by Heidi Wicks
“I’ll have the El Camino.” Jess points to it on the menu. The Overcast newspaper recently declared it the best drink in St. John’s. When it arrives, she sips the frosty neon-green mixology. It’s boozy and just what the doctor ordered. Just the prescription to numb her guilt. She drains the glass quickly, motioning to the waitress for another.
“Whoa, horsey!”
She ignores Dan. She’s not in the mood to talk.
“So…I’ll get a platter of Pickle Points from PEI? You’re really gonna do this?”
“Yes, Dan, I said I’d do it.”
“Alright. Jesus. What’s your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem, it’s just that I already said I’d do it!”
“We should get other stuff too.”
She looks at her second drink, nearly empty. “Yeah, I want tuna tacos and the Kobe-beef lettuce wrap.”
The tables along the purple wall are very close together. The woman at the table next to them catches Jess’s eye and points to her drink. “Awesome, right?” Her eyebrows are raised, as if to say, “Us wives are keeping a delicious secret from our husbands.”
Jess drains El Camino number two and Nirvana t-shirt slides the oysters onto the table. “More drinks?”
“Another one of theeeeese, for me.” Jess points at her glass and her eyes are getting droopy. “And I’ll get tuna tacos and the beef lettuce wrap.”
“Probably more water too, please.” Dan adjusts the location of the oysters. “I’ll get a Chasing Sun, please.”
“I don’t know how you drink IPAs.” Jess slurs. “They taste like ear wax.”
He ignores her. “Okay, you ready to try one of these?”
“Sssssure. Why the hell not.”
Ai-ai-aiiii! Yelps and whoops and hollers and cowbell. Someone has bought a round for the kitchen. They are at a fusion hipster new Newfoundland kitchen party. Jess frowns at the yelling.
Dan holds a shell up, puts it into his mouth, tips his head back. The goo slides down his throat. “See? All there is to it. Your turn.”
Jess reaches her index finger and thumb towards a shell. Her balance is off, she can tell, even though she’s just sitting. Raising the shell to her lips, her fingers quiver and she can smell the sea. Suddenly she’s on the ferry from Port aux Basques, age eight, and the ocean is unsettled and the boat swoops up? Down. Up? Down. She throws up over the rail on the side of the boat.
She pushes back her chair. Bolts to the back of the restaurant. Into the restroom. El Camino blasts into the toilet. More El Camino. Into the toilet. Flush the toilet. Sag down to the floor, cheeks flushed, eyes salt-watery. Awash in guilt. Blow nose. Dab face with paper towel. Wash mouth out, apply lip gloss to lying, cheating mouth.
Back at the table, Dan doesn’t seem to have noticed Jess’s distress. He’s finished off the oysters and the platter has been removed. A new couple has been seated at the table next to them.
It’s Matt Fucking Bohmer and his fucking wife. Of course. Only in St. John’s would something like this occur. Someone from Newfoundland could be anywhere in the world and they’d run into another Newfoundlander. It’s one of the most endearing and annoying things about it. This impossible thing is only possible in Newfoundland.
“Jess! Hey!” Matt Fucking Bohmer jumps when she reclaims her seat.
“Oh…Matt? Hey. Wow. Dan, this is Mmmatt.”
“Hey, man.” Dan shakes Matt’s hand. “You’re the Matt from high school? Bohmer?”
“That’s me. Great to meet you, Dan. This is my wife, Grace. Grace, Dan and Jess. Listen, we can move to another ta—”
“No, no, no, no, no. Why would you do that? There’s no need to do that. Stay!” Jess feels like she’s in The Twilight Zone.
“This isn’t The Jess, is it?” Grace has long, whip-straight, jet-black hair and wears cakey makeup. “Your high-school girlfriend? The Jess who is our daughter’s teacher?” Blush, lipstick, fake eyelashes. She’s stunning, and looks high maintenance, and the opposite of the type of woman Jess ever imagined Matt would end up with. “Matt told me that her teacher is his high-school love. Imagine.” She glares at Jess.
Dan pulls his hand from Jess’s and sips his beer. Whenever Matt’s name comes up, he stiffens. It’s the one thing that makes him distant. He knows Jess’s heart, and he knows how attached it gets. How hard she finds it to let go. He doesn’t quite know how to deal with the subject of Matt.
