by Lisa Moore
She forgot the children; the children were asleep. She had been knocked back to a time before the children. Before anything except when she’d met Cal and, though it sounds silly and made up, though it sounds completely untrue, she’d decided to marry him the very first time she slept with him. This is mine, is what she thought. Let’s keep doing this.
Panic and beauty are inside each other, all the time, copulating in an effort to create more beauty and panic, and everybody gets down on his or her knees in the face of it. It is a demonic, angelic coupling.
Everybody who had listened to the radio in the morning knew by then that the men were dead, and they had tried to imagine the deaths and could not. Tim Brophy was sitting in Helen’s kitchen with his coat still on, his boots dripping over the linoleum.
He answered the phone when it rang, and it was Louise calling back. Louise was phoning back because Helen had hung up on her. Helen didn’t know what she was doing.
Later Helen would say: I didn’t even know I’d called you.
Louise called back and Tim answered, and Louise thought Tim was Cal. It was a weird mistake because Tim sounded nothing like Cal.
Louise said: Cal, I think Helen is losing her mind; she said you were dead.
Louise was forgetting that Cal was out on the rig.
And Tim Brophy said: It’s Tim Brophy from next door. The Ocean Ranger went down and it looks like no survivors. The whole bloody thing went under.
The men on the Seaforth Highlander saw the men in the water. One is always haunted by something, and that is what haunts Helen. The men on the Seaforth Highlander had been close enough to see some of the men in the waves. Close enough to talk. The men were shouting out before they died. Calling out for help. Calling out to God or calling for mercy or confessing their sins. Or just mentioning they were cold. Or they were just screaming. Noises.
The ropes are frozen, the men on board the Highlander were telling the men in the water. The men on the Highlander were compelled to narrate all their efforts so that the dying men would know unequivocally that they had not been abandoned. And the Highlander crew were in danger of being washed over themselves but they stayed out there in the gale on the slippery deck and took the waves in their faces and tried to cling on and did not give in to fear. They stayed out there because you don’t give up while men are in the water, even if it means you might die yourself.
We’re cutting the ropes.
Have you got the ropes cut?
Bastard is all iced over.
Hurry up.
And there must have come a moment, Helen thinks, when all this shouting back and forth was no longer about turning the event around, because everybody on both sides knew there would be no turning it around. The men in the water knew they would die and the men on board knew the men in the water would die. But they kept trying anyway.
And then all the shouting was just for company. Because who wants to watch a man being swallowed by a raging ocean without yelling out to him. They had shouted to the men in the water. They had tried to reach the men with grappling hooks. They saw them and then they did not see them. It was as simple as that.
… . .
John in the Dining Room, November 2008
IN THE LATE morning light John brushes his teeth and stands for a minute looking at his reflection. It was midnight last night before he made it through the revolving door and checked into his hotel in Toronto. He doesn’t like his shirt and he doesn’t have time to change it. But he wriggles out of it fast and a button comes off and pings against the counter. He pulls on a cashmere sweater. His mother gave him a black cashmere sweater for Christmas last year.
John runs his hand over his face and stands still like that, his eyes closed, full of excitement and jet lag. He’s nauseated. Then he pats all his pockets, and his wallet in his back pocket and the swipe key in his wallet, and he’s out the door and waiting for the elevator and down two floors, and three girls get in and the smell of shampoo and the damn thing goes up two floors and the girls get out, and then it goes down to the lobby.
He’s greeted at the entrance of the restaurant and he takes in all the tables. Jane isn’t here yet. He’s glad she isn’t here. He wants to see her walk in. An hour later he has read the paper or tried to read it. Obama gaining in North Virginia. Change. The time has come for change. Yes we can.
John orders poached eggs and they come with grilled asparagus, two pieces crossed like an X on the white plate, and a broiled tomato that he doesn’t touch. The asparagus stinks. He hates that smell. It smells of an overripeness that sickens him. He cuts the egg with the side of his fork and the yellow spills all over the white plate and he puts down his fork. The burst yellow eye of the egg stares up at him. He’s not hungry. A minute ago he was ravenous and now he can’t touch the food.
