by Joe Denham
“We’ve noticed Stu Farnsworth is offering upwards of thirty thousand dollars,” Svend pipes in, almost leaping from his chair with excitement.
“And that’s a considerable sum, Svend,” Miriam responds. “Though it would be unwise to sell this to Stu.” She looks to me now dead-on. “If I were a shrewder woman I’d cut you a check right here and now for that same sum, and I’d be sure to double my money, maybe triple it, by sundown. One phone call.” Svend is sitting back smug as she says this, finally triumphant in his scheming to sidestep a middleman. “Instead, I’m going to make that call for you, Mr. Wishbone, free of charge, and in return you’re going to stay with me another night and we’re going to feast of the sea, be happy, and give thanks for all that the ocean provides.”
MIRIAM DROVE US in her fully loaded Prius out to a beach on the east side of the Esowista Peninsula. We harvested oysters and clams, then drove further on to town where we bought fresh crab from one of the local fisherman and a bag of expensive food from the local market. By the time we started back toward her house I’d simmered in myself a broth of dislike for Miriam, for her pat expropriations of the Native customs, art and language (at least those convenient to her lifestyle and aesthetic); for her ease and self-assuredness and easy environmentalism, her fifty-thousand-dollar hybrid car and her organic wool sweater. Then I thought, watching the forest whiz by her back-seat window, how my knee-jerk contempt was just like Anna’s, almost instinct, and I resolved then and there to put it aside.
When we arrived back at Miriam’s house I went out onto the front deck to call Anna. On the car ride I’d resolved to tell her the truth of where I was and why, thinking again that if the float was as valuable as Miriam suggested I would use the money to finally break with Anna; if it wasn’t, it was of no consequence other than to give her more fodder to fling my way.
She wasn’t angry at first, not expecting me home still for a few more hours. But as I told her about the float and what it had led to, she grew more and more irritable, launching into a tirade about my desperate financial schemes, my head always off in the clouds dreaming up some fucked up way to get us out of the mess I’d gotten us into buying the stupid fucking boat in the first place. Of course I fought back, our voices growing louder and more hostile, till I realized the others were most likely hearing my every heated word inside the house.
So I told Anna she’d see and she’d be sorry, and I hung up and went back inside, my anger re-bloomed inside me like an algae in the harsh light of Anna’s reprimand. But now it had its familiar object of attention, my wife, back in focus, which left me free to celebrate with Miriam when she emerged from her study with the news that a buyer representing Mr. Sunimoto would indeed be in Vancouver on Monday to exchange $150,000 cash for the fishing float I nearly broke when—later in the evening and drunk on the first bottle of wine I’d drank in nearly five years—it dropped from my hands and rolled the length of Miriam’s kitchen island before falling to the forgivingly soft fir floor.
Svend, Fairwin’ and I journeyed back this morning at first light, Svend and I nursing our collective hangovers. Fairwin’ drove the Dart—the whole time with this little schoolboy’s smirk upon his face, unlicensed, and having not driven a car for nearly fifteen years—through the mountains to French Creek, where we took Svend’s boat across to Squitty Bay. Fairwin’ stood in a grove of huge old arbutus and watched us motor back out into the strait. From the stern, as I puked my guts out into the southeasterly waves heaping up on Point Upwood, I could see his lone figure climbing out onto Poor Man’s Rock, a barren buttress of scoured igneous protruding from Lasqueti’s southern tip like a prow into the sea.
Back on the Coast I drove to Sechelt with Svend and bought some new Levi’s, a couple of t-shirts, underwear and socks. I picked up some toiletries at the pharmacy and went with Svend back to his house to shower, shave and call Jin Su. All to avoid going home to Anna. I considered hauling Willow from school for a walk or lunch, to spend some time with him and get some grounding in the midst of all this.
Ever since Miriam pronounced the figure $150,000 I’ve been hovering six feet off the ground, oscillating between elation, nervousness and fear. Will the approaching exchange, with such a large sum of cash involved, go off without a hitch? Is that even possible? It seems that my every turn of fortune these past few years has been, though not catastrophic, certainly not without its foibles. I thought better than to have Willow see me in such an anxious state, to expect that he might be able to calm me down when quite likely he would be disturbed by my preoccupation.
