“This fucking town,” I said at last.
And with that, the worried, mildly annoyed expression rose up and left his face. “Yeah,” he said cheerfully. “Fuck this town.”
I wiped my eyes and looked around at everyone in the street, waiting for word from inside and trying, in their own ways, to comfort one another. And I thought for the second time that night that I understood why somebody would stay in a place like this.
“I was inside talking to a buddy of mine who’s a ranger,” Jason told me. “Girl’s got a broken wrist and maybe a sprained ankle. She’ll be fine. Violin’s toast.”
“She fell so far,” I said in wonder.
“She had a soft landing. Right into the mosh pit. Some of them won’t like waking up tomorrow, but nobody’s hurt too bad.”
“I want to go home,” I said, realizing it.
“I’ll walk you there.”
I looked up at him. “Jason?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t stay there forever. At that hotel.”
He frowned. “You want to go back to—”
“I want …” I cleared my throat. “I was wondering if I could stay with you. Just for a while.”
“You want to stay at my house.”
“Just until I get a job. I’m going to start looking this week. I’ll find something, and then I can get an apartment. But till then I’d be a good roommate. I’m a good cook,” I said. I was not a good cook.
“You want to stay with me.”
I shrugged. It had been a bad idea. I wondered if he would avoid me now, punish me for trying to draw him too close. I looked back at the church, so as not to look at him. In the window I could see people clearing up. I could see a woman standing by the window, like she was searching for something outside. I stared at her and she stared back. The features of her face were made obscure by the light of the sun, already rising again, hitting the window. It made her look like a ghost, an outline of someone not entirely there. “I wonder who’ll be blamed,” I said, to say something. “Who built the set on the stage. Whose fault it was.”
“My buddy said they never should have had a show like that at the church. Usually bands like that play the tent. But in the end nobody was hurt much. By next week, nobody’ll care.”
I wasn’t listening. The woman was still watching me from inside the church. I thought for a moment I recognized her. Something in her pale gold hair, her white, stricken face. I moved toward her and saw her features take shape, becoming more surely the person she could not possibly be.
“Jason,” I said softly. “Look at her.”
“Who?”
I pushed my way through the crowd till I stood before the window, looking for her that I’d always been looking for. It was her face. There at the window, looking back at me. There, as the sun lifted into the sky, I saw the shadowy forms of people working in the church disappear, till all I could see was my reflection in the glass. And I saw her face.
I turned back to look at her son, who had not followed me. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, watching me, and I could see thoughts tumbling in his head, the push and pull of what he wanted or thought he did.
“Never mind,” I said, walking back to him. “I thought I saw someone. I was wrong.”
He didn’t answer for a moment. And then he said, “You’ll stay in her room.”
After we left, we stopped at the hotel and I paid while Jason carried out my suitcase. We walked the rest of the way in silence.
The house was a small clapboard two-storey, with peeling yellow paint and green wooden windows. The steps up onto the narrow veranda creaked under my weight, and I looked back at Jason, bent over beneath the weight of my suitcase, which he’d hoisted on his back. “So this is your home,” I said.
But as I opened the door and walked into a bright, open living room that connected to the kitchen, it hit me all at once that it wasn’t his home I’d asked to stay in but hers. In only the clutter, the indiscriminate collapse of one thing here or another there—a plastic mesh hat on a pot hook over the stove, a calendar from the Yukon National Bank tacked over the wooden chair by the door where he sat to pull off his boots when he came in—was there any sign of him or of a man like him. The rest was all white-painted wooden furniture, the tiny brown roses on the wallpaper, bits of cotton crochet like shed exoskeletons prostrated over every surface. All of it was hers, her things, in her home.
No. That was wrong. I could not look for her in any of those things. I remembered that Mara would not have chosen the print on her wallpaper or the colour of her table and chairs. Some other person would have made those decisions. She wouldn’t have known the things she lived among except by their sounds and surfaces.
I looked again at the small efforts that had been made to make the room cozy or comfortable. Over the sagging frame of a door at the far end of the living room, there was a narrow shelf of coloured bottles. Wine bottles, beer bottles, liquor bottles. All different sizes and colours. Maybe in the afternoon, there was a brief hour when the sun could be seen directly through the window, and it would hit those bottles and maybe someone once had thought it lovely, the way those different pieces of glass glowed. Someone who had picked out the wallpaper and the furniture. Who had tried to make a home for his blind wife.
“Jason,” I said, “what about your father?”
He was pulling a couple of beers out of the fridge. “What?”
“Your father, were you close with him?”
He took two green plastic cups out of the cupboard and snapped the caps of the bottles off on the edge of the counter and then poured them into the cups. The beer made a longing, gulping sound that rose in pitch, almost gleeful, as it sucked and pulled air from the bottle.
“I think you know I wasn’t,” Jason said. He handed me a cup.
“I don’t know. Not really,” I said. “All I know is what you told me about how he died and … how he hurt her. But then why did she stay—did she love him that much?”
