by Angie Abdou
We’re almost back at the truck when Nicholas drops my hand and turns to face me. We stand still on the boardwalk, looking at each other for an awkward three seconds before he finds his words. “Eli, did that exhibit at the museum ...” He has his serious-thinking face, the three deep lines on the bridge above his nose. “Did the exhibit say anything about where Elijah is buried?”
I shake my head. “Tell me,” I say. “I want to know.” But I don’t want to know. I do not want to know, at all. Or maybe I already know.
Dear _______,
I can no longer even pretend I write these letters to my Eli, who seems to drift farther away from us every day.
He turns his face to me but doesn’t see me. There’s no baby-love for me in his eyes. Nothing of my Elly Belly.
I thought the new warmth between Nicholas and me (his kisses on my cheeks, my laughter at his jokes, our returning to each other, if in small steps) would make Eli happy. But Eli’s face reveals not even a shadowy recollection of happiness.
I always knew I’d forgive Nicholas. I couldn’t do it right away, of course. I needed to make a show of my anger. And then Nicholas needed to enact his penance. I wouldn’t want this Danica sort-of-thing cropping up again and again like a resilient virus. But the act—I always knew I would forgive it. I never wholly believed in monogamy in the first place. I understood this would happen to one of us, eventually. Maybe both.
That’s how I think of it—that Danica happened to Nicholas. “Sorry, Nicholas is incapacitated just now. He’s down with a bad case of infidelity.” Or, “We’re going through a bit of a rough spot just now. Nicholas was hit head-on by a giant, speeding Infidelity.”
It hurts, of course. Not the betrayal—I barely think of it as such—but the image of another woman in his arms. But I also know it could have happened to me just as easily, stepping into the street and accidentally falling into a hidden hole of adultery. It could happen yet, if I don’t step more carefully.
Even before Danica, I’d been feeling it, a sort of middle-aged unrest. Boredom. A turning away from Nicholas, my feelers out for someone else to turn toward. Someone new. Even before Sam.
In my Old English poems, the worst insult is to call someone a promise breaker (wœrlogan). Before people could write or read, keeping spoken promises ensured a smoothly running society. Is Nicholas a promise-breaker, a wœrlogan? Did he and I promise absolute fidelity? I don’t know if we were ever that naïve. Our promise fell more along the lines of: shit will come up, and we will try to deal with it. Together.
Shit has come up.
Dr Laird once told me: “The hardest thing to accept is that we can only live one life.”
It’s true. Before Danica, I imagined myself walking down a beautiful road—the road of Nicholas and Eli—but I couldn’t hold my mind (“my little humming bird of a mind” as Nicholas calls it) focussed on that road. My eyes drifted down side streets, curious. I needed to remind myself constantly of the merits of the road I had chosen. “This is my life,” I said it to myself over and over again, as if the single phrase—“This is my life”—would root me, help me stay the course. “Enjoy this road.”
But in the end, Nicholas beat me to the detour. Taking my own, afterward, would be predictable in the most mundane way, wouldn’t it? I will resist, after all. From here on in.
And there’s a newness in our rediscovery of each other. I can take joy in that. With my first husband, I veered off course as soon as I knew the road by heart. With Nicholas, I’m surprised to learn that, after we pushed through that lull, we might find something better on the other side. I hadn’t known that could happen.
Now we need Eli to join us on our road. We miss him.
CHAPTER TEN
I know Elijah now. His story is my story. Elijah came with his family to Canada, to Ontario, from Syria and almost immediately started to work in a mine.
He was—I was—twelve. His “ethnic background” worked against him there, held him down, but he followed the adventure (and the money) to Coalton, where he could create his own background, invent his own story. But in all of his years in Coalton, he never dropped his Muslim religion. As a father, he took his two boys out under the night skies, pointed at the canopy of stars and said, “This is Allah. This is Allah’s magnificence.” I remember pausing here, letting this sink into my young boys’ minds. “You remember what I say. We go to their church because we must in order to belong here. You smile when they tell you stories of their Jesus. You smile and nod, but here”—he held his fingertips to his heart and then touched those fingers to the same spot on each child’s chest—“here, we believe in Allah. Here we love Allah. Nobody can control what we do here.” Elijah pressed his hand firmly to his chest while he and his two boys gazed upon the infinite star-scape.
