He sat down next to her, leaned back and exhaled. He was skinny, but his weight was enough to make the seat creak. There was a smokiness about him, Vantage menthols and creosote-soaked railroad ties, that reminded Christine of her father.
From Toronto to Parry Sound, he sat beside her without saying a word. Christine edged her elbow away from the armrest between them and held her hands in her lap. She listened to Sonia’s CD on her Discman: a mix of the Ramones, the Doors and the Who. The pine trees outside flew by the window all in rows. Christine focused on the spaces between the trees as they passed. She watched for moose until it got too dark to see anything at all. The man must have fallen asleep beside her; he hadn’t moved for three hours.
The bus stopped at the McDonald’s in Parry Sound. They pulled into the parking lot and the driver said, Fifteen minutes. If you need a smoke, please do so outside the coach. The bus made a hissing sound and the door opened like it was gasping for air. Christine wanted to get something to eat, but the man was still asleep right next to her. The other passengers started to stretch and stand. They moved stiffly, like newly hatched reptiles.
Excuse me, Christine said.
The man opened his eyes and turned and looked right at her. His irises were the yellow of canned pineapple. The pull of his jacket made the stretched sound of twisting balloons.
Let’s go get a hot apple pie, he said, like they were old friends.
I want a cherry one, Christine told him.
We’ll get you a hot cherry pie, then. Come on.
He bought the cherry pie for her even though she offered to pay for it herself. The cashier folded the top of the paper bag twice, flashing bright pink fake nails. Christine reached for the bag on the counter and her eyes met the cashier’s, so she smiled and said thank you and walked out. She could feel the man following her. She got on the bus and led the way to their seats. They ate together as the bus pulled out of the parking lot. Christine blew on the cherries before each bite to cool them off.
When they were finished, he said, That hit the spot, didn’t it? His Adam’s apple quivered under bristly skin when he spoke. He hardly had lips at all. And yet, even though he was ugly, there was something sexy about him.
Yeah, Christine said. Thanks.
I just love the apple, he said. But you think the cherry’s better, don’t you?
Christine looked at him. I like apple too, she said.
What I mean is, I’m interested in your opinion. The tastes of young women—especially the Northern type. See, I’m opening a restaurant myself.
Really, Christine said. She remembered Sonia’s peppermints in her pocket, felt for one, and popped it in her mouth. Sweet mint cut through sweet cherry.
In Thunder Bay, he said. A bagel place. And it’s all about the market research, I’ll tell you.
You going to sell apple pies? she asked.
Well, no, I’m going to be selling bagels. But—he paused and watched Christine transfer the peppermint to her other cheek with her tongue—but I was thinking that I could sell cherry-flavoured bagels. What do you think of that?
Christine rolled the candy back across her tongue, making a wet knocking sound on her teeth. She curled her lips into a little pocket. I think it’s disgusting, she said.
It wasn’t until they were an hour outside of Sudbury that he asked for her name. The inside of the bus was dark, with scattered beams of light aimed at opened magazines and paperbacks on passengers’ laps. The smell of greasy burger wrappers lingered in the air.
I’m Sonia, Christine said.
Pleased to know you, Sonia, said Bruce Corbiere.
They kissed for almost an hour. Her lips were wet and rubbery, but her limbs were all fuses and wires. Outside, the lights looked sharp and clear. She considered staying on the bus.
How old are you? Bruce asked.
How old do you think I am?
He looked at her. Seventeen?
A warm pulse in her chest from this: he thought she was even older than Sonia.
When she didn’t respond, he looked uneasy.
Sixteen?
She grinned. Don’t worry, she said. It’s not like I’m going to call my mommy or anything. She pushed back her sleeve, looked at her bare wrist. What time is it? she asked him.
It is the time for us to part, he said. Farewell, Sweet Sonia.
Good luck with your bagels, Christine said. She wrestled with her backpack, trying to find what was catching the strap.
Wait, he said. Let me help. With one move, he released the strap from the footrest. Then he said, Sonia. I’m going to need your phone number. For more market research.
Christine wrote it on the palm of his hand with a black felt-tip marker, and as she pressed the ink into his skin, she made a silent wish: Please make something happen. It was a wimpy, ambiguous wish and she didn’t even know what it meant. The bus pulled into the station. Her father would be outside, waiting for her. She held Bruce Corbiere’s hand where she’d written her phone number. She pushed his fingers until they curled inward and made a fist.
Call in the evening, she told him. Okay? Like after five.
You have someone picking you up? he asked her.
Yeah, Christine said. She didn’t say: My father.
Well, you take care of yourself, then. It was a pleasure.
She thought he might try to kiss her again. But he didn’t. He just waved goodbye to her with one hand, and he kept her phone number closed in his fist.
When Christine was standing in the aisle with everyone waiting to get off the bus, she noticed a tall woman wearing a white woven scarf. The woman stepped off the bus and scanned the cars outside the station. Christine followed, watching her. The woman bent down next to the belly of the bus and picked up an old red suitcase with a crinkled paper tag hanging from the handle. The mangled voice on the loudspeaker called out: For passengers travelling to Thunder Bay, your coach is located on platform three, preparing to depart.