He drained about half the cup of beer. “She hated him,” he said.
“Because he hit her?”
“You wouldn’t have known it was possible for one person to hate another so much, but if you had, you wouldn’t have thought it would be a wife for a husband that could feel that way. I don’t know if I came to hating him on my own, or if it was just a habit I got into from watching her.”
“But why,” I asked. “Why did she stay with him?”
Jason stood up. “You see this chip off the edge of the table?”
I looked and there was a chunk missing from the end of one of the boards of the table, like someone had taken a bite out of it. A sheet of paint had torn off with it, and where it was left exposed, I could see the warm sheen of wood worn down by the oils on the hands of the people who had lived around it.
He said, “That’s where one time he tried to bring the blunt end of a splitting maul down on her. He missed that time. But most of the time he didn’t miss.”
I felt the place—where was it supposed to be? my brain? beneath the left pocket of my blouse?—where I should have known something to say or wonder, and it was mute and dumb as muscle and bone. When I spoke again, I had to look somewhere else, like it was out of my liver or my lungs that I found the question. “Because she was afraid? That’s why she didn’t leave him?”
Jason ran his hand back and forth along the table, its edge in the gulf between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know why people don’t leave things,” he said.
“Jason,” I said. “Jason, did he hit you?”
He said, “What do you think.” He said, “They had fights like they were fucking. It was the closest I got to seeing what it would look like if they’d loved each other, there was this heat in them, this way he’d look at her, as if he could hardly see anything else in the room. Sometimes if I got hurt it wasn’t even on purpose—sometimes he’d hurt me because he was so haunted with her and wanting to do her harm that he just didn’t notice I
wasn’t her. He’d go at her with a fist like he thought he could just flatten her into nothing. Into not being there. Not being anything at all.”
I hated the wallpaper. I hated the bottles. I thought I shouldn’t live here after all, and Jason shouldn’t either. I thought we should just leave this town and take nothing with us. And now I understood why she had done it. It had been the only way she could leave. And she already knew that way of making an exit. “Jason, I know what happened to her,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“How she died.” I looked at him meaningfully but he wouldn’t return my gaze. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But it’s important you know”—I took a deep breath and told him what the psychologist Aunt Una had taken me to had said—”it wasn’t your fault and there isn’t anything, in the end, that can be done for other people except what they do for themselves. We can love them and support them, but that isn’t enough for some people. Some people need something more that’s meant to come from themselves, and for some reason they don’t have it. Do you understand?”
Jason said, “You think she killed herself?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. I was in the middle of realizing something. I’d been pulling Stephan out of drawers since I arrived, out of every thought and fear and desire and grief I had, and I’d thought what was left was all the missingness of Mara. All her absence, all my guilt. But now I saw that I’d been wrong. It was Jason that was left. He was so full, he was bursting out of containment in my thoughts or care, and he was what I was full of. Not his needs, but my own, what I needed to be for him. What Stephan and perhaps even Mara had not needed from me.
Jason said, “Say something.” My mouth went looking for words and he looked at me then and said, “Say something.”
“Do you,” I asked, “do you have another story?”
He lowered his head. His hair was dirty and somehow much longer than when I’d met him, though it had not even been two months. It fell in pieces from a nucleus at the back of his head, where a coin-sized bit of bare skin showed, like a baby’s hair. “Can it be just a little one?” he asked.
I nodded. I was looking at the table and all the places where paint was scratched or scraped away.
“Okay,” he said. “You think you know what happened to her, but you don’t. I haven’t told you yet.”
My father’s people believe that if a pregnant woman dreams of a dead person, her child will inherit that person’s soul. Old Woman had wanted a child for so long. She no longer thought it was possible for her to have children. She was too old, and her husband had never given her a baby.
Old Man had been angry with her for so long. He was tired of her face, the way it was always the same face in the morning that it had been in the evening. When she talked, she did not make him think of anything interesting. But it was not just her he was angry with. He had felt for a very long time that a trick had been played on him. He had thought he invented the world. He had thought he was an important person. The man from the beginning of things. He thought he would be busy forever with the pride of having made the world. But the longer he lived, the less the world pleased him. The animals had less and less to say. Eventually they would not talk to him at all. And he had made men and women to play on the earth, but because they were mortal, they were often bored and they never lost a certain kind of doomed expression that depressed Old Man. And because he was depressed, he decided that winter would not leave the world. He prepared more snow than he had ever made before and he let it fall until the men and women and animals did not know what there was to the world that was not snow. They waited for summer to come, so they could take fish from the rivers again, and so the caribou would run, but summer did not come.
At this time, Old Woman had a secret. She was with child. And so she did not mind anymore that her husband was melancholy and discourteous with her. And one night, as she slept with her head on the sea, as she often did, because it was such a soft place to rest her head, because even the frozen sea melted when Old Woman touched it, and her body between the sheets of snow, because the snow did not melt, not even when she touched it, she had a dream. She dreamt of long, green blades of grass that could cut your fingers. She dreamt of fireweed pushing up into a lit blue sky that did not darken for months. She dreamt of the quick water in the river full with salmon. She dreamt of the dumb, sad eyes of caribou.
