by Leesa Dean
“I’m going to call an ambulance,” she said.
“I’m fine,” he repeated, wiping a hand across his forehead. The blood disappeared. “Get some sleep. I’ll call you in the morning.”
“No—” she started to say, but Patrick was already retreating to his apartment.
She waited until she heard his door close before returning downstairs, to the home where the two of them used to live together. In the bathroom, she propped the flashlight against the sink and removed her wet clothes. In that light, she looked ghastly, with nearly translucent skin. She chose three pill bottles from the cabinet and took one from each.
In the living room, she placed a cushion on the floor and sat with her back against the wall, watching as the storm decimated her yard. Water pooled in the garden, drowning the chrysanthemums, and the wind snapped branches off the rose bush. Every sound made her nervous—debris falling on cars, toppling lawn ornaments, the pregnant neighbour’s footsteps overhead. Louise held two fingers over her carotid artery, counted for ten seconds, and multiplied by six. Her pulse was much too fast.
She moved to the bedroom where she put on pyjamas and hid under the covers, waiting for the meds to make her heart feel normal again. Shadows moved across the room, and branches constantly scraped against the vinyl siding. She closed her eyes, still measuring her pulse, and prayed the storm would be over soon.
PATRICK WOKE UP the next morning feeling disoriented. His room smelled like a wet forest. I am a wolf, he thought. This is my den. He put on a shirt and looked out the broken window, past the skinned tree. The sun was full and bright and if there hadn’t been so much damage, he might have mistaken the storm for a dream. He took his cigarettes from the side table and lit one. While he smoked, he felt around his face, searching for the cut.
The blood had sent his mother into a tailspin. Jesus, he’d wanted to say. Chill. He understood her concern, but the problem was that she’d been in a spell for months and he was running out of patience. She was clingy, neurotic, impossible to deal with. Despite her various illnesses, despite his best intentions, Patrick found it difficult to be nice to her. It was as though the part of his brain that made him a good son all those years had finally burned out.
On the street, people took pictures of the fallen oak. His mother was in the yard, talking to the pregnant girl from the second floor. She’d served him a few times at the Bicycle Thief. They would look each other up and down as if to say, hey, I know you, which was kind of true. They’d only ever said hello in passing, but the soundtracks of their lives sometimes collided in the vents. Eventually he’d go outside and walk around, but first he wanted to listen to his storm recording.
For months, Patrick had been learning to mimic weather conditions by drawing them. Using a wooden box with contact microphones, he was able to replicate mistral winds, flurries, drizzle, convection rainfall, and a variety of other weather conditions. The microphones would broadcast his man-made weather through the gallery while Patrick remained hidden, giving the audience a sense of how art can be simultaneously present and concealed. On November 1, he would fly to Berlin for a one-month residency in a small but reputable gallery. He had no intention of returning to Halifax afterwards.
Patrick listened to the recording and began to draw. The pencil strokes would have to be fast and angular to recreate Hurricane Juan. He thought of Basquiat—the sharp, violent lines of his paintings. Patrick laid a piece of paper on the floor and spiralled his hand fast, creating wind. Yes, there it was. Crooked rain, high winds. Patrick could feel his body responding to the soundtrack—his breath came in raw gusts and he felt the synchronicity of everything.
This is it, Patrick thought. I was born to do this.
CHELSEA AWOKE WITH the shape of Marco’s name in her mouth. She’d been dreaming of Isla Holbox again. For three days it had rained. On the fourth, the sun returned, casting its reflection on the knee-deep puddles left behind. Chelsea and Marco had borrowed bicycles from the hotel and ridden to the far side of the island, pedalling hard through mud. They left their clothes on the shore and made love in a shallow bay, sand clouding around Chelsea’s knees as she straddled Marco. In the distance, two flamingos stood near the shore with their backs turned, elegantly facing the sun. She’d been home a month when she realized she hadn’t menstruated for some time. The doctor confirmed the date—the child had been conceived that afternoon.
