“My grandmother picked it.” I flounced the skirt, keeping my eyes on the ground.
“And he seems nice. Derek.”
“Darren,” I said, picking at the grass. “I heard you were going to arts school.”
Cheryl finished her drink and started in on another. “Len’s dying.”
“What?”
“Something eating his lungs into Swiss cheese, and he’s suing the pool.”
“Jesus.”
She shrugged. “It’s probably his own fault. I smelled like chlorine for years after I left. That kind of thing catches up to you, eventually.”
We sat on the lawn and stared out into the street, sipping our drinks and watching cars drive by. A few of them honked when they saw me in my wedding dress and veil, and I raised my glass in a salute to their enthusiasm about my new life. I turned to salute Cheryl too, hoping to look openhearted and forthcoming, newly cleansed by a ritual that had required me to wear white and carry flowers, to be led down a walkway by small children throwing rose petals. But Cheryl was already finished her drink and starting to tuck in her shirt. “If my boss sees me, I’ll get fired. No drinking on the job, no mixing with the clients.”
“But we’re friends,” I said.
Cheryl stopped and squinted at me, one hand down the back of her pants. Her mouth opened and it was a good two seconds before any sound came out. “Don’t,” she said flatly, like she had considered her options and it was the only word worth the effort.
She stood and balanced her empty glass on one side of the tray, repositioning the napkin over her arm. She straightened her spine and gave her head a little shake to the left, the same way she used to when there was water in her ear.
I wanted to say something redemptive and apologetic, or at least something that might ring even partly true, but instead I asked her about Ronaldo Diaz.
“Do you ever think about that kid?” I said.
“What kid?”
“From the essay. Ronnie Diaz.”
Cheryl laughed and the crack of it startled me. “Ronnie Diaz was a piece of newsprint, Alex.”
I watched her walk back towards the house. My eyes strained as parts of her vanished: first her black pants, then her outstretched arm, then even the electric whiteness of her shirt melted into the shadows. I was struck by the fact that, at a certain distance, everything blends into the background.
Later that night I found out that the bird cage full of envelopes was missing. “Stolen,” my grandmother declared. She called it a violation. She wanted to call the police, interrogate the catering staff—“They were the only ones with access,” she said, “the only ones who weren’t family or friends.” I told her I would handle it. It was probably all just a misunderstanding, I said. Nothing just disappears.
The METEORITE HUNTER
DAVID’S FIRST THOUGHT when she was born was that she was dead. She was blue and rubbery, rimed in thick whiteness like a freezer-burned steak. All lumps of fat flesh and shivery lengths of bone, fists clenched and ready to fight their way into an afterlife that had already started there on the starched sheet, stained with tired blood and greasy lubricant. Her name was going to be Lily, because it had sounded sweet and pure and clean and white. But that was before they saw her there, dead and turning purple.
“Oh fuck,” Julie said, and those were the first words the dead baby heard, her heart still beating, her mouth open.
David almost had the courage to reach between his baby’s blackened lips with a hooked finger. Something he had seen on television somewhere. Something a father would do. But the doctor, wearing a bandana patterned with cowboys roping steer, swooped in and picked her up, twisting her upside down and holding onto her neck while her body sat limp on his forearm, barely making it to his elbow. He slapped his gloved fingers against her blue backside.
“Come on, girl,” he said, slapping her again before flipping her over his arm and sucking the snot and phlegm out of her nose and mouth with what looked to David like an enema bulb. “That’s right, come on,” the doctor said, slapping.
She didn’t come on. They took her to a table under a bright light and spoke incantations of acronyms, taping electrodes to her ribs and shoving a long and silvery plastic tube down her nose and into her flat belly. David looked on while Julie, numb from the waist down, legs flopping out of the stirrups, yelled at the nurses, “Is she okay? Is she okay?”
No, their aproned backs said. She is not okay.
Another doctor came to work on Julie with thick and steady hands that scared David. “It’s alright, sir,” the doctor had said. “You can go with your daughter.”
