by Lucy Atkins
If she were my godmother, surely my parents would have thought to mention it.
Susannah leans a hand on the tabletop and stares at me, unblinking. ‘Elena didn’t want you to be a scared person. We both liked the power of Kali. We wanted you to be fearless.’
‘Well, it didn’t bloody work! I do not have ultimate female power and I am not fearless. Far from it. I was actually quite scared of her.’ I realize this is sort of true. I was always a little bit afraid of my mother.
A laugh curdles from the back of her throat. ‘You were afraid of Elena?’
‘No. Yes. No! Sometimes. On some level. But I think maybe she was scared of me too. God, I really don’t want to talk about this with you. Why am I talking about this with you?’
‘Well, I guess it was always going to be complicated.’
‘What? Why? Why should it have been complicated?’
‘Oh, never mind. Shit. It’s late. I guess I’ve had a little too much to drink, huh?’
‘Why won’t you tell me anything?’
‘OK. Now, listen, Kali.’ She shoves her hair out of her face. ‘We’ve both suffered a terrible loss. We need to care for ourselves right now. We need to nurture ourselves, and heal.’
‘Kal!’ I snap. ‘And what have you got to heal? You hadn’t seen her in years!’
We stare at each other across the table. Then she takes a long breath. She blinks, slowly. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Holy crap. Losing people is tiring.’
‘You lost my mother decades ago, Susannah.’
‘You know what? Neither of us has lost her, Kali. Because she isn’t really gone, is she?’ She leans both hands on the table. Her bone eyes are fixed on mine. She takes a long breath in through her nose, as if summoning my mother’s spirit. ‘Don’t you feel her with us? You must. You must surely sense her. She’s right here, Kali. Right now. She’s with us right now. Can’t you feel her? Can’t you? I know you can; she’s here. She’s in this room with us, right now.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Susannah! You have to stop this! Stop this right now! My mother is bloody dead. I watched her die.’
‘Oh, you need to go to bed.’ She waves a hand as if to dismiss me. ‘I guess we both do.’
‘What I need,’ I grit my teeth, ‘is to know who my mother was.’
‘Actually, you really don’t.’ She straightens, hands on hips. She suddenly seems very tall and broad.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You know what, Kali? The thing that really gets me right now is that this actually isn’t about your mother at all. This isn’t about you chasing down Elle’s secrets. This is about you distracting yourself from the humiliation of a straying husband. Look at you!’ The sinews in her neck stick out like wire and she seems to raise herself up and inflate, like a cobra. ‘You come here like a spoiled little girl with your questions – demanding answers, answers, answers. Instead of caring for that baby boy you ignore him – you neglect him – and you sit there and fuck with my head. Shit!’ She slaps one hand on the table and I jump. ‘I was wrong about you, you know? You are so much like her it hurts. It’s agony to be in the same space as you. You’re completely fucking single-minded – driven by intuition and impulse. You force me to dredge up all these things – things you can’t even imagine; painful, awful memories – and you don’t even understand why you’re here. You don’t have a fucking clue! This is not about you at all. So stop asking all these questions!’
‘Who are you to tell me what I’m here for?’
‘This is my house you’re in right now, Kali, and believe me, I know why she sent you and it wasn’t for this shit.’
‘What? Who sent me?’ I stare at her. ‘What are you talking about? Nobody sent me here.’
She looks at me, unblinking.
‘Jesus Christ, Susannah. You know nothing about me!’
‘Oh Kali.’ She shakes her head. Her voice is suddenly flat and hard. ‘I know everything about you.’
She spins away from me and stares out the French windows, at the cold blackness and the rain falling and falling onto the deck.
Our eyes meet in the glass, and for that second I see the demons lurking inside her. I don’t know what psychodrama I’ve stumbled into here, but I need to get out of it. I need to leave.
I turn and I walk out of the kitchen, through the living room, not looking at that fat red orb, not looking at the dogs – though I know their amber eyes will be fixed on me. I half expect her to thunder after me, hair flying, dogs baying by her side, but she doesn’t.
Back in the room I shut the door. There is no lock.
