When I opened the door, Mira went wild. She jumped onto Jonathan’s leg and fell, rolling over and repeating her attack a dozen times, yipping and growling.
Under his coat I could see he’d dressed up for the occasion. He wore jeans but had on a canary yellow shirt and a matching tie.
“You should harness her into wind energy.” Jonathan blocked Mira with his slushy sneaker as he proffered a complicated bouquet of pine cones and evergreen interspersed with carnations and a sprig of mistletoe. Christmas was over. He’d probably got them on clearance.
“I had that one special made. To prolong the best time of year,” he said, pleased with himself.
I grabbed the water jug from the fridge and tossed the arrangement into it, hastily zipping up my coat and leaving Mira there whining as I rushed us out.
He moved ahead of me to open my door first. The car tottered along until we pulled into the lot of a downtown restaurant covered with parrots, sombreros, and palm trees, called Maria Guadalupe’s Cantina. The windows were boarded up with plywood, but the lot was full. Passing it vacant in the daytime, I’d always assumed the place was out of business.
He rushed around to open my door again, bending his arm for me to slide my hand through it. I did so only because the ground was icy.
The restaurant was loud and crowded and colourful, as if a rainbow had detonated inside. After spending the holiday in isolation, the fiesta was daunting.
Jonathan was helping me with my coat when a woman resembling Frida Kahlo accosted us. We followed her swooshing, richly dyed skirt to a reserved table by a tile fountain. He ordered margaritas while I studied the mural behind him, struggling to make small talk.
“How did you get into cryptozoology?” I asked over the sound of mariachis tuning up nearby.
“My dad’s an entomologist. He found a new bee species in the nineties, but it died out within a year.” He dumped some salt onto his fruity drink before tilting it toward mine. “He taught me to see beyond what’s there.” His smile was frank. It bewildered me that he didn’t give off a fraught vibe. I decided his face was artless. “So, Edith Walker, what led you to the world of art?”
“My dad.” I didn’t elaborate, rubbing at the embroidered flowers on the tablecloth.
He sat back and rolled up his sleeves like he was thinking this through. “Tell me about your hobbies.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Everyone’s got hobbies.” His laughter was confoundingly free of deceit.
What was missing in Jonathan, which was engrained in myself and everyone I knew, was bitterness. Only Clair was like that. I couldn’t stay annoyed with him. Even so, I wished he’d back off.
“How do you spend your free time?” He looked at me expectantly.
I searched for my sister. What else was there to do?
“We need to get you a hobby,” he continued as I pressed my hands on my forehead to fight the margarita brain-freeze.
When our shared platter arrived, it smelled delicious. I was famished, as though I’d been deprived of real food for months. I turned my attention to the mariachis while we ate.
“I’ve always wanted to bake pies,” I finally told him between songs.
“Now we’re talking. What kind?”
“Coconut cream, rhubarb. Pumpkin. And I want to play the piano,” I added, finishing my third taco and moving on to the enchiladas.
Through the trees in adobe planters, I saw a moving flash of colour. The mariachis were making their way around the tables. Couples stood and danced. I was ready to go home.
* * *
“IS THAT A toucan?” I asked Jonathan when we walked out.
“It is indeed,” he said, discreetly sliding an arm around my waist as he led me into the cold. The arm didn’t feel so bad there.
I invited him in. If only to have him enter the silent space between my routine thoughts, so my mind couldn’t stir up unwanted memories. Being with Jonathan was simple and straightforward. Maybe I needed this for a while.
Once inside, I plugged in the lights dressing the living room window frame. The pegs livened up the dull space. It was the first time I had experienced their effect since stringing them up the month before.
Wearing herself out with barking, Mira manoeuvred her way onto Jonathan’s lap as soon as he sat down. He patted her head and spoke directly to her. Then he picked up On the Track of Unknown Animals from a stack on the floor. “This one’s a keeper,” he said, flipping through it. “It’s hard to find, no pun intended.” The book had that out-of-print, musty smell to it. I’d read parts of it, but the stories of extinct animals were so disheartening I couldn’t finish.