“I didn’t realize you had Matt’s kid in your class, Jess. You didn’t tell me that.” He sips his beer and stares at her, and she responds with pleading eyes. She knew it’d make him uncomfortable, telling him she had interactions with Matt again, and she didn’t feel it was necessary.
“High school—that was a long time ago, hey?” Jess looks around for the Nirvana t-shirt. Fidgeting. Dying for her tuna taco to soak up the El Camino and regret.
“Come on now, Jess, it wasn’t that long ago, right? We’re all still young at heart, yeah?” Matt’s blue eyes sparkle around the table and land on Jess. He suddenly looks ghoulish under the purple lights. Sallow. Haggard. Evil, even.
Goddamned tequila in the goddamned El Camino, thinks Jess. “It feels like a long time ago to me.” She reaches for Dan’s hand. He doesn’t accept it and instead reaches for his beer again. “Two boys at home makes it feel like a really long time ago.”
“Two boys, wow.” Grace adjusts a strand of hair away from her face. Her cheekbones are defined. Possibly from Botox. “You’ve got a really good body for two kids.” A martini is laid in front of her. She sips it without removing her eyes from Jess.
“Well,” Jess slugs some of Dan’s beer, “all I eat are scraps from their plates as they’re being scraped into the garbage can. Maybe that’s why. HA!”
Matt cracks up. Too much.
“They do keep us pretty busy.” Dan crunches his fish taco, his eyes remaining on Matt.
“Anyway,” Jess turns her attention to her own food, “this is a rare chance to eat a real meal, so I’m gonna tuck in here.” Desperately she tries to make eye contact with Dan but he looks anywhere but at her.
Nirvana t-shirt arrives a few minutes later. “Anything else you two?”
“What do you think, Dan? Dessert? There’s a caramel log-inspired creation I saw on Instagram earlier.”
“I’m pretty full. Feeling a bit sick, actually.” He flicks his eyes toward Matt, then back at Jess, and they bore right into her. In her own stomach swirls the green drink, the vanilla latte from the other day and the fishy smell of the harbour.
The bill arrives and Jess snatches it up. “Let me give you my Visa.” She whips it out of her purse and hands it over. Punches her PIN into the machine.
Ai-ai-aiiii! Clang pound whoop cheer—the bass thumps louder and it’s right in Jess’s ears, and the longing she feels for Matt and her mother and Dan, as heartache does, stretches down her throat, like long fingers intertwining with her ribcage, pulling it apart, exposing her soul to the elements.
budding buddies in the bookstacks
2016
Maisie is wonderstruck, gaping at the book stacks. “Booooks!”
The crinkling of the cellophane wrapped around book covers that smell like someone’s basement. Books that smell of knowledge, of the past. It’s a smell that hurtles people through the decades, stirs images of people reading fairytales, through the lens of each of their own stories. With their children curled into their laps, they orate tales of adventure and mystery and love through their own joy, their own pain, their own loss and it’s all made better by the bursting affection they feel for that child tucked into that lap, like a baby bird in a nest. All of the bruised hearts. Comforted and lulled by words, illustrations, humanity and other-worldliness and long-ago lands.
One of Cait’s earliest memories of elementary school is when the librarian gave the class the introductory tour of the library and explained how the Dewey Decimal System worked. Cait adored trolling the shelves, running her fingers along the spines, th
inking about being somewhere else and about what she’d do when she got older. Select a book or three or six. The Story of Ping—where a little duck in China gets separated from his family, but in the end, they’re reunited. Millicent and the Wind—about a lonely, isolated girl who lives on a hill and who wishes for the wind to bring her a friend. Tales of the lonesome who find the familiar or a new connection.
Flip through the Dewey Decimal System cards that slept in pull-out beds inside a case of oak: the strongest of woods—made to last. She loved the sign-out card in the pocket stuck to the back cover. Who signed this one out before her? Who would see her name printed there after she returned it? The person who saw her name could be someone she knew, or maybe not. She loved the idea of that possible anonymity. It was somehow an extension of the story on the pages—who else read that book? Who liked that book? Who was like her? It was the possibility of a secret, unspoken, unrealized-as-of-yet connection between a string of people. She’d draw library cards with crayons in the backs of her own books at home. Years later, she’d spend hours in the bowels of the QEII Library at the university, trolling through news articles on lit microfilm screens, reading the bylines above the stories, hoping someday someone would read her name on a screen.