I kneel by the bed where Finn is sleeping. Adrenalin is pumping through my body, making me hot and trembly. I try to slow my breathing down.
Finn is on his back, hands thrown up, surrendered, head to one side, lips slightly open. He is so beautiful and perfect, and so very little. He always seems to shrink when he’s asleep, as if he is reverting to his baby state. I put a hand, very gently, on his stomach and feel it rise and fall beneath my palm, warm and tight under the soft quilt of his sleeping bag.
Susannah may be positively deranged, but there is also some truth in her accusations. She’s right that this isn’t just about my mother – I am running away and I’m scared. She’s also right that I have not been the best mother lately. I didn’t wedge the bedroom door open properly, I let him break that frame and cut himself, and I lost it over peas and a boiled egg. What she doesn’t seem to understand is that there is nothing more important to me than Finn. But why do I care what she thinks of me? Tomorrow, we’ll be gone. And we are certainly never coming back.
I stroke his head with my fingertips. Maybe this trip is unfair on him. The lack of routine and the strangeness can’t be easy for him. But then I think about his utter delight at the squirrel today. And again, outside, this afternoon, stomping through puddles in his red wellies, grabbing things, poking sticks into mud, bashing rocks and laughing at his own breath in the cold air. Finn is fine. There’s more to life than routines. I’m not going to let Susannah undermine me. My child is perfectly happy.
And this is not just a distraction. This is real and important.
As I watch Finn sleep I realize that this is not over. My mother is where everything begins. She is what makes me who I am, the mother that I am. Like an orca matriarch, she is influencing absolutely everything. If I never know what happened to her up here then I will never be able to make sense of myself, and I will always be afraid – and running.
Susannah may think I am weak and distracted, but she’s wrong. There is something in my mother’s past that she knows. I can feel it, lurking like a burglar in the shadows. I will stay tomorrow because I have to get it out of her. We can get the last ferry of the day – I need to know what secret Susannah is protecting.
British Columbia, late spring 1976
As they motored up the coast one day, they came across an old claw-foot tub that had been abandoned on a shingle beach. The three of them hauled it into the boat, then squashed themselves around it and motored back to base.
They pushed, dragged and heaved it up the steep path to the campfire. There was a mound, overlooking the bay, over to the left of the fire, surrounded by tall, skinny pines. ‘Bathroom with a view,’ said Dean.
The guys got shovels and began digging a fire pit, where they planned to put the bath. Elena went and got firewood from the tarp on deck, lugging it up in three loads – one to them, two to the main firepit, where that morning’s embers were still glowing beneath the green branches Jonas had put over them. She crouched down to try to revive them, blowing at an angle as the guys had shown her. None of them had eaten anything since a peanut-butter sandwich at lunch. Her arms and legs felt stringy, and each time she turned her head it was as if the world took a second or two to catch up.
The sun began lowering itself towards the horizon. Jonas and Dean were like kids, messing around together in the dirt.
Elena took Jonas’s sharp, curved fish-cleaning knife
and sliced into the Chinook’s belly. She tugged the blade along in a swooping motion, the way he showed her, and opened the fish up. Then she scraped out dark, twisted, fish-stinking entrails into a bag before cleaning out the cavity with patient strokes. She tied the guts tightly in their bag. Then she made her incisions under the pectoral fin, and snapped off the fish’s injured head. When she looked up, the men had heaved the bath over the pit, and were filling it up by lugging buckets of seawater from the shore. She went back to the salmon, drawing the knife along its spinal column, concentrating hard to keep her hand steady.
She washed the heavy salmon fillets down and laid them on the cedar plank as Jonas had shown her – the Native Canadian way. She had watched him spear the fish with a Swiss army knife corded onto a branch that afternoon in a stream that was teeming with Chinook. He stood very still on a rock, halfway out in the rushing water, holding the spear point below the surface. After a bit, he eased the knife towards a fish and then, with a sharp downward stab, he pinned it there. But he didn’t lift it out right away – he went into the freezing water, up to his thighs, and dug down with one hand to grab it. He came wading out of the water with an enormous salmon on the end of his spear. His eyes shone and were deep blue, like the sky behind him. She saw his Viking ancestors in his broad shoulders, the big fish in his hands and his solid, wet thighs coming over the rocks towards her.