Then I considered driving down to the dock and loading up what little crab I had hanging, maybe three hundred pounds, into my pickup before heading to town. But I was clean and dressed in my new clothes and quite frankly still exhausted, though wired, from the journey and the excitement and the booze still flushing from my body. So instead I headed straight to the late-afternoon ferry, where I fell asleep in my truck, still aware of the wind howling through the upper car deck.
I dreamt I was with Miriam making love in her big bed of driftwood and white linen. When I woke up, I stumbled from the truck to the side of the boat and threw up again into the wind and the tumultuous seas below. Back in the truck I thought of my drinking and of Miriam. I cursed my slip back to the bottle, but consoled myself with the fact that she was indeed a beautiful woman, attractive still for her age, and had clearly made advances toward me once Svend was snoring on the couch and Fairwin’ had gone off to bed. Advances that, despite my drunkenness, I’d denied.
I felt better as I pulled the truck off the ferry in the dusk, my body having ejected the last of the poison and my mind calmed by the thought of soon being with Emily and Jin Su, of the love that awaited me there, still untarnished and strong.
•
Jin Su answers the door in boxer shorts and a kimono when I arrive. She leaps up into my arms and wraps her legs around my waist before I’ve even made it in the door. The pent-up lust of my dream on the ferry rises up to meet hers and we make love frantic and heated on the couch, little Emily already down for the night in the bedroom. It’s a world of difference in comparison to the love Anna and I seldom, if ever, make anymore: the occasional attempt at romance between us always leading to a lovemaking that proves only to reaffirm and widen the chasm between us, so we lie naked and darkened afterward, turning away from each other, each to our own arms.
Jin Su and I lie entwined now on her grey leather couch, her light body on top of mine, her head on my chest and her hand up behind my neck twirling my hair with her small fingers. She stares toward the door and finally asks, “What’s in the box?”
I’d set it to the floor as she’d leapt at me, then slid it into the room with my foot as I closed the door and carried her to the couch. “It’s a surprise,” I reply, just as Emily starts to stir, then sputters a cry from the bedroom.
Jin Su lifts herself off me, slips into her kimono, and wrinkles her nose. “She’s fussy,” she says. “Cutting her first teeth I think.” Then a scream like a battle cry issues from the bedroom and Jin Su springs away to tend to our daughter.
Emily was born ablaze, a roaring inferno from the first breath. She’s all fire, from the birthmark spreading perfectly from the midline across the left side of her face to her tuft of light red hair standing up static on top of her head, despite her mother’s dominant Chinese gene and my own head of dark brown curls. She has a wiry body, a rambunctious disposition, and a ferocious, though often playful, howl. She is, frankly, foreign to me, as is Jin Su, having come swiftly like a fresh wind into my life. Though it’s a wind that feels hospitable, carrying an undercurrent of settling and the unexpected scent of home.
I gaze around Jin Su’s apartment. There are some baby toys by the window, a small collection of rattles and stuffed animals and little musical instruments, a tambourine and a bean shaker, a drum and sticks. There are painted wooden blocks and a couple of old Chinese dolls, a baby boy and girl, from Jin Su’s childhood, a
ll ordered neatly on the polished floor. She’s arranged a collection of photographs of her large family back home on top of the piano and another on the wall space between the dining room table and the floor-to-ceiling window. There’s a tiny alcove kitchen beyond the table, and though I can’t see it from here, above the stove is a picture of me in rain gear on the deck of the Prevailer sorting a trap loaded with crab. Jin Su took it soon after we first met, the one and only time she’s been out on the water with me.
Taped to the stainless steel fridge is another picture taken at our request by a stranger on Granville Island one sunny Saturday in early February. We’re all three bundled up in winter clothes and smiling from beneath our toques and hoods, happy together in the mid-winter sunlight. I can hear Emily suckling in the other room, contented, and I’m amazed that I am here, that this is my life, in stark contrast to the one I share with Anna and Willow. Somehow it seems there’s more of me here in this relatively tidy, relatively empty apartment than there is or ever has been in that other rental home with its half-acre yard littered with my spare traps, motors, haulers and crab crates, my heaps of clutter and scrap.