Once upon a time, Robert Munsch visited their school. The actual, real-life, Robert Munsch. The Robin Williams of children’s literature. Cait couldn’t believe a celebrity of such stature, such acclaim, was coming to their school. Looking at him in wonder as he read The Paper Bag Princess, just the way he did when she listened to him on CBC reading to other children, in other places. He flailed his arms all over the place, leapt up, wahhhhhh!-ed—all of the very high-energy crazy Robert Munsch that was to be expected. In The Paper Bag Princess, Princess Elizabeth meets a handsome prince named Ronald, who she’s set to wed. He’s freakin’ gorgeous, Prince Ronald. Spiffy, dashing, always dressed to the nines. Elizabeth can’t believe her good fortune, landing such a fellow. But tragically Prince Ronald gets captured by a fire-breathing dragon! And no one can help him besides the woman who so selflessly adores him. Elizabeth doesn’t hesitate—she ventures on a daring and brave mission to save her prince, all in the name of love and devotion. She trudges through burnt wasteland, the likes you’d find in a Cormac McCarthy novel. All her gorgeous princess clothes get burnt right off her so she has to wear a paper bag. Her hair gets singed. She finds the dragon, bribes and manipulates him in order to tucker him right out so he’s not guarding Prince Ronald anymore.
Anyway, she finally makes her way to old Ronald, in eager anticipation of a grateful embrace now that she’s saved him. But instead? He acts like a saucy, spoiled, self-entitled dickweed. Scolds her for not looking clean enough and princess-y enough. Oh, well I’m sorry if I’ve braved fire and apocalyptic environmental conditions to save your ungrateful ass. Screw you, Ronald, is what Cait, as an adult, now imagines is what Princess Elizabeth meant.
Cait loved it then and she loves it even more now. She spots the book on the shelf and feels the same electrical current Princess Elizabeth must have felt, and she plucks it off the shelf for her and Maisie to read at home later.
Maisie leaps to reach a book just beyond the height of her. “Want that one, Mommy!”
Nearby, a man with hair coloured like cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream wears a plain white t-shirt. His daughter looks about Maisie’s age, maybe a little younger. They’re sitting in the same bookstack and his arm is wrapped around her like she is the Hope diamond. His Roman nose brushes her rosy cheek and she nuzzles into him, her milk-chocolate brown hair mussed against his chest. He looks up from the book and so does his daughter, towards Maisie and Cait, and his eyes crinkle into the gentlest and most genuine smile. He stays there, rests his cheek on his daughter’s shiny hair, and watches Maisie, jumping for the spine that pooks out slightly beyond the others in the row. Cait smiles at him. He seems amused.
“Mommmyyyy!”
“Yes, hold your horses, sweetheart, I’m getting it for you.”
The man’s daughter is looking, too.
“You want to go read it now, or bring it home?”
“Now. Here.” Maisie plunks down right where she’s standing. They’re only about ten feet from the man and his daughter.
“Well,” she glances at them, the way parents do with each other when they’re trying to feel out boundaries. “Why don’t we go a little ways down, so we don’t interrupt those people. Libraries are for quiet time, so they may be trying to read.”
“No, here!”
“It’s okay.” The crinkly eyes still twinkle. The man has an Eastern European accent. “We don’t mind.”
“Here!”
“Shhh, Maisie, library. Remember? Quiet.” Cait whispers. “Are you sure?” His quiet kindness feels warm and comforting, even just from being in the same vicinity.
“Yes, sure. You are welcome.”
“Sit here, Mommy.” Maisie has skipped right over and plunked herself right next to the man and his daughter. “I’m five.” Maisie looks the girl in the eye. Turning five is a huge deal.
The girl is mildly startled but instantly starts to melt. “I’m four.”
“My name’s Maisie.” Maisie touches the girl’s arm and cocks her head to the side and her mouth stretches into a row of little halogen Chiclets.