How quickly weather can turn, Chelsea thought. She stood at the window and watched birds side-wind through the sky, a second ocean. It smelled like spring again. In the yard below, ravaged branches from the fallen tree covered the grass. The old yellow of last week’s fall mingled with new and vibrant greens. The landlord was there, raking leaves into a pile. When she noticed Chelsea, she motioned for her to come down. Chelsea put on a sweater that would hide her stomach before descending the stairs.
“Everything okay up there?” the landlord asked.
“The apartment’s fine,” Chelsea confirmed. “Thanks.”
Disappointment flickered across the landlord’s face as she motioned toward the fallen oak. “My husband planted that tree when Patrick was young. When he got older, he’d climb up there and draw all day. I could never get him to come down for dinner.”
“I’m sorry,” Chelsea said.
Louise stopped raking for a moment. She gave Chelsea a once-over, blue eyes squinting as if looking for some hidden truth. Her eyes travelled down to Chelsea’s bulky sweater.
“Your boyfriend,” she said. “Where’d you say he is? Chile?”
“Colombia.”
“Wasn’t he supposed to be here this summer?”
“Something came up,” Chelsea said. “He’s coming soon.”
After their conversation, Chelsea returned to her apartment and lay on her bed, curtains drawn. It wasn’t the first time the landlord had mentioned something about Marco in a way that suggested he didn’t exist or wasn’t coming. Since returning to Halifax, Chelsea hadn’t really connected with anyone. None of her old friends, no one at work seemed to understand. She barely even talked to her parents anymore. Whenever anyone found out she’d only known Marco for a few months, their faces betrayed the words they wouldn’t dare speak: That child will have no father.
LOUISE TOOK A nap after lunch. The covers over her body felt like the lead vest patients wear during X-rays. It reminded her of a game Patrick once played with her called sandman. “Concentrate,” he’d said. “You are in your bed. It’s deep summer and the windows are open. While you’re sleeping, the sandman comes through the window. He is standing over you. He has a knife in his hand and begins to cut you. He is cutting from heel to toe. Now he is folding back skin. He is filling your foot with warm, heavy sand . . .” Patrick went through each part of Louise’s body. He took out her eyes and filled the cavities with sand. He cut a hole in her head the way one would a jack-o’-lantern. When he told Louise to open her eyes, she was pinned to the ground.
His power over her was frightening. Louise felt his headaches in her temples, his rage in her stomach. It had been like that even before she lost her husband, but it intensified when she was left to raise Patrick alone. Once, she tried to explain how she was tuned into his frequency. His reaction was that of a despot humouring a fool.
Their relationship was changing. First, Patrick had announced he wanted to move to Europe. “All good art happens in Berlin,” he’d claimed with the pompous certainty of a late teenager. Louise had tried deterring him by using conventional methods of guilt: “What about your education? What about money? More importantly, what will I do without you?”
She didn’t want to be irrational or manipulative, but both seemed necessary given the circumstances. Louise picked vasovagal syncope because the symptoms were elusive and the disease was easy to simulate. A fainting episode while jogging, another in the kitchen, one triggered by gunshots on TV and she had herself a bona fide medical disorder. Patrick immediately inundated her with questions: “What is your doctor doi
ng to narrow the pathology? Did you ask about the nerve conduction test? Can’t you get a scan?” As months passed and Louise remained uncured, Patrick began to lose interest. In May, when the third-floor tenant moved out, Patrick asked to move in. “I need space,” he said. If she didn’t agree, he’d go elsewhere. Imagine. Blackmailed by her own son.
With every utterance, Louise felt their mother-son helix unravel. Pieces were missing in his goodbye hugs. He must have known she would detect it, agonize over it. For what reason? Maybe he already knew she’d been lying to him. Maybe that was his revenge.
IN THE EARLY afternoon, Patrick heard a knock at the back door. “Hello?” a voice said—not his mother. He crossed the apartment and was surprised to see the girl from the second floor. She wore a baggy sweater with a wolf on it, something he might wear.
“I’m out of sugar,” she said, offering coffee in exchange.
