A bird on every tree

by Carol Bruneau

  “You don’t wanna leave sicker than you came,” a voice singled itself out. It was the brochure-waving lady from the bus. Next in line, trapped there, Arlene felt her scouring squint. Ridiculously, she held out her palm. The water’s softness was refreshing, refreshingly ordinary, cooling her wrist. She thought of Em burning up with a fever. Behind her the woman was complaining. The tour company hadn’t yet found another bus; their delay was being extended.

  Around her, people were weeping, some even fainting, out of what she supposed was some strange gratitude. Hennigan eyed her intently, as if trying to extract something from her, some secret trouble? Because troubles encircled them, they were everywhere, no one immune from the ones surrounding them. The brochure woman, at least, had moved on. Undoing her sandal, Arlene picked dried blood from her tiny wound. Muffled prayers rose around her, so much vapour. She felt at once ashamed and lucky, and more than a little pathetic. If there was a god and s/he or it had a plan, why bother working on your own plans, wanting things that mightn’t be included in it?

  The world turned and would keep turning; nothing stopped—and certainly not her companion, wheeling off. Now was the moment. She could catch up or make a complete break, offer an excuse facing him later on the bus. Instead, something made her re-join the queue, even dart ahead apologizing to someone poised to drink. She couldn’t have explained what, or why. The world didn’t stop; neither did impulses. Twisting the handle she let water pool in her hand, its dankness rising like the funk of empty streets at dawn—the streets around the station in Toulouse, sidewalks steeped in piss and the wafting scent of flowers.

  Head and shoulders knees and toes, she imagined Em, tiny Em, singing. The parts of the child’s body built into a song. She brought her palm to her mouth. The water’s flatness piqued regret even as she tasted it. Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood; Em had grown up faster than the mind or heart could grasp—the way of every child?—as if childhood had never happened. At the back of her mind, Em teased: WTF? Next you’ll be going to church.

  Out of nowhere Hennigan—Michael—re-appeared. His paleness and bright shirt were his only distinguishing features in the blur; the sunlight’s intensity altered everything. His patient smile undid her. It was too late, much too late, to thank him for his company, his help, and field what remained of the day amusing herself. By this time tomorrow with any luck she would be leaving the Dordogne, having freely admired paintings by people who had lived so long ago they might not have lived at all; in the end who knew for certain what was actual or authentic, or that anything was as you were led to understand it to be?

  The caves at Font-de-Gaume seemed somehow less important when he suggested supper, his treat: an early one so they could be the first on the bus once it came.

  As they climbed the crooked streets, her toe seemed all but healed. He asked if she was thirsty and they stopped to buy l’eau avec gaz. He barely blinked forking out ten Euros, though his hand quaked rather badly. Ignoring it, he spoke matter-of-factly, describing Nevers and Bernadette’s incorrupt body on view. Lying inside its crystal casket, hands and face as rosy as if the little saint were sleeping. Her convent room smelled like lilies, a sweet, peppery scent, he said; his wife had been the one who’d wanted to go.

  She tried and failed to imagine Em’s response. “You’ve got your health,” the prof had said after the divorce came through, laying some exams on her desk while she fussed over emails.

  How smugly, how decently the suffering of another could be downplayed.

  All the way uphill the cafés were closed till well into the evening. They found themselves once more, she and Hennigan, at the hotel, where a girl was persuaded to bring sandwiches. They had the dining room to themselves. While Arlene was peeling the cellophane from her supper, Michael slid his hand across the sticky tabletop and touched hers.

  In the lobby the driver paced, lighting one cigarette off another. The replacement coach had yet to be dispatched but would surely arrive by midnight, he promised. Repeating this in English, Hennigan—Michael—said he needed to lie down.

  In her mind’s eye her daughter yawned, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that at age sixteen Em knew exactly what it was to feel deluded, disappointed if not cheated by someone’s weakness. The limits of someone’s love, and not just her father’s.