Despite his personal, secret devotion to Allah, Elijah attended Catholic mass every Sunday. Nobody would ever call Elijah a dumb man. He knew to keep up appearances. How could he be a leader to men if they thought he wasn’t a good Christian? Only the priest knew Elijah had never been baptized. The priest refused to give Elijah communion but put up with his tricks, like getting in line and kneeling without taking the offering. In the priest’s eyes, Elijah could see his own inadequacy, his shame. It was a feeling that had nothing to do with those words Elijah spoke to his sons under the stars—true words—but with a heaviness that burned in his chest.
I lived a lie.
The Catholic Church would not let me be buried inside the Coalton Cemetery. I remember now. I remember all of it. I told Ursula on my death bed, “Keep it quiet, my burial. Nobody else need know.” Even then, even with death hovering, I wouldn’t take their holy water on my forehead. I would let them put my body in a small cemetery for the unclean. A cemetery the city would neglect and then forget.
These memories flood through me in raging waves now. That history is no longer a faint trace of a memory floating past now and then—my coal-blackened hands in the wash basin or the strong taste of whiskey at the end of a long day or my hand holding a five-dollar bill, arm stretched out to sweet, smiling Mary. I learned new ways for a new country, loosening some of my old rules as I made this place my home. The memories come to me full and solid, while Nicholas and Lucy fade.
I remember my sons James Mountain and Isaac Mountain—names that would raise no suspicion here in Coalton, names that would not hint at their otherness, at my otherness. I could have called them James Montagne and Isaac Montagne. Or Góra. Or Ropa. I even considered Berg, knowing that Germanic descent would be the quickest explanation for my blue eyes. In Coalton, blue eyes in a brown face seem startling, but in Syria, it’s common. The Crusaders brought blue eyes to my home country. My blue-eyed boys could have been Isaac and James Berg.
But we were Elijah Mountain, James Mountain, Isaac Mountain. Fully of this new place. When the Coalton mines boomed, the workers there spoke over thirty different languages. Hiding my true origins amongst that hubbub was easy.
I see James and Isaac sitting in the church pew, next to me and their mother, Ursula, their hands crossed in their laps. They smile and nod, as I have taught them. Ursula has combed her hair smooth, combed until it shines. She wears a bright gold clip to hold the hair out of her pale blue eyes. She watches the boys proudly and touches her fingers to the back of my hand. It is a kind of thanks. Thank you for these boys. Thank you for this life. Ursula puts her gratitude in her touch. She is a good woman.
I do not deserve her gratitude or her goodness. Not all of my memories are as pleasant as this one.
I must pull myself back from Elijah’s reality. I need to make a show of belonging to Eli’s life too.
***
Lucy tells me I’ve spent enough time on the couch.
“You don’t have a fever. You haven’t thrown up. You’re not even coughing.” She speaks sternly in a way that doesn’t suit her. I hear the fear behind it. Or maybe it’s only uncertainty, which, with Lucy, is close enough. I flinch when she pulls the blanket of
f me and throws it over the back of the couch. A whiff of stale boy air raises with it.
“C’mon. Get up, kiddo. Some fresh air, that’s all you need.” Kiddo is a word Lucy has picked up from her new friend Patricia.
Lucy says we should go outside because that’s what’s best for me, but I know she only wants an excuse to go drink wine in Patricia’s kitchen. And I’m right. That’s where we head as soon as she’s corralled me into clothes and out the door. Once there, I try to stick close to Patricia and Lucy, hovering by the oven and its smell of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. While they talk, Patricia pours me a huge glass of milk and puts two still-warm cookies on a small plate just for me. I touch one cookie lightly, testing its heat. The chocolate melts on my fingertip. I put the finger in my mouth and suck. I want to save one of the cookies to take away for Mary, but then I remember: Mary won’t eat a cookie.
My Mary never eats. She picks berries for me. She sits with me while I eat and rubs the colour from the berries on her own lips. But I have never seen Mary swallow them herself.