David wondered if everyone saw right through him.
Once his baby stopped dying and started breathing, he held her in his arms and thought about what kind of warrior name he should give the baby girl who used to be called Lily. A name that had some strength to it, some meat. A name that would ward off the curses of birth trauma. Muscle weakness. Brain damage.
“David.” Julie’s voice was soft as she reached for the baby with her long, white arms.
“Let’s name her Diana,” David said.
Julie looked at the baby and at David in his running shoes and faded t-shirt, his beard red and grey, his hands clumsy as he passed his daughter to her mother.
“I love you, Deedee. You did good,” Julie had said to the baby who came back from the dead, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
And it had been easy then, David thought, looking over at the awkward contortion of girl that Diana was now, all elbows and knees beside him in the front seat of the rusted-out Rabbit. Her face was pressed against the passenger side window as she slept. He thought about reaching over and brushing the hair from her forehead, but he didn’t want her to wake up and look him in the eye. It was better just to drive.
He wanted to pull over soon, even if it was a long way to Whiteshell and Rick had told him to get there fast.
“We don’t want Explore to hear about this guy, Dave,” he had said. “There just aren’t enough crazy Indian stories to go around these days.”
Rick in David’s cubicle, wearing those hiking boots that squeaked on the office carpet, which was made of reconstituted pop bottles, didn’t David know. Rick’s khakis pouching around his crotch as he sat on the edge of David’s desk.
“The guy is an obvious nut job, but whatever, right? People are into that kind of New Age bullshit. Makes our readers feel more connected to the land, whatever, whatever. Call him The Meteorite Hunter, or something. Yeah. Write that down.”
David wrote it down.
“Make sure you get a shot of him all mystical. Looking up at the sky, holding the meteorites like he’s talking to the bloody aliens.”
“Aliens, right.”
“But don’t get too bogged down in the science,” Rick said. “All people need to know is that shit falls from space and then this guy finds it and picks it up. But stress the Native thing. Seriously, it’s nothing without the Indian connection. Hell, the world could probably learn a thing or two from wackos like this. And it’s a long drive to Whiteshell.”
“Already said.”
Rick had walked away from the desk in his wool socks and leather boots like he was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Well, David had been camping, too. Once. Julie’s idea. He still remembered the image of her legs planted in an upside down V as she waited under the canoe for him to catch up on the portage. David, puffing and pale. His skin clammy and his ass itchy. Nothing left to do but hump the pack while Julie called out, You okay? Fine, David thought, heart exploding. Yes. The smell of Julie on his body mixing with his sweat, the smoke in his hair, the grit in his teeth.
Julie. Her voice into his blood like a heart attack when she called:
“David? It’s me.”
His fingers had gone numb at the sound of her taking in a breath. By the way she said his name.
“David, are you there?”
She had told him she was sorry that everything wa
s last minute, that he hadn’t seen Diana for so long. No, she was sure she didn’t want Deedee at the funeral, she needed to go alone. It was okay with her if Diana went to Whiteshell, as long as he swore up and down that the car was in okay shape and he could have Diana back on the bus by Sunday afternoon.
“David, can you handle this?”
David had hung up the phone and looked again at the map, retracing his route along the Trans-Canada highway with a dull pencil. Nothing left to do but drive.
And now Diana was snoring, thick little gasps that made David nervous. He went faster still, racing the sun to the horizon.
“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” David asked.
“No,” Diana said, rubbing her eyes.
“Are you sure? ’Cause we can’t stop for a while, and . . .” David trailed off, wondering if ten-year-olds still pissed themselves every once in a while. He had no idea.
“I know. I’m fine.” Her voice like Julie’s. All sass and pity.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Do you like hamburgers?”
“I’m not really supposed to eat them. Mom says that they feed the cows unhealthy things, like antibiotics and ground-up animals. Makes you sick.”