A woman is standing next to him as big as a house and he nearly tips over the chair standing up and his napkin falls to the carpet.
I fell asleep, Jane says. I’m sorry. I fall asleep all the time. Sitting up in a chair sometimes. Hours and hours. Yesterday I fell asleep in the lotus position. I have no control. Out like a light. The alarm was ringing when I woke up.
You’re so big, John says.
Anyway, I’m late, she says. I’m sorry.
Beautiful, I mean, John says. But he is not at all sure. He knows there is a baby coming but he has not imagined Jane’s body. He has not imagined this beach ball that gives her a waddle, and the softness in her face. He leans over to pick up his napkin and Jane must think he is going to kiss her and moves in and they bang foreheads. Then he tries to make it look that way, like he was going to kiss her, but it’s too late. Two women in business suits at the next table stare at him.
Then Jane looks as if she hears something. She looks distracted and absorbed.
Oh, she says. Oh. She grabs his wrist and puts his hand on her belly.
John feels a ripple, a soft bump.
Did you feel anything, Jane asks. She is lit up. She shifts his hand an inch or so. Do you feel it?
… . .
Free Fall, December 2008
HELEN PUTS IN the other earring. She is going to a concert. There will be Christmas carols and a trapeze artist and men dressed as toy soldiers, and fifty teenage girls in spandex Santa suits cut to show the cheeks of their bums.
She straightens her rhinestone necklace and catches herself in the mirror. She touches the skin under one eye with the tip of her finger. How did this happen? Decades have passed. Centuries.
Sleet rattles the bedroom window; she squirts perfume on her wrist, touches her wrists together.
I’ve got to pick up my grandson, Barry said this afternoon. So, it was his grandson. It was not a wife or girlfriend. It was not a lover. She felt elated. The cellphone rang and he said, I’ll be there, Henry.
My grandson, he said to Helen. He closed the phone with a little flick of his wrist and went suddenly very still. There, in the bird feeder on the window: a blue jay. Where had it come from? How blue. And it flew away.
He let her know, just as if it were any of her business. Not another woman; a grandson.
Tonight a girl of twenty-two, a trapeze artist, will climb two flowing strips of white fabric suspended from the theatre ceiling. Some sort of fabric with sway and give. Hand over hand the girl will climb, until she is suspended in a spotlight. Helen will cover her eyes and squirm in her seat. It is too high. The rhinestone necklace from her fifth wedding anniversary; she looks haggard in the mirror.
Life barrels through; it is gone. Something rushes through. The front door slams and then a door slams in the back; something burns on the stove; birthdays, brides and caskets; babies, bankruptcy, huge strokes of luck, the trees full of ice; gone. She touches her necklace. All gone. She grips the arm of her chair. Switches off the lamp and watches a car come down the hill. The headlights burn through the lace curtain. Pattern on the wall. A pause for the stop sign, then the car turns the corner and the shadow of the curtain moves aroun
d the whole room: her dresser, her cardigan on the hook, the mirror, and Helen’s face and arms.
The Christmas show is a fundraiser for the families of soldiers in Afghanistan and her grandson is an angel in the second act. Timmy is an angel.
At the show, Helen spots Patience in the front row, in front of Timmy. Helen bought wings for them at the dollar store. The children sing and twirl and patter off.
Then there is a meaningful hush. The audience anticipates. Two white strips of fabric unfurl from the ceiling. A fog machine switches on and the ballet dancers move on tiptoe across the stage into the wings. The aurora borealis is on the scrim, and stars descend from the rafters, and there is no net, ladies and gentlemen. Please note. There is no net.
The girl in white, in flaring sequins, has climbed the streaming bands of fabric. She is too high. The girl has wrapped herself in the fabric and she does not hold on. She swings her arms in an arc over her head.
The applause comes in bursts and it climbs a ladder and climbs back down and quiets itself.
