All Is Beauty Now

by Sarah Faber

  The music is warm and smooth and hazy, and when Hugo asks Dora to dance she looks almost as pliant and transported as he feels. By the time they reach the dance floor, a shadow has crossed her face and she is scowling, preoccupied again. They dance in silence, until he feels her body shudder slightly against his.

  ‘Look now,’ he says, suddenly awkward. His own wife and he doesn’t know what to do with her pain, what to say. Remote, he had sometimes thought her; but it isn’t that she’s cold. She’s determined, sometimes afraid. Careful not to feel as much as the rest of them, never to fall apart like they have, because then who would hold them up? But now that she’s crying he is like a child seeing a parent cry. Unsure what to do. He tries to lift her chin so that her eyes meet his, but she won’t let him, so he speaks into her hair.

  ‘That man was nothing to us,’ he says. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t true. ‘I won’t mention him again.’

  ‘I won’t either.’

  ‘And when we get to Canada, it will be so cold your tear ducts will freeze, so you won’t be able to cry anymore.’

  Here she laughs a little, then lays her head on his shoulder. ‘It’s not cold there all the time, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  A thin, high-pitched whining escapes through her clenched teeth. She might split open; she’s fighting so hard to get something out. Or keep something in.

  ‘There’s time,’ he says, holding her tighter now, holding it in. ‘When we get there, once the girls are in school. We’ll have so much time.’

  ‘Yes.’ A release of breath now. She leans into his lapel and the saxophone player goes on: ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ ‘Misty.’

  ‘Do you remember, when we were young,’ he says, ‘how much we loved to dance?’ He lifts her chin again and this time she meets his gaze, nods, then shuts her eyes once more.

  ‘We went to that masked ball for Carnival once at the Copa. I remember thousands of people.’ As he says it, he knows that can’t be true, but that’s what he sees in his mind. Translucent waves of fabric hung from the ceiling and crested onto the walls above people jammed around small tables. Silhouettes of boats were mounted above crowded balconies, streamers spilling over their edges. Giant stars hung from the walls, and large pillars topped with lanterns protruded from the floor at an angle. The men were in white jackets with plain masks while the women wore lace, cat ears, peacock feathers.

  ‘You wore that velvet rabbit number. All the other women wore the prettiest masks they could find, and you looked so bizarre, with those ears that kept nearly poking me in the eye. I loved it, how you were willing to make yourself ugly, when you were the most beautiful one there.’

  For years, they’ve been drifting farther from one another, their lives bifurcating, but he promised her he would come back. And perhaps they could still recover something elemental, those cardinal lines on the map where they still cross. Elsewhere.

  Outside the ballroom windows, he is surprised to see only the slate-coloured sea, the deepening blue sky. The ship is an amusement park, but the world outside is nothing but air and water.

  They had danced all night at the masked ball, and then as now, she lets him hold her up.

  LUIZA

  She sits on the bed in her tiny room at the convent, holding her mother’s note, reading it again and again. We sail in two weeks. I’ll get everyone settled. I will come back for you.

  Luiza had said everything she could think of to get Dora to leave her at the convent. Everything but the truth. Now her mother is gone and it hadn’t even taken the worst parts of her story to frighten her away.

  The truth was she hadn’t planned it. The day after the goodbye party, she couldn’t wait to get away from home, from thoughts of Carmichael, her mother. She had promised to take the girls to the beach so that her parents and the maids could deal with the movers, and all day she longed to feel surrounded. Salt. Sand. Sky.

  It was unusually bright that day, a silvery mist over the sea whitening the horizon. Their usual spot was crowded with people they knew—the McMullans, the Dawseys—and Luiza sat with her lunch amid the jumble of blankets and folding chairs, chatting slackly with neighbours while Evie and Magda played on the shore. She tried to read for a while, but became hot, agitated, and finally put her book away and let the girls bury her legs in the cool sand. Evie decorated Luiza’s sand-covered legs with stones as she always did, took a bite of her sandwich, protested when Magda wouldn’t release some spiny creature from a bucket. But how could she really be fine? Maybe she was just pretending, for Luiza’s sake.

