Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  She could use the phone and tell someone to come and pick her up. Keeping the cathedral on her left, she turned back. The contractions had stopped and her mind was clear for the first time in months, and the trail made sense to her now. She recognized features that, even after all the years, had scarcely changed—a tumble of rocks below a face jagged from a slip, the cleft where snowmelt gushed in the spring. And Roz’s fence when she came to it hours later was just as she’d remembered it, even if a little more worn and ramshackle and hidden deeper in the trees.

  The swimming pool was there, deadfall from the storm spinning on its surface—leaves and twigs and branches—the water a pale green and lapping up over the edge. They were never very good at keeping it clean, she thought. It was the chemicals. Roz’s stepmother was always talking about how bad the chemicals were and threatening to turn it into a natural pond. Biofilter, she called it. Pippa stood on the top step in the shallow end, thinking about a swim. She was so hot and so tired from the long battle to get there, from the trail and the woods and the baby fighting her all the way, the spotty labour, her skinned knees and shredded palms. It had been a long time since she’d swum in this pool. Summers, sleepovers, boys—it was all coming back to her and she wanted to plunge into it and float suspended there, among those memories. She just wanted to go back. Far, far back and away to when just talking was enough. At night she and Roz used to skinny-dip, the cold pinching at their nipples, daring the world to discover them. What a difference now, she thought. No innocence, no modesty—all just equipment meant to service or be serviced. The contractions had stopped but they’d start up again. As a machine, her body was reliable. She took another step down and pushed out, the water cresting in front of her, and floated into the deep end like an inflatable trying not to flip. It felt marvellous, taking the weight off and letting the water carry her for a while. She should’ve birthed her children in a pool and avoided her legs hauled up to the ceiling, her spine mashed into a padded board and all those people clustering and trying to clean her up, fussing around like fruit flies, feeding off her ripeness.

  I should have my baby here.

  She gave a push. Nothing yet. Pippa held on to the side and stretched her legs behind her and kicked. She could have her baby here, or she could just slip under herself and let it all go. Hold her breath and never draw another one. She tried, but she was like a cork and there was nothing on the bottom to hold on to. Nothing to stop herself from floating up, no drowning hook. What she’d need was an anchor, pockets full of stones, concrete shoes, an exoskeleton of brick. What she’d need was to have planned it out, but lack of planning, she’d already established, was what her problem was. Her adolescence had just been an uncontrolled slide into adulthood and there was another baby coming now and she didn’t want any part of it. Didn’t even know whose child it was.

  Pippa tried the back door but it was locked and without even thinking she went around the side to the basement door, because it was never locked, and she let herself in. She and Roz had done it so many times after parties or dances, and now she relied on muscle memory to find her way in the semi-darkness to the next room and the stairs. Nothing there had changed.

  But the kitchen, upstairs, was different. When had they done that? It took her a moment to find the refrigerator because it wasn’t where it used to be against the wall of the basement stairwell. They’d put cabinets there instead. Other things were different too, or had she just misremembered them. How long had it been? She turned to the wall where all the jars of pasta and raisins and nuts and rice should have been, but a big mirror was hanging there instead, and when Pippa caught sight of herself, wet and filthy and huge, she was horrified. She didn’t want to see herself, not like that. She was hideous. She grabbed two bananas from the bowl on the island and went to the table at the other end of the room, surrounded by windows, and sat down. This, at least, was the same. A smaller, newer table but at least it was in the same place. Finally, she could feel a settling.

  Pippa didn’t see him right away. He was stealthy, as children are, moving from the doorway to the chair opposite her before she even knew he was there.

  Hi, she said, surprised.

  She looked at him. He was young, probably three years old, his T-shirt riddled with dinosaurs.

  I’m Philippa, she said. Roz’s friend. Who are you?

  She tried to remember Roz’s extended family. Her cousins. Didn’t they live in California? Were any of them still this young?

