In Case I Go

by Angie Abdou

  I try to push Mary from my mind and stay inside the front-seat chatter. Tamara tells Patricia and Lucy about disincarnates, souls who don’t realize they can go through to the other side. Instead, they find themselves stuck in the pain and suffering of this life. “They don’t know freedom is only a thought away. They don’t know the portal is always open.”

  I let Tamara’s ideas pass over me. That’s one way of putting it, I guess. I wonder if she’s just throwing words at the things we don’t understand to see what will stick. Souls, ghosts, intuitions. “Intuition about your ancestors,” that’s what Sam had said. “Talking with the old people.”

  “Some spirits don’t know how to die,” she says without looking at Patricia and Lucy, her hands clenched on the stirring wheel. “How to find rest. They need a little help to the other side.”

  So that’s what Tamara thinks. She seems to believe Mary and Elijah need to learn how to die, so that Sam’s Mary and I can learn how to live. If only life and history and obligation were as simple as Tamara wants to think. Not even living and dying are as simple as Tamara wants to think. Tamara can bite my ass.

  The road grows curvy, and the blur out the window less enjoyable. I think to ask Tamara to slow down. I almost explain about the roll and heave of my stomach, the acid burn at the bottom of my throat, the growing itch in my sinuses, the hot rocks filling my lungs. But Tamara doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who slows down because a young boy tells her to so I swallow hard and stay quiet. It’s no use. The liquid rush of saliva fills my mouth no matter how hard and fast I swallow. I close my eyes tight. The dark makes the heave and burn worse.

  Around the next corner, I lose control of my body. My scrambled-egg breakfast spills down the front of my shirt and onto Tamara’s freshly vacuumed floor. Lucy let me have extra ketchup this morning. Now, the ketchup, on the floor and on my shirt, looks like blood. I can feel the mix of eggs and sauce in my nose. I try to blow hard to get rid of the feeling, but I retch again. Tamara swerves hard to the side of the road—“Shit, shit, shit. No, no, no!”—and then all the women’s voices mix together: “Oh god.” “Oh honey.” “Oh no!” Hands come at me. Someone wipes my face with a smelly wet piece of tissue that tastes like something Lucy would use to clean the oven. I retch some more. While the hands come at me, Lucy and the other two argue about whether it’s safe to have stopped on the side of the winding road with such a thin shoulder.

  “My fucking truck,” Tamara says, and we’re back on the highway, racing and weaving. Lucy hangs over the seat trying to clean me, saying, “Oh honey. Oh sweetie. Oh shit.”

  I try to tell them I need to go home to Mary, but they shush and fuss and pretend I haven’t said a thing.

  By the time we pull over in a large rest area, my stomach has stopped its violent dance. I tell them not to worry; I have no more throw up in me. But that doesn’t calm them. Patricia and Lucy hold the backs of their hands across their noses. Tamara scowls. “Fuck,” she says. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  The sign above the row of trash cans announces: GARBAGE FOR TOURIST USE ONLY. OTHER USERS DUMPING REFUSE WILL BE PROSECUTED. Lucy stands there, a ripped rag reeking of my vomit dangling from her fingertips. We change my clothes and throw my dirty ones in the tourist garbage cans.

  Tamara puts a hand on my shoulder and holds my eyes with hers. First, she has to put a finger under my chin and lift my head to get to my eyes. I worry she’s going to say “fuck” some more. “If you feel sick again,” she says, “tell me. Just tell me.” She slides her hand off my shoulder and rubs it in two warm circles across my back. Her hand feels so good that I smile.

  “Okay. I will tell you.” I drop my head. “Sorry.”

  “No worries, Eli. We can’t always control what our bodies do. Not always. But we can speak the fuck up!” She winks as if the f-word is just a joke this time. “Now, let’s go!” Tamara thumps her hand hard on the hood of her red truck. “It’s not a real road trip until someone barfs.”

  The truck doesn’t smell too bad, but we drive with the side windows all the way down. The women laugh again in the front and tell their worst road-trip-barf stories. The loud rush of the highway wind keeps most of their words from me, and I focus my attention on my stomach, on the back of my throat, on my sinuses. This time, I will tell Tamara if I feel the heave, the burn, the itch. I will tell her right away.