I made espresso on the stovetop. When it was ready, I emptied the grinds from the funnel filter as Liam had shown me how to do. The grinds left a hard, dark puck in the sink. I regretted Jonathan’s presence again.
I carried the small cups and box of dessert over on a tray. Jonathan’s eyes were the same colour as the coffee. I offered him a Flakie, still in plastic.
“I can see why you want to bake pies,” he said after a bite. “On the upside, if there’s ever a nuclear disaster, I bet the shelf life of these bad boys would save us.” He rearranged Mira so they both viewed me. “So. Tell us about yourself.”
I couldn’t say what possessed me. It was that mellow face of his, all sincerity.
“I have a sister. Vivienne.” As if by mentioning her I’d keep her existence going, like an occult spell where you invoked a person’s name aloud to conjure them up once more.
Then I ate some Flakie and started blubbering. I poured everything out to Jonathan. About Viv’s pageantry and the scraps between her and Con, and how Con was still in denial over Viv.
I told him how Viv was missing four months now. How she wreaked havoc wherever she went. Or was it misfortune persecuting her from the get-go, was she damned? I said there were times I wished her dead.
And I told him about the hospital and our plans for a transplant in India. I told him about the morgue. But other events I didn’t mention. Those surrounding Henry’s betrayal. Or what happened with Liam, whose name I wouldn’t say aloud ever again. I left out the part about Omar. The history I shared with him and what we took from each other.
But in releasing the rest to Jonathan, I processed those events also, laying them down in separate, hard-to-reach spaces like the compartments in Henry’s paperweight boxes. The weights I wouldn’t think about anymore. The weights I’d close the lid on. This was my bereavement for those parts of myself I’d squandered.
Afterwards, I was spent. I’d gone through half a box of Kleenex. Since Mira was scratching at the door, Jonathan suggested we walk.
We put on our coats and went around the block, Mira leading the way like an invalid reindeer. Moonglow permeated through the clouds. The snow sparkled like tinsel. The air had warmed up and a fresh snowfall gave the neighbourhood the feel of a new bar of soap.
We passed through the quiet streets without talking. In giving me this gift of silence, Jonathan went up again in my esteem.
Back at the door, I saw something reliable in his open face that warmed me. Briefly, I considered a kiss. Instead, I only asked him a question. “I read about this healing river, inland in Florida. Where unicorns supposedly dip their horns. Do you believe it’s there? I mean, can you take sick people there, hypothetically?”
His eyebrows lowered with concern. “Does it matter what I think?” He said it with something like tenderness. “If you want, we can try to find it,” he added.
“Someday, maybe.”
Whether or not the place was mythical would probably be unclear to me for the rest of my life.
FIFTY-THREE
SPRING CAME ANYWAY. JUST before her due date, Raven begged me to be the godparent.
“I’m not Christian,” I told her.
“Me neither, I’m doing this to shut my mom up,” she said. “Besides, this kid needs all the protection it can get.”
Most days s
he looked terrified. Maybe she didn’t want a child in case it was predisposed with the gene that skipped generations like hair and eye colour. Like cancer.
My cell still rang, but it wasn’t about Viv anymore.
Sometimes, on my breaks, I’d find a bench in the Great Hall dome and call Constance in Florida. I suppose I missed her. Everyone in my family was gone.
Through the dome’s glass wall, I watched the last of the winter’s snow fall on Maman’s spiralling body and her long, arched legs. Groups of schoolchildren ran beneath the giant spider, launching snowballs at her cage-like sac of eggs.
I asked Con if she got the books I sent on emphysema and she thanked me, all the while puffing away on her cigarettes at the other end of the line, probing when I was going to fly out.
She asked after Mira but didn’t mention Viv. Most likely she tricked herself into thinking Viv would snap out of her suspended animation and resurface—Instant Life!—as she once was: intact, youthful, alive.