  But he just sat there and was silent. One of her own boys was about his age but she felt no impulse to mother this one. What she wanted was her friend. She wanted to confide in her. Tell her, finally, what had happened. Tell her everything she should have told her such a long time ago.

  Where’s Roz?

  And then he came to life, shooting from his chair and running, screaming, all the way back upstairs. She could hear him, his little feet overhead, the master bedroom, and then the disjointed sounds of an adult and then heavier footsteps on the stairs coming down. He was bringing someone. Pippa winced. Roz’s stepmother wouldn’t be happy. She’d never been good with surprises.

  But it wasn’t Roz’s stepmother, or Roz, or Roz’s father or anyone else Pippa had ever seen before.

  Who are you?

  The woman clung to her son’s hand, for that’s who she was—his mother—the two of them imitations of one another, small and petrified.

  20

  David stirred both mugs of tea and carried them to where his wife was lying immobile in the family room. Georgina was fetching Philippa from Roz’s house—which he thought odd, because hadn’t both parents died and the house been sold?—and Jax was upstairs on his computer, so it was a chance, for the moment, to be still. To take a deep breath before the next attack, which was the only way to view the current state of affairs with his children camped out in his house like scouts from an invading army. He only ran his clinics on Tuesdays and Thursdays and so, being Sunday, there’d be another entire day of this before he could escape. His wife had the television tuned to the news network, sound down low, and when David set her tea down on the coffee table where she could reach it, she didn’t ignore him the way she usually did. Instead, she turned and sat up.

  This is different, he thought, trying not to look at the enormous screen at the far end of the room, the sudden flashes of colour, the announcers’ faces close up and mesmerizing. Trying to focus only on his wife because he could sense her intensity and he was trying to save his energy for the larger battles that were coming. Better, he knew, to make it at least appear that he was listening.

  David, she said quietly. Do you remember that first time?

  Her voice was like a whispered incantation because they never spoke about their encounters—those regular episodes of violence that stitched their marriage together. The mug David was holding suddenly didn’t feel hot at all. He could have stuck his fingers in and not felt them burning.

  There was—, she continued, not waiting for him to respond because she knew she had to keep talking if she was going to let the secret out. I was pregnant.

  Pregnant?

  I lost it, Margaret said.

  She couldn’t shy away now. Being honest was her price for getting Pippa back; the vow she’d made to herself—if Pippa is found, I’ll let my secret go.

  It was a boy. There was enough to—

  But she couldn’t. Not the tiny fetus she’d birthed that night, alone, her husband sleeping, wrapping it in a towel and burying it at the bottom of the hole he’d dug for the magnolia. The hole he’d dug too deep anyway, trying to work through the thrilling horror of what he’d done to her in the middle of the day. How completely he’d given in to his appetite, and how she hadn’t fought back.

  A boy? He might have had a son, and not just girls he’d named for boys.

  Margaret watched him. He was staring at the television, slumped into the couch, everything slack. She had kept that secret to use it as a weapon one day, and now s
he’d just handed it to him. Like a gift.

  I don’t—, he began.

  Jax burst in holding the phone.

  It’s Pippa, she said. George’s taking her to the hospital.

  She had to say it twice before they heard.

  Margaret stood at the cliff’s edge letting her cigarette burn down and stared out over the city, down to the hospital where Pippa was. It was afternoon and everything was bright.

  I’ll stay here, she’d said to her husband, making him go. Pushing him gently out the door, as if greeting his newborn grandchild would make up for what she’d robbed him of—a son, which was what she knew he’d always wanted. What he never tired of telling her.