“My name’s Ana.” She smiles. She’s some sweet.
“Just like in Frozen!”
“Yes, we’ve seen that one a few times, haven’t we?” Cait looks from Maisie to the man.
“Mommy, she even has sort of the same hair as Anna!”
“We have not seen that one yet. Ana’s friends at school tell her about it all time, right, Ana?”
“You can come watch it at our house if you want to! You be Anna, I’ll be Elsa.”
Maisie says that line to Cait almost every day.
“They make friends so easily, hey?” Cait says. Making parent small talk is always a bit awkward. It’s the same questions—how old is he/she, what extra-curriculars is he/she doing, how is he/she at daycare, etc., etc.
“It’s a beautiful thing.” He watches the two girls, who have scuttled over on their own, and are flipping through Z is for Zamboni, jabbing their fingers at pictures, cackling at God-knows-what. Hopefully not something poop or pee related, which is all Maisie and her classmates are about lately.
“It really is. I wish adults were better at that. Too bad we have all of this baggage.” Cait’s attempt a joke, then notices the confusion on the man’s face, and realizes there’s a language barrier. “I mean, it’s too bad we carry all of these yucky experiences with us that prevent us from making friends so easily.”
“Ah, yes. But maybe, you know, we learn from our kids a little bit.” He looks from the girls to Cait, and he looks right at her, but just for a moment, before turning back to the girls.
“What’s your name?” She catches a whiff of him. Not a bad thing.
“Jakob.”
Oh for fuck sakes, another Jake, but he pronounces it Ya-kob, so she determines it to be okay. Maybe he’s another version of Jake, from another reality, a reality in which a Caitlyn and a Jakob could work out in the end. “And you?”
“Caitlyn. Cait for friends.”
The other Jake and his Stacey have been spending more time together. Cait gets the scoop from Maisie. It’s time to move forward, and she feels increasingly more comfortable about that every day. There are dips—moments, seconds—where she still misses Jake. A song, a smell, a TV show. But those moments fade and become less frequent.
“Nice to meet you, Cait.” He extends his hand and she accepts it.
“And you as well.” She shakes it and his palm is smooth. “Hey, maybe we’re not so bad at making friends after all.” They both laugh. He is not wearing a wedding ring, but who knows what that means. He’s not her type, physically. He’s smaller. There are people who perk interest, for all sorts of reasons. All of the bruised hearts and fresh starts. There are Millicent connections an
d there are Ping connections. And there is Paper Bag Princess power.
taxi driver
2016
Outside Adelaide, Dan flags a taxi. Slides into the back, not waiting for Jess to get in first. She walks around the other side to open her door.
“Stirling Crescent, please.” Dan clicks the seatbelt into the holder.
“What is wrong with you?” Jess hisses.
“Wow, I wonder.” He glares out the window. “Look, I know you’re bored, okay? I know you’re restless.”
“I’m not…Dan—”
“I know you’re sad. I’m sorry I’m not enough.”
“No. Dan, please—”
“I just can’t believe…did something happen with you? And Matt? Tell me the truth, Jess.”
Does he know something?
From the rearview mirror, the cab driver catches Jess’s eye.
“Do ye like Irish music?” He asks.
“Sure.” Her insides are hard.
“Give this a listen.” He pops on a tape. Blasts it. “Do ya like that?”
“Sure. Who is it?” She’s desperate for a side conversation. Anything to keep Dan from asking more questions.
“That’s me. And me band.”
“You’re pretty good.”
“Goin’ on a reunion tour soon. Starts in Dublin.”
“Oh, so you were a pretty big deal then?”
“That we were.” The accordion and the stomping feet blast and the salt air wafts through the window. They sit and inhale it in silence.
“But ya know,” finally, the cabbie breaks his meditation, “the memories are just incomparable. They’ll stay with me forever. Those were some of the best times, on them stages, just…havin’ a laugh.” His eyes in the rearview mirror crinkle into a smile.
“So then, what brought you to Newfoundland? You’re Irish, it sounds like?”
“A woman. Course. Ye Newfoundland women, hard to say no to ye. Been married to her for forty years now.” His laugh bounces out the window. The people outside Merchant Tavern hear him and wave and laugh and he waves back.