The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  I come back to Joni Mitchell painting her post-apocalyptic paintings and singing her requiems for the earth, and for what? So some fans can convince themselves of the self-delusion that they’re different because they choose her over Celine Dion or Madonna? Because her CDs come in cardboard packaging, because she cares. Obviously, I’m bitter. This world isn’t the world I wanted or want, this world of cellphones and all-inclusives and rich artists building mansions on the beach. I suppose I hold the artists more accountable than most because art should be transformative, and if it’s not it’s because the artists haven’t pushed themselves to the point of necessary transformation themselves. Ferris accuses me of self-exemption. He points to my computer and my internet connection and my car as evidence that, to scale, I’m no different. But that’s naive. This is a war. The Poles on horseback stood no chance against the blitzkrieg. There is necessary weaponry, and there is luxury. There is a clear and easy distinction there, and Ferris’s refusal of it comes from his own desire to legitimize his acquiescence, his cowardice, which in his heart of hearts I know he can’t, and I know it’s turning him slowly into one of those broken men, hiding from the world inside himself behind a patchwork of flimsy ideas that hold no water. Ferris’s are like the clepsydra that hangs on the wall above his dresser, the one passed down from his father, given to Ferris by his mother on the tenth anniversary of Cosmo’s death. One of those ancient clocks the Saxons used to keep time, a wooden bowl with lines carved into it and a tiny hole in the centre. They would set it floating in a basin, and as water entered the bowl the time was indicated by whatever line it had risen to. Eventually, of course, the bowl would sink, just as Ferris will, I mean figuratively, of course, and knock on the closest piece of wood I can find as I think it, a washed-up, sea-worn timber, as any fisherman’s wife would.

  •

  One thing that’s been good as a result of the quake has been the lack of tourists in town. Usually they’re swarming this time of year. City-slickers in convertible beemers and on fancy motorbikes cruising around checking out the scenery and the real estate prospects. Usually the bay is busy with speedboats and water skiers. But it’s been quiet these past few weeks, eerily like it was when we first moved here, as if the quake set the clock back a decade. Aside from some blown-out windows and a few fallen power poles there was little damage done to the area, so by physical appearance alone you’d almost think the quake hadn’t occured. But the city’s become a bottleneck that virtually nothing can pass through, so things have been altered insofar as supplies, primarily food, have been scarce. The bakery just reopened a few days back, and the general store’s shelves are still relatively empty.

  Willow and I each get a muffin—it’s either that or strudel or a croissant—and the only drink available, a glass of water. The Asian woman and her baby are seated out at one of the two tables in front of the store, so we sit at the other. I say hello, and she responds with only a timid smile. Her baby’s another matter, practically leaping at me from her lap, bursting at the seams, a wide grin across her face. She’s got the dark Asian eyes and fair skin of her mother, aside from where it’s been blemished dark red over the entire left side of her face. “What’s wrong with her face?” Willow blurts out, indiscreetly. It’s not like him to speak so insensitively, though he’s picked up more and more of those types of behaviours over the past five years at public school.

  It’s another one of the repercussions we suffer as a result of Ferris buying his stupid crab boat. Who of our class spends $450,000 in their twenties on any business, let alone one as precarious as fishing? If things were different I’d home-school Willow, or send him to Waldorf down in Roberts Creek, but as things are I can’t afford not to work and we can’t afford the Waldorf tuition, so he’s at Halfmoon Bay Elementary, and he has morphed into one of those kids who say inappropriate, even cruel things without thinking as a result. Like now, asking a perfect stranger what’s wrong with her child. Some of the contractors’ wives around here would lay right into Willow for it, but this woman very politely answers his very rude question.

  “She has a birthmark,” she says. “She was born with it.”

  Willow takes a bite of his muffin and then responds, his mouth half-full still. “Oh, I thought she was burned or something.”

  “I’m sorry,” I interrupt, embarrassed by my son’s lack of manners. “I’m Anna,” I continue, trying to change the subject. “And this little ruffian is Willow.” I tousle Willow’s hair, hoping to illustrate that he is, after all, just a rascally kid.