  On the other side of the lake where the escarpment boomeranged toward Toronto, she could see a single road cut straight up like a ski run and on it were flashes like beading mercury—cars, lives, destinations. It was easy to feel insignificant with the world spread before you like that. Easy to think that your particular artery of this entire corpus was a redundancy, that it could be severed and nothing would even register the pain. That nothing mattered. That it was blemishes like that—the road carved into the cliffside—that were meaningful and permanent. Original. But Margaret knew better. Knew that what she was doing now—forcing herself into the centre of it, raising her arms like a prophet, like an embrace, like a mother sweeping her children to her breast—that was where the meaning was. Individual families. Home. The very stones around the hearth. It was, after all, why she’d stayed. This was the maelstrom she’d created, and she wouldn’t have it any other way—especially now that she’d seeded it with more turbulence than she alone had the power to direct. Her desire to be dominated had always been as strong, or stronger, than her husband’s desire to dominate, but now, looking back at the house, she knew there’d been a shift. That girl upstairs, and Margaret’s power over her, was something wonderful.

  Another baby, she sighed, turning back to look down at the hospital. Philippa’s made two more than me. Perhaps now she’ll stop.

  Even now, Margaret refused to count the boy.

  Pippa had jammed her feet into an old pair of her nephew’s running shoes, Jax’s flip-flops busted from all the rough walking. The sneakers were almost big enough. If her feet weren’t so swollen from the pregnancy they’d probably fit perfectly. When had that happened? That her nephew’s feet were the same size as hers? It was painful to walk, everything needling her, and the baby so low now she had to shuffle wide-legged like a toy. If she’d been able to turn around she would have seen the debris falling and the trail she was making—leaves and dirt and bits of tree, but all she could manage was straight ahead and even that was difficult. If there’d been a wheelchair, she would have sat on it. A gurney, even better. A hospital. Thank god. What had she been doing out there in the woods, and floating in that pool? Why had she thought Roz would be there? Roz lived in Toronto now. She’d visited her half a dozen times.

  She let her sister undress her, no fight left. She’d do whatever they said, take whatever she was told to take. Give herself over, because she was so clearly shit at doing anything on her own. She sank back into the plastic mattress and when the nurse lowered the sheet and smeared gel on her mounding stomach, apologizing cheerfully for how cold it was, Pippa just lay back and closed her eyes, glad that someone was in charge of her. Surrendering.

  There she is, the nurse said, turning the screen so Pippa could see.

  She.

  It was all Pippa would remember of that visit to the hospital. After four boys her baby, finally, was a girl. She hadn’t even dared to hope. It suddenly didn’t matter who the father was, not now. He’d given her a girl and that made up for everything. A fresh start. It was what she’d been looking for and now she had it, this girl, this daughter, a template for a life lived over again. A perfect sheet to map her future on.

  By the time David and Jax arrived, Pippa was being discharged because her labour wasn’t far enough along and the psych evaluation, the nurse said, had come back “sane enough.” The hospital was putting her out, and Pippa was glad for it. All she wanted just then was to collapse, and she would, just as soon as she got home—and not to New Zealand, and Leo and the kids, but up to that house so filled with the past ghosting her, because there were things she had to settle now. How had she forgotten about the lake? That family friend and the culmination—she suspected—of his wanting her for years. She realized now that she’d been running ever since. Covering her tracks with organic grains, a confusion of wholesomeness, laying a bed of moss that would creep and grow, softly obliterating what she’d done—or had done to her. And wasn’t it both? She couldn’t claim victimhood because hadn’t she wanted it too? Encouraged him, enjoyed the illicit adventure at the start? Getting married, having babies, building a family … it wasn’t until the swinging—the other couples—that she’d remembered having been shared like that before.

  She knew she loved them—Leo and the boys—but everything had just happened like the tide rolling in and all of a sudden she’d realized the water had gotten deep. She was tired of treading and she’d forgotten how to swim, and there weren’t any sisters down in New Zealand to keep her afloat. Her house was all boys. And boys—she got into her father’s car, reached for the seatbelt—were not girls.

  This one, she thought, pulling the belt across her tummy, will love me unreservedly. Just the two of us against all those boys and we will win.

  Pippa smiled then. The first real smile in weeks.

