The kitchen could be okay at certain times of day. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon there were almost nice—Thomas playing on the rug in front of the windows, the lake beyond, the radio prattling while I cooked or made tea or tried to fit pieces of grass or flower or cow together in the endless puzzle on the dining table. I could sit on the couch while the kettle boiled and read a book and still be within steps of the stove. A kettle boiling was a homey sound. But come four o’clock, it changed—the whistle of the kettle was an assault that pierced my brain. Four o’clock was the black time. If the baby was still sleeping, I got him up for company. But I scared myself. I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t slap Thomas’s hand if he reached for my cup and spilled tea on my shirt. I couldn’t be sure that just because I dropped a cup, or lost a game of solitaire, or burned the food to the bottom of the pan, I wouldn’t walk out the front door and never come back. Was I broken? Or just exhausted? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t tell Danny about it. All the words I tried came out wrong, like complaints or self-pity. Instead, I held Thomas close, turned the radio loud, made more and more elaborate dinners from the simple things I could get at Overwaitea Foods. Four o’clock was my nemesis. This wasn’t the first time I’d found myself plowing through the bush to the Swannells’ house.
Thank goodness they were retired. They were always glad to give us cookies and see Thomas blow spit bubbles and jabber. I melted into a stiff chair in their sitting room and fiddled with my cup and saucer, watching the same view as ours, only one lot over. While they laughed and played with the baby, I drank my tea and listened to the fire crackle. I took in the little gold-framed oil paintings and stiff black-and-white photos of Swannell ancestors, and I smiled and answered their questions, but I kept one eye on the lake and an ear out for the sound of the car.
Mrs. Swannell—Rosie, she said to call her—watched me closely. She let Thomas tug on the string of beads that held her glasses around her neck. Jim Swannell filled the living room with weather commentary, but I felt like Mrs. Swannell could see me trying to hold it together. If I didn’t have to escape the cabin I wouldn’t have gone to them—I was terrified she’d say the thing that would undo my careful front and I’d come tumbling down. It had taken all my evasive skills to avoid spending Christmas dinner with them.
Christmas came and we weathered it alone. We had nothing prepared—no decorations, no traditions, not even a plan. I would have preferred not to celebrate, but Danny was a do-it-for-the-sake-of-doing-it kind of guy; our uncarved Halloween pumpkins were still out there under the snow, flat and rotten piles of almost and didn’t.
Danny built a bonfire on Christmas Eve. He started with the blowdown from the fir trees ringing the cabin, rounds from the old woodpile, and branches on the shore that washed up last year, and it ended up an eight-foot monster pile of wood on the beach. I watched him build it from the kitchen window. His breath followed him like a thought bubble as he hauled wood and threw it higher and higher up the pile. I could see him getting hotter; his hair, plastered to his head, turning straggly and dark. It was getting so long it brushed the collar of his woolen shirt and mingled with his beard.
Thomas had napped all that afternoon. When Danny came in, it was dark, the black time in full swing, and I had swapped out my tea for whisky. I’d cleaned the cabin while he worked. I’d been a good wife. I swept out the dark corners and wiped down the counters. The tea towels hung straight and soup was on the stove. He was careful not to make too big a deal about it, but I could tell he was pleased—he raised his eyebrows and nodded, his lips bent in a smile. He wanted me to be okay. I wished I could tell him I was. Instead, I opened a beer for him while he unwound his scarf and took off his boots. I handed it to him and I wanted to do more.
“Can I cut your hair for you?”
He fingered the damp strands at his neck as he drank. “It’s long, isn’t it? Have you cut hair before?”
“No, but I can figure it out.”
I pulled the kitchen rug away and sat him on a stool on the empty floor. He took off his shirt and I grabbed a comb and all the scissors we had: nail scissors, kitchen scissors, paper scissors, pinking shears—those were a joke. He smiled when he saw them.
His skin was the colour of stained wood in the firebox’s glow. The overhead light was low. I placed a fingertip on his crown and he complied, bending his neck, bowing chin to chest. I took a last sip of whisky and set the cup down, then I picked up the comb and started stroking it through his sweat-dampened hair.
