by Jane Bow
“The dam, the cables, the tubes are all still there,” Brigit was saying now. “I was so angry, I couldn’t stand it. And I had this eerie feeling that Daniel was nearby. I started to yell at him and then I was crying …”
Vanessa went on rubbing Brigit’s back, did not trust herself to speak.
“But up at the dam the glacial pool was still emerald green. The sun was high and I was tired, so I stripped—”
“What, again!”
“Well, why not? The place was deserted and I was so hot. Anyway, what had I got to lose? And it felt so good.”
Vanessa trickled more cold lotion onto Brigit’s upper back, spread it with the palm of her hand, working out from the spine, pressing hard, around and down then up to work her shoulders. Disconnected, that’s what Brigit was. What she could not imagine did not exist.
“And afterwards there you were, wet, all alone on that path—”
“Right, but first, here was the same aluminum ladder, as if Daniel were still just around the corner, as if none of it had ever happened.”
“Oh great.”
“So I threw it down over the falls!”
“And then, don’t tell me, you ran back over the same rotting little bridges where the woman was killed! Because you have to feel the wind up your ass.” The Schubert CD was over. So was the massage. “And God forbid you should ever be caged in by any kind of rational thought.”
Vanessa was wiping the leftover lotion off her hands with the edge of the beach towel when cold liquid trickled through the piled up mass of her hair, tickled her scalp, slid down her neck, dripped off her nose, filled the air with the white wine’s bouquet.
Holding the empty wine glass, Brigit looked as surprised as Vanessa did. Then a giggle broke free.
Dripping wine, Vanessa ran into the kitchen. Brigit slithered off the table, was putting on the towel robe Vanessa had laid out for her when Vanessa’s cry, sharp with alarm, came through to her.
“What?” Brigit hurried through the doorway. Straight into a wall of warm, salty, freshly launched lobster water. Vanessa’s timing had been perfect. Eight litres of water sent Brigit staggering, slipping backwards to land, incredulous, on her bottom.
Laughter, great peals of it, gobbled Vanessa’s breath, doubled her over, the empty lobster pot still dangling from her fingers. Her feet slid out from under her. She landed in a puddle of warm water as the laughter switched, the way laughter loaded with too rich a mix of emotion sometimes does, into tears, sobs. And then waves of pain.
“Easy, Van.” Brigit slithered across the floor, put an arm around her.
Vanessa dug a piece of damp tissue out of the pocket of her robe, blew her nose. Brigit found the wine bottle and passed it to her. Vanessa took a swallow, another, then leaned her head back against the kitchen cupboards. Above them in the sink, the lobsters’ legs tapped against the stainless steel.
“I’m sorry.” Vanessa waited for her breathing to steady itself. “It’s just that you and Daniel, Brother Bart and Mia, Charlie and me — what is it that keeps destroying love? You saw what Charlie and I had, even when we came back to Canada. But now—” Another squall of tears overtook her.
How to explain what exactly had been wrong with the quickening pace of their lives — wake-up, black coffee, one eye on the time, then research, meetings, proposals designed on computer, then phone calls, emails, research on line; sunset aerobics or a quick game of squash, then a noodle box dinner, anything to quash the need to cook, to think. To look. Charlie loved it, fed on the lightning-paced thrust and parry, the thrill of the race, the wins and the grace of Gucci shoes, gowns from Farouche. And so did she. Except sometimes when she came home from a meeting and kicked off her shoes, and Charlie brought her a Scotch and started to move a hand to her breast, his voice a caress, as if kiss-fuck and “I love you” were enough, and sometimes when she stood at the picture window, looking down at the sailboats flitting like water bugs back and forth to Toronto Island, even if he was right there with her.
