Day 3: Drove by a field of deer. I tried to count them, but there were too many. They looked at us and then sauntered away.
Nikki met Thomas that spring when he was finishing school. He was studying photography and described his latest project to her.
“I’m taking photos of people standing in the financial district surrounded by buildings on a Sunday when there’s no one around. And then I take another picture of them in the same pose, but standing in a field somewhere outside the city.”
“That’s an interesting juxtaposition,” Nikki said to him. She thought he was cute.
“I need more models.”
They met a week later on a Sunday at nine in the morning at the foot of a skyscraper, First Canadian Place. The area outside was empty, not one businessman around, and she could see their wobbly reflections in the shiny dark glass of the buildings. She wore black pants, a black t-shirt and pink flip-flops. Thomas didn’t want the flip-flops in the photo, so she posed barefoot. The cement was cold. He wanted the same light for the second picture, so the next day he picked her up at the same time and they drove out of the city. West and then north. It was strip mall, subdivision, subdivision, strip mall, farm, strip mall, country. They listened to Neil Young and drank Coke he kept in a cooler in the trunk. When he found the field he wanted to photograph, they hopped a barbed wire fence and started walking.
After the pictures they kissed in the field. That spring Toronto was infested with ladybugs, and Nikki saw them everywhere, swarming benches and poles, flying slowly and getting stupidly tangled up in hair or in folds of clothing. After they kissed Nikki forgot all about the infestation and when she looked down and noticed a tiny red ladybug crawling on her big toe she thought, how special.
Thomas lived in an apartment off of College Street just east of Dufferin. June kicked off with a heat wave and the two of them spent nights laying naked on his bed, the television on mute in the corner, an electric fan whirring and blowing cool air onto the soles of their feet. It was too hot to be close, but they were giddy enough to have sex anyway, sweaty before they even touched. They drank his roommate’s cold white wine because he always kept a bottle in the fridge while theirs would still be wrapped in the paper bag, forgotten in the corner.
There was something about that summer, the heat. Nikki was twenty-one when it started and twenty-two when it ended and she kept lists of the places where she and Thomas had sex. Mostly his apartment. Once, High Park. After they left she just wrote, everywhere.
Day 5: Picked up wood for a fire. It cost three dollars, but there was no one around to collect the money, just some envelopes. I put the money in an envelope and slid it under the office door. Thought about not paying, but there are places to be cheap, and someone went to a lot of trouble bundling up the wood.
Nikki’s brother didn’t know she was gone until he called her cell phone a few days later. She and Thomas had made their way to the Smoky Mountains at the edge of Tennessee. Her brother was in Toronto, visiting from out-of-town. Had Nikki forgotten that he was supposed to stay with her that weekend? She had. The reception on her phone was bad so she walked to the only pay phone on site and called him back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m in the Smoky Mountains.”
“What are you talking about?” Her brother was outside her apartment building.
“You didn’t call me before you left.” Nikki said. “You should’ve reminded me.”
“The Smoky Mountains?”
“Tennessee. I’m with Thom.”
“What the hell?” he asked. “Why are you in Tennessee?”
“I’m on vacation. I didn’t tell you I was going?”
“Where am I supposed to stay?”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
When Nikki was younger she dyed her hair hot pink, neon green, black with streaks of grey and many other shades in-between. The frequent variations in colour gave people the impression that she did things without thinking or that she was indecisive, but they were wrong. She was a brunette: if you want pink hair, it takes commitment, patience, bleach kits and latex gloves. When she began art school she grew her hair out to its natural colour after a chunk broke off in her hands, but her reputation for being flaky followed her.
“Nicole,” he said finally. That’s all. He hung up. Nikki started dialling his number again, but stopped herself.
Day 7: “SWALLOWING ANGRY WORDS IS BETTER THAN HAVING TO EAT THEM.”
