The Journey Prize Stories 30

by Sharon Bala

  We ate the pasta on my bed while watching episodes of The Wire on my laptop.

  “They filmed a scene in my grocery store,” I told James.

  “I was on the same plane as McNulty once,” he said, leaning in and rasping against me with his beard. On The Wire, Bubbles gave an emotional speech at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. The ziti was mush in my mouth. The mozzarella had cooled into a skin. I set it on the floor by the bed. James moved closer, put his arm around me, and gave me this smooch sort of kiss—all gums and teeth.

  “It’s bright in here,” he said. Then he stood up and turned off all my lamps. It was us and the neighbour’s Christmas lights, and I should have felt romantic. Instead, I thought of cockroaches rushing through drainpipes and silverfish slipping into electric sockets. I thought of the train that would take James back to Washington. Earlier I’d checked the schedule in eagerness at his arrival and noticed that the last train left at 11:15. When I took the plates back to the kitchen I checked the oven clock and it was already 10:30. It would take at least twenty minutes to get to Penn Station. That meant he had to leave by 10:50 to be safe.

  When the episode ended he put on the next one and then settled back into place next to me. We had time for half of it, probably. He kissed me again, the brim of his hat joining our foreheads, his hand low on my back. I turned away, pretending to be invested in what was happening in the show, though I’d zoned out of several scenes and lost the thread of the story. McNulty was saying something about a serial killer. I kept thinking of the time and trying to guess how much had passed. James was cracking a topical joke, but I’d missed the beginning so I just laughed anyway. I tried to remember if he’d mentioned having a friend in Baltimore that he was planning to stay with. If he didn’t, I couldn’t ask him to stay at a hotel or take a several hundred dollar cab ride back, could I? And I certainly couldn’t afford to offer to pay for it. Had he checked the schedule? Had he assumed he was staying here?

  I knew I should just ask, so I considered how I might phrase the question: “Do you know what time your train’s leaving?” or, more simply, “What time’s your train leaving?” But would that seem as though I were trying to get rid of him? It wasn’t really that late for a date to end.

  When I checked the time again, it was 11:00. James would miss his train. When the show ended, he stretched his long arms behind him, yawning. “One more?” he asked. “Or is that enough TV for one night?”

  “That might be it for me,” I said. “I’m getting sleepy.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “It’s still early, but I guess we could go to bed,” he said. “I’ve got a morning train ride tomorrow.”

  I went to the bathroom and changed into my PJs, which I buttoned austerely to the neck. When I came out, James had undressed to only his boxers. We got into my bed, and I noticed how small it was for a long man whose knobbed feet angled out from under the blankets. The bed’s size forced us close, a couple of spoons pressed coldly together. His beard was against the back of my neck, kissing gently. His hand roved over my hip. I made myself stay still. I impersonated taxidermy. James must have known I wasn’t asleep. When his fingers passed my stomach, it was rigid.

  “Be reasonable,” I told myself. In the morning he’d catch his train and I’d never see him again. I could wait it out, just as I waited out my panic at the edge of Point Pleasant Park last summer, sitting on a bench facing the Atlantic, gripping the weathered seat planks on either side of me, trying to get ahead of my erratic breath. I focused on the caracara poised plumply on a branch, raising the finger-like edges of its wings.

  From here it could fly to Portugal and never see a soul.

  GREG BROWN

  BEAR

  We yawn our way through the ranger’s warning.

  “Sure sure,” Dilly says.

  “Got it,” I say.

  Later, Dilly’s disappeared and I’m staring into a tangle of tree branches and darkness.

  The stars in the night sky: glint of teeth.

  * * *

  —

  The teeth are literal teeth: a grizzly bear.

  * * *

  —

  Not a grizzly, it turns out: a woman inside a mechanical bear. She’s studying the effects of predation on the spatial distributions of local ungulates.

  “Isn’t the effect pretty obvious?” I ask.

  “We only know what we can prove,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  She lets me climb up and sleep beside her inside the bear, which is a pretty cozy affair for two people. No room, I mean, for a futon or kids or antique bookshelves or the other amenities that make domestic life such a rich damn joy. She insists I stick around. “Nothing serious,” she says. What it is is she needs help operating the bear’s haunches. “Research protocols require maximal verisimilitude,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  I’m mixing synthetic bear feces in a glass bowl and wondering if Assistant Professor Ursula’s three-month pregnancy undermines the ongoing negotiations between the Shareholders and the Union, as we call ourselves.

  “Listen,” I holler through the ventilation shaft that separates the bear’s two compartments. “We’ve grown…apart.”

  “Shh,” the ventilation shaft echoes in return. “You’ll wake the caribou.”

  “Fine. I’m going for cigarettes,” I say.

  “Only you can prevent forest fires,” the ventilation shaft returns to me.

  * * *

  —

  I’m lost, hungry, dying, dead.

  * * *

  —

  That damn ranger’s hovering over me, smiling to himself, some dickishness dancing on his face like I told you so.