  The talking and laughing in the front slows, and I pull my attention away from the signs of my body and look out the window. We’ve turned onto a dirt road. Tamara slows down, and her truck dips and weaves through the big ruts in the road. I’m getting used to the new pain in my body, but I hear myself moan every time we hit a bad bump. Lucy wraps her fingers around my ankle. “We’re almost there, baby. We’re almost there.” Tamara tries to drive around the worst of them, but the road grows narrow, and she’s swearing again. I bet Lucy and Patricia want to remind her that coming here—wherever here might be—is her idea.

  We’re in the forest now, but it’s not green like at home. It’s brown everywhere. Dust blows in the windows, and Tamara swears some more. I know if it wasn’t for me and my barf, she’d roll up the windows and keep this awful dryness where it belongs—outside. I feel the grit of it, scratchy in my eyes. Dust coats my tongue. My breath rattles in my chest. We pass rusted cars, quads, and smashed-up snowmobiles in the brown grass, under the thirsty trees. We pass broken-down cabins that make Elijah’s house look like a castle. The road creeps up and up. We keep climbing in our cloud of dust, but nobody asks Tamara where she’s taking us anymore. We’re all scared. We don’t want to know.

  When we come to a fork in the road, Tamara takes the steepest, most rutted direction, and we go up some more. We pass NO TRES PASSING signs. We pass KEEP OUT OR ELSE signs. And Tamara keeps driving. Finally, the dust gets so bad that Tamara must roll up the window, locking us all into the smell of dust and vomit. Nobody complains. Nobody says anything. We stare out at the mountain forest, as dry as death.

  I’ve almost given up on arriving—anywhere, ever—when the road levels out, and I realize we’re not climbing anymore. The forest has thinned to a clearing. But this place, it’s not the kind of somewhere I recognize.

  What did I expect? I’m not sure. Tamara said she knew a place that would make me better. Maybe I pictured a hospital? Tamara has not brought us to a hospital. I sit up and put my face against the dusty glass of the window. Chickens run everywhere, scraggly, dirty chickens and geese and ducks. Don’t ducks usually live near water? On lakes? There is no water here. Everything seems covered with a filter of dust, and my tongue sits caked and heavy in my dry mouth.

  Also, there are goats. And the goat smell. I want to hold my breath. The goats watch the vehicle pull in, and then they walk slowly toward us. The noise they make sounds like pain and loneliness and need. It is almost like the cry of a human baby, but a baby without hope, a baby who knows how bad things can get.

  I don’t want to see the sad goats. I don’t want to smell them. Where are the people? I see a large garden, mostly dead and overgrown. I can imagine Mrs Evanhart working in that garden with her dirty flip-flopped feet.

  I wonder where Lucy and I will sleep tonight—if we stay the night. Maybe I expected a hotel? There are two small rusty trailers and a garage. At the far end of the property, there is one small house, but not like any house I’ve seen before. I stare at the strange domed building, willing people to come out—someone to explain this place. I want someone to stop the goats from crying. I want someone to bring my Mary to me so my lungs stop hurting, so my limbs quit feeling like they’re being stretched apart. Someone must come and help us.

  Our arrival has struck us all dumb. I wait for Lucy to try to perk us up. Finally, Tamara breaks our silence. “Okay,” she says in a forced but enthusiastic rush of energy. “We’re here.” She gives the truck horn a happy beep and jumps out into the heat.

  Lucy slides out of the truck less quickly and confidently. She holds the door open, but Patricia doesn
’t move. Patricia stares straight ahead, both hands firmly planted on the dashboard. When she finally speaks, her voice comes out soft and airy, with a hint of a whimper. She sounds like a young girl. “I,” Patricia says, “am homesick.”

  Yes, I think, aren’t we all?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When a woman finally comes out of the house, she looks normal. I close my eyes quickly and open them again. Still, she looks normal. She’s taller than Lucy—like everyone—and also wider through the hips. She wears old jeans rolled up to just below her knees and her wild blonde hair pulled back from her face with a purple scarf. The ends of the scarf trail down her back like a tail.

  “Welcome! My name is Sahitya.” She smiles at us, but she can’t reach out her hands to welcome us because she holds two full pails.

  I wonder if she’s on her way to take care of the goats. I hope she can stop their crying. I’m dizzy and lean into Lucy to keep myself from falling.