Having failed at her attempts to nurse her back down, Jin Su brings Emily from the bedroom and plops her down on my stomach. Then she retrieves the tote from the entryway, sets it on the floor beside me, and sits down at my feet on the couch. Emily pounds my chest like a drum, a wily grin splayed across her face. “Take it out,” I say, sliding the tote toward Jin Su, and I can tell she thinks it’s some kind of present I’ve brought for her, which in a way it is, though it’s evident she’s both disappointed and intrigued by what she finds as she unpacks the glass float. “Careful,” I can’t help but caution her as she lifts it to her lap.
“Oh, it’s quite beautiful isn’t it?” she says, after turning it around in her hands. Emily reaches back and gives it a swat. “Careful sweetie,” Jin Su says, holding Emily’s hand for a moment as she does. “Where did you find it?” she asks.
“In the inlet. On Thursday afternoon.”
Jin Su carries the float across the room and places it on top of the piano. She turns the little piano-top lamp on beside it and sets three of Emily’s blocks around its base to keep it from rolling off. Its opalescent sheen swirls up now under the light as Emily lets out a yowl, pointing firmly toward the float and her blocks.
“It’s okay sweetie,” Jin Su assures her, taking two more blocks from the floor and handing them to our daughter. Then she says something to her in Chinese followed by, “Daddy brought us a pretty pretty ball,” in her quiet, calm voice. I feel almost reluctant in telling her, though I know the money is more of a gift than any glass ornament could be for Jin Su, so I do: “I’m meeting a man at a sushi restaurant on South Granville tomorrow and he’s going to give me $150,000 for that thing.”
“What?”
“Cash. It’s all arranged. Through this woman, Miriam Maynard, Svend and I,”—she doesn’t know anything about Fairwin’ Verge and I don’t feel like explaining right now, so leave him out of it—“we met with her a couple days ago in Tofino. She’s some kind of aficionado when it comes to these things. She says this one’s among the most treasured in the world. So she made a phone call, and wham, $150,000!” I stand up as I say this. I’m still naked, I’ve got Emily in one hand hanging off my hip, and I feel ridiculous, but what the hell, it’s just finally setting in what this means, here now with my daughter and Jin Su, as I tell her the news. I set Emily down and slide my jeans on, then reach out and take Jin Su by the waist while Emily beats her blocks against the floor. “What are you in to?” she asks me, with some suspicion, and blooming joy, in her eyes. “One hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” And I repeat it. “One hundred and fifty thousand. Enough to buy Anna out of her half of the boat. To break clean.”
There’s a sadness that enters the room as I say this. It settles like a fog in the valley formed between our two bodies. Perhaps it’s the wrong time to point out that opportunity, those intentions, as it suggests a future, a near future, of both renewal and loss, pain and healing; of change and upheaval, redefining and reconfiguring. I sense in Jin Su an immediate resistance, which strikes me suddenly as something I might have anticipated in her, as organized and tidy and conservative as she is. I kiss her on the top of her head—something I often do as it’s right at mouth level—and reassure her. “It’ll be good Jin Su,” I say. “You’ll see.” Though I wonder if it’s not myself I’m reassuring, because I’ve been here before, at this place where choice and commitment suddenly weigh in like the Achilles heel of the horse you’ve put all your money on; like the little rattle in the engine room, the sound that’s not quite right—you search and search for its origin without luck, and so assume the best, and grow to accept it as just another sound.
•
“It’s up to you Jin Su,” I say to her through the dark. Emily is asleep between us, restful, the pain in her mouth finally subsided as her little teeth relax their heaving at the surface of her gums.
“What’s that?” she asks sleepily. I flick the bedside lamp on and walk out to the living room to retrieve the float. Back in bed I lie down and hold it on my chest.
“However this works out tomorrow, whatever this brings, if we do get that money like Miriam has said, it’s up to you what we do with it.” Jin Su turns over, props her head up and looks at me, then rests it back down on the pillow, flipping her long black hair from her face as she does. She slides her hand over and places it on my hand where it steadies the glass.