  It made no sense to rent two rooms where one would do, simply to rest and freshen up. The best room available was three flights up—no elevator. The effort of climbing stairs sapped Hennigan’s strength, she could tell, lugging the walker for him, which folded like a stroller. The room smelled of ancient cigarettes and coffee, its yellow walls, carpet, and corner sink each an expansion of grim. The dripping tap summoned Pavlov and his German shepherds salivating at the sight of a lab coat: food, the memory of white.

  Michael limped without apology to the bed. Settling into the sole chair, Arlene quietly removed her sandals, for an uneasy silence had spread between them, a silence now murky, freighted. Slowly her companion drew up his legs, straightened each at the knee, and stretched out.

  The unlikelihood, the impossibility of anything more than silence pressed in, enveloping the room’s dinginess even as its shabby appointments—solid things—seemed to resist it. Shielding his eyes against the lamplight, lying there he looked for all the world like a phone recharging. She should’ve rinsed her foot—there was a single towel, threadbare but clean—and left him then. It would have been the opportune moment, the right thing to do. Instead, her need, her tiredness mirrored there, drew her to the bed, every nerve tweaked, giving in; negotiating its lumpiness, she aligned herself with the edge: the edge of a raft. She pictured Em likewise adrift, spooned together at home with her current boyfriend, their breath trapped under her hot pink duvet.

  The Pavlovian had kissed her: a febrile peck stolen near the photocopier while no one was looking. Sex would follow the faculty club dinner, she felt gloomily certain. If dinner happened; if she wanted it to. Dodging gossip and its complications was the least of it. Something about the prof’s acute smile, his greyish teeth, seemed distinctly off-putting now. The feeling teetered then grew, that she could live out her life and not have sex again: it was possible the way many, perhaps most things, are.

  Hennigan’s kiss was sobering when he turned to her. It was gentle, chaste, and disinterested, and closed the door on needs and neediness, his and hers. Dismissive or weary, maybe both, he patted her arm. His breath smelled of the lozenge he’d been sucking—a Fisherman’s Friend, sour and cool—breath distinctly unlike the professor’s, which, that once, had been faintly bacterial. Like a hungry animal’s, she’d resisted thinking. As Hennigan began to snore, she recalled a paper the professor had wanted distributed—not that she’d mulled it over, its jargon elevating what was common sense into science: how circumstances took a back seat to responses that were automatic, unquestioning. What mattered was association. If you believed something, your imaginings and the reactions they drew made it so. But didn’t all of us long for, expect, more?

  Em’s name hammered inside her; Em herself so tough and delicate, fragile yet intact. Contradiction was reality’s test, someone had said, as wisdom was stupidity’s. It was Em’s assurances she needed, not a stranger’s. Fastening her sandals, picking up her purse, she imagined the prehistoric paintings: silhouettes of mammoths, bison, and horses hunting or being hunted, preying on each another. Barbed horns no more real or more genuine than the impressions of pilgrims’ lips on the walls of Bernadette’s Grotto, the Grotto of Massabielle.

  From the parking lot an engine rumbled, a low, grating throb. She was lucky to find a payphone in the lobby, a working one, a relic. It would be 2 or 3 A.M. at home, Em maybe asleep. The only answer to any prayer she could’ve mustered would be Em’s dodgy hello. But as she punched the numbers and the operator’s voice clicked in, a queue was forming outdoors.

  The driver, obviously relieved, stepped in to m
ake his announcement. Eyes bright with fatigue, passengers were pushing forward; luggage had been transferred, hatches were being bolted shut. Everything but her purse and the clothes she had on would be aboard. She imagined Em’s disgust, predictable, deserved or not. OMG, You’re saying you got horned up and tried to fuck a cripple?

  Sometimes silence was the only defence a person had. She tucked away her credit card. “The guy with the walker, y’all know where he got to?” the brochure lady was calling. She pictured Em the day her dad had finally moved in with his new partner. She hurried up the three flights of stairs. She pictured Em in the bathtub, water everywhere: tiny breasts barely covered, her navel ring mimicking the one in the plug. You’re such a douche. Everything he says is true. Wish I could leave too. Wish I had that choice.