“Yeah,” David said, eyes on the road, watching for deer. “I guess that probably isn’t too good.” Shit, Julie.
She yawned. “But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”
“Where’d you get that?”
Diana shrugged. “Oprah.”
David glanced over as she talked, watching her so-what palms punctuate her sentences. You still drive the Rabbit, she had said as they walked across the empty bus station parking lot, careful not to make it a question. That’s cool, she added. Sensitive, for a ten-year-old. Brave to travel alone, to carry her backpack so casually over just one shoulder. Now her fingers, pink and raw like skinny newborn mice, were finding the holes in the upholstery, burrowing. One day she would be pretty, David hoped.
She hugged her knees as she talked, her feet weaving back and forth across the dashboard leaving behind a figure-eight of dust from the dried mud on her sneakers. Her grey eyes reflected the high beams of passing cars, like she was lit up from the inside. Then a blurry little halo of hands because she was excited. That. That he knew. That was all Julie.
“But what do you think?” she asked, eyes on him. High beams.
Shit.
“Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening,” David said, eyes on the road. “It’s just hard to know what to think sometimes.”
“Yeah, but if Mom had her way, we’d all be living in teepees and eating organic rocks, or whatever.” Diana looked out the window. “How much longer?”
“Maybe we’d be better off,” David said. He pushed harder on the accelerator.
It was all Julie’s fault, in a way. She had landed him the job at the magazine. Begged it for him. Five months pregnant then and constipated. Her hands like rabid bats, flying into her hair as she said to David, Well, what the hell do you think it’s going to eat? Breast milk until it goes to college? David worked at the grocery store, knew the codes for all the produce: 4020, Golden Delicious apples; 6113, kiwi fruit. He bought a crib with loose rails from a garage sale and Julie painted it yellow wearing her nurse’s mask, worried about paint fumes and deformities. They fought until Julie threw a mug of green tea through the front window, but no, David still wasn’t taking the job from Rick. He had cleaned up the broken glass and duct-taped a garbage bag into the frame.
There was just no way. It was a pity job, and it was from Rick. Rick the Dick. The guy who got drunk at the hospital Christmas party and grabbed Julie’s ass as he said with a slurred tongue, A nurse is a wonderful thing for a woman to be. Rick’s wife Tricia cried into her plastic cup of wine, her mascara plopping onto her red velvet dress. David had noticed how pretty she was, how beautiful a woman she could be with her hair in curls and her make-up running. How lovely it was when she put her soft, cool hand on his and said, Oh, David. Julie had come up to them then with their jackets in her arms, telling Tricia it was okay, they were going to have a good laugh about it all on Monday.
“For Christ’s sake, let’s get them home,” Julie had whispered to David. He had helped Tricia button her coat.
“Sorry,” he said when he touched her breasts.
David drove. Rick in the front seat, his forehead pressed against the window, unrolled a little to let in flakes of sobering snow. Julie and Tricia were in the backseat, Tricia still snuffling, but laughing here and there at Julie’s little jokes. David had watched in the rear-view mirror as Tricia touched at her mascara with a tissue.
“Dad?” Diana said. “I am hungry, actually.”
She pointed to a sign at the side of the road: Tasty and Delicious Diner, 1 km. A picture of a hamburger, fries. A milkshake. David checked the map again. He wasn’t any closer.
THE HAMBURGERS were flat and steaming, served by a woman with large breasts that sagged inside her waitress blouse. Regina, her nametag read. “Enjoy your meal,” she said when she plopped the plates down on the Formica table, making the pickle slices bounce. “I hope it’s tasty and delicious.”
Diana sat opposite him in the booth, cross-legged. She wrapped her long hair into curls around her index finger. Her eyes were puffy. She poked at the burger with her fork, sipped her chocolate milkshake. She tested a french fry and looked right at him. High beams.
“Why didn’t Mom let me go with her? I’m not a little kid anymore.”
“Well, she thinks you’re old enough to handle a weekend with me,” David said, not sure if he was joking.