  ALICIA ELLIOTT

  TRACKS

  For the twelfth time in two days I watch as Laura shreds her vocal cords screaming and still she’ll take no drugs. Her eyes are hooded with exhaustion, her hair a wet mass on her sticky forehead. It was a twenty-two-hour delivery, most of which she spent foodless and hunched over a birthing stool in the biggest suite at Tsi Non:we Ionnakeratstha Ona:grahsta. She wanted a natural delivery, she’d said. If she could feel the conception she sure as shit was going to feel the birth. That was Laura. Ever crude and to the point.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hosp—”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? No no no no no no. No. Heck, Roy!”

  The camera shrinks away. It focuses on me spitting encouragement through the pulsing crush of Laura’s grip. I glimpse up at the camera—at Roy—and give a pained smile. Back then I didn’t know for sure that I couldn’t conceive but I had my suspicions.

  I fast forward to the end, when Sherry is finally in her arms. Laura looks tired as hell, but when the camera comes for a close-up, she swats it away. “You’re not allowed to catch my wrinkles on camera just because I gave birth to your kid.”

  There’s a time lapse. When the camera starts again Laura’s made up like some eager starlet. But she’s not looking at the camera from beneath pristine eyelashes or blowing kisses the way she would when she was young. She’s looking down at Sherry. Every touch and gesture is full of yearning, for both the present and the future. Tracing Sherry’s veins with her fingers like she’s following a map. Like in those small trails of blue, peeking from beneath crystalline skin, Laura saw their lives: love and anger, tenderness and humour, pain and envy. Like Laura saw their worlds—separate but interlocking: two halves of a Venn diagram.

  No one watching could have seen anything but a mother and a daughter, each absolutely smitten, adoring and sizing one another up. I’m not sure I see anything different now but I continually find myself trying. Nothing ever really comes out of the blue. There must be shifting eyes somewhere in the grainy footage, a hesitation, a smile held a moment too long.

  “Em.” Tom is standing in the doorway in a too-big black suit. He’s holding my black pumps and watching me, a question on his face. I wish he would just ask it.


  “Is it time?”

  He nods. I stop the video, get up, and grab my shoes.

  * * *

  —

  There is a persistent, musty smell in the viewing room. It’s hidden well beneath strangers’ perfumes and plug-in deodorizers, but it’s there. I imagine it’s the smell of formaldehyde or death, though I’ve never really smelled either. I haven’t been to a funeral since Uncle Rob’s and that doesn’t really count. I was so young; for all I remember I wasn’t there at all. Laura said she remembered everything, from the music (“Fucking Garth Brooks”) to the “huge ass mole” on the priest’s chin. I didn’t consider it at the time but it was strange a priest was there. Mom said when she and Uncle Rob were at the Mush Hole together, he was constantly in trouble, back-talking the priests and refusing to speak English and biting the unlucky teacher tasked with cutting his long, black Indian hair to a more “civilized” length. They beat him so he hated them; he hated them so they beat him. And yet at the end of his life a priest was praying over his Mohawk soul.

  Twenty years later I’m at this funeral. Three generations—almost an entire family—gone, all put to rest courtesy of Styres Funeral Home. Laura planned her funeral shortly after she and Roy were married. It should have set off alarm bells but it didn’t. At least her preparations have helped Roy. All he’s had to do is nod, mute.

  The room is orderly enough. Chairs arranged with absurd precision. I have the feeling that were I to take a ruler and measure the distance between each one, I’d come up with the same number every time. There must be some sort of science to grief, some manual funeral home directors adhere to, detailing the most manageable chair arrangement or flower placement for friends and family of the deceased. Everything is too calculated: the beige wallpaper, the overstuffed couches, the pre-packaged condolences.

  Aunt Chelsea is at the podium, mascara that took thirty minutes of applying and re-applying to perfection now sliding, sap-like, down her cheek. Otherwise she is composed, wearing the stiff, proud pout of a once-great general facing a war tribunal. Her voice is level and dry.

  “Laura was such a smart girl. Rob loved her so much. When we lost him she was four. It was…difficult. But she was strong.”

  “Smart.” “Strong.” Adjectives any parent could slap on the dead child they didn’t care to know. I look around for evidence of skepticism. Not even a raised eyebrow. No one is thinking about Aunt Chelsea and Laura’s relationship, which was tempestuous at best. In the face of death, ugly truths are redacted.

  As long as I can remember, every conversation between them had notes of danger—as though any minute they’d collapse into fists and fire. I don’t remember Laura ever mentioning Aunt Chelsea with anything resembling love. Even when she was six and should have still been under her mother’s spell, she ignored her almost constantly, called her “Chelsea” with satisfaction.

  I remember in grade nine when she was asked to prom by Mark Hanson, a white twenty-year-old senior with a car and nipple rings. She was one of the only ninth graders going—probably one of the only kids from the rez going, too—a fact she loved to remind us of, dangling it in front of our faces like a succulent piece of fruit. Laura couldn’t do anything without thoroughly pissing off her mother, though, so she decided to wear Aunt Chelsea’s low-cut red cocktail dress—the expensive one she bought herself in Toronto to celebrate graduating from nursing school. The way Laura told it, she sauntered home drunk at 3:00 a.m. wearing Mark’s leather jacket and swinging her panties around her finger. She greeted her mother with a smile, slurring, “Guess who’s a woman now?” before throwing up on the kitchen floor.