  ‘Here,’ Evie said at one point, holding out a leather-bound book, its pages forced apart by sand. ‘You dropped it again.’ Luiza reached out her hand but looked over Evie’s shoulder, painfully into the light. She couldn’t meet her sister’s eye.

  ‘Just stick it in my bag for me, would you, pet?’

  She smiled at the dentist from Santarém sitting nearby, made some excuse for her poor treatment of literature. Tacitus! Too hot, too dull. Soon after, she must have dreamed restlessly for a few minutes. When she startled awake, the world around her seemed subtly rearranged, its textures indefinite. Gouging at the sand, scooping huge handfuls from around her legs, she was suddenly desperate to get in the sea. At last, she stood, slapping at the sand still clinging to her legs. She quickly kissed Evie on the forehead, thanked the girls for staying close by, then caught Mrs. Buchanan’s eye before going in the water, hoping a swim might wake her up. The older woman nodded but didn’t smile, and Luiza was sure she was judging her somehow: sleeping when she should be minding her little sisters, then oddly abrupt and frantic in her movements, too selfish even to take the girls swimming with her, too caught up in her own world. That was what these people thought of her.

  Luiza headed for the water, trying to shake off her unkind chorus. She had to shield her eyes as she waded out, blinded by the midday sun over the water. She imagined she would swim then turn around to face the beach, see her sisters playing with no notion they were being watched, their faces strangely serious. When she did glance back, the dark shapes of people dotted the beach, but they were ringed in a harsh, erasing light and she dove to escape it. She would swim. Swim until she was clean again. She slid underwater above the sand for as long as possible, then drifted toward the surface and stood waist-deep in the water, splashing around. Then she jumped in with her arms in an inverted V-shape, diving shallowly, just like she used to as a girl, trying to retrieve some feeling other than regret and disgust. Sorrow. A forgotten image kept flashing by, a fish at the edge of her memory, trying to take its full shape, to form itself into words in her mouth. But again it slipped past.

  She stood and tried to catch her breath. Then, that familiar, hesitant touch. Carmichael’s hand on her shoulder. A clammy chill shot through her as her stomach dropped away, like expecting a step that isn’t there. She moved unsteadily backwards. For a moment she wondered if anyone could see them. He must have walked in behind her, perhaps entered the water a few hundred yards away from everyone else, unseen against the dazzling light by her sisters and their various neighbours, including Mrs. Buchanan, who stood by the rocks, watching solicitously over the girls, her hands on her hips. Maybe she should scream. He might truly be dangerous—he’d touched her in that disgusting way, made her hurt Evie. And now he kept moving slowly toward her. She continued to step back, but really she wanted to withdraw from knowing she’d ever loved him, from the shame of inhabiting this same, expended skin. He appeared thinner, almost wasted. He had lost weight in just these past few months. Had she done this to him? Of course not. Dora had.

  ‘It doesn’t matter why,’ he said, still moving toward her in his black swim trunks. ‘Why we… came about. It matters how we are now. Leaving out yesterday. I was awful.’

  ‘You took her from me.’

  He frowned, briefly puzzled, as though the idea had never occurred to him. He answered almost as though asking a question. ‘I loved her.’

&n
bsp; ‘I loved her. I was a child. My father was gone. I needed her.’

  ‘He took her from both of us. Your father changed her. Yes, you were a child, but I remember. I watched it happen. He broke her, again and again. It wasn’t his fault, I suppose, he was ill. But for all the times he left you, he should have stayed away. I would have taken care of you.’

  As she watched, he appeared to shrink before her. Becoming more pathetic and helpless. In all of this, he, too, had suffered. But it was draining her again, all her ineffectual empathy. She wouldn’t give in to him.

  ‘And at what point would you have traded in my mother for me? Or would you have remained a good man in your version?’ She took a few more steps back. ‘And my sisters? In your little fantasy, they would never have been born.’

  ‘I could have been a father to them. A better one.’

  ‘He took that too?’