I told her about Clair. The few visits I’d had with her, and how I’d grown fond of Nick and Nahlah. “I will come to meet the little one bientôt, je viendrai,” Con repeated.
So far she hadn’t shown up.
I introduced Jonathan to Clair after I stopped putting off his advances. So enraptured was he with my niece’s games that he forgot I was even with him. I saw then what a good father he’d make, though I gave myself no illusions—he didn’t spark my insides the way Liam did. But I’d been through that fiery passion. Maybe I was more the type for a painless intimacy that grew casually, shaped by the years.
Peng gave me roots and remedies, telling me I was spiritually empty. I also brought Mira to him. He cleared up her infections with kelp and garlic, saying she’d live forever if I gave her five drops of ginseng root a day. Her bronchitis went away and her eyes became clean and shining. The more I exercised her, the less she limped. I asked Peng if there was a cure for her licking and he said no, so I plugged my nose and tolerated it. The only thing that fascinated her equally was the salamander paperweight. She pawed at it and rolled it around on the floor like a chew toy. Give it up, it’s in there for good, I told her. Locked in its own patina. Lustrous and untouchable, like some higher power.
When it came to Viv, I had a hard time sequencing events. I tried to arrange them as frames of a film strip, but they scattered on the floor like the fake pearls off one of her tiaras, falling through heating ducts, rolling behind furniture. Pieces of my sister, in disarray and impossible to refabricate.
Occasionally I still walked past the Laff and thought I saw her in there, sketching, sipping on a sparkling ale. I told myself, cork floats. It’s buoyant and impermeable. I saw what wasn’t there.
I took over Raven’s job in the streets. I included my sister’s picture in every bag of food I handed out. I got used to people telling me they’d seen her, their eagerness faltering when I asked for proof.
Girls with teased hair sat rigid against derelict buildings, their once-virginal skin gone flaky, their once-full lips razor-thin. You’re so ghetto, the one mainlining meth told the one shooting up Wellbutrin, a pharmaceutical prescribed for depression. It was the new cheap alternative to a blast of rock. It burned through the veins and ate the skin down to the bone, carving abscesses like shark bites into the body.
The novelty of seeing me wore off quickly. This one offered me an injection. That one told me for five bucks I could take her picture. Hey! I used to be a majorette, jelly bean! On sedate days she pointed out how I could improve my pies. On grandiose days she antagonized me and hurled the food back in my face with a myriad of profanities, because I didn’t have any idea. I really had no idea.
With these girls, I stood alongside enlightenment. It was right there and I renounced it, even though they prepared me, as the morgue had prepared me.
But I couldn’t believe Viv curled up and died like an animal in a skeleton den. I read that cirrhosis had become reversible, what with advances in medicine. She could have been in good health somewhere warm. Eating salads and painting.
If Con and I were patient, she’d call for cash or a place to stay and we’d have a good laugh about how she worried us. “You shouldn’t stress so much, Worm,” Viv would say.
I had it figured out. I’d get her fixed up and stick by her until she was better. Do what I didn’t the first time around. While she rested in bed, I’d comb her flaxen hair and tell stories. Starting with the time, as girls, we sat in a patch of clover and found a hummingbird there in our own backyard, iridescent and no larger than our palms. Viv drew it in all its stillness and gave me the picture, before Henry put the body in a shoebox of grass.
He told us the next morning that it had flown away.
* * *
DRIFTING THROUGH GALLERY spaces, I thought of Theo often. Mostly I pondered his lifelong obsession with the remnants of lost worlds, and his pilgrimages through pristine and unravaged lands. And I thought about how we were all caught up by unreachables: those lost to us that we couldn’t get back, who beckoned from a place off the radar, beyond our grasp.
Against logic, I imagined Theo recovering. The day he’d no longer be wheeled to the window like a corpse, I’d go with him to Hiva Oa. I pictured us in the lush, humid jungle with sketches, maps, binoculars, and nets, looking for that splendid phantom bird. Trekking inland past high-class resorts on the sea, past huts and villagers and roosters crowing through the night, with the koao in our hearts.
