The other thing was the letter from his mother almost certainly waiting at home. It’d been a few weeks since her last, so one would be due soon. He didn’t think of it like that, exactly. He got as far as picturing himself unlocking the mailbox under the tree, the hollow tocking sound of the lock opening, and the dread-worry sensations closing around him as he reached in, and then standing there feeling like the ground had opened under his feet. Again her handwriting on the envelope. Another fat letter full of nothing—place names and animals and facts about life up there in the territories and the latest high and low temperatures, names of people she’d met. My mother’s in the Arctic, talking to schoolteachers about their problems and observing the effects of global warming on little towns you’ve never heard of and never will and would never care about even if you knew their names or could say them. Ulukhaktok. Tuktoyaktuk. Because that’s what she does and that’s what she cares about. More than anything else.
“Spaceman,” the bus driver was saying. “HEY, spaceman back there with the bloody nose.”
Thomas sat forward. Looked around. Light everywhere. “What?” He’d been a little off in his calculations. They were not, as he’d thought, approaching the crazy house of quilted-together RVs and trailers with the piles of split wood and innumerable junked cars just past Winding Creek (aka Oil Sands) Estates. “You talking to me?”
“You got a name?”
“No.”
Head bobbing, grinning, hissing laughter. “I didn’t think so.”
“Thomas.”
“OK then, Thomas. I got some advice for you.”
“What’s that.” For a moment, he thought this might really be it, might be just the news he needed today—weird warm Chinook wind day. Why not? The guy could stop a nosebleed. Maybe he had other powers.
“Come on up here, so I don’t have to shout it.”
He studied the driver’s shivering image in the rearview mirror. Watched his nose seem to elongate and shrink again (a warp or divot in the glass?) as he shoulder-checked and shifted and returned his gaze to Thomas: Native eyes and eyebrows, everything else about him Slavic or some other brand of northern European. Viking?
“Come on. Right here in the seat there behind me.”
“No thanks.”
“You gotta lay off the blow. That’s my advice, man. It’s a killer. Only thing worse?”
Thomas zoned out the rest. He didn’t know why it should surprise him anymore: another so-called grown-up parading around advice that was really just a projection of his own messed-up personal life, personal traumas and experiences. Why were they all like that? Was anyone not like that? Give the guy two more seconds, he’d probably start talking about sex with underage girls . . . or boys—it was probably the whole reason he’d reached out in the first place.
“Is that a fact?”
“It’s my walking-talking paranormal nightmare-testimonial, bro. You lay off the stuff or it’ll kill you.”
“Sure, but I’m not your bro. OK?”
The bus driver kept nodding but didn’t look back at Thomas. “You just lay off it, whatever your thing is. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Whatever. If it makes you happy.”
And again as he exited the bus, the words seemingly aimed to pierce the back of Thomas’s skull: “I don’t care who you are or what you know or how much money you got. It’s gonna kill you dead.”
THE DAY OF SURPRISES: first the snow-eater winds, then the fight, and the image of his son that kept coming back to him afterward—underwear wrenched from beneath his belt, elastic torn from the briefs, and the briefs themselves, laundered how many hundreds of times by him in the privacy of their own laundry room and never meant to be exposed like this. And the expression on Thomas’s face. Beaten, defiant. Unreachable. Had Franklin responded appropriately? Could you be mad, sad, and perplexed in equal measures, all at the same time, and know it? It was a first for him anyway. And then the surprise in the hallway and his own rage, his son’s disappearance, and the further surprises in Vice Principal Legere’s office.