  “I’m Jin Su and this is Emily,” she replies, smiling a reassuring smile my way.

  “She’s very beautiful,” I say, and mean it. Her birthmark isn’t ugly as you might expect, it’s just different, and I for one find it stunning. It looks like the underside of a bird’s wing outstretched in the wind. It’s the type of diversity in humans and in the world I’ve grown to love. Not the kind built of artifice, of intention, but the organic kind. That which is as it is, beyond any conscious meddling or manipulation. This baby’s birthmark is such a thing, and it’s captivating. It seems to lift more of her to the surface, and she’s obviously a boisterous and beautiful spirit. “I’ve only just noticed you around these past few weeks, since the quake. Are you staying with relatives or something?”

  “With Svend,” she says, and I’m surprised.

  “Svend is a good friend of ours. He’s like an uncle to Willow.” Willow has taken his muffin and wandered across the road where he is climbing the retaining rocks of the steep embankment. “How do you know him?” I ask.

  She takes a moment to answer my question, fussing around with her baby girl, repositioning her on her lap. “He is my uncle,” she says, again to my surprise.

  “I didn’t know Svend had any family in this part of the world?” I say, the question caught in my inflection.

  “He doesn’t,” she answers, and pauses as though to think again before speaking. “He didn’t, until I found him. His eldest brother is my real father, but I didn’t even know until a few months ago. I grew up in a Chinese family in Vancouver, but I was adopted. When I got pregnant with Emily I started looking into my real family, and I found my father. He lives in Norway. When he came to meet me last summer, he told me about Svend. We’ve been e-mailing ever since.”

  “I met Svend’s brother last summer. But he didn’t say anything about you. We thought he was just here to visit Svend.” Emily starts clawing around at her mother’s chest, so she puts her back on the milk. I flash a look across the street, but Willow is gone. Probably run up the trail across the road to the little waterfall he likes to climb in and under this time of year.

  This Jin Su is quite stunning too, and I’m realizing talking to her that she’s not as young as I’d assumed from a distance. She has fine, unlined skin, and eyes that don’t show their age, but I can tell by the way she conducts herself, by her composure, that she’s a woman of my age or older.

  “Do you live in Vancouver now then?” I ask, though the answer is obvious. She explains to me in her soft voice how her apartment was ruined in the quake, and how she’d been trying to cross the city to get to her adopted parents’ home, but by way of circumstances ended up coming on a boat here instead, landing at Svend’s door. The baby drifts off to sleep on her mother’s breast, to the lilt of her voice as she tells me her story.

  “The boat you came up on,” I ask. “Who was driving it?” Again she takes her time answering, and this time it seems almost as if she doesn’t know how to respond, so I ask her flat out. “Was it a guy with dark, curly hair named Ferris?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I was trying to remember his name, and that was it, Ferris. I met him in the street below my building.” Ferris had said when he got home the night of the quake that he’d slept in his truck in a parking lot up by Queen Elizabeth Park. He’d said it was probably the only thing that saved him because there were no buildings around. He told me he stole a boat from one of the docks near Science Wor
ld, but he had said nothing of any passengers, let alone a niece of Svend’s. “I was crying in the street, holding Emily, and he came up to me and asked if I had anywhere to go. So I told him about my parents on the North Shore, and about Svend, and he told me he knew Svend and could take me to his house.”

  I explain to her that Ferris is my husband, and Willow’s father. “How is he?” she asks. “Have you heard from him?”

  I respond to her only with a questioning look, not immediately understanding why or how she knows Ferris is gone.

  “Svend told me,” she offers without my asking. “I wanted to find Ferris to thank him for helping me, and Svend said he had gone away. On a sailboat to Hawaii for some reason.”

  “We haven’t heard from him. Did you hear about the eruption last night?”

  “No!” she almost leaps from her chair, the baby fidgeting at her mother’s raised voice.