Diana shrugged. “Everybody else was busy. Mom called like twenty people.”
“Twenty?”
“But it wasn’t like she thought it was a bad idea, or anything,” Diana said quickly. “In the end, I mean.” She paused.
“Listen,” David said, leaning into the table, “I’m sure your mom has her reasons for why she didn’t want you to go. She probably just didn’t want you to have to see all that funeral stuff. It can be kind of scary.” He ate his fries.
“I heard Mom say on the phone that Grandpa was a class-A shithead.”
Regina came over and poured more coffee into David’s cup, spilling some on the table, wiping it up with a dirty rag she took out of her apron pocket. David took out the map to Whiteshell to have something to look at.
“So, was he?” Diana, relentless.
“What?”
“A shithead.”
“Diana, language.” More fries in his mouth. “But yeah, sometimes. Not always, though. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
The last time David had pulled into the driveway of the cigarette-stained bungalow, he had heard the tinny sound of a shoot-em-up blasting out of the television and seen the stacks of stale dishes festering on the counters. There was a vase of tulips on the kitchen table, Grace’s favourite, just starting to wilt.
“Hello, sir,” David had said. “Julie sent me to pick up a few things for her mother. That she needs. The hospital made me a list.”
“You still working at the goddamn grocery store?” The voice soggy like wet cardboard.
“Actually, I write for a magazine now. It’s called The Adventurist and it’s for men who—”
“Fucking great,” Frank said, his eyes on the television. “Now get outta my house.”
“I’ve got the list right here,” David said, offering the crumpled paper and wishing he had just gone to a drugstore instead of dealing with the old prick again, regardless of what Julie said about Grace needing her own things, that patients always did better with a few things from home.
“What part of get the fuck outta here didn’t you understand?”
Frank stood, his knees cracking under the weight. His flesh flowed down his body, settling somewhere in his lower gut. His face was loose and jowly, ready to stretch into tissue-thin skin. He wore an unbuttoned flannel shirt, stained jogging pants that sagged. S
hoes with bursting seams like split sausages. His thick hair was perfectly combed.
“The nurses said she needs a nightgown, a toothbrush.”
“Get outta my house.”
Frank shuffled past David into the kitchen, his fat hands inching him along the greasy wall, the stink of liquor and sweat drifting back.
“You can just tell me where to look and I’ll get them myself.”
“If you don’t leave, I’ll make you,” Frank said, his lungs whistling.
“Oh Jesus, Frank,” David said. “This is ridiculous. Just give me her fucking toothbrush and I’ll tell her you send your love, okay?”
Frank took the vase of tulips to the sink, filling it to the brim with cloudy water.
“Gracie is dying,” Frank said, his eyes the pale blue of soft ice. “Don’t you tell me about love.”
David had given up and bought Grace a flannel nightgown from The Bay. Slippers. A new toothbrush, a hairbrush, and a gossip magazine. But by the time he got to the hospital, her room had been cleaned, the bed made. Julie sat on a plastic chair in the corner of the waiting room, feeding Diana and crying, her left breast leaking through her shirt.
“I’m so sorry, Julie.” He let the bag of useless items drop onto the seat beside her.
“It’s not his fault, Dave,” she had said, wiping the tears off her lips. “I know you think it is, but it’s not.”
She told him that once, for her birthday, Frank had given her a beautiful doll wrapped in pink tissue paper and a white box.
“It had real glass eyes. Bright robin’s egg blue.” She shook her head. “The memory alone.”
Julie had put Diana over her shoulder to burp her, and the sound of her hand on their baby’s back had seemed shockingly hollow to David.
“Mom’s just so unfair,” Diana whined, her high-pitched voice carrying through the diner and making Regina raise her eyebrows.
“Finish your fries,” David said, laying bills on the table. “We’re leaving.”
DAVID SAW THE HOUSE just as his eyes started to swerve blankly across the dirt road, the sun coming up.
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