He smelled like himself: like cinnamon and wood chips and clean cotton. The smell of wood chips was new since he’d started at the mill, but I liked it. If I asked, he told me about flipping logs or driving pallet loads around or flipping switches and doing safety checks. He told me about coffee break and who he sat with. And I tried to ask, but I forgot sometimes, just as I forgot the names of the men, his new friends, even as he was talking about them. I couldn’t imagine his days. It was like he drove up the driveway every morning and vanished.
I combed his hair out on his warm skin and inhaled. He was so close and real. When I lifted the comb out, his hair curled around the knot at the top of his spine.
The blade of the scissors sliding against his skin made him shiver as I snipped a line across the nape of his neck. I brushed the cut hair from his back, lifted the hair up from the back of his head with the comb, and cut at an angle like I’d seen hairstylists do. His hair fell back to his head shorter, the cuts blending into the slight wave in his hair, my inexperience forgiven by the soft light and a natural curl.
Jazz Christmas standards slid out of the radio and time slowed. The fire crackled, the soup simmered, the smell of potatoes and pepper wafted around us. Danny sighed as I combed and cut his hair, complied when I moved his skull this way and that, moaned when I blew the loose hairs from the back of his neck. I straightened his head with my fingers and started on the hair around his ears.
“It’s loud,” he said. “It’s like you’re snipping right in my ear canal.”
“I’m almost done.”
“Don’t rush. I like it.” He snaked his arm around my waist and pulled me close.
“No touching,” I said, but didn’t mean it. I straddled his thigh as I moved to the front of his head. His eyes were closed, but he was smiling.
I used the nail scissors to cut his bangs. Little wisps of blond curls fell onto his jeans and stuck in his chest hair. I brushed them away with my fingertips. His breathing was audible and I was deliberate—leaning into him with a hip, pressing down with the hot flat of my hand to move him this way or that. The heat was rising in both of us. The kitchen felt like the only room on earth—the glint of light off the scissors blade, the smell of smoke from the fire. I nestled in between his legs as I cut, pausing, breathing near his ear. I could feel his hard cock against my thigh. He squeezed my hips, pulling me closer.
“Hold still.” I laughed, and he was trying, but it was building in both of us: desire after a drought. I slid the comb into the thicket at his crown and combed the hair straight up and held it. I snipped. Hair slid down his face and tickled him. He sneezed, jerking free of my fingers. “Hey!”
He sneezed again. And again. He held his arm out, like wait, it’ll stop, but it didn’t. “I can’t help it,” he managed to pant between sneezes. They were violent. He bent at the waist with each one, his hair flopping forward, almost dry now. I waited, frustrated, and all the romance leaked out of the room.
I held myself still so the frustration wouldn’t turn to fury, but it did. I couldn’t stop it. I unravelled in the space of a second. “Forget it. I’m done.” I put the comb down.
“Wait!” He sneezed. “Just a minute.” He sneezed. Two more sneezes in quick succession. Piles of hair exploded with each blast of air. Hair blew all over the kitchen.
“I just cleaned this!”
He held his hands over his face and stood up. He held a finger out to me, just a minute, then rushed toward the bathroom, drifts of hair wafting
in his wake. I poured myself another shot of whisky, drank it fast, and surveyed the damage. I grabbed my coat and left.
The cold was a relief after the heat of the cabin. I breathed in deep, felt the booze in my blood. I went to the shed first and grabbed a can of gas and a pack of matches. I followed the path down to the lake. The light spilling from the cabin windows was enough to show me the snow-trampled path and keep me from falling in the drifts.
I stopped on the path and looked back at the lit-up windows. We were like a movie in there. Every day, making coffee, cuddling the baby, and tonight: me cutting his hair, all framed like a TV screen. The haircut felt unreal already. The wind bit my cheeks. I tucked my face in my collar and tromped down the trail onto the ice, imagining Danny as I went, coming out of the bathroom, done sneezing, pink-cheeked and shorn. He’d see the room empty. He’d call my name, but not so loud he’d wake the baby. Seeing no sign of me, he’d look for my coat and boots, then he’d go to the window. Out on the dark lake he’d see a speck of fire—the flame from my match. He’d see me set it to the gas-dampened wood and he’d see the labour of his day go up in a whoosh of fire.