The thing about living in the north, he’d learned (though few Canadians, he knew, Jane especially, would call this anything like actual north), day after day he could pass in a state of sleep-stupored, mind-numbing placidity—not a thing happening anywhere, to the point where he hardly knew if he was dead or alive. It wasn’t bad really, just weird and tiring. The first light of day seeping up somewhere in the middle of first period and long gone by the time you made your way back across the lot—snow squeaking underfoot, icy air freezer-burning your nose and throat and blasting up your pant legs, so you were horribly awake, dreadfully, surreally awake—to unplug your car’s block heater and drive home. And on the drive home, wind making the snow swirl and tunnel along the pavement in your headlights like the vapors of some inhospitable alien planet, frost spreading its crazed lace down the inside of the windshield faster than you could blast at it with the defroster or scrub it away with a mitten. Was any of this real? Some days, it was all he could think of anyway: bed—the smell of bed, the sound of the heater clicking on and off in the dark, the heavy blankets piled just right on top of him, the dark cold in the window and the frigid air standing just in front of each window, the clock humming and hours more of sleep ahead. No Jane.
Then, all of a sudden, a day like this, where nothing went right—everything ran against the grain.
Malloy had not come clean to Legere and apologized for his actions—trying to escape, bullying Thomas, being prime instigator. Instead, seated around the table in the conference room, where hearings of this type always took place, they’d witnessed something like an emotional reversion for Malloy from age fifteen to about ten. He wouldn’t stop blubbering, kept looking at Franklin with his eyes streaming, accusing him between hiccupped sobs: “You almost killed me! He tried to kill me! We weren’t doing anything . I swear! It was a game.” The other boys said nothing. They sat dumbstruck. Legere, too, twirling a gold ballpoint pen around and around his right index finger and thumb. What did Franklin know about this kid, after all? Almost nothing. He’d never had him in a class but had heard of him from other teachers and witnessed some of his antics. It was a small-enough school that everyone seemed to know everything.
“Look, I saw what happened, OK?” Franklin said. “What you and your friends here were up to, that was not a game. A nosebleed and a wedgie, or whatever you call it . . . So, why don’t we start from the beginning and you can explain for Vice Principal Legere here exactly how things got out of hand and exactly how—”
“He was trying to kill me.”
“Who—what?”
“You tried to kill me!”
“No, Malloy. The fact is, no, I did not.” He tried to keep his voice as level and neutral as possible. Not quite apologetic, but certainly warmer than he felt. “You made an attempt to escape, which I prevented. Now, why don’t we . . .”
Malloy lowered his head onto the table. His shoulders shook, but no sounds followed. Franklin couldn’t say for sure if he was faking it.
“What?” Franklin began. “For real?”
No response.
“Differing perceptions, absolutement,” Legere said, patting a hand on the conference table and smiling. Winked once in Franklin’s direction, maybe, though it didn’t have to mean anything. “I, for one, think we do not gain so much pressing further without parents present. Perhaps we can take five minutes break now, until one or two arrive, yes?” He peered over the top of Franklin’s head and seemed to be humming to himself a moment as he sought his next, exact words. “Jeremy can compose himself in the interim and then we talk.” Twelve years as vice principal of this new little outpost, composite high school, twenty-plus years in Alberta generally, and still he talked like a displaced Frog. Franklin tried not to picture, as he usually did, Legere standing at a mirror, oiling his hair and pursing his lips at his reflection as he practiced saying things aloud in his outrageous accent in order to preserve it.
> He nodded. “Sure,” he said. He pushed back from the table. “I have class next period.”
“This we know, Mr. Franklin.”
Outside again by the east entryway closest to Legere’s office, he stood rolling in his fingertips the cigarette bummed off Dorrie Weiss there at the reception desk (he wasn’t smoking again, not really, just this one to cope, calm the nerves), but not lighting up yet, testing his resolve, eyeing his watch and savoring the last moments before caving into addiction. Ordinarily, fourth period, if he was caught up with everything workwise, he’d be sweating on one of the treadmills or rowing machines at the gym or, weather permitting, jogging around the outside track or on the school cross-country trail. Perfect day for that, he thought, though he was glad, too, for the excuse not to run—considered it, even, according to some inverse logic, exactly the justification for the cigarette he hadn’t yet lit: because if you’re going to miss a day, may as well really miss. He listened to the wind whistling in the eaves and the sounds of traffic out on the main road blown first toward him and then away with the ceaseless clatter and clang of the halyard striking the school flagpole somewhere just out of his sight, the flag itself snapping riotously. Just over fifteen minutes remaining until the start of fifth period and his first of three back-to-back classes: honors ninth, core tenth, and the senior seminar, his plum, Classic Canadian Lit. This week’s story, one of his favorites—“The Painted Door”: early twentieth-century agrarian prairie life, marriage, betrayal, and death by freezing.