  ‘Yes.’ Carmichael was trembling now, sinews taut, and Luiza worried briefly that he was cold. ‘Even after your sisters were born, he should have left. I would have taken care of all of you. I would never have expected you to give up your life. He’s always been selfish.’

  ‘You’ve been fixated on my family for so long, but deep down you hate us.’

  ‘Not you,’ he slackened and reached for her in a way that was almost comical, as though he was paralyzed above the elbows and able only to extend both forearms. Another hopeless act. ‘Never you. Not even them. In my own way, I loved you all.’

  As she stood there facing him, Luiza saw a shard of her life there in Brazil, the one she might have if she stayed. There would be no grand adventure, no pink dolphins. Now, a shift: turn all boats toward the future. Uneducated, unattached to family, she would end up in a tiny kitchenette apartment overlooking Copacabana Beach, a cell in a beehive Carmichael would pay for, where they would both grieve quietly for her mother, for a time when they’d been whole. An unconsecrated pact: each of them a secondary consolation for the other, time stretched out shapelessly before them.

  She knew her mother was right. In Canada, there could be more: university, a husband, a home. A family. But there would always be the possibility of her own inherited madness waiting in the margins, until one day—a tear at the seams. All the damage she could do. Carmichael shrank before her, pale concavities reflecting on the water where he stood, almost as weak and stunned as Evie the night before in the garden. Her child’s body, thin and yielding in Luiza’s rigid hands, head tipping back and forth violently on her white neck, then the distortion of her face as she fought back tears. That memory was worse than all the lies, all the shame. It was the worst thing she’d ever done. Could ever do. What was she becoming?

  ‘Whether he stayed or left, it wouldn’t have mattered,’ she said, gazing at a bird on the horizon, its distance incalculable. ‘She didn’t want you anymore. And neither do I.’

  She felt the tips of his fingers graze her rib cage as she turned her back to him, and there was violence in them, in that briefest of connections. But she dove cleanly away and began to swim, imagining herself receding, merging with that far point on the horizon.

  How long did she have to swim before someone squinted into the distance, asked themselves whether or not that figure was really her? Before murmurs of concern rippled through the adults on the beach? Before Carmichael realized she wasn’t simply playing and stopped swimming after her? Perhaps he was marvelling right now at how fast she was. A little farther. Soon she would turn back, but it was as though the water propelled rather than resisted her, as though some outside force was pushing her away from shore. Just a few minutes more.

  But then water, not air: an awkward turn of the head, a miscalculation when she took a breath, her face a few centimetres closer to the sea than it should have been. She kept expecting to choke, but instead she swallowed more water. Twist, head up. She tried to right her body, get her shoulders above the water, but she kept slipping under, tied to that darting fish in her mind. Pulled under. It took more and more energy to get her mouth above the surface, to take a single breath, and yet she had time to think about how she wasn’t doing the right things, wasn’t drowning in the correct way. She should be waving, calling for help, but she couldn’t. Somehow she was already mostly underwater, climbing an invisible ladder that kept sliding out from under her, and soon there were so few breaths and so much pressure in her head that she couldn’t remember how to move. When the water closed completely overhead it was almost a relief. She wouldn’t have to struggle anymore. She felt herself drift down through the deeper, colder water, her vision darkening and smudged at the edges. The blackness branched and spread through her vision. Then, a bite. A monster on the ocean floor. She realized later it must have been a crab, but the contact flooded her heart with adrenaline, jolting her back from near-unconsciousness. With both knees bent, feet flexed against the sand, she shot through the water, then swam upwards into the air.

  At the surface she gasped and spluttered, then swam as hard and fast as she could without even thinking about where she was going. Not back necessarily—she didn’t think about getting back—just away from the horizon, away from the vastness, the emptiness. Just get to the shore, catch your breath, then go back. Go back before they get too frightened.