  Her father directed the car out of the parking lot and up the hill for home, saying the right things—how pleased he was to have her back. That a girl—he winked awkwardly when she told him—wasn’t the worst you could get. Trying, for her sake, to put a brave face on it and to suppress what was eating him; the crime his wife had confessed to. Never considering, even momentarily, that he was responsible.

  Where are the others? Pippa asked.

  Said they had something to do, her father replied.

  Pippa’s thoughts turned to baby showers, sure that her sisters had gone shopping for gifts.

  21

  The gallery took a little finding because it was in a part of the city Georgina never visited. She’d never thought there was anything worth stopping for in that neighborhood: abandoned storefronts, warehouses, and the streets like canyons that in winter funneled ice and snow and air so cold it sliced your lungs. But this was summer, and the air Georgina stepped out into was so heavy with moisture, the gallery’s large windows ran like a waterfall.

  She hesitated.

  Re-Inventing Rich. A dollar sign with arms and legs, the S climbing a body so thin it was like a dime turned up on edge. Amanda Courtland was the artist. The name didn’t sound familiar, but how could she be expected to remember names when her whole working life was a never-ending cascade of them. And all so repetitive and similar. Alison Howland, Amani Compton, Amy Torston … Slant rhymes. Phonetic cousins. Georgina stood there, taking the poster in, confused by its use of colour—all shades of yellow. What did that have to do with wealth? Was it meant to represent gold? Searching for some sort of rubric by which to measure things. Feeling stupid and out of place on that deserted sidewalk with her modest professor’s car parked at the curb, sandwiched between delivery trucks. She was early, but the gallery’s door was unlocked.

  Once inside, she began at the extreme left, like a text, and walked slowly alongside the long, high walls of what must have been a warehouse before it was whitewashed. She was reading the paintings. Looking at the Art. And it should have been enough, for her, to see the historical references the artist had woven into the barely figural scenes of luxe and prosperity. Should have been enough to see her lessons taken so to heart—the colourful shadows, the abstract forms and patterns, the depictions of bourgeois leisure fixed there with acrylic spray. Because here it was. Her legacy. Her teaching made manifest. It is, she thought with a start, a lexicon and I can read it like a syllabus. It’s Art History 1A03 with a
n overlay of graffiti.

  But it wasn’t enough, of course, to recognize that there. Not even close. It didn’t even come close to validating what she did—all the contact hours, the lectures ad infinitum, the scholarship honed to a razor’s edge—it cheapened it. Showed it up for what it was—derivative. How like a jingle, and that the product she sold—creativity—was reduced to an ad. I’m the pitch person, she thought. Not the maker, just the vendor. That’s the economy on display here, feeling at once drunk and sick at the realization of the part she played. Dreading the artist. What would she say to her? Re-inventing rich as pastiche … the word sticking in her throat. More jargon to lay the bricks on, cement the wall, these canvases a pretty version of what she’d thrown and buttered, year after year, her entire adult life. Mediocrity. A forti-fucking-fication of mediocrity.

  Coming here had been a mistake. Just like everything else that day, and the day before.

  She went back out to the street and, like a magnetic needle, spun immediately to the escarpment that rose like an arrested tidal wave above downtown, an ever-present threat of extinction. And perfectly on axis with where she stood was the house. Even from this distance it was enormous. Not a house at all, but something grander, like a manor. A palace. And it wasn’t hard to imagine that what surrounded her, down there where she stood, were the toiling vassals who sent the constant stream of their tribute up to that ancient citadel. And this art, then, became just another small portion of the estate that wouldn’t yield. An acceptable loss that wouldn’t even register in the tallies, and could be forgotten because it would never stand the test of time. Because wasn’t that house, she felt then, looking up at its windows dazzling in the sun, the polestar? There was no escaping it. Even Toronto wouldn’t be far enough away because there would always be that pull from that altitude where even the oxygen was more pure and plentiful. And what—she felt herself slipping now—was the point of something like this? Another failed crop. And wasn’t her life, just as it was, good enough? And didn’t it produce?