for all we know.” He watched Marianne walking toward them with Jarvis. “Are you seeing someone?” she said. “Besides my mother?”
He whipped around. “What? Come on, Bridget.”
Marianne looked exhausted, as though she’d spent the morning waiting for a child to be pulled from a well. “They’re going to stop,” she said. “Just for the rest of the afternoon. Dr. Jarvis says they have a machine that can look through the dirt. Is that right?”
Jarvis nodded, his eyes moving from John to Bridget. “You clocked him something good, huh?”
“I should’ve.”
“How can it see through dirt?” asked Marianne.
“It knocks on the ground and listens.”
“What a clever machine.” The representative from the ministry was waving people back from the hole with big circular sweeps of his arms. Marianne let the stream of people gather her up and the others fell in behind, walking toward the Lakeshore gate.
When she was out of earshot, John took Bridget by the wrist and drew her away from the crowd. “You haven’t looked me in the eye for five hours.”
“How can I look you in the eye, John?”
“Tell me one thing you’ve done since your father died that was for him? That wasn’t about saving face or proving someone wrong or backing off from everything?”
She took her wrist back sharply. “You arrogant bastard. I don’t have to justify myself to you. You were the one behind the wheel.”
“All he wanted was some of your attention.”
“I gave him that, and more.” The hotel was piled up behind her, its windows reflecting the city in discrete frames. He wondered if Marianne had backtracked to find them, but he couldn’t see her.
“You might have taken notice, but not because you wanted to.”
“Christ.” She stepped toward him. “You’ve only been around for seven years, John. Do you think I haven’t been through all of this already? That we haven’t all been through this? I went to digs, I saw him pull old muskets out of the ground like they were rabbits from hats, and turn up lost gravestones and cellars. I got dragged to these things plenty. I was standing three feet from my father when he uncovered Simcoe’s first parliament in this city. I can tell you all about that. Would you like that?”
“You can try me.”
She crossed her arms; she didn’t want to be pushed into giving him anything. “You know who Simcoe was?”
“Remind me.”
“He founded the city. Around 1800.”
“1793.”
“Whatever. He built a parliament somewhere near the lakeshore, at the eastern city limit. No one really knew where it was, but Dad figured it out. He made a couple of maps that showed the old shoreline and the new one and he figured out where the old streets were. He had scrolls of paper with old drawings on them. I remember him laying them down in a parking lot — with rocks in the corners to keep them from blowing away — and showing me and Mum and Alison where we were.
“We’d gone there with some of his students — there were a couple of politicians too, and a reporter, and we were beside a car wash near King Street and Parliament. This was 1981. I think it was 1981. There was a backhoe there, and some white rope tied to stakes, laid out in a square.”
“Just like they have here, right?”
“That’s right, John. Just like they do here. So don’t try to pull emotional rank on me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Are you coming back to the hotel?”
“What happened next?” She’d already turned to follow her mother, but when she saw he’d not budged, she faced him with her hands in her pockets. “I want you to tell me the rest of it.”
“I don’t remember the rest of it.”
“You do, though.”
She looked down to her right, her jaw set. “He told us he’d settled on that spot because he’d put all the information he had in a pile and looked through it and figured it couldn’t be farther south or north, and Parliament Street was where it has been for two hundred years. So that had to be the spot, or it was nowhere. Okay?”
“Were you excited?”
“I was cold. It was December.”
“Go on, Bridget.”
She brought her face around to him. “He asked the guy, this Iranian guy who owned the car wash, if they could dig, and he said go ahead. He just waved his hands at the ground, like it was the craziest thing he’d ever seen. They started digging, and the backhoe put big chunks of the asphalt in a pile, with dirt and bits of garbage. Dad’s students were sifting through it with white gloves. The backhoe kept putting big scoops down on the ground. Dad told us we were looking at dirt that was more than a century and a half old. Then someone shouted, and we all looked. There was a flashbulb and then a student held up this little thing the color of a water stain — you know, like in a sink.”
“What was it?”
“It was a swine tooth,” she said. “A tooth from a pig. We passed it around and looked at it. It had dirt packed so tight in the crown that you couldn’t scrape it out
. Then the backhoe blew its airhorn and we all looked into the hole and Dad hollered. There was a wood floor under the steel claw. Dad was surprised because he thought it would be farther down.
“We all stood at the edge of the hole. It was five feet deep, with a wood floor at the bottom, and no one was saying anything. Then the owner jumped up and down and shouted for us to keep digging and Dad waved the machine on. I remember the look on his face.”
“He was ecstatic.”
“Yeah.” She pulled a strand of hair out of the corner of her mouth, that beloved gesture. “It took an hour and then there was a whole room there, and the white ribbons surrounding the hole were like walls, except we couldn’t see them. We had to imagine them. There was a brick outline around the edges of the floor and a pair of stone steps. We all stood on them, in a dip where people’s shoes had worn it away. Dad told us there would have been a hand-painted sign above our heads that said this was the parliament. He said the men and women who walked across that wood floor built the whole city.
“One of the students gave him a clay pipe she’d found in one of the piles. It was very pretty. You could see that someone had made it by hand. It had a little lacy pattern around the bowl. Dad gave it to me.”
“He did?”
“He put it into my hand and closed my fingers over it and he said, ‘The past really happened.’” She couldn’t look at him.
“Can you hear yourself, Bridget? It matters. To you. At the very least, you can say that.”
“I’ve lost it, though. That pipe. How could it have mattered to me if I lost it?”
“You held it in your hand. You know something most people don’t.”
“Yeah. I know he died for a piece of clay I lost and a chunk of wood nobody in their right mind gives a fuck about!”
He tried to go to her, to draw her to him, but she stepped away, as if she were being pushed by a force field. He stood before her, helplessly, and held his hands out to her. “This whole place erases itself every day, it kills itself, Bridget . . . do you understand? It gets wiped clean like a hotel room. When your mother leaves the Harbour Light, they’ll vacuum up every molecule she’s left behind, and the next person who comes by won’t ever know she was there. They’re going to do the same thing behind this wall.”
Consolation Page 32