The first time Lucy and I came to Patricia’s house, Lucy gawked at the twelve-foot ceilings, the wall of windows framing the Lizard Range, the custom-built aqua cabinets.
“Swimming Pool Blue, we call it,” Patricia told us. “We figured if we were going to build, we might as well have something original. Something us. All this blue reminds Steven of his swim team days.” She walked Lucy and me through the house, pointing out other features—the gigantic aqua-coloured tiled shower with dual-head rain faucets, another bathroom with a whole separate room for the toilet, in-floor heating on every level of the house, a fireplace in the master bedroom.
“I’m not good at numbers. They don’t stick in my head.” Patricia said this the way she might explain she had a peanut allergy or an intolerance for gluten. “I can tell you how much our driveway cost though—ten thousand dollars. The back patio—another ten thousand dollars. The extra sliding door off the kitchen onto a barbeque deck—ten thousand dollars. The hot tub? You got it. Ten grand. Let’s just call everything—another ten thousand dollars. I had to put a stop to it. Wanting something is not the only prerequisite to getting it, I had to tell him.”
“It’s a beautiful house, though, Patricia. Gorgeous.” Lucy sighed the words. I almost told her then: it’s not Elijah’s house that suffocates you. A new house would make no difference now. For any of us. It’s our history that suffocates us.
“Yes, yes, it’s a beautiful house, but can we afford it? Do we need it? The outside gets looks—the high, slanted rooftops, the funky angles. At night, lit up, it’s fine art. ‘One of the top five homes in Coalton,’ Steven says. But do we need to live in fine art?”
“I wouldn’t mind living in art,” Lucy said, lazily stroking a forged-iron staircase railing. But Lucy doesn’t gawk anymore. She’s now used to Patricia’s house. Lucy pulls a leather barstool up to the sandstone countertop and waits for her coffee. Patricia fiddles with an elaborate espresso maker, nozzles steaming and foaming. The sickening smell of coffee beans fills the kitchen. I hold the back of my hand across my nose, wishing my skin smelled like trees and dust and berries. Wishing that it smelled like Mary.
Patricia sets a doll-sized cup of coffee in front of Lucy and then hands her a tiny stirring stick made of brown sugar. “Here you go, sweetheart.”
The kitchen stretches over to a small staircase. I can see down the stairs to where Gracie and Quinn watch television, both tummy-down on the floor, bowls of cereal at their chins. Lucy and Patricia will make it their project to get me to join the other kids, to force the three of us outside to play, because that will be “good” for us. I would rather stay in the kitchen, drink milk, and listen to Patricia’s gossip.
“How are those cookies, kiddo?”
I nod and make a show of taking a bite, though I keep it small. The longer it takes me to eat the cookies, the longer I can stay inside with the women. Like Mary, I’ve lost my appetite. Patricia studies me for a few seconds longer than feels comfortable before saying, “My kids would never sit here quietly like this while adults talk.” She smiles at Lucy. “Quinn is a few years older now, but at this age, he was pure untamed energy flying in every direction. He’d grab hold of the adult conversation and pull it in whatever direction he wanted.” She ruffles my hair and I feel dismissed, somehow less than a real-life energetic boy should be. Patricia seems to have forgotten me entirely when she next speaks, a giggle simmering at the surface of her words. “News around the town is that your hot neighbour—who we all thought was single!—has a wife, and she’s coming back!” Patricia bends over, peering into the oven at her last batch of cookies while she talks. She doesn’t see the pain cross Lucy’s face. I’m about to tell them the wife’s name is Tamara, but I don’t want to remind them I’m still here. I stay invisible.
“You know Sam?” Lucy stirs her sugar stick in small fast circles around her miniature coffee cup. She looks at it, rather than Patricia, and keeps her voice even.
Patricia’s laugh explodes, full and loud. “Name a woman in Coalton who doesn’t know Sam! Tall, dark, and handsome.” Patricia pulls off quilted blue oven mitts that match her kitchen tiles and hangs them neatly above her stove. “He’d be a hard one not to notice.”
Lucy darts her eyes my way, then shoots Patricia a meaningful look, and I already know what’s coming.