He slapped the fish down, heavily, then eased the spear out of its neck. The fish was the length of her forearm, a shimmering mixture of silvers, and she felt suddenly sorry that it had to die for them.
‘It must be cold in that water,’ she said.
‘If you lift the spear up,’ he said, ‘she slips off and she’s gone.’ The fish was still impaled on his knife. The blade had gone into its skull from above, right through its brain. Death, at least, would have been instant.
‘How do you know how to do all this?’ she said. ‘Who taught you this stuff?’
‘Various people. Myself. When I was eighteen,’ he said, ‘I decided to come up here and survive a month with nothing – in the end I was up here three months. I didn’t want to go back.’
‘Don’t listen to his wild man routine. He looked like a skeleton.’ Dean was lying on a rock, just above them. She’d forgotten he was there. He spoke from under his baseball cap. ‘We all thought he’d died up here.’
‘Your poor mother.’
A shadow fell across Jonas’s face, and he knelt down to the salmon, ducking his head as he tugged the blade out of its skull. It made a crackling, suctioning sound. From under his cap Dean said, ‘His mom had just died.’
*
She flattened out the burning logs and balanced the ends of the plank on stones on either side of the fire.
Jonas’s reaction to his mother’s death seemed, in some way, to demonstrate the essential difference between men and women. When her mother died, she had frozen. For a long time, she was afraid to go to school, or to leave the house. But when his mother died, he had headed out into the wilderness. Then again, perhaps the two reactions weren’t so different – they had both retreated. And she was only eight years old. The only wilderness she could find was inside herself.
She wondered what losing someone she loved would do to her now – would she freeze and become afraid again? She didn’t think so. But it was hard to imagine what it would be like to experience that level of pain again.
*
The art was to cook the fish through without setting fire to the plank, which they left soaking at night in seawater. You had to find the exact right spot on the fire: too hot and the whole thing would go up in flames; too cold and the fish would be raw. Just right and the cedar smoke infused the fish, bringing out its most delicate flavours.
Jonas and Dean had finished filling the bath now. They’d got the fire going under it and smoke drifted around them, obscuring their faces. They were talking about the orcas, something about charts for tomorrow, but she couldn’t hear what. The clearing was saturated with rich golden light, but the evening chill made her wish for another, warmer pullover. She was dog-tired now and couldn’t bring herself to go to the boat and get one.
Every single thing she owned was damp anyway – every piece of clothing, even the pillows and the sleeping bags. The inside of her backpack felt as if a family of sea slugs had recently crawled through it. The pages of the books and journals she’d bought in Victoria – anything she could find about orcas – were already sticking together. And now the stove in the boat was broken so they had to build up the fire at dawn just in order to fill the thermoses of coffee for the day.
The smell of the cedar-roasting salmon made her stomach growl, but at the same time she felt slightly sick. In fact, she’d felt off-colour a lot recently, probably because, when they weren’t eating salmon, they were eating peanut butter. She craved collard greens and kiwifruit.
At night she dreamed of black Californian grapes. Jonas and Dean assured her that vitamin C sources were abundant up here; they spent one long, irritating afternoon on the Zodiac outdoing one another with plant names. The berries alone had gone on for a good hour – fairy bell, cloudberry, bear berry, hairy manzanita, Indian strawberry, chokeberry – until Elena was sure they were just making words up. ‘There’s a whole grocery out there,’ Jonas said. ‘Burdock leaves, nettles, wild ginger and garlic, nuts, licorice.’ But they never seemed to be on dry land long enough to forage. Dean’s wife had packed him a big bottle of multivitamins to ward off scurvy, and when they remembered, they each swallowed one. But Elena was dying for a good crisp apple.