I found the bonfire pile in the dark. The wind tried to pull the can from my hand as I poured gas over the logs. I got most of it out, then I lit the match and dropped it on the wood. It went up just as I’d imagined—the whoomp of the gas-wet patch bursting into flame. I watched for a second, and then I unscrewed the nozzle and tipped the gas can up over the flames to get the last drops out. Fire lit the splash of gas, licked up the stream of droplets, and then the can was on fire. I threw it down, but my coat was on fire, too. I screamed. I shook my arms but the wind made it worse, flames crawling up my front to my face.
A weight hit me from behind and crushed me to the snow. I couldn’t breathe. There was snow in my face, in my mouth. I wanted to scream, but all the air was gone. The fire roared beside my head. I was drowning. Something pummelled me and rolled me over. I looked up into Danny’s face. Both of us were screaming, then we stopped, and he held me while I sobbed. His bare arms, goosebumps all over him. The bonfire caught deep inside the pile and whooshed higher. We stumbled away together, me holding tight to him, his hair golden and spiky in the firelight.
That night when he reached for me in bed I let him. I moved this way and that to make it sexier and more realistic. I moaned, I gasped. I gave him everything I had.
“More tea?” Rosie asked, solicitous and kind.
I blushed to have been caught thinking about sex and struggled to come back from so far away. “Thank you. Yes.” And in answer to a question I’d only half heard, I said it again: “Yes, thank you. We had a nice Christmas. I was sure we’d been by since then.”
CHORUS
Jill Stone, Arts Unlimited Building
Off the point, the rock breaks off and drops who knows how far into darkness. From above, the water changes from green to black, the limestone promise breaks, and underneath? Who knows what lies underneath. The jutting, rutted rock face of the point off Chance Bay, the one pierced through, is a beacon for boaters—they see the hole in the rock and they know they’re almost home.
But come night, those rocks shift and move. The drop-off crawls closer to land, maybe to trick us into skinny-dipping when we’re drunk. Some nights we don’t go out. We sit onshore and watch the shifting colours off the point—green, blue, silver, gold. The sun sets right there, moving farther and farther south as the summer dies and the earth shifts.
Off the point, the rock drops off into rippling sand so far down the light only slips through in glimpses. And there—that’s where the dead lay out hands of cards. Sons and fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, sisters, mothers sit in a circle and lay down their hands, and their clothes drift off them with the current. The fish swim through their rib cages, and those of us onshore can’t hear the slow-motion clacking of their bones knocking joint to joint.
Deep in this lake is a current that pulls the dead away from their quiet games, shifts the sand underneath them. Slowly, the lake drains down the river and the dead flow with the ancient river south to the Stuart, south to the Nechako, south to the Fraser, and then to the sea.
You’d believe it if you saw the cliff. If you saw the darkness where the swimmers don’t swim, and if you get caught in the current, we’ll find you over Sowchea way, or at the Stuart mouth, eyes wide open with weeds in your hair.
When the wind blows and the waves are so high a man might be swallowed whole, you can hear the thump in the rock tunnel, the waves shaking the point. Rumbles and groans. Why any man would choose that spot on that bay to live, no one knows—that drop-off looming, the river’s pull. You know anybody out there will come to harm. That’s what legend says. That’s what they say in town.
RENEE
At five fifteen, Danny got home. I was waiting for him. He walked into the cabin with fogged glasses and I handed him the baby. After tea at Swannells’, it’d been non-stop crying—mine and Tom’s. Each of us too upset to even try to be okay.
“I’m going to yoga,” I said, and walked back to the stove, leaving Danny still wearing his boots and coat in the foyer. I watched him while I stirred the chicken. He kissed the baby, then put him down among the shoes, where Thomas sat like a little Buddha and pulled a sandal to his mouth. Danny took the sandal and gave him a hat instead.
“Have you been to that before?”
“No. When would I?”