Enter the next surprise of the day. Moira. He hadn’t seen her in going on three years and resisted believing, at first, it was really her, not another phantom look-alike approaching from across the lot—scattered-seeming, fast-paced gait, bent forward slightly as if to accommodate for an ungainly height; expression of fixed but unspecified glumness, mostly (he guessed) the unintended consequence of long cheekbones and downward-turning mouth; high-priced, high-end clothing worn as if she’d just flung them on, designer jeans tucked into soft low-heeled boots, candy-cane red sweater, fur cap, and white scarf around her neck. He stood straighter. Felt his skin prickle and his vision sharpen. It was her all right.
“Moira!” He couldn’t stop himself—the sound in his voice, already something too deprived and insistent.
“Oh my gosh, John? Is that you really? What are you doing? I mean . . . how . . . what in the world are you doing here? Everyone’s asked about you; you know, since you quit the group, it’s never been the same. Just last week, Ravi was asking if anyone ever saw or heard of you! Oh my gosh! How are you and . . . was it Jane?” She held her palms to her face a moment and looked at him pitifully enough—with sincere-enough seeming pity, that is (or some strong kindred sentiment anyway)—he was reminded all over again how difficult it was ever apprehending what she knew, what she didn’t, what she intended. With that, some of the embarrassing things he’d said to her their last afternoon together: . . . call it a crush. Sure. Devastated infatuation, more like . . . I know people would say it’s a matter of transference, projection, what have you, of course, because of my trouble with Jane; still . . . you and I, it’s like our souls are mated at some higher ontological plane, like we . . . such longing, it’s like.... Had he really said all that? Best not to remember for the moment.
“Jane, yes. She’s gone. Been a couple of years.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I had heard that I guess, yes. From . . . somewhere, I can’t think where. What a mess, those days! All the cheating and lying and everyone’s marriages busting up. The horrible zeitgeist of the new millennia. Thank God that’s over!”
“Yes.” He exhaled, shook his head, but said nothing further. Zeitgeist. One of those words you didn’t hear every day in Central Alberta conversation. He reminded himself how it’d always been this way with her: always the tendency to overemote, always enough real feeling behind the—he didn’t want to call it pretentiousness, but it was, almost . . . some form of calculated playacting anyway—he could choose to see past it. “And you! What about—?”
“But you’re OK now? Still writing?”
They’d spoken at once.
He nodded, smoothed the cigarette between his fingers. “I’m hanging in. Better than ever, really. And yes, pretty productive. Closing in on a finished manuscript. The old Sule Skerry project; I’m sure you remember.” Four, five months ago, he would have boasted to her about the poems that had been taken for publication at an East Coast quarterly—older ones, completely revised and revamped. But the novelty of publication acceptance had mostly worn off. He was tired of hearing himself find ways to mention it, and then pretending not to have wanted the attention. Besides, she’d know those poems by name—might even quote him a line or two in appreciation. Of all people, she would understand the significance for him, having placed them so well, finally having risen to the rank of most of the rest of the Bowness group, but she’d know, too, they were not exactly new work. Well, it was something to save for later. “Jane and I . . .” He waved a hand. “That was in the pipeline for some time, as you know. I guess you’d say we hit the point where we stopped being able to see the best in each other. Conflicting ideals and priorities—radically conflicting, actually. Maybe that’s the long and short of it.” He shrugged broadly. “Probably all my fault. No divorce yet. She’s north with that CEAP group around Inuvik for now. Part of a nonprofit mission, monitoring climate change and. . . .”
“Yikes. That’s . . .”
“Yes. The Arctic. More or less.”
“John. What ever did you do to that poor woman?”
He laughed. Watched her push back the hair that had blown across her face, strands catching against her mouth. “Would that I could claim that much influence. . . .”