  I explain to her the reported magnitude of the quake and eruption, and I could swear she’s fighting back tears by the time I’m through. She gets up from her seat, her baby tucked in against her chest. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I hope he’s okay. It was very nice to meet you.” Then she turns from me and heads up the road.

  •

  Jin Su took the news of the earthquake in Hawaii harder than I would have expected, and all afternoon I’ve wondered why. If I didn’t know better I’d almost suspect her to be Ferris’s lover or something. I’ve always wondered where he stays on his delivery nights, but I don’t ask because really, I don’t care to know. If Ferris has a lover, it’s all the more to keep him from me—from any more pathetic romantic overtures like the Joni Mitchell night. I decided a long time ago just to get through this thing with him till Willow is on his own two feet, and if his taking a lover makes the whole thing easier on him, then it’s easier on me, and so on Willow, too.

  But there are two reasons that make this woman being Ferris’s mistress a complete improbability. First of all, she’s Asian, and given the disdain for that ethnicity which Ferris has developed through his many years of difficult dealings with the Chinese buyers in Vancouver, it’s safe to say she’s not his type. And secondly, she’s got an infant, which would almost certainly make Ferris the father, which is impossible. Ferris is congenitally incapable of keeping a secret, especially for any sustained period of time. If he had fathered this woman’s child I’d have found out long before it was even born. So it’s not that she’s Ferris’s lover, but something stirred her when she heard the news of the eruption. What? And where is the father of her child? Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I marched up the road to invite her and Svend for dinner.

  “He came. I let him stay for a few nights, then I asked him to leave.” I’m explaining to Svend why Fairwin’ Verge isn’t still here with us. I assumed Svend had taken him back to Lasqueti, and Svend assumed him to be here all along. I’ve been angry with Svend for the role he played in the whole fish float shenanigan, so we haven’t seen each other over the past few weeks. Now we’re both finding out that wherever Fairwin’ is, and however he got there, it’s otherwise than what we expected.

  “Whatever,” Svend says. “That old bugger could survive in the desert without water. I’m sure he’s fine.”

  It’s a good segue into the question, so I ask Jin Su, “Where’s Emily’s father?” Svend shifts around, a bit uncomfortable, obviously, and I suddenly dread what I hadn’t considered given Jin Su’s predominantly calm disposition. What if he died in the earthquake? Perhaps that’s why the news of the eruptions in Hawaii seemed to strike such a raw nerve in her earlier today. I’m about to apologize, to tell her she doesn’t have to answer the question, when she clears the air.

  “He’s in Toronto. He works for Nike. He’s in sales. He was at a training seminar for the week when the earthquake happened. He’s still there, waiting for YVR to open to commercial flights. We’re fine here with Svend, and there’s nothing but a ruined city to go back to right now, so he’s better off there anyway. We’re thinking it might make the most sense for me and Emily to fly back east, actually, once we can. His parents have a nice place in the suburbs, and it helps that it’s still standing.”

  Listening to her answer I realize that I haven’t yet asked her if she’s heard from her parents, her adopted parents, the ones whose house on the North Shore she was trying to get to when she met Ferris. I decide not to ask, thinking it best to let sleeping dogs lie. “I’m just going to check on the salmon,” I say, and leave them sitting on the couch with their mugs of peppermint tea.

  Willow is out in the yard building a fort with his driftwood. He carries a stick or small log home with him every day from the beach, and he’s built up a good pile through the spring. Now he’s stacking them up in an interlocking pattern like a log house. It’s just a few days since solstice and the evening air is warm and clear, well past 6 p.m., with hours of daylight to go. Every day it seems he grows more and more to resemble his father. Maybe it’s because of Ferris’s absence that I see it as such, or maybe it’s that time in his life, just pre-puberty, when his more masculine features are starting to emerge.