“Life seemed so barren. That’s crazy, I know. Our life was so neat, ordered, like one of those neighbourhoods where all the pretty houses are lined up along the streets, lawns neatly trimmed, stop signs at the corners, trees planted where they will give shade, people out raking away the winter’s debris, pruning their hedges, toddlers riding tricycles. Then last week it was as if this hole opened right in the middle of this perfect neighbourhood and before I could do anything these flames were leaping up!” Vanessa wiped her nose again.
“Flames? Why?” Brigit stroked her arm until Vanessa was calm enough to tell her about the National Magazine Awards banquet three days ago, how she had been nominated for Best New Writer on the basis of her first full-length magazine article, “Treasure Island North,” how she had waited in the hotel mezzanine, writers in rented tuxedos and backless spring gowns streaming past her into a banquet room.
Any minute now, she kept thinking, Charlie would come leaping up the mezzanine’s spiral staircase, or the elevator door would open and he would stop to whistle at her new royal blue gown. Her hair was up in a chignon, her earrings, lapis lazuli and silver, had been his present last Christmas. But twenty minutes later the elevator had released a last dribble of guests. The waiter removing the doorstops had looked at her with sympathy.
“Vanessa Holdt and Guest” had been placed at a round table for eight. She tried to stay calm, to chat as if the empty seat beside her did not exist. Three courses later, when the master of ceremonies called for quiet, Charlie’s chair was still empty. Vanessa’s body inside the blue gown began to shake, sweat trickled down her sides.
“This year’s choice of the Best New Writer was difficult.”
Vanessa hung onto her hands. The words from the microphone dissolved into cacophony, but she thought she heard “Treasure Island.” Air stopped somewhere inside her windpipe. Then people around her table started smiling at her, clapping.
It was raining, but she walked the twelve blocks home. Let the June rain join her tears. Let it soak her hair, the new dress, her gold medal.
Let him see what his absence had made of this, her most special night in which the only certainty was the fact, irrefutable, unalterable no matter what the explanation, that the sea of applauding people had contained no friend.
Her dress was a puddle of blue silk on the bedroom floor when Charlie’s key turned in the front door lock.
“Tunnel Warrior,” the new computer game he and Pete were designing, was in its final phase and timing was crucial, she knew that, so when a last minute glitch had arisen she would understand—
“And if you would carry the cell phone I bought you, I could have—”
“What?” She hated cell phones, the jingled summons from the depths of her handbag. She put the imaginary receiver to her ear: “Sorry babe, when it comes to choosing between supporting you at probably the most important night of your life and—”
“No! I was just trying to explain—”
“That your game matters more.” There it was: the truth, naked as a charged nerve.
“Anyway, I won!” Vanessa tried to push past Charlie into the living room, but he must have thought she was coming to him, that the flush spreading up her neck was glee, because now he took hold of her arm, pulled her to him, kissed her.
“That’s so great!” He ran his hand down her back. “And I really am so sorry, sweetheart. So let’s not argue?”
Vanessa stared. He thought a kiss was all it took? Problem solved?
The charge ignited, flame leaping, sucking the air. She did not know she had pulled away until she found herself beside the little table by the front door. They kept their keys there, in a shallow brass bowl.
Her hand picked up the bowl, spilled out the keys. She watched from somewhere outside herself, fascinated, as the enamelled Chinese garden painted in the bowl spun Frisbee style through the air.
Charlie ducked, thought again, put out a hand to stop the bowl before it struck the living roo
m’s picture window. It glanced off the side of his palm, hit the wall, clattered to the floor.
Vanessa’s father had given her a china flamenco dancer — ruffled crimson skirt swirling, feet stamping to the sound of an unheard beat, black eyes flashing — the night before they had left Spain, and Vanessa never tired of the dancer’s china grace, the long proud line of her back, the sleekness of her hair. The figurine stood on the table at the end of their white leather sofa. (“White leather!” her mother had yelped, “Is that practical? What will dirty diapers and throw up and crayons do?”) Vanessa snatched up the dancer.
Charlie was staring at the blood welling up out of the split skin on the side of his hand.
Vanessa’s arm went back.