“I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “All for the best, I’m sure.” And like that, he was lying to her—stowing his feelings in a layer of bravado anyway, and posing himself as someone better or more cavalier. More casually self-deprecating. Pipeline. A marriage didn’t have a pipeline; an oil company did. Jane was gone, plain and simple. Call it an extended leave of absence, she’d said. Call it my pilgrimage to save the world. Call it what you have to.
He rolled the cigarette a final time between his thumb and fingers and lit up. Drew deeply and waited for the first rush of pleasure to tingle his nerve endings, perk up his blood; sweet momentary lapse of self from self. Closed his eyes and drew again.
“So what brings you out here?” he asked.
“My son.”
“Right! I always forget you have kids.”
“Kid.”
“Right. Sorry. Kid. How old?”
“Fifteen.”
And then he knew: bussing in from the Turner Valley. Of course—Malloy, that would be her first husband’s last name—but the likeness was now unmistakable. Her second husband was Stringer, Springer, something like that—Rick—and her own name she’d preserved for herself through all of that, Moira Francis. Briefly, he tried to remember anything he could about all this—her past, her life story: first husband, high school sweetheart, common-law, never officially married, left her with the two-year-old; second husband, lawyer whose words occasionally crossed with and sparked her own in poems, handsome, doggedly logical, older than she was and loyal to a flaw, but on his own terms. Brought back to mind, as well, the picture of her home life he had formulated based around these and other details. The boy he’d always envisioned (if he pictured him at all) as Devon, younger, dark-haired, with eyes like hers, the unknown portions of his face filled in reflexively from the only guy in his own high school class he knew to have married straight out of school, a wrestler and track jock named Brett. Rick (also more or less reflexively) he’d modeled on the lawyer from Primal Fear, always in a dress coat and on his way somewhere, seldom flustered. All of it, he knew now (and had always known, though he’d lacked the specific details by which to correct or amend it), completely wrong.
“Not Jeremy Malloy?” he asked.
&nbs
p; She nodded. “Yes. I . . .”
“Listen,” he said. “Let’s walk.”
“Like old times?”
“Sure. Sort of. Old times.”
He drew on the cigarette a few more times and flipped away the remaining half of it—there, resisted, mostly—as he crunched his way along next to her across the lot to the football field.
“So, you should know this. I’ll just be straight up about it. Jeremy and I had a bit of an altercation today, which began, actually, with other behavior I’ll tell you about in just a second here,” he said. He kept his gaze from her, staring forward at the half-melted dirty snow crust and bare, sand-patterned pavement, wind pushing back his hair and causing his eyes to water. Like old times, he thought, yes: how they’d walk and walk, never touch; talk about poems and poets, sex, marriage, anything at all really, except the obvious longing between them, and never anything of a too-practical nature from their daily lives that might allow reality (or the truth of their intentions?) to intrude. First only monthly, in connection with the poetry-group meetings in Bowness, and later, more often—weekly, biweekly Sunday afternoons, always the same trails and pathways and the same meeting point, same loop over the footbridges and along the river. How long? Years. Two at least. More. Too jumbled to say. In college, he’d scorned friends of his who’d had these protracted, undefined, semiromantic friendships with women or other men that seemed to go on and on—never understood the necessity of not knowing and deliberately keeping yourself from knowing, month after month, as feelings deepened and turned septic. Tragic. And there he was, letting the same scenario consume his attention, not as a college student, but as a married adult. How foolish was that? The counterpoint of subjects and scenery—wet pines, snowy pines, mud, maples flaming with color, yellow-leafed cottonwoods, ice on the Bow River—and their perfectly matched strides, always moving in a rhythm that felt to him at once specifically theirs alone, and greater than the two of them, so their talk seemed inconsequential, part of some ongoing music sustained by the planet, and yet specifically, privately their own: He wanted that back of course, all of it—the connectedness and ease and the talk, the smell of her, sound of her laugh, sound of her voice addressing him—but felt, too, more or less convinced it was impossible. Wasn’t entirely sure how much of it had ever existed. Maybe only in his own head.
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