Nikki’s grandfather had been a sign painter in Poland before immigrating to Canada and as an homage to him, she bought huge sheets of glass wholesale and painted on them. She’d found a book of church signs at a thrift store and taught herself how to hand-letter a sign by painting out slogans included in the book. They said things like, SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE or HOW DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY? SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING? She’d spend hours planning and then painting a single word, making sure the slant of the A’s were at the perfect angle, that the O’s were symmetric.
When Thomas and Nikki drove to the field for their second photo shoot, she told him about her project. Thomas said that the best church signs were in the States, especially in the South. That afternoon they made plans to take a roadtrip together. They could look for the craziest church signs for her to paint and he could take pictures. They high-fived, but Nikki wasn’t sure if they were really serious about it.
The next time they spoke, he called while she was working late at her studio. She’d been so absorbed in the act of painting a Z that she forgot she’d hung another piece of glass from the ceiling. When she bolted across the room to answer her phone, she smashed headfirst into it. The sheet shattered into pieces, cut her cheek and gave her a swollen lip. She pressed her hand to the top of her head and discovered another cut on her scalp. The bright red blood on her fingertips reminded her of how she’d dyed her hair fire engine red for her high school prom.
Nikki had stitches the first time she and Thomas slept together. She bowed her head and showed them to him and he touched the wound gingerly, felt the raised railroad of dark thread.
Day 11: Bourbon and orange soda.
Nikki turned twenty-two while they drove between Athens and Savannah. She had spotty cell phone coverage and kept missing calls from people who didn’t know she was away or, if they knew, were fuzzy on the details.
Her brother called. “Are you okay?” he asked in his voice mail message. “What are you doing in the Smoky Mountains anyway?”
She hadn’t spoken to him since the conversation at the campsite and by the time she heard from him, the mountains, their dampness and trees and green, seemed long ago. He must’ve been imagining her camping, fresh-faced and roughing it, while in reality she and Thomas had left that campsite quickly, annoyed by loud families staying near them. Instead of finding other places to camp, they kept sleeping in shoddy motels across Georgia. They thought they would camp more, but hadn’t anticipated the sheer heat of a Southern summer and spent more time than expected sussing out cheap, air conditioned lodging.
Thomas and Nikki stepped out of the car to buy fruit from a roadside stand. The heat was so astounding that Nikki gasped. She ate an unwashed warm peach and threw the pit onto the road. They had a bottle of Maker’s Mark, the seal unbroken, its red wax melted and smeared all over the top like congealed blood. Before getting back into the car Thomas poured some bourbon in a plastic cup and Nikki drank most of it quickly.
“Happy birthday to me,” she sang.
Thomas took her face in his hands and squeezed her cheeks. She could smell the bourbon and peaches between them. They stared at each other and he kissed her nose. He hadn’t shaved since they left and the scruff of his beard scraped against her skin.
Day 12: Outside in the dark I looked down and saw black spots. They started moving. Cockroaches.
On their roadtrip, Nikki wanted to keep records of what they did, but she couldn’t bring herself to write full paragraphs in her journal, so she’d scrawl certain words:
catfish, rain on the windshields, wet socks. Sometimes more than that. A description of the crabs on the beach at night, maybe, or how the Spanish moss that hung in lazy drapes from the trees in Savannah was used to stuff pillows.
She didn’t write anything concrete about her days, no real narrative, and she definitely didn’t write about the rest of her birthday, how they’d stayed in a motel in Tybee Beach outside of Savannah because they couldn’t afford anything in town. They’d walked to the beach with the rest of the Maker’s Mark. Thomas finished it off too quickly and told her that he’d slept with someone a few days before they’d left for their trip. Twice, actually.
“Why’d you do that?” Nikki asked. Her stomach hurt.
“I don’t know,” he said. He sat with his legs apart, his head hanging between them, heavy. She thought of a scene they’d witnessed on their first night in Nashville on Music Row: a woman, drunk and stumbling, crying, trailing after a man and saying, you broke my heart, you broke my heart. A country song.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” Thomas said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Nikki meant it and then a second later she didn’t, but he’d already pounced on her forgiveness and wrapped his arms around her in a hug. He engulfed her. They rocked back and forth and then he threw up in a garbage can. Nikki stood by close as he clutched the sticky sides of the can and vomited a day’s worth of bourbon and peaches.