  Breathless, she found that the door gave effortlessly. Inside, the room’s emptiness breathed back. There wasn’t a wrinkle in the chintzy bedspread, or in either pillow. The walker hadn’t left so much as a track in the yellowish carpet. It was as if Hennigan had never existed, not a sign of him left there at all—without a trace he was gone, as though he had never stopped or passed the afternoon with her, as if she had dreamed the river, the cavern, their skimpy, uninteresting meals.

  There was no sign of him downstairs either, or in the queue boarding the bus. Had he dozed off in the shadowy dining room, fallen or had some mishap in the loo? A man in a Tilley hat went in to check. The driver counted heads.

  Hennigan was not to be found.

  Taking her seat, she thought of Font-de-Gaume, of its cave and its dark, flat pictures, and once more, of lips grazing stone, imprints left in hopes of blessing: safekeeping from doom? “Merci pour votre patience, mesdames et messieurs. En cinq minutes nous partirons,” the driver’s voice crackled from the speaker. Bouncing into his seat, he adjusted his mirror. The sea of grey-heads nodded, exhausted but happy, you could tell. The better part of their lives were behind these people, yet like tired schoolchildren they were excited, jubilant, to be on their way.

  “Please, wait,” she almost shouted. But as the gears engaged, the night’s cooling darkness closed in, and Hennigan’s absence absolved and filled her with a strange relief. It was unlikely anyway that he’d have appreciated the outlines of antlers and hoofs, the evidence of human hands and their ability to outwit beasts and doom—doom of any sort. Unlike her, he didn’t need to see in order to believe in things, she told herself, settling in for the last leg of her journey, and soon enough, on to seeing Em.

  Solstice

  He’d never seen a kid with whiter skin, he was pretty sure. A sparkly stud in her cheek. Eyes blue as a baby doll’s that never left his face, except while inspecting the van and when she was test-driving it—his idea, the test drive.

  “How much will you take for it?” she said, climbing out. She had a man’s-man sort of voice. A shiver to it, though, there in the frozen yard, too cold even for Dog to come out of his house. She was skin and bones, he guessed, if you could’ve seen under those baggy black clothes—that uniform kids wore these days, the type that’d come out of nowhere to wash your windshield. Get away from my vehicle! he’d yelled last time, hadn’t been to the city since.

  “Well?” Those eyes of hers lit into his.

  He’d play her a bit, maybe, a smolt on a line so to speak. That chain hanging down below her hoodie—it was hitched to a wallet, he hoped. First you look at the purse, the song swam through his head, better than the rum-pa-pum-pum Eileen and her girlfriends had blaring from the house, the festering, oops, festive season upon them.

  “How much you got?”

  “I can give you fifteen hundred.”

  Funny, a little girl being that direct. But he liked it, wasn’t going to take no. These shoppers you got off Kijiji, tire-kickers usually, make you bend over backwards, like they were doing you a favour taking whatever it was off your hands.

  I’m looking for something I can live in, she’d emailed.

  Then she’s just the ticket, he’d emailed back.

  A pinging jumped from under her heaped-on clothes; clothes that put him in mind of tarpaper, sugar shacks, outhouses and the like. A cellphone. He let out a big exhale, to let her know he didn’t have all day. The wife wanted the van out of the yard yesterday, and just the one answer to his ad! A kid who looked like Ozzy Osbourne’s illegitimate spawn, only starving. If he didn’t get this deal on the road Eileen would be inviting her in for Ovaltine and a bath. Or maybe not. She was up to her armpits in “craft”—crap, he called it, in his head anyway. Her and her friends having a few sips, making lamps out of pickle jars and plastic holly. He’d drilled the holes in the bottoms, driven all the way to the mall to buy electrical cords, skinny ones, white not green.

  “I’m sure you can amuse yourself in the garage.” Eileen had given him strict orders to stay out, she and her hens wanting the house to themselves.

  The kid turned the phone off. “Sorry. So. Like. Okay? Fifteen hundred?” Goth girl, Eileen’s friends, especially Susie the soccer mom, would’ve called her. “You’ll take cash?”

  “Done!” He hadn’t expected money up front. Yeah, that was a wallet at the end of the chain. The van barely worth the cost of the safety check, but he wasn’t going to argue.