He directed her to a small jar of sugar on the counter. She stirred a spoonful into her cup and followed him down the hall, stepping over his Orchestrata prints, wrinkled from water damage. Before sitting down in his only chair, she scanned his record collection, alphabetized in crates along the wall, and perused the graveyard of electronic equipment to be used for various projects or perhaps nothing at all. Patrick crouched with his elbows on his knees, frayed white holes framing his kneecaps.
“What kind of person are you?” she asked him. “I mean, if you had to define yourself.”
Patrick was surprised by her forwardness. After a moment, he said, “I would say I’m ruminative. Often perplexed. Most of the time, I feel like the sound a mouth harp makes.”
She laughed.
“How does it feel?” he asked, pointing to her belly.
“Strange,” Chelsea said, pulling at her sweater to hide the bump. “Nerve-racking.”
“Nerve-racking?”
“My boyfriend doesn’t know yet.”
Patrick raised his eyebrows. “No?”
“He’s away. I want to tell him in person.”
“Right.”
“He’ll be here soon,” she added.
“Are you scared?” Patrick asked.
“No,” she responded. She reconsidered. “Yes.”
Patrick swirled his coffee and peered into the bottom. “The grains in this cup tell me your future will be golden.”
“I hope you’re right,” Chelsea said.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, they explored the storm-ravaged city together. “Quick, before my mother sees,” Patrick said, ushering Chelsea down the fire escape. They followed Agricola Street to the Commons, past torn vinyl siding and shingles from a blown-off roof. Military trucks lined the road by the public gardens and uniformed men stood in front of a roped-off area.
“You’d think this was the zombie apocalypse or something,” Patrick said.
Debris was piled as high as snowbanks on Barrington Street. At the waterfront, a barefoot man told a crowd that during the hurricane, he’d seen the face of God in the waves. Bright-pink tape blocked sections of the boardwalk but people stepped over to take photos of a sunken ship. The tip of the mast rose just above the water’s surface. Below, you could make out the ship’s deck with its furled ropes and waterlogged crates.
“My boyfriend’s a sailor,” Chelsea told Patrick.
She’d first met Marco in Veracruz, early one morning at the fish market. From a barnacle-crusted dock, she watched the returning boats trawl across the flat morning surface. Marco was at the hull of one of those ships. He looked at Chelsea across the water and if she hadn’t believed in love at first sight before, that moment changed her mind.
A friend of Patrick’s sauntered down the wharf, waving to get his attention. Chelsea recognized the boy from the Bicycle Thief, where she had too often served him and his drunk friends. Sometimes, late at night, he flirted. He didn’t recognize her out of context.
“Heard about Orchestrata,” he said, slapping Patrick on the back. “Bummer! When are they back?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll be in Germany.”
“Right. You been to Point Pleasant yet? I hear it’s fucked. I have my mom’s car if you want a ride.”
When she was a child, before the family moved up-island, Chelsea’s parents had often taken her to Point Pleasant on Sundays. Later, when she moved back for university, she and her friends drank there on Friday nights. Sometimes they wrote messages on torn bits of cigarette packs and sent their hopeful bottles floating into the harbour.
Patrick and Chelsea walked to where his friend had parked and they drove away from the city centre, detouring once where a fallen tree had tangled with the power lines. Traffic gridlocked as soon as they turned onto Point Pleasant Drive. They pulled over and entered the far end of the park.
It was hard to follow any one trail because of the damage so they zigzagged through the remains of what had once been a lush forest. A scent hung in the air, a mixture of splintered wood, gasoline, and the sea. Almost every tree had been pushed over, broken, or uprooted. Jagged trunks scraped the horizon and the ocean’s deep blue framed the newly empty spaces.
“This is fucked,” Patrick agreed, taking pictures.
Chelsea gazed at the ocean, now calm, and thought of her Sunday walks through those trees. Her parents would be devastated. They’d called her in the morning but she let it go to the answering machine. On the message, her mom asked if she was okay and recounted disaster stories from the paper. She also said they’d be driving down from Sydney on the weekend. Chelsea hadn’t seen them in two months. Not since she started showing.
“No excuses this time,” her mother said. “We’re coming and that’s final.”