  “Welcome to Lokya Landing! Go on inside,” Sahitya says and nods toward the dome-shaped house behind us with her bare shoulder. It looks like a spaceship. None of us steps forward.

  Sahitya’s purple shirt has no sleeves, but it shows dark wet below the armpits almost down to her waist. Only when I see the shirt stained with sweat do I notice how hot it is. Hotter than two squirrels wrestling in a wool sock, Sam would say. I squint into it the hard wall of heat, and breathe the scalding air in through my nose, the shallow breaths less painful in my lungs.

  “I’m going to feed the chickens,” Sahitya says, walking away, buckets slopping. “And then I’ll give you all a welcome tour of our Lokya Landing.”

  I look at this thirsty brown land with its weird-shaped buildings, and I wonder if we want the tour. Sahitya practically limps under the weight of the pails. Watching her go, pulled down by the effort, I can’t imagine she is the woman with our answers, the person Tamara has brought us all this way to see. As I scan Sahitya’s body, looking for something to mark her as unusual or special, something besides her peculiar name, I see an iPhone jammed in her back pocket and a tattoo on her shoulder, a beautiful flower, and in its middle a number that looks like a fancy thirty-five, but broken and split in a way I’ve never seen.

  On the tour we learn that there are no showers, no toilets, and no electricity. Dirty hippies, Nicholas would say. The land south of Coalton has many dirty hippies, and they cause Nicholas the most problems at work. “Dirty hippies” can get pretty loud over dead, toxic fish.

  I still smell like vomit, but as Sahitya sets out the rules, it is Patricia who looks like her stomach heaves and rolls, her throat burns, her sinuses itch. With each new rule, Patricia’s face grows more pinched, but before anyone has time to ask if she’s okay or hand her a bucket, Sahitya tells us that at Lokya Landing there is also no coffee, no sugar, no meat, no booze, and no cell phones. Sahitya holds her hand out and waits for Patricia, Tamara, and Lucy to hand over their phones. “For this experience, you need to cut yourself off from the outside world. You need to retreat.”

  For what experience? We put the question in our eyes and shoot it at Tamara.

  “Oh and no black clothes.” Sahitya runs her eyes up and down Lucy. “We need to let our inner light shine.” Tamara and Lucy and Patricia and I make sure not to look at each other. I know we would laugh. “I’ll let you settle in,” Sahitya says, pulling out her iPhone and scanning its screen, “and then we meet at the tepee at five for our first havan. Then dinner.” As she leaves, her purple scarf-tail blows behind her in the hot wind.

  Just as I ask, “What’s a havan?” Patricia hisses, “I thought you were bringing us to an elder! A medicine man! Something like that.”

  “A medicine man?” Tamara looks confused. “Why’d you think that? I’m a welder. I lived in Calgary. A medicine man? I don’t even know a medicine man. I found Sahitya on the internet with all that stuff I told you about incarnates. There was an article with her website in The Coalton Free Press.”

  Lucy opens her mouth, and then closes it again. A little noise escapes. Confusion or anger, I don’t know.

  “What?” Tamara’s question is innocent but I hear the laughter lurking in that one word. She raises her hands and shrugs dramatically. “C’mon. We live in the Kootenays. Spirituality and all of that. It’s worth a try.”

  The laugh in her voice goes away when Tamara speaks only to me. “Sometimes people who listen hard enough hear things, even if they don’t understand them. Let’s see where all of Sahitya’s listening might take us.”

  ***

  This place has brought back the little boy in me, and I attach myself to Lucy. She wants me near her, too. Without me, she has no reason to be here. She could be home in Coalton, her knitting needles clacking, Nicholas’s head in her lap, a romantic comedy playing on the television, the smell of popcorn and melted butter filling the air. I guess I imagine it like that. With me gone, Nicholas could just slide into the space I have left behind. Everything would be simpler with me gone. Instead, Lucy is stuck with me, here on this end-of-times goat farm. And neither of us knows why. Not yet.

  We find a spot to sit at a beaten-up picnic table outside the bakery (the building we mistook for a garage). I peel greying paint off the table in long curling strips. Lucy doesn’t stop me. Who would possibly care?

  “One day,” she says. “We’ll try this place for one day. Your lungs okay?”