She woke and smiled with the freight of her secret. In her belly, a little bigger each day, pushing and turning inside her, summer grew.
Mara
THIRTEEN
IN THOSE YEARS at the boarding school, I was more deeply happy than I have ever been since.
The girls respected me and did not ever seem to regard me as the strange burden I knew I had become to the rest of the world outside the heavy front doors of the school. They loved the stories I told them from the Bible and let me make up others too, or tell them about Da, or about how I had come to be blind. Some days I would tell them that my mother had been so mad before she hanged herself that she pulled our eyes from our heads while we slept. “If you could see me,” I’d tell them gravely, “you would see only holes where other girls have eyes.” Or, “Give me your hand and touch the glass eyes they make me wear. They feel real, don’t they? They feel just like yours …” Or, if I was in another sort of mood, I would say it had been an ordinary childhood illness, such as any other child might have.
It was a kind of miracle, for which I was constantly grateful, that they never questioned the revisions I made to my account for myself. One day I might say, “A flight of birds descended on my eyes with their claws and beaks while my mother fought to shelter me from them but was too weak and could not run as fast as they could fly,” and the next: “Cataracts.” And the girls would make little bird-like sounds of their sorriness for me each time, and we would link our fingers together in the way that we had learned to do to comfort one another and remind ourselves that the darkness we lived in was not empty.
We were not entrusted with our own time at boarding school. Rather the nuns took our time into their care, and released it back to us in small parcels, with instructions as to how best to use it. I was so grateful to have them attend to time for me. There were no long hours with my cheek pressed to the glass of the window, straining to hear what might be on the other side. There was no occasion to question how I might better occupy myself or whether there was any true joy or relief in being so occupied, or where and how she might be occupied and why there was not a word from her, not any sign or evidence of her continued occupancy of the world itself, not even its faint consequence, the way a distant leaf might tremble on a distant tree because she had opened her hand. Instead, everything proceeded with a sense of hurry and urgency that was never panicked, only steadily, persistently brisk. All procedures of our day’s activity were as efficiently managed as was possible for such simple undertakings, stripped bare of any possible excesses of movement or hesitation. We learned to walk in straight lines, holding the hands of the children in front of and behind us. We knew precisely how to find our seats at the table with just a simple count of steps and a quick grasp of the back of the chair. It was as if a great engine lay beneath the school, turning us on a wheel that drew us from the dining hall to our classrooms, where we learned Braille and scripture and the few other subjects deemed applicable for children of our disability, and then from exercise in the yard to prayer to crafts to chapel and back to the dining hall. The fixed intent of that wheel, its unwavering progress, was a great comfort to us.
The girls were mostly soft-voiced and timorous, eager to please. I understood that many of them had come from homes where they had not been welcome. Those who were more confident or spirited were chastised so often by the nuns for being overly boisterous that their little clique lost its status among us and their exuberance became defiance. We were rewarded for three things at the school, and we knew the significance of those three things because they were con
stantly expounded: diligence, diffidence and deference. Excellence of other kinds—an especially high score on a test or victory in one of the exercise matches that the nuns reluctantly allowed once a year—was treated with mistrust and something akin to reproach, for, it was understood, such triumphs might rob us of our humility.
I did not come to know many of the girls individually, and most of them remained for me part of a single comforting entity composed of many gentle voices and soft, cold hands. Only Agnes, who was my roommate all the years I was at the school; Sister Margaret, who occasionally showed me affection; and Father McGivney, who took my confession and would tell me how to be forgiven with prayer and how many Hail Marys I was to say, emerged from the rest of the nuns and teachers and students. And they were enough. This little group of people who were mostly kind to me came to seem to be what was left of the world, and I did not feel that I needed more. Except at night, when all I could hear was the sound of Agnes’s asthmatic breathing and perhaps, if Sister Margaret had consented to open the window, as I begged her to do in the summer months, the evening sounds of insects making their calls to one another, which might have been the same calls made by the same insects we had heard back home when we had fallen silent and lain with our heads together on the pillow, waiting for sleep. Then I thought of her.
Jason
mid-August 1996
FOURTEEN
IF ANYBODY EVER TOLD YOU to be careful about wanting things, you’d better believe the fuck out of them, I’d always known that. I knew for a fact that nobody with a closed hand ever got their fingers cut and so I went around like that all the time, with my hands in fists beside me.
Some folks didn’t know any better than to take whatever they got. They had their hands out all the time, asking for whatever happened to them. It gave me a good feeling to see those people hurt themselves. I liked the looks on their faces, the little round Os of surprise they made out of their mouths when everything came to shit. Like the girl they loved turned out to like some other guy better, to have liked him better all over the back seat of his nicer car. Or they told you that you mattered to them, and then their mouths made little Os when you found some way to show them you weren’t owned.
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