  Either way, watching him now from the kitchen window is like watching a miniature Ferris at work, and it sets in unexpectedly how much I miss him. It’s the last thing I would have seen coming, but I’m flooded with dread as I turn to pull the salmon from the oven. Where is he? Somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific, hopefully, on his way home. I place the salmon on the stovetop and sit back against the counter for a second to gather myself before calling Willow in for supper. I can’t help but wonder if I pushed Ferris to go out on that sailboat. If all my bitching at him about buying the boat has pushed him to do something as stupid and desperate as that for money. It must be. Why else would he be in such a hurry for the money other than that he sees no other way to bring our life back to the relative harmony it had before he got the loan with his mom and bought the boat?

  I feel ill. How many times have I accused him of not being the man that I agreed to have Willow with? As if I’ve not had a hand in moulding him into what it is he’s become. I always thought I’d be happy if he’d just leave me, if he’d just be the one to end it so I wouldn’t have to choose between enduring more years in this house, this life, or being the one to leave. Being the one in the story of our son’s life who left. But I never fully understood what it would feel like with him gone. How could I? And I’m petrified, suddenly, standing in our kitchen where we’ve fought and fucked and fed together. Where we’ve provided our son with a sense of family, however tumultuous it has been.

  It’s not these strangers I want at my dinner table with me. That’s why I sent Fairwin’ Verge away. I don’t need company, I need my family, together. I need Ferris home, whomever he’s become and however he wants to be, and it’s setting in just how far away from me I’ve pushed him with my resentment and my inability to let him live his life in the way he needs to. So far away from me that he’s somewhere adrift in the middle of the Pacific, best-case scenario. I don’t want to think of the worst-case scenario, but I’m unable not to, to wipe it from my mind. Jesus. What if in my uncompromising, unrelenting expectations, I’ve pushed the father of my child, my best and only true friend—I’m feeling right now even still my lover—to embark upon a journey from which he may not return?

  I’m on my knees in the bathroom, dizzy and nauseous, and I hardly remember rushing in here. I’m hyperventilating and sobbing uncontrollably, and I can hear Svend calling from the living room, asking if I’m okay. I wipe the saliva from my mouth. “I’ll just be a minute,” I manage to call out. I run the water, strip down, and climb into the shower. The water’s near-scalding, my skin lighting up bright red, but I can’t feel it. I step back out of the water’s stream. All I can feel standing in the steam, watching the water swirl down the drain, is the emptiness at the centre of myself, the one Ferris is supposed to fill, for better or for worse, though till this moment I’ve not allowed myself to see it clearly a
s such.

  •

  Ferris,

  The moon is near full and through the small spaces between the houses across the street I can see its light skipping across the water. Time is much kinder at night. John Berger wrote that in his latest novel, a book of letters written in the voice of a middle-aged Palestinian woman to her lover in prison. I’ve just read it cover to cover this evening. Svend was here with his lovely niece Jin Su and her daughter. We ate a chinook he caught off Point Upwood, an early catch, with rice, and salad from the garden. The quake didn’t seem to upset the lettuce! When they left I read Willow to sleep, then thought I’d do the same for myself. Now it’s late, or early, I suppose I should say—it’s the middle of the night, and I’m out on the front porch wishing you were here, wanting to say so many things. So I’m writing to you instead, as Berger’s A’ida would do each night to her incarcerated soulmate.

  Earlier in the evening I made myself sick thinking of you lost at sea. I can say it’s a fear I’d learned to live with long ago so I could care for Willow when he was an infant and you were out off Tsawwassen, hauling in the gales. Now I’m wondering what part that has played in all that has become of us. How much has the fear of losing you in that way I can’t control forced me to push you from me in the ways I can?

  I’ve just smoked the last of my tobacco. We’ll have none till the late fall now, till the Perseids, but I knew we would run out long ago. I planted twice as many seeds this year, and they’re all thriving in the heat, so we shouldn’t run out again. It takes a lifetime to learn a life, I think. Just when you think you know what you need, you need more. Or less. Or different. I’ll confess I had convinced myself I didn’t need you anymore Ferris. That we didn’t need each other. I would be surprised if you said you hadn’t done the same. But now I wonder. No, I don’t wonder, I know that is wrong.