Charlie shook his head. “No, Vanessa, don’t!”
But Flamenco Dancer was already flying head first straight at Charlie. She began to wobble, probably because of the lack of symmetry in her skirts. The flame died. Too late.
Charlie dodged. Flamenco Dancer crashed into the window. Her head snapped off. A crack spread across the glass. Charlie looked down at the broken figurine. On his face was a terrible blankness. He walked past Vanessa, out the door.
She had knelt, her fingers gathering up the china pieces, trying, in the charred silence, to fit them together.
“And now I’ve been thinking that maybe I lost everything on purpose, maybe I made it happen because all I know is how to be different, how to lose—”
“Stop.” Brigit tipped up the wine bottle. “Because how does that explain what happened to Brother Bart and Mia, or to Daniel and me?” She took a last swig. “Love.”
The word thunked, dull as the empty bottle hitting the floor.
Vanessa looked up in surprise. Brigit had always maintained that love was divine, the energy that pushes up the grass. Da Vinci was in its thrall when he conceived the Mona Lisa, Mozart when he heard the “Magic Flute,” Shakespeare when he dreamed up King Lear. Love, she said, could show in an instant the essence of a complete stranger. But now—
“Daniel loved me and look what he did.”
“Not on purpose!”
“Still, he killed himself. He could have listened to me. He could have stopped.” Brigit started drawing lines through the water on the kitchen linoleum. “But he was determined to take control of the landscape—”
“He was crazy about you, Brig’.”
“And he’s dead.” Brigit looked at her. “And Charlie’s not there for you. And you know what else? In order to make a perfect neighbourhood somebody has to bring in a steam shovel, rip out all the trees, bulldoze the wildflowers, pave over the rabbit warrens, fox holes, snake holes. What could be more barren than that?”
Above them the lobsters’ claws scratched at the sink. Brigit tucked her feet under her, got up.
“Wise people are hermits for a reason, Van. Give me the woods, rocks, trees, birds, bears, the sea over people any day.” Brigit reached down to help Vanessa up. “Still, look on the bright side. Everything that’s happened has brought us here now, just a few minutes away from one of the world’s great unsolved treasure hunts with a diary nobody else alive has ever read. And didn’t your Cornish Grampa, the one who used to visit you in Spain, say something once about gold and love?”
Vanessa’s mind cart-wheeled back through the years, into the Altamira evenings, sitting on the porch, watching the fishing boats’ lights move across the black night sea, eating the sun-sweet muscatel grapes they had picked in the afternoon, and listening as Grampa’s gravelly voice, lilting on an accent older than time, took her and Adrian into the stories of the Celtic great cauldron, of the Holy Grail and King Arthur’s knights who had ridden through dark forests, cut their way through undergrowth, had slain so many dragons in search of the Grail. The Green Knight finally won the golden Grail cup, according to Grampa. Then he lost it again. “And do you know why?” Vanessa and Adrian had had to wait forever while he lit and sucked, lit and sucked on his pipe, clouding the air over their heads with the fragrance of his smoke. Twenty years later the old man was confined to a nursing home according to Vanessa’s mother, lost inside his memories, but now his voice came to Vanessa in the flooded kitchen.
Because gold stands for love.
V
GOLDEN LOVE AND BARREN GROUND, breaking waves, a jewelled crown, as she tossed in the netherworld between sleep and wakefulness Vanessa’s mind swirled, melting time, images eddying, carrying her down, down into the hole at the top of the Altamira headland—
She woke to find herself covered in sweat, her heart beating out loud. She must have forgotten to draw the curtains last night because the first light of dawn was picking out the quince bush outside the window — a splash of crimson during the day — now an abstract in grey shadows on the bedroom ceiling, shivering to the pulse of her memory.
Altamira, treasure, love—
Vanessa rolled out of bed, padded into the kitchen for tea. It was 6:01 am but her recall was clear of the day she and Carlita, Paco, Adrian and his friend Santi had lain down on the stony headland above Altamira’s harbour.