LOUISE WATCHED HER son sneak off with the girl from the second floor and it occurred to her that Patrick might be the father. There was something disconcerting about their body language as they trotted down the fire escape. Something secretive. Also, the girl looked five or six months pregnant. That was about how long Patrick had been distancing himself. Ever since the girl moved in, she kept saying her “boyfriend” was coming. “He’s in Panama,” she said once. The next time he’d be in Brazil or somewhere equally implausible. His arrival was either delayed because of paperwork or some job he had to do. The story changed every time.
Louise decided the only option was to find evidence and confront him. Patrick’s door was locked but she had her own key. She hadn’t been inside for weeks and was annoyed to find the apartment in deplorable condition—dirty dishes sagged in piles on the kitchen counter. Some of them were grey-streaked and smelled like cigarettes. The living room was in disarray, and not just because of the tree and the broken window. Her first thought: I’ll evict him.
As she stood in the centre of the room, Louise began to feel strange. She steadied herself against an armchair. It wasn’t so much the state of the apartment as the realization that Patrick had grown up to be just like his father. The mess, the records in milk crates, the smoking, his artistic tendencies. Even their beards were similar. Her vision started to blur. She straightened the sheets on Patrick’s bed and decided to lie down for a moment. His scent had changed now that he was doing his own laundry, buying his own soap.
Beside Patrick’s bed was his Moleskine notebook. When she picked it up, a few papers slid out—a ticket to Germany for November 1st and some documents. There were English subtitles in small italic font below the German. Name, address, date of birth. Date of arrival. Next of kin. The forms, she realized, were for some kind of visa.
Tears sprang into Louise’s eyes. His departure was only a month away and he hadn’t mentioned the trip, not one thing about it. What was wrong with him? Whatever the story was, she decided, Patrick wasn’t going anywhere. Louise took his plane ticket and the papers and tore them in half. She ripped again and again, tearing until there was nothing left but a pile of scraps.
BEFORE LONG, DARKNESS was upon the city again. Chelsea and Patrick walked along Almon Street, talking to people who drank warm beer in the twilight and excha
nged disaster stories. Someone had set up a generator on the sidewalk. A small group crowded around a television, watching that evening’s episode of Survivor. In the yard next door, neighbours pooled their perishables and cooked them over a communal fire. The air smelled of burnt marshmallows and steak.
“Hey,” one of the neighbours asked, “are you hungry?”
“I’m okay,” Chelsea replied. She was starving, but her ankles hurt. All she wanted to do was lie down. Patrick declined the offer as well. He opened the back gate and let Chelsea go first. Thick, leafy branches lay in haphazard patterns on the waterlogged grass and Louise’s sneakers, still wet from the night before, dangled from a makeshift clothesline.
“When do you leave for Germany?” Chelsea asked.
“November first.”
“When are you back?”
“I’m not.”
“Never?”
“Not if I can help it. Don’t say anything if my mom asks.”
“She doesn’t know?”
“I can’t tell her. She’s crazy.”
“Like, mother crazy, or crazy-crazy?”
“Both.”
“You’re seriously going to take off without saying anything?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Have you considered what it’ll do to her?”
“It’s better this way, trust me.”
Chelsea crossed her arms. “I hope I don’t have a kid like you,” she said.
Patrick continued up the fire escape while Chelsea fumbled for her keys. She entered her dark apartment and lit two candles. She walked down the hallway to the bedroom, trying not to let the wax drip. By the time she changed into her pyjamas, there was a lot of noise overhead. She heard both Patrick’s and Louise’s voices. Various snippets of disjointed arguments and accusations percolated through the vent. Chelsea fought the urge to go upstairs—it wasn’t her place to intervene. Still, she felt sorry for the landlord and the overblown, uncontrollable love she had for her son. It marred her judgement and left her vulnerable.
Chelsea got into bed with her notebook. Today, I saw a sunken boat at the harbour and thought of you, she wrote. I remember your stories of mayday calls, water in your lungs, and I never want you to be that way. I want you the way we were in Isla Holbox, together, legs entwined beneath the water. I told my neighbour that you’re a sailor. Know what he said? Sometimes sailors don’t come back to port. Prove him wrong, Marco. Please.