“Maybe while I was at work.”
“How, Danny? You’ve got the car.”
“Right. So, it’s in town? How did you hear about it?”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Yes, it’s in town! I read about it in the paper and I’m taking the car and I’m going to town!” I slammed my fist down onto a dishtowel on the counter. I sucked in a breath, rubbed my face with the towel, then glared at him so he would know I wasn’t sorry, that I was serious. I had my yoga pants on already.
“Go, Renee, by all means, go. We’re not trying to keep you here.” He picked up the baby. The wood stove rumbled in the corner. I saw Thomas look at his dad, then whack him in the face with his wide-open hand. Danny took Tom’s hand in his and kissed it. I couldn’t watch. All day I’d struggled to simply be. The baby, the crying, the cabin breathing all around us—I couldn’t do it. Danny could. I hated him.
“He’s fed. I should be a couple of hours at the most.” Tears stopped up my throat. “Sorry I’m such a bitch.”
Outside in the car, I was glad, for once, for the early dark. The hard part of getting out of the house was done and now I only had to drive to the high school and blend in. I gripped the steering wheel, eager but uneasy. I checked myself—my clothes were neutral, my hair slightly mussed like I hadn’t given it too much thought. Perfect. I wondered how I would compare to the other mothers. I decided I would be casual, but not overeager; I would reveal myself slowly in conversation, leave them wanting a bit, curious about me. I smiled a little. As I neared the school, I breathed deep and tried to squash down my thoughts and worries.
In the fluorescent light of the school foyer, I could hear low music and voices coming from the gym. I walked down the hall, my purse in my hands, awkward and hyperaware. As I stopped to the side of the open double doors to take off my boots, I could hear women talking inside the gym.
“I wouldn’t do it again if I couldn’t have a midwife.”
“I know. I couldn’t have done it without mine.”
“My husband was pretty good, but the doula was awesome. I’d have her babies if I could.” The women laughed.
“Did you have a home birth?”
“Oh yeah, that was awesome, too. I couldn’t stand the thought of the baby coming into the world in the hospital—it’s so cold and sterile.”
“I know. I was so happy to write ‘successful home birth’ in the baby book. I love my baby book, but it’s hard to keep up with. Don’t you find? All those blanks to fill in every day…”
I remembered labour like a battle I’d fought and
lost. Twenty hours into it, with contractions two minutes apart and four centimetres away from full dilation, the foetal heart monitor flatlined. They wheeled me into an operating room at a run. Doctors and nurses yelled at one another—professionals with fearful eyes above their masks. Danny fell out of view.
I don’t know what happened in those minutes of panic—I lay on my back, senseless from the scrubs down, breathing shakily through the oxygen mask while tears dripped into my ears. Finally, Danny’s face came into sight again, his white mask crumpled and damp from crying. He talked to me and I heard his voice, a familiar murmur underneath the din of the operating theatre. Lights beat down on us in the cold room. Behind the screen of blankets across my chest, my body was wrenched back and forth as they pulled the baby out of the trap of my pelvis. I heard one doctor swear. Blood squirted across the chest of another. Danny talked and talked, stroking my hair, soothing me like an animal under his hand.
“It’s a boy,” someone said, and silence fell, and held, though the machines still beeped and something whooshed in the corner. “He’s blue,” the same voice said, and the noise ratcheted up again. Danny stopped talking and I closed my eyes. I was empty, exhausted. They didn’t bring the baby to me; they resumed work on my body. The doctors sewed through layers and layers of skin. There was a hole in the room that a sound should have filled. A drip of fluid hammered the floor again and again. I squeezed my eyes shut and sobbed into my mask.
“Renee,” Danny said. “Renee, Renee.” I opened my eyes to him and swallowed him whole and we held each other, riveted together with the force of our stares. I threw my whole self into him and I felt him catch me. He touched my face. He kissed my temple through his paper mask. My body jostled back and forth, and then a thin, climbing voice squeaked out and grew to a wail from a corner of the room. Danny’s eyes softened and flooded. We looked away from each other toward the sound, and Danny’s hand dropped from my hair.
Glory Page 4