‘Ladies first then.’ She looked up. Jonas was grinning down at her. ‘The water will be warm.’ The sleeves of his checked shirt were rolled to the elbow, showing strong, tanned forearms. He still had oil smears on his arms from fixing the Zodiac’s outboard when it broke that morning. His jeans – which had never really dried from the river – were soaked down the thighs again, from carrying buckets of seawater. They were smeared with dirt from the earth and the tin bath. For a moment or two, she just gazed at him.
Then Dean came over to the fire and poked at it with a stick. He was filthy and bedraggled too; the dirt had darkened his hair from flame to gingerbread. She couldn’t see his eyes but his mouth looked sad. Sparks flew up around the salmon. Jonas went off to throw the fish guts out to sea.
Dean must be missing his wife and baby. She wondered what his wife thought of him coming up here with his old high school buddy to spend two months chasing orcas – his second summer in a row. He wrote her letters most evenings, which he’d send back to Victoria with passing kayakers or any fishermen who happened to be headed south. She wondered what proportion of the letters actually made it home.
On the journey from Victoria, Dean had told her that his wife was a UBC anthropologist. Her specialism was First Nations oral storytelling traditions. It was her passion, he said, but she stopped six months ago when their son, Daniel, was born. Elena imagined a woman with Inuit-style hair, baking bread and telling her baby stories in a sing-song voice.
‘So, does your wife go back to work this fall?’ she asked him now.
He turned his head. His face was tired, but placid. It was just in profile that his mouth looked sad. ‘Nah. Her job involved field trips half the year – and mine involves field trips half the year – and they’re not always different halves of the year. So, she’s at home now with Danny.’
It took a moment for Elena to realize that he meant his wife had quit her job permanently.
Jonas came back, wiping his hands down his jeans. ‘OK, so – I’m serious – you want to get in that bath first, Elle? That water’s not going to be pretty after it’s had me then Deano in it.’
She glanced from one filthy man to the other, and got up.
‘Just be sure to sit on the wood planks,’ Dean said. ‘You don’t want to scorch your butt.’
She walked, with as much dignity as she could muster, up the little slope to the tin bath. Below them, she co
uld see Dean’s big long boat, and the Zodiac next to it. Dean’s boat was their base for the next two months. It was huge and cumbersome, stank of oil and mildew and, faintly, of fish. The engine had broken several times on the journey north from Victoria, but each time, the guys fixed it after only a short battle. It guzzled oil and left trails of inky smoke against the sky, but it was warm inside, with narrow cabin beds, a rudimentary toilet, and most importantly, no rain. Jonas’s Zodiac was their daytime home – just twelve foot long, inflatable, with an outboard and no shelter – a boat to chase whales in.
Beyond the boats the ocean glowed in the last light. The waves, which had been choppy and unsettled all day, were calmer now, as if someone had soothed them with the promise of a goodnight’s rest. The sun had swollen into a fat gold orb and was easing itself behind the shadowy islands that lay between the bay and the open sea.
She glanced around. The little clearing where they’d built the main fire was hugged on all sides by tall firs, spruce and pines. There was no need to feel exposed here. The tiny canning town was filled with commercial fishing boats, but it was right round the headland. The fishermen, many of them Native Canadians, would be sitting on the dock, chewing the honeyed strips of sockeye they called ‘Indian candy’ or throwing back beers in the shack bar – but they were half a mile away. Nobody could see her here, except the two men by the fire. And only one of them was looking.
She peeled off her damp pullover, then her T-shirt. Goose-bumps sprang up on her skin. She glanced over her shoulder again. Dean, a gentleman, had turned his back, and was crouched on his heels over the salmon. Jonas looked steadily across at her. She felt blood rush to her cheeks. She turned her back again, tugging at her jeans. She touched the water with her fingertips. It was murky, salty, but perfect – almost hot from the fire beneath – but not boiling. They’d put two planks along the base of the bath. She stuck her hand in and prodded them. They seemed secure enough.
Taking a breath, she eased her underwear off, and, feeling his eyes on her body – the sensation as vivid as any touch – she lowered herself into the water. She closed her eyes as the heat eased her tired, chilly limbs. She leaned her head back and let out the long breath that had been coiled inside her.