The woman in the scarf bit her lip in a worried way. She was looking for someone. Then she found him. He was wearing a green and black plaid jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He appeared to rise out of a big wood-panelled station wagon. The man took the red suitcase out of her hand and said something to her. She laughed. They kissed each other. They looked strange and out of date, like they had just rolled out of a vintage shop in Kensington Market.
There was no sign of Christine’s father’s pickup truck.
Years later, when Christine tells this story, she’ll say that she waited for her father for half an hour before she started to worry. When she watched the bus leave the lot, on its way north to Thunder Bay, Bruce Corbiere looked out the window at her and pressed his fingertips against the window to say goodbye. She felt in her jacket pocket for her Discman and couldn’t find it, realized she’d forgotten it on the Greyhound, and then wondered if Bruce Corbiere had stolen it. She’ll say that after all of the other people had been picked up and driven away in cars and taxis, when she was left alone in the station with the blips of the arcade game flashing in the empty room behind her, when she felt in her pocket for quarters and headed to the pay phone to call her father, before she dialed and listened to the phone ring and ring and ring at the other end, before she called a taxi to come and get her, before she put her key into the lock and stepped into her dark house, turned on the hall light and saw the folded piece of paper on the table, before she read her father’s last note, before calling Juicy and telling her what happened and then lying down in front of the television just to listen to the people talking while she waited four hours for her aunt to drive all the way up to Sudbury in the middle of the night, before the funeral and the packing of boxes and moving down to live with Sonia, just like she wanted— before any of that happened, Christine will say that she’d seen the ghosts of her parents at the bus station that night, but that she just didn’t recognize them at first, because they looked so young and happy.
Prognosis
De
ar Mrs. B——,
Twenty years have passed since we have spoken. I know you haven’t always agreed with our lifestyle, but I was surprised when your letters stopped entirely. It’s been almost a decade. Your unwillingness to argue about our life decisions in recent years led me to believe that you were either resting comfortably in a divot of calcified judgment or that you had finally made peace with our choices. I had hoped it was the latter, but I just discovered that your silence was more menacing than I had feared. Your resentment is palpable and extraordinary, and it has tested the architecture of my marriage. I don’t know what has been more distressing—having to justify our modus vivendi every time I was in contact with you, sensing your disapproval from a distance during these years of silence, or learning that you have actually been in contact with my husband all this time.
Gabe has told me about your diagnosis. He said that you might not even live to see next summer. You know that I have little faith in the trappings of organized religions, so I will not say that I am praying for you. Instead, I will say that you are in my thoughts, and that I am writing you this letter because I have also been silent for too long.
I wish you had given this place another chance, come for a second visit. We were so young back then—just married, barely making enough money to pay for the wood we needed to build this house. We were inexperienced landowners and we weren’t ready for you. I’m sorry you had such a hard time of it, especially your nausea from the boat and your constant chill (even when the wood stove was raging with fire, you managed to find corners and pockets of cold in our house). Our outdoor shower frightened you even more than the dark forest behind the property. But I never thought that you would take these things personally—as though we had created an unlivable environment so you would never come back.
Many things have changed since your visit so long ago. We’ve had solar panels installed, and even though we’ve kept the outhouse, we’ve landscaped the path to it, and the walls are insulated—it’s all much more substantial than when you were here. But you probably know these things already, don’t you?
Here is something you might not know.
I have always been slightly afraid of you. I know that you looked at Gabe as your finest creative success, that you had the highest expectations for his future. But I could never be sure what you thought of me. I could read disapproval everywhere: in your gestures, your vocal intonations, in the very syntax in your letters. Although I sensed that you always wished for a more studious wife for your son—someone who managed to finish her doctorate, at least—I shouldn’t have built that feeling into a stone citadel.
Instead of putting energy into our broken relationship over these years, I’ve been studying your work and writing. Your extensive research on the relationship between faith and reason is very compelling. I’ve read your work on the epistemological diversity of current Catholic theologists and your essays on rationalism and anti-rationalism and how it affects political and cultural oppression within Catholic universities. Your knowledge is substantial and intimidating. I was especially intrigued by your latest book, I See Holy: Religious Simulacra and Pareidolia. It relates to an issue that has perplexed me for most of my life.
As I sat alone on the porch this morning, apprehensive and hurt by the news of these years of secret letters and phone calls, I wondered why I had never asked you about this issue before now. I studied the shoreline and contemplated the creatures hidden under the sand. I questioned my own motivations for making a home on this island. I calculated the degree of damage done to my relationship, a marriage built on honesty and trust.
Do you remember, the last time we spoke, I told you that I had a condition, a malfunctioning tear duct from a childhood surgery? I asked Gabe to explain it to you, and he did—but he was telling you about a medical condition that I don’t actually have. The real story is stranger than that. What I told you was an excuse for something I could not understand myself. I realize now that you would likely have been comfortable discussing it quite openly—in your work, after all, you spend a great deal of time assembling conceptual parentheses to contain matters of an abstract or philosophical nature. What held me back then was fear (again, fear!)—not entirely of your disregard, though I believed this to be the case. It was my own fear of the inexplicable.