  I give a quick nod but don’t meet Lucy’s eyes.

  “They hurt, don’t they? Bad?”

  I don’t know I will tell the truth until I hear myself say it. “Yes, they really do.” I want to tell her that I don’t think I’m supposed to leave Coalton, Elijah’s house, that I don’t think my Mary likes it, but I’m afraid of Lucy’s anger.

  “Two days at most,” she says. “We’ll give this place two days. We’ve come.” Lucy rests her eyes on my face. “And then we’ll go home.” Lucy packs a world of meaning into that one word: home. “We will go home, and you will get better.”

  I nod again. I look at the beautiful, jagged mountain range in the distance behind Lucy. These mountains don’t close us in tight the way they do in Coalton but stay far away and pretty, like a postcard. The trees feel different too. How long did we travel to get here? One hour? Two? It feels so much farther. I listen for the song of Mary, the one I heard in the old-growth cottonwood forest, blowing up high through the canopy of leaves: eye ya ah nuss hewk zoo kah nee. I know her song can follow me. It did that time. But these trees remain quiet, too thirsty to speak.

  I want Mary. I want Mary. I want Mary.

  And hasn’t that been the refrain of my life? Hasn’t that been the refrain of all my lives? I imagine walking with Mary through the rough land behind the Lokya Landing bakery. I imagine the arid ground crunching beneath our feet, Mary singing her Ktunaxa song into the dry hot wind. I’m so lost in my yearning, in my other self, in my other time, that I don’t notice that Tamara has joined us at the picnic table. She wears business on her face.

  “You like my man.” She smiles and a deep dimple pops into her right cheek. “That’s okay. I’m used to women liking my Sam. I was going to let it go, like I let it go with the other women. Sometimes a thing does not need to be said, if we all understand each other. But I changed my mind. This is different. You are different. We’re neighbours. We’re going to be friends, you and I. So I will say my bit, if only to put it behind us.” Tamara squints into the sun like she’s trying to see something on the mountain tops, something more interesting than Lucy’s face. I look too. I wonder if maybe I’ll spot the white specks that Nicholas claims to be mountain goats but could just as easily be patches of snow.

  “Nothing happened,” Lucy says quietly once the silence gets awkward, but there’s no weight in her words.

  Tamara flips her hand as if she can bat Lucy’s weak words right out of the air. “Nothing, something, whatever. I know your man is always gone, working at the mine. Always. My man, though, he is always right there. I understand
your feelings about Sam. Maybe even I understand his feelings about you.” Tamara aims her words over Lucy’s head, as if she’s speaking to those far-off specks of white.

  “He and I are ... friends.”

  “Friends. Yes, yes.” Tamara does that flicking motion with her hands again. “Sam is a good listener. Women like a man who listens.”

  To this, Lucy says nothing. She rubs the back of her hand across her eyes and squints into the sky.

  “He’s a good watcher too. He makes a woman feel looked at, seen. A woman likes that, I know. Especially a woman too long in a marriage where she’s not seen. I get it.” Tamara raps her knuckles across the rough surface of the picnic table. “My Sam isn’t always smart enough to draw a line, so I draw his lines. Consider this line drawn.” Tamara laughs, deep and full, like she’s made a pretty good joke, and then leaves the picnic table before Lucy can respond.

  I put my hand out and touch Lucy’s forearm. She doesn’t look my way, and I won’t check to see if she has tears. I run my hand up and down her arm and squeeze. I’m not mad anymore—not about the way she feels about Sam, not about what she’s done to Nicholas, not about the twisting and squishing in my stomach when I saw Sam’s hand on Lucy’s hip in the museum. I understand.

  She loves two.

  Or maybe it’s not that. Not the same. There are different kinds of love. We want to simplify love and desire—squeeze them into easy words—so we can pretend to understand. We want there to be a right way and a wrong way to live. Right and wrong would be easy. Lucy loves Nicholas, she knows Nicholas, but she wants Sam. She only wants Sam. She wants only Sam. Her life, though, belongs to Nicholas. Tamara might not understand that pull, the war between belonging and wanting, but I understand. I squeeze Lucy’s forearm one more time and then lean my forehead against it. She puts her forehead on the back of my head, and her hand on the back of my neck, gentle and full of love. I relax into it.