“There’s treasure down there.” At seventeen, Santi knew everything so she and Carlita had followed the boys down into the chimney of rock, down and down, feeling their way into the darkness until there were no more footholds, no choice but to let go, to fall blindly.
The floor of the sea cavern was sandy. Outside, the tide was low but still Vanessa could hear it whispering. In some places little trickles of wet made the walls look shiny in the leftover light from above, in others the black was absolute: tunnel openings. Santi built a fire in a circle of stones on the sand and now, as the cave walls twitched in the firelight, Adrian handed around the Canadian marshmallows their father imported and they toasted them on the tip of Santi’s fishing knife while he told about the heathens hundreds of years ago in South America, who had had so much gold and silver that they threw piles of it into lakes to honour their gods.
“No!” Paco turned to Adrian. “Have you met any of these Americanos?”
Vanessa’s family were the only North Americans living in Altamira. Adrian shook his head.
“Those Indios were the Incas. They’re extinct now.”
“Extinct?”
“Wiped out, murdered, skewered, shot.”
“Anyway, it’s true about the gold,” Santi continued. “The great treasure ships lay right here, offshore, waiting to unload down at Cadiz.
What people don’t know is that not all of the treasure made it to the king.” His teeth flashed in the firelight. “Some nights my six-times great grandfather — maybe yours too, Paco — rowed out—”
“They stole treasure from right under the king’s nose and nobody talked?” Vanessa couldn’t imagine it.
“Bars of gold, jewelled crowns. If anyone had talked, hija,” Santi sliced the tip of his knife across the air in front of his throat. “But my grandfather said no one in Altamira ever saw a single piece of that gold—”
“Why not?” Carlita asked.
Paco snorted. “Probably they all killed each other.”
“No. Listen!” Now the light dancing across Santi’s face painted shadows under his cheekbones. “One night they were rowing out when a man swam toward them in the moonlight. ‘Go back,’ he told them. ‘The ship has already been looted.’ They dragged him into the boat. He was half drowned but later my grandfather said he told them about a much greater cache of gold hidden up the coast of Norte America—”
Treasure in North America?
“—so our people decided to use the gold they had stolen to finance a ship.”
“Because what else could they do with it anyway?” Paco’s mind was always the quickest. “If they had tried to spend it, the king would have known. They would have been hanged.”
“Our six-times-great grandfathers went across the ocean?” Nobody Carlita knew had ever been anywhere further away than Madrid.
“No,” Santi sighed, “they kept trying to get ready, to g
et a ship. But then they started to fight … and don’t you see? It means they never used the money.”
The next afternoon at low tide Vanessa, Carlita and Paco had borrowed Vanessa’s father’s flashlight, and a rope which they tied to a bush above the hole. Carlita was left to keep watch.
Vanessa had not noticed the dripping in the cavern when the others had been there, or the hundreds of tiny eyes, pinpricks of light, staring.
Now the only warmth came from Paco’s hand. Vanessa held onto it, flashed the light along one of the cavern walls, found two of the tunnels, leading where? A third, wider tunnel opened in the direction of the sea.
“Sshh!” Paco had no sooner spoken than Vanessa felt a movement of air. Then came the sounds: footsteps in the sand, something being dragged, a voice muttering. “Switch out the light!”
The muttering grew louder. It was coming from the sea tunnel. They flattened themselves against the cavern wall; edged toward the closest, smaller tunnel. Reached it just as a figure came out of the darkness into the circle of light from the chimney. It was stooped, female, dressed in a black hooded cloak.
La vieja! Paco’s hand tightened around Vanessa’s. No one had ever met the old woman. No one knew where she lived, whose family she belonged to, but everybody had a story about how she waited behind a barn, sprang out of the shadows to take a chicken, a goat, a cow, maybe even a child from those who did not ten cuidado — be careful.