Day 13: Hushpuppies are called “hushpuppies” because they were originally fed to dogs to shut them up.
On their trip Thomas didn’t take many pictures and Nikki forgot to write down most of the church signs they passed. It was hard to think about art on vacation, and, truthfully, the signs she had in her thrift store book were better. The one sign she liked the most said, WHAT IF YOU DIDN’T BELIEVE IN ME AND THEN IT TURNED OUT I EXISTED. It wasn’t clever or funny or a quotation from the Bible and it wasn’t even grammatically correct. It was just a threat. It would be scarier, she thought, if she painted the opposite: if you did believe and then he didn’t exist. It was better to not believe and be pleasantly surprised at the end.
Day 15: Outdoor showers only. You have to yank a chain and keep it pulled to get the water running. We took turns pulling the chain while the other rinsed off. Little whirlpools of sand at our feet.
They ended their trip on Ocracoke Island, a skinny, tiny island on the southern tip of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They took a ferry from the mainland at six thirty in the morning. Nikki’s favourite picture from the trip was one that she took of Thomas on that ferry. He’s standing on the main deck wearing tattered army shorts and a black t-shirt. In the background you can see a little girl, blurry. You can’t tell in the picture, but the girl spent most of the ferry ride outside playing with the seagulls trailing the boat. She stood with her arms on her hips, put a cracker in her mouth and jutted out her chin, stubborn and brave. The birds swooped down and snatched the crackers straight out of her mouth. The gulls were fast, like military planes the way they dived down so quickly, and the girl, maybe nine years old, never flinched.
There were wild horses on Ocracoke Island. Nikki expected to be greeted by them running gloriously free, but the harbour was dotted only with little cottages and boats. It was quaint and pretty, but everything was too expensive. They managed to track down a campsite by the beach and there was a deep, sandy path that connected their tent to the ocean.
They never saw any wild horses. They drove to a lookout they read about in the guidebook and climbed three steps to a wooden platform for a better view. There were a few horses in the distance, small, stubby creatures, and they stood in a line, heads dipped into feed buckets. Their tails flicked the flies away, but otherwise they were motionless and lethargic in the mid-afternoon heat. These days the horses are maintained by Ocracoke’s agricultural society. They’d skipped that line in the guidebook.
“Do you know Houyhnhnm?” Nikki asked Thomas.
“What the hell is that?”
“A language, from Gulliver’s Travels.”
“I don’t know any languages from Gulliver’s Travels, Nik. I don’t know French and I took it for eight years.”
“Gulliver meets these horses and it turns out they speak to each other in a special language. He lives with them and learns it. In Houyhnhnm the horses don’t have a word for ‘lie.’”
“Why not?”
“They’re so noble they don’t even understand the concept of lying. They just never did it.”
Thomas got uncomfortable. He thought she was leading him back to a conversation about the girl he’d slept with. They’d spoken about it one more time, the day after her birthday. They walked along the boardwalk at the beach and talked about it calmly, and they held hands and she told him again that it was okay. She meant it more than the night before. Afterwards they’d driven to Savannah where he doted on her, buying pecan candy, cold bottles of water, a big straw hat. She hadn’t meant to bring it up again in Ocracoke, had just been reminded about Houyhnhnm while looking at the horses. People always talked about the part where Gulliver lives with the tiny people or the giants, but not the horses, and it was her favourite part.
Day 16: The air is heavier out here, swampy. The grass by the beach is long, each stalk broad and pale green.