  Once she reached shore, she collapsed on the sand, throwing up sea water. She dragged herself up high enough so the waves barely touched her feet, sure that at any time the water could still drag her back in. She wanted to stay there, fall asleep on the sand, but soon they would notice how long she’d been gone. They would come looking for her. She’d washed up at least a mile away from where everyone was sitting—she could only make out a tiny, indistinct clump of bathers off in the distance. But here there were cockleshells and sand dollars and the vague sense of what this place might have been like once, before her people brought their shoes and ploughs, their pitiless endurance. And their wonder. She didn’t think it through, didn’t know then where she would go. There was only that voice inside her, saying, Go. Walk. You’re not like them. You won’t survive a second time.

  So she walked a little farther, and still a little farther, until eventually there were narrow dusty roads, then people, then a man selling bright dresses and rubber flip-flops from a stall, some of which he traded her for her silver ring. A taxi, then a bus. More jewellery bartered. The convent. Maricota said it was such a peaceful place, describing how the women there sang and prayed and grew flowers and made pretty things to sell. Just for a little while, she thought, and then she’d call home and tell them she was all right. She could pretend she’d hit her head and couldn’t remember, lost a few days. She could just be quiet for a while, alongside peace.

  But she did not call home.

  What could she have told her mother that would have satisfied her? Luiza didn’t understand herself why she’d stayed away. That was a cruelty she couldn’t explain. Except that it saved her. She told herself she wouldn’t survive her family. They wouldn’t survive her, the ugliest version of herself. It would have been selfish to return. Better that they believe she was gone than have to watch her slowly degrade, or be wound into her chaos. How many tragedies could a family withstand? And which is the greater catastrophe—an accident or self-destruction?

  The truth was, it was lonelier being with her family than apart from them. But she hadn’t planned it, hadn’t mapped it out in advance. She went down, into the dark, into the underworld of the ocean floor and something happened to her there. A sea change. Some part of her froze over, unable to return to them.

  And now here on her bed in the convent, holding her mother’s letter, it closes over her once more, the sea, everything she’s left behind. And taken.

  She stands up so suddenly she nearly falls over, the forgotten letter dropping from her hands. Her family will be gone soon, to the white shores of an unknown place, and perhaps one day she will go there too, and live. Earthbound.

  But not yet. She’ll stay in this gentle, sunlit place a little longer. And
before she leaves she’ll swim again like she swam that day, before she slipped under. She will turn onto her back and stretch out her arms, borne by waves until the mountains seem to topple in on her, the sky wider than in any dream.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My deep gratitude to the many people who have helped me during the writing of this book:

  To my tireless and brilliant editor, Anita Chong at McClelland & Stewart, for her commitment, insight, and attention to detail; to my wonderful agent, Samantha Haywood, for her faith, vision, and help with early drafts, and for holding my hand throughout; and to my U.S. editors, Amanda Brower, for her passion, invaluable edits, and for the title of this book, and Carina Guiterman, for taking on the project midstream with such warmth and enthusiasm; to the teams at McClelland & Stewart and Little, Brown for helping to bring this book into the world; to copyeditor Heather Sangster and proofreader Catherine Marjoribanks, for their careful readings; and to Kelly Hill, for her beautiful cover design.

  I gratefully acknowledge the support of Arts Nova Scotia.

  I’ve been so fortunate to have many thoughtful teachers and dear friends who read early drafts of this novel and provided feedback and support: Terry Byrnes, Stephanie Bolster, Kate Sterns, Catherine Cooper, Maureen Green, Mary Catherine Karr, Susan Paddon, and Jocelyn Parr.

  A special thank you to Edward Carson, Johanna Skibsrud, Rebecca Silver Slayter, and Amy Stuart, all of whom read closely and also helped me navigate the practical aspects of publishing a novel.

  Love and thanks to my family for their support, especially my cousin, Georges Cunningham, for his translations; and my aunt, Jean Faber, for her excellent recall and fact-checking, and for sharing her memories. To my vóvó, Lucy Faber, and my mother, Susan Faber, both emigrated to another star, I miss you. Thank you for telling me your stories and inspiring so much of this novel. And to my father, Paul Vincent-Smith, for reminding me not only to see but to look.