If I were to ask Barry to stay for dinner, Helen thinks. She has her hand over her eyes; she cannot watch this young girl thirty feet above them. Instead, Helen sees herself putting down a candle on the dinner table. She sees the good silverware.
She cannot ask him.
The girl swings one leg so the fabric circles her thigh, once, twice. She swings the other leg so that leg is wrapped in fabric too.
I could not use candles, Helen thinks. How formal it would seem, and full of expectation. She is abashed. Candles? Candles are romantic and intimate, and she will not use candles, she’ll put the dimmer up as far as it will go. She’ll light the meal like a shopping mall.
Would Barry take off the baseball cap?
He said the room was shaping up. What do you think, he said. They were standing together in the empty room.
I’m almost done, Helen, he said.
It looks pretty good.
I have to say, he agreed. He nodded at the ceiling.
The girl falls all at once, the girl is tumbling to the stage, tumbling and unwrapping, tipping, somersaulting towards the stage, and there is no net and the audience cries out, and she snags halfway down. Helen flings out an arm in terror and hits Louise in the seat next to her. A smack on the chest.
The girl dangles in mid air, triumphant. Wild clapping that breaks like waves.
Louise grips Helen’s wrist. It’s part of the show, Louise whispers.
Helen will ask Barry for supper. She will risk candles. What the hell. She will risk candles if she bloody well feels like candles.
THE NEW YEAR
Fireworks, January 2009
THE FIREWORKS WERE moved from the harbour to Quidi Vidi Lake because it occurred to someone to be careful of the oil tanks over on the South Side. Barry said they could park the truck up in the White Hills.
I’ll come get you, he said.
That sounds nice, said Helen.
You know, there by the school, the building, whatever it is they have up there.
The building up there, Helen said.
There’s a good view, Barry said.
I’d say that’d be the spot, all right, Helen said.
Around eleven thirty, then.
Barry had finished the renovations three weeks before. He’d left his tools and said he’d be back to get them. A few days later his stuff was gone and Helen’s house key glittered on the bristly welcome mat.
Imagine if a spark from them fireworks landed on those oil tanks, Barry said. Helen was talking on the phone and looking out her bedroom window. The South Side Hills had long, dangerous icicles all over their craggy cliffs. Snow streaked the smooth bare rock farther up. The five white tanks, fat and implacable against the blue sky.
What if I cooked supper for us, Helen said. She had not meant to say it. She heard something crunch. It must have been an empty pop can. Barry had crunched a pop can in his fist.
I don’t want you to go to any trouble, he said.
If you’re too busy, she said.
What time, he asked.
Everybody in town had the same idea. Helen and Barry couldn’t get near the White Hills because of the traffic. They parked, and it was snowing lightly and the ground crunched and squeaked with new snow. They walked down to the lake. There were long lines of traffic and the snow fell between the crawling cars and shone in the soft fans of the yellow headlights.
There were teenagers hanging out of a van in the Employment and Immigration parking lot. The doors of the van were open and music was thumping into the cold air. The kids had fake ice cubes in their drinks that crackled with light. The girls were shrill. One swaying blonde in a rabbit-fur bomber jacket yelled Happy New Year to Helen and raised her glass so beer slopped over the side and sizzles of light from the fake ice cubes shot out through her fingers.
Earlier, Helen had answered the door after the bell rang and she was dressed up and Barry was not dressed up. He wore jeans speckled with paint and a plaid shirt. They’d sat down to eat almost at once because there was nothing to say. The risotto had been gluey and cold. The beef was grey. Helen had just finished serving herself and she pushed out her chair and it screeched over the hardwood. Barry glanced up, startled and guilty looking. He was wiping his empty plate clean with a chunk of bread before she had even started.
There had been a hole in the centre of the dining room and all the things a man and woman could say to each other had dropped into the hole, and it had closed over, and the new hardwood floor gleamed shiny and mute. It was a silence full of what they expected, and what they expected was turned up on bust, and it was sexual and full of need and too much to expect. Helen had the dryer going at the back of the house and she and Barry listened to the clothes tumbling around. Something with snaps scraped and was muffled and scraped again, over and over.