  A wad of mostly fifties fresh from the bank is what she hauled out. When she licked her thumb to count them, there was a B. B. on her tongue. The things kids do for glamour, he thought. Thank your lucky stars, Earl, she ain’t yours.

  Somehow he owed her ten bucks, the last few bills being twenties.

  “Wait here and I’ll get your change.”

  Instead of doing like he said she followed him inside. Eileen and the girls quit laughing right in the middle of someone’s “Imagine!” Something about some kid down in Halifax. “Oh my God,” one of them went. That Susie what’s-er-face, the one and her husband that got on that wife-swap show a few years back on the CBC?

  “Staying with you and Donnie for the holidays, is she?”

  “Hell no. Not in this life.”

  “Just a sec till I get your money,” he told the kid. But before he could grab his wallet he heard Eileen asking her if she’d driven before, she didn’t look old enough, blah blah blah. The two of them in the hallway, a host of tole-painted angels and Smurfs smiling down at them, and those flowers Eileen bought every year that smelled like diapers or burnt wires piddled on by the cat. Then everything went quiet; there was just the crackle of the fake log in the fireplace and the snip-snip of someone’s pliers and cursing when one of the girls, maybe Susie, busted her light bulb pushing it into the jar.

  “Have a really great holiday season,” the kid said, taking his ten. It was like the clothes gobbled it up. So many layers you couldn’t tell what she might or mightn’t have underneath.

  Having the sense to wait inside, frig Eileen, he watched through the sheers. Okay, let the bugger start, please, pleeease. Last thing he needed was a bunch of women saying he’d taken advantage of some poor kid. Thing started like a charm, though. The kid pulled out onto the road like she’d driven a truck her whole life. Any luck and it would get her back to where she’d come from—the city, he figured.

  Being on the up and up, of course, he’d remembered to write her a receipt.

  For being near the city the park was pretty sweet. It had woods and a pond with a trail around it—except for the pond it was a bit like the park behind their house in Calgary where she and her sister, and all the other kids on the cul-de-sac, had played. Cul-de-sac: it made you think of a twisted intestine. A land of beige. Barf, puke, vomit, was how she characterized the house colours. Taupe, olive, cappuccino, was her mum’s take. Just the other day, texting, she’d set Mum straight. Fine. You get the last word, her mum had put. If Mum could’ve texted a sigh she would’ve. PS, I’m sending your present, she’d added, since I won’t be seeing you. It’ll be in your bank account, okay?

&nbs
p; The park was bomb, actually. It was near a subdivision too, but one with smaller houses and hardly any beige. The best part was the parking lot: like, pretty much empty, just people walking dogs, a trash can with nothing but dogshit to show for it, now and then a Timmy’s cup.

  The van was red, so it hardly showed the rust. So things were pretty perfect—well, as perfect as they could be. The back seat was gone (she probably should’ve talked the guy down, but what the fuck). More room for her stuff, whatever hadn’t been nailed down in the apartment.

  One day when real people ruled the earth, landlords, fucking capitalists, would see how it felt: it sucked having no power.

  It sucked having no electricity, too, but that was the only downside.

  The pond hadn’t frozen yet, so there was water, and the woods to piss in. It didn’t matter, really, that the water stank like bog. She wasn’t into hair-washing and that shit. It was cool being crusty. An added layer of warmth, she kidded herself.

  But the best thing about this place? The very best thing? No pigs. Not a single cop had come nosing around—not once in the five nights she’d camped here. So she could concentrate on making the van a home. “She’s got room to burn,” the old dude had said. Earl, Earl Joudrey, was the name on the receipt he’d shoved at her. Poor old loser, surrounded by those Martha Stewart whackjobs, that super-Martha-douche he had for a partner. Even if he probably deserved it. Mum had a sister who lived up around there somewhere. She’d met her just once, that was enough.

  Did you call your aunt? Mum was always texting. Aunt Susie had two kids, and yeah, like, when she’d first moved east she’d gone there one weekend. They’d treated her like a freak. One kid wanted her to be his human goalie net, shooting pucks in the basement; the other watched her the whole time like she was going to hide the Lego up her rectum.