“Gracie! Quinn! Why don’t you two take our guest out to the yard? Show him the new tree fort. Or take him down to the park. Play some ball.” Groans rise up from the television room, but otherwise there’s no movement. “C’mon, kiddos! Snap-snap! That’s enough television for the day. Ten, nine, eight ...” I don’t know what happens when Patricia gets to zero because Gracie and Quinn bound up the stairs and are standing by my side before she makes it to four.
“C’mon, Eli.” Quinn shrugs for me to follow him out the door. He looks bored already. Gracie imitates his expression and posture the same way she’d wear her older brother’s football jacket. It doesn’t fit. When Quinn looks away, Gracie eyes me with curiosity. She makes sure he doesn’t see her interest, but I see it.
“Eli does look like some fresh air, and exercise will do him well,” Patricia says to Lucy. “He’s still not back to full health, is he? Poor boy.”
Poor boy. It’s the story of my life.
Gracie and Quinn don’t have red hair like me. They’re not skinny like me. They don’t carry an inhaler like me. I bet they don’t like comic books like me. They seem to be the kind of kids who are good at sports, bad at school. Gracie will be in my class in the fall, if Lucy even tries to send me to school this year, and Quinn’s two years ahead.
I know I should “make conversation.” I know I should ask them about themselves. “Don’t just stare,” Nicholas would say. “Do something.” But I can’t think of a single question. Nothing comes to me. Quinn, Gracie, and I—we might as well be from different centuries. I cannot imagine myself into their world. I do smile when Gracie looks at me, though. It would be nice if she liked me.
Quinn doesn’t look at me at all. He walks six strides ahead like he’s embarrassed to be seen with us or like maybe he doesn’t even know us. Gracie tries to walk quickly to keep up, but when she notices me labouring, she slows her pace. They take me to Elgin Park with its big cedar trees and open fields of grass. I never come to Elgin Park or to any park. Why would I when we have a forest right out our back door? More than anything I want Mary, but she wouldn’t understand this place any more than I do.
Quinn leads us into a big bush near the centre of the park. We squish through the branches and a clearing opens up in its middle. You can tell people use this space inside the bush as a secret fort. Beer cans and cigarette butts litter the ground. Quinn sits down cross-legged in the dirt and stares at the sky through the small opening in the shrubbery. “We can veg out here for an hour and then go back. Then I don’t have to worry someone will see me hanging out with you two.”
“Quinn!” Gra
cie puts both hands on her hips. Quinn looks up at her from under his squinched together eyebrows with a trace of guilt. “That’s. Not. Nice.” Gracie pronounces each word with a punch. I get the feeling she has very little tolerance for people being not nice, especially to her.
“Gracie, you guys are grade five. I’m in junior high. I can’t get caught hanging out at the playground with a couple of elementary school kids.”
Gracie stands above Quinn with her legs spread, hands still on her hips. Her thighs flex, big and strong beneath her thin pants, and I wonder if she does gymnastics. She’s mad at Quinn, but she doesn’t look like she’ll cry. She doesn’t look like she ever cries. Whatever Quinn sees, softens him. “C’mon Gracie. You’re a good sister. Let’s just hang out here.”
“What’re we going to do in here for an hour?” Gracie’s body softens, and a pout creeps into her question.
In the quiet lull that follows, they remember me. I hope they don’t expect me to be the answer. I still stand—embarrassed and apart—half hidden amongst the leaves. My fingers play at the puffer that Lucy stuck into the pocket of my shorts before we left. The dust in here is quite bad for my asthma, actually.
“Come in, Eli. Sit down.” Gracie plops down and pats the ground next to her. “It’s okay in here. Kind of cool. Most people don’t even know it’s here. We could play I Spy.”
“Not that,” Quinn groans.
“We could play x’s and o’s in the dirt. Or Hang-Man.”
“Boring.” Quinn picks up a cigarette butt from the ground and I worry he might try to smoke it. Cigarette smoke is actually very, very bad for my asthma. All the doctors say so.
“Do you know any games, Eli?”
I hear kindness in Gracie’s voice, and even though I don’t quite trust it, I try hard to think of games I like. I want to please her. Let’s see, I like when Lucy tells me about medieval philosophers. I like making comic books about a redhead species. I like hanging out with Mary. I like researching Coalton history.