Then Barry brought up the subject of his ex-wife. He glossed over the subject. He put his hand against the edge of the table and pushed his chair out and ran his other hand down the front of his shirt, and bread crumbs bounced onto the floor, and then he just casually mentioned his ex-wife.
She took up with my best friend, he said. Old story. This was long ago. They collect meteors in Nevada.
Helen’s plate was full of food and she didn’t want to touch it but she couldn’t leave it there. The gravy had congealed with a crackled sheen over the cold risotto.
You mean, like comet tails, she said. She stabbed a limp shred of colourless broccoli, then shook it off her fork.
Worth their weight in gold, Barry said. Chunks as big as your head. The two of them out there, shovelling sand. They got a house built almost entirely of glass. That’s not what they do for a living, he said. That’s what they do for fun.
And this was the wistful closing statement about the ex-wife. The mother of his son. He did not begrudge his ex-wife falling stars.
Helen suddenly remembered to put on music. Something perverse or decadent made her choose Frank Zappa. Barry poured them a second glass of wine.
I’m not kidding, Helen, he said. This is a fine meal.
Helen’s mouth was full. She chewed and swallowed and flapped at the kitchen with her white napkin.
Go, she said. Help yourself.
Do you mind, he said.
She laid her hand flat on her chest and swallowed and gulped wine. Be my guest, she said.
Barry came back with his plate heaped up and he was saying about the journalist who’d thrown a shoe at Bush. Did you see that on the Net? Then he said about the mayor who had thrown up in her purse years ago. He’d done her floors too. She was a ticket, Barry said. And then the new mayor had demanded that a councillor bring him DDT in a cereal bowl with a spoon and he’d eat the whole goddamn thing for breakfast. Because there was nothing wrong with it. DDT wouldn’t hurt a fly, that mayor had told the TV cameras.
Helen said, Shut up. Stop. She was laughing. Barry had worked his hand into his pocket and then he took out a lighter and lit t
he candles. He walked over to the wall switch and dimmed the lights while he was talking.
Helen raised her hand, clutching her napkin, and lifted one finger to make him stop. I have to show you, she said.
What?
She was already up the stairs and he was following two at a time.
You have to see, she said. Helen stumbled forward in the dark and turned on the gooseneck lamp on her dresser. The wedding dress she’d been working on lay over the arm of a chair. It was finished.
That’s really something, Barry said.
And the girl who is going to wear it, Helen said.
That’s a beautiful thing, Barry said.
Helen had a hundred-watt bulb in that lamp and it hit the white satin and the dress was blazing white. Pearls and sequins sparking, light spilling along the folds, beading up like mercury and spreading in all directions.
Then it struck Helen that they were in her bedroom, and the wine hit too. Her bed was appalling. The pillows were appalling and the personal things on her dresser were appalling: her deodorant; a pair of nylons that still held the shape of the ball of her foot, shiny with dirt, and the rest like a crumpled reptile skin, faintly shiny and lewd; a black patent-leather evening purse with a broken strap. She had come into her bedroom forgetting it was her bedroom. She had come in by accident. She turned off the light to make the bed go away, and Barry said her name.
Then they were in the dark. Just standing in the dark, and Barry was not sure what to do. Helen fumbled around for the light and turned it back on. It was an uncompromising light. Barry looked at his watch.
It’s time to get down to the lake, he said. Or we’ll miss the fireworks.
And now Helen and Barry were in a crowd at the lake. A bang clapped against the low hills and they both turned. The explosion of light seemed to reach through the darkness towards them. It was coming at them fast. Silence followed the bang, deepened and became fathomless. The light flew into their faces as silent as something at the bottom of the ocean. Helen stepped back. The snow crunching under her boots. Then the booms overlapped. The fireworks looked like underwater plants. Starfish, phosphorescent flowers with stamens and petals and seeds. They pushed up out of the dark and were extinguished by it before they could touch or come anywhere near her.