  “You should’ve seen her face, Em,” she’d said, laughing. “I’ve never heard her scream so loud. And all for that ugly dress! Never mind her piss-drunk daughter shooting vomit like a fucking sprinkler.”

  But a month after prom, when it became obvious that Mark Hanson’s “gravity’s as good as birth control” claim was bullshit, Aunt Chelsea didn’t yell or tell her she had it coming, even if she thought it. She calmly described Laura’s options, then asked what she wanted to do. When abortion was chosen, Aunt Chelsea didn’t flinch or grimace in that self-satisfied way she usually did when Laura chose anything. She diligently set about doing all the work: finding a clinic, booking the appointment in Toronto, borrowing a car to drive us there. All Laura did the week before the procedure was talk about Mark. He hadn’t even looked in her direction since prom.

  “I’m gonna keep the fetus so I can send it to him. Like in a little jar. Oh! I should put a fake birth certificate in the bag, init? You know, like, ‘Mark Hanson Jr. was aborted on this day, child to a naive girl and a small-dicked asshole.’”

  “You haven’t been naive since kindergarten.”

  “Maybe I should send it to his mom. She’d already be pissed enough an Indian snagged her son, but wouldn’t it be great if she was one of those crazy pro-lifers? Like with the signs and bombs and stuff? She might actually kill Mark. Save me the trouble.”

  But when the day came she didn’t even mention Mark. She didn’t say anything at all. Afterwards, she cried against her mother’s chest for almost an hour. It was strange to watch them in that embrace, as though they were any mother and daughter at any moment in history, timeless.

  * * *

  —

  Laura never really mentioned the abortion to me after it happened, and out of respect for her, I never mentioned it either. I only heard her reference it once in an offhand kind of way the day Sherry was born. I didn’t hear it when she said it, I must have been talking to Roy or Aunt Chelsea. It was something I noticed when I watched the video. The camera is on her bedside table. It only catches the pale curtain’s flutter, but I imagine her gazing down at Sherry, maybe touching her nose with a manicured nail. Then you hear it.

  “I get to keep you.”

  The first time I noticed it I rewound the tape to make sure that’s actually what she said. Each time I heard it I felt sick. Even all those years later, on what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life, tragedy was playing in the background. She put on a good show but she couldn’t forget. She couldn’t escape. Until she did.

  Maybe Laura was trying to atone for her sins. Sacrifice the child she chose for the child she didn’t. Maybe that was a clue. A dot I should have connected. As though hearing those words the first time could stop the train that was, months later, barrelling forward.

  * * *

  —

  Aunt Chelsea’s voice has gotten thicker, the tears faster. She wobbles on her heels. Mom gets up and quietly approaches.

  “It’s okay, Chels.” She tries to lead her away by the hand. Aunt Chelsea only clutches the podium tighter as she continues to melt into the wood. Her cries are guttural, inhuman. She knows she wasn’t a good mother—the type who’d stay up all night and watch movies with Laura, or ask what she wanted to do with her life and really listen. She wasn’t the type of mother a daughter would come to when terrified by her own thoughts.

  Had Laura seen this, she would have offered a bemused cliché. “Better late than never.” As if time is infinite and lives don’t end. What good is remorse now? It might as well be never.

  I lean toward Tom. “I need a cigarette.” He moves to get up and I stop him quick with a shake of my head. Any time I’m alone for more than ten minutes he calls to me, or peeks his head in, or comes along with a cup of coffee or a bowl of corn soup. It’s suffocating.

  I stand in the doorway and inhale deeply. Freshly-shorn grass and charred hotdogs from a fundraising barbecue across the street. Evidence that other lives continue, unchanged. A slow nausea creeps up, stops short at my esophagus.

  The only other person outside is a woman wearing a simple black dress. About my age. White, blond. She’s whispering into her phone with her back turned. As the screen door clicks shut she turns around sharply and thrusts her phone into her purse, her eyebrows squeezed in agitation.

  “Sorry.” I pull out
a cigarette and try to light it. My hands are shaky and imprecise.

  The woman looks wary for a moment, then all creases smooth.

  “It’s okay. I was looking for a reason to hang up anyway.”

  I raise an eyebrow and she rolls her eyes.

  “Ex-boyfriend,” she offers.

  I nod, focusing on my still-unlit cigarette. Once, twice, three times, four, and still no flame. The woman reaches into her purse, pulls out a red lighter, and flicks its head ablaze without hesitation. In a moment the end of my cigarette’s aglow.

  “Thanks,” I say as I inhale.

  “No problem.”

  I can feel her eyes darting back to me as she digs through her purse. I wonder what she sees. Looking in the mirror hasn’t really occurred to me lately. I could have grown crow’s feet overnight. My lips could have decided once and for all they were done pretending, leaving me frowning forever. I’ve seen other people like that. Old Mohawk women with faces like scored leather. They couldn’t have always been that way. They must have been happy once, even beautiful, before some event came down on them with such unrelenting force that the smiling ended.