The purple-plumed cryptid was always ahead of us, dashing into mudholes, digging tunnels beneath the ground we walked on as we made our way through the mist.
Winged souls moved inside the landscape unseen. We tripped over a clue. Caught sight of something, held our breath. In the pre-dawn, we waited for a reappearance.
It didn’t materialize again.
EPILOGUE
I STAND WITH STRANGERS in the shuttle parking lot. It’s the middle of June, but the thin mountain air is still cool enough to give me goosebumps this early in the morning.
For over a year, I added to and removed from the suitcase, planning more than one itinerary in my mind.
Viv’s scarf and mitts keep me warm.
When the yellow bus finally comes hurtling around the bend, we pile into it like criminals. I slide into a seat near the front and put on Liam’s scuffed-up aviators. The vehicle is packed—everyone reserved months ago.
Voices hush down as we climb the rugged spine of dirt road, everyone’s face glued to the windows as meadows sprinkled with burgeoning wildflowers, soft pine forests, and snow-capped peaks emerge before us like a fairy tale.
The little motel along the highway is gone. On an impulse I booked a room at the Château Lake Louise, where we dropped Constance off and where she spent her days while we went hiking.
Last night, I wandered the shore of the ice-cold lake. I sat on a log at twilight, looking across the emerald water and the glacier rising above it, until the scenery turned into a whitish-blue ghost of itself, changing to a shade Henry would have found challenging if not impossible to recapture on canvas.
My hiking boots pinch at the ankles. By the time these two months are up, the leather will be broken in. When I told Jonathan where I was going, he insisted I borrow his bear bell and his walking sticks. He brought me to MEC to buy pants with legs that unzip at the knee to make shorts. Henry would have got a kick out of these. He gave me a container filled with granola and beef jerky. He drove me to the airport and kissed me before I went through Departures. Whether we’ll stay together, I don’t know.
The bell chimes as I step down from the bus and put on my backpack. The tourist hut is a miniature of what I recall. Inside, I buy a few postcards. One for Clair, one for Con, one for Jonathan and Theo, one for Raven and Wren.
“Won’t she get pestered with a name like that?” I asked Raven when she was born. But now I see the name suits her, with her shiny black hair and her small, powerful fists. At fourteen months, Wren is conspicuous with a loud, comp
lex song.
Wren and Raven adore Mira so much they’ve adopted her while I travel. I miss that tiny mutt. We got used to one another this past year, during which time we took walks with Jonathan and his shepherd Darwin.
I pick a card with a hoary marmot basking in the sun. I’ll send it to their new address at Body Poets, which had its grand opening last month and where Raven says I have a job in the front spa if I want one. Yet I already miss the viewing room. My few regulars there, and the quiet light after mornings in storage. I even miss Alejandro’s antics.
For Clair, I choose the card with the yearling deer. On Viv’s birthday this past May, I picked her up and we went to Magnolia Park, just the two of us. The trees were in bloom, these cups aimed skyward and falling like eggshells into the grass around us, as if we were in some kind of Shangri-La. I don’t spend as much time with Clair as I’d like. But I see Magnolia Day becoming a tradition between us.
I can’t hear my father anymore, telling me I’ve given up too soon, too easily. In the dead of winter, his voice dissolved and I began to feel my sister’s presence beside me. Sometimes I can almost smell her sweet, sisterly essence from childhood.
Over time, my idea of happiness has changed.
Viv’s erasure took away the possibility for profound joy, scarring like a clear-cut so vast it can be seen from outer space. Nothing grows back there.
* * *
THE SPRUCE AND larch forest around Lake O’Hara yields to ridges, cliffs, and stream beds of lichen. I climb in solitude through the fragile alpine terrain.
I go by brooks and lakes, each one a different blue-green unlike any man-made hue.
I pass hanging valleys and boulder fields as I gain elevation. Then I reach the rock slide and the roaring waterfall bursting forth, and the hillside.
The Gallery of Lost Species Page 25