When Thomas and Nikki returned to Toronto three weeks later, it wasn’t as hot anymore. They had lunch together one more time before going to their separate apartments. When their drinks arrived, Nikki started crying. She kept dissolving into tears as they ate, but she insisted on staying. Thomas put down his fork and petted her hand. “Are you mad at me?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
Nikki wasn’t angry and she wasn’t sad, but she couldn’t stop crying. Or, she was both of those things and more. Mostly she felt stripped of the protective cocoon of travelling. Far away from home nothing fazed her, but now that she was back she felt somehow betrayed by real life. By Thomas too for bringing her back to it.
It was like the confusion she’d felt after running into the sheet of glass in her studio. She remembered being utterly perplexed by how the air had suddenly solidified, how it had hardened and slapped her so hard she bled. A friend of hers who worked on the other side of the room said she’d exclaimed, “What the fuck,” when it happened, but she didn’t remember saying that or anything at all.
“I don’t know,” she said to Thomas. “I’m overtired.”
Day 18: The rattle of large groups of crabs scurrying on sand.
People asked, what did you see on your trip, what did you do? Nikki hesitated before answering. They didn’t do much really: they drove and they talked and they looked at things. They went entire stretches without talking. This wasn’t the answer people expected, so she’d describe the exact shade of red of a Red Velvet cake instead. Rusty brownish red, the bloom of a drop of blood in a cup of buttermilk. Nikki still has the journal she kept on the trip, but she never flips through it, although sometimes she’s envious of the girl who wrote only little phrases, tiny summaries lit up by the glow of those heat-blurred days.
Day 19: I just sat in the groin of a riptide.
Nikki’s legs and arms were scarred up by mosquito bites for the rest of the summer. She got them at the very end of the trip on Ocracoke Island. They’d fallen asleep naked, and the mosquitoes had ignored Thomas and gone straight for her. They’d left the tent flap open a crack for air, and when she woke up in the middle of the night, her body hummed with itchiness, worse than when she had chicken pox as a child. The itchiness was more like a presence than a sensation; it hovered an inch above her skin, hot and throbbing. She wrapped herself in a sheet and when she woke up in the morning it clung to her, dotted with bright red spots of clotted blood. She’d thrown off the sheet and ran straight into the ocean, kicking up sand behind her. The water was freezing and frothy and angry. She sat down and listened to the foam fizz as the waves retreated.
At that point on the island the currents were powerful enough to be riptides. The
re was a sign with a diagram of the beach that charted out the anatomy of the surrounding ocean and Nikki copied it into her journal. According to the diagram Nikki was sitting in the groin of a riptide. It wasn’t a bad thing. You’re safe sitting in the groin because you’re tucked in snug between the tides.
Thomas followed close behind and sat down. They sat for a long time while Nikki waited for her itchiness to subside. The sun climbed higher and coloured their shoulders and the apples of their cheeks.
Nikki also learned from the sign that if you’re too weak to swim out of a riptide, you should just float on your back and allow the riptide to carry you away from shore until you’re beyond the pull of the current. Fighting against it is what sucks you under. Once you’re out in the distance, you can wave or yell for help, find a safe way back. She wrote that down too.
WHEN I MET NICK, I thought he was nice. A little dumb, but nice, and he didn’t go to my high school, which was the most important thing. He came over while my parents were out and I played him “Country Feedback” on my guitar. As I fumbled between E minor and G, he leaned over and kissed me. The top of my mouth, underneath my nose. He missed. Nick’s mouth tasted like toothpaste, and that night as I brushed my teeth, I got dizzy just thinking about it.
Nick was cute; he had these cheekbones. My aunt Lydia had a soft spot for paintings of Jesus, the airbrushed kind with photorealistic details. The strangest, my favourite, was of Jesus before the crucifixion. It’s a close-up of his face. His eyes are rolled heavenwards and thin dribbles of blood are sluicing down his forehead, pooling in the gaunt hollows under his eyes and spilling over his cheekbones. Those cheekbones were as sharp as a supermodel’s and when I was sixteen I was jealous of their definition, even if it was the blood drawn by a crown of thorns that emphasized them. Nick had cheekbones like the painting, like Jesus.
Bats or Swallows Page 5