“It’s up to both of us Francis,” she says, and closes her eyes again. “I love you. And I’m ready for whatever life you’re ready for.” The room is warm and silent, the three of us close in this little bed together, her gentle hand on mine and our daughter’s small breathing between us. Her hand eventually goes limp and slides down to my chest as I stare for a time at the orb of glass till it takes me as if by trance, in the dim light and the sweet scent of my daughter’s new life, into sleep.
•
We wake to a loud bang, as if something far off has exploded or collapsed. Then the walls and window start to undulate and the bed begins to shake with the floor which is heaving and bucking. I bolt upright and the glass float rolls from my chest to the bedside table, as the floor-to-ceiling window explodes, sending a spray of tempered glass out into the early morning air. I grab hold of Jin Su, all I can think to do, and we ride out the racket of shearing wood and cracking concrete with Emily in our arms between us, stunned, then screaming, as the earth far beneath rumbles and shakes.
The sound is of a million wine glasses being stomped underfoot by a million people stampeding. It suspends time, so it’s as though we lie on the bed like this for a moment and an eternity concurrently. Then it’s over, and the city around us falls to a tenuous silence that hangs in the air like a single strand of spider’s silk. Then the grind and shatter of glass again, buildings creaking on one last precarious point-load, and a splintered, agonizing moan issues from the throat of a woman far below us.
As more cries of the injured begin to rise into the day, I come back to myself, turning toward the window just as the float rolls the last few inches of Jin Su’s bedside table and drops into the void left in the window glass’s absence. I look back to Jin Su holding Emily tight to her breast, our daughter wailing now in fright, then leap to the buckled floor and scurry on all fours to the edge. All I see with my nearsighted eyes is a white blur of broken glass on the street twelve storeys below. I squint and squint and think I see a spot of blue on the other side of the street, so I wave Jin Su over.
“Are you kidding,” she cries at me from the bed, one tear streaking down her face.
“You’re okay right?” I ask, looking back at her, Emily hysterical in her arms. I get to my feet for the first time since waking, go to the bed, and hold them both, just hold them tight for a long time till Emily’s wailing turns to sobs, then sniffles, then finally stops.
“Okay,” I say. “We’re okay
.” I wipe the last of the tears from Jin Su’s eyes and Emily decides to smile, which lightens her mother as I lead them both to the ledge. “Is that it on the other side of the street?” I ask. “I see blue there, is that it?”
Jin Su looks at me incredulously, then finally begins to scan the street below. “It might be,” she says. “I’m not sure. And anyway, even if that is a portion of it, it’s bound to be cracked or blown apart. We’re twelve storeys up.” I think about this for a second, then I think of how it flew from my hands at Miriam Maynard’s and landed unscathed on the other side of the room, and I wonder. What are the chances?
“I have to go down and check,” I say to Jin Su as I start looking for my clothes.
“Are you kidding Ferris?” she says. She only calls me Ferris when she’s displeased with me, but I don’t care because she’s all right, and the baby’s all right, and I’m all right. If that float is all right too I want to be the first one to it. Short of being one of the first looters downtown at Birks, it’s my only shot at setting my life somewhat straight, a little gift from the gods, and I’m not going to give it up till I’ve seen it ruined or in shards with my own eyes, up close.
“You just have to trust me, Jin Su. We have to get out of this building anyhow, right now, so let’s go. Grab whatever you can and let’s get to the fire escape before the rest of the building does.” Jin Su thinks only for a moment on this, she’s sensible, before she grabs a bag from the closet and starts filling it with clothes and diapers for Emily, whom I hold as Jin Su changes herself. Thankfully she has no mirrors in her room, no glass other than the window that ejected out onto the street, so we walk unhindered to the entryway. “Boots, Jin Su,” I say to her. “You’ll need the thickest soles you’ve got.” I pull on my steel-toes, then Jin Su laces up her hikers and ties Emily in her mei tai close to her chest while I grab some bananas, apples and bottled water from the kitchen.