When I was six years old, my mother saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in an Ida Red apple in the produce section of Food City. As you know, it’s become a bit of a cliché now—last year a vision of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 in an auction, and the image of Jesus Christ in a water stain brought hundreds of people to a concrete wall in a Chicago underpass. In your paper Apparitions of God: Divine Intervention or Delusion? you write about the face of God spotted in the smoke of the Twin Towers. But this apple appeared to my mother years ago, when we were still surprised by the one or two satellites we’d catch moving across the night sky; before there were cellphones and BlackBerrys; before farmers began to introduce DNA from Arctic char into our tomatoes. Had it happened today, my mother might have put the apple up for auction on eBay.
My mother dabbled briefly in the United Church when she was a child, but she was never what I would call a religious woman (though you should know that she has always said good things about you. She has never forgotten the lilac suit you wore to our wedding. Was it a European design? My mother searched for a reasonable duplicate for many years). I was not baptized. At the age of six, I’m not even sure I could have identified the figure of Mary anywhere, other than in a lit-up manger in our neighbour’s front yard every December—a glowing blue-cloaked figure kneeling by a plastic baby that appeared to be strapped to a toboggan.
On the day that it happened, my mother pushed the clattering steel grocery cart up to the apple bin and stopped there, moving her hands together in front of her chest like a knot she was trying to untangle. People looked at her. She ignored them, muttering, staring straight ahead at the pile of apples. She ignored me. In a rare demonstration of adventurousness (I was a placid child, not given to roaming), I left my mother and wandered on my own until I found the bulk food section. I settled myself in front of the bottom shelf and set to unwrapping sticky glittermints and chewing on fingerfuls of rubbery licorice nibs until a skinny red-coated stock boy pulled me off the floor and back to the front of the store to find out whom I belonged to. There stood my mother, a holy look on her face and a plastic bag full of apples in one fist. She held the “special” apple in her other hand. When she saw me, she bent down and put the fruit to my face. Look, she said.
Now, my mother had been in the care of a psychiatrist for most of that year, sometimes away in “retreat” for weeks at a time. I wasn’t told these details until I was much older, and I don’t know what frightened me more: her absence, or seeing her anxious and unwell. I was late for school one morning because she wouldn’t let me out of the house before she had sewn a careful lining of tinfoil to the inside of my winter toque. She cancelled our subscription to the newspaper because she read mysterious, malevolent messages there. She watched television with a notepad in hand, scribbling down pieces of dialogue. My mother’s fear was palpable; it was an electric, metallic charge in the atmosphere. When I was six years old, my mother was my closest friend. I was afraid of her agitation, yet I hated to be away from her. It was not an easy time.
It feels important to note that the day in the grocery store, when my mother found the apple, she was not buzzing with anxiety. She was gentle and clear. I was not afraid of her. This all happened a long time ago, but I remember that for certain.
Five years later, a peculiar thing happened to me. One afternoon, curled in an easy chair reading Harriet the Spy, I discovered that if I pulled on my left earlobe, water would come out from behind my ear. The water was warmish and there wasn’t very much of it, but it startled me, and I made a sound that brought my mother into the living room. She asked me, What happened? And I had to tell her: I pulled my ear and water came out.
; My mother had been in a stable period for at least two years. Calmly, she inspected my ear. She rubbed and poked the spot I located for her. And even though there was no hole, crack or puncture in my skin, the water came out for her too: a trickle that I could feel like a teardrop sliding down my neck.
My mother had never mentioned the legendary apple after that day in the grocery store. I suspect that she told my father and he had credited it to her paranoia. My memories from these years are vague and scattered now, but I do not recall my mother modifying her behaviour in any way that would signify having experienced a “miracle.” She did not begin attending Mass, she did not speak to me about the importance of prayer, and as far as I knew, she did not acquire even one religious icon—not even a rosary. Despite this, when my ear produced water that day, it somehow became clear to my mother that this was a direct result of my witnessing a miracle in the Food City as a child, and she said so. She said, I can’t explain it, but we should celebrate.
That afternoon, she took me for a manicure and pedicure at an upscale salon, and a very nice lunch in a restaurant with a waterfall in the courtyard. I had a drink made with layers of cranberry and grapefruit juice, and my mother had a glass of white wine. We toasted the Virgin together, admiring our newly polished nails.
I began to explore Catholicism on my own, with a customary preteen focus on the unexplainable, the paranormal and the macabre—or, as these things are called in the Church, miracles. My mother certainly did not encourage my investigation. I imagine my father was aware of my obsession with stories about weeping statues and historical Marian sightings (from the Miracle Tortilla in New Mexico to those four little girls in Spain who could run up mountains, their feet moving without touching the ground) and my fascination with famous cases of stigmata, but he did not interfere, even when I decided that I wanted to start going to church. My mother hated the idea. I was nearing the age when girls begin to abhor their mothers. If I had been older, I’d like to think that I would have been more sympathetic to my mother’s misgivings.
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