Sanctuary Line

by Jane Urquhart

  The orchards were filled with empty ladders: the whole operation had ground to a halt. Not a single Mexican worker had left the bunkhouses that morning except for Dolores, of course, and her brother, who had walked with her to the squad car and had sat beside her in the back seat, his thick arm over her shoulder. I don’t recall the police vehicle pulling away, but I do remember thinking for the first time that the man who was always referred to as Dolores’s brother was also Teo’s uncle. All those years he had had an uncle too. That one thought penetrating the wall of anguish inside me.

  There are large patches of time from the days following the accident that are completely unavailable to me, but I do have a distinct visual memory of being in the car with Mandy. The older maples had begun to turn and their coloured leaves were slick with rain. Now and then a leaf would descend through the air and paste itself to the windshield of the car like some kind of bad-news propaganda that had drifted down from an enemy plane. The monarchs were nowhere to be seen, having begun their migration, I suppose, unnoticed in the midst of this human tragedy. Quite a number of them would never reach the south side of the lake, never mind their eventual destination. None of them, I have come to know now, would ever come back.

  Strangely, I was thinking about “little Nellie’s grave,” how Teo could never understand the wit behind the adults banishing us from their day in such a fashion. She is dead in a funny way? Now I knew that no one was ever dead in a humorous way, particularly not a child. Poor old Reverend Thomas Sanderson must have written his bad poetry in a state of helpless grief. The fact that his child’s carefully chosen resting place had gone missing in less than a century just added to the tragedy. I thought about the lost Nellie. I knew no one would write a poem for Teo.

  Mandy was wiping her wet face on the sleeves of her shirt. “The Mexican whore,” she said, echoing her mother’s words.

  “Don’t,” I said, the word torn from inside me.

  “She deserves her son to be dead.” Mandy’s voice was flat, cold.

  I stopped crying then and looked at my cousin for a long time. Everything was unfolding in slow motion and slowly, slowly I could feel the desire to strike her moving through my blood. Instead I put my hand on the steel handle, pulled it up, and kicked open the car door, slamming it behind me as I walked away.

  On the beach I threw everything I could find into the lake: stones, driftwood, two lawnchairs, a magazine Mandy had been reading the day before that she had left out in the rain, a plastic bottle filled with suntan lotion. I wanted to throw the house and outbuildings into the lake as well, and one part of my brain was trying to figure out how to accomplish that while another part of me had spotted my aunt’s roses, more accessible victims.

  A considerable number of bushes were floating offshore by the time Mandy attacked me from behind, her arms around my chest in a weird embrace, pinning my arms to my side.

  “I didn’t know,” she said over and over, her head beside mine, her voice coming directly into my ear. “I didn’t know, okay? I didn’t know!” Blood from my hands was all over my shorts, and when Mandy let me go and I tried to push the tears and rain off my face, there was blood all over it as well. Mandy grabbed a sodden towel from the line and tried to clean me up. “I’m an idiot,” she kept saying, crying as she pulled the cloth across my eyes and mouth. “Nothing is ever going to be the same, nothing is ever, ever going to be the same.” She opened my closed bloody fists, first one and then the other, to search for thorns. “Shit, Liz,” she said, trying to remove a black barb, her hands shaking.

  How frail each life is. We mow a meadow and kill a thousand butterflies. The racket of the mower, the sound of a fist hitting flesh, an American bomb striking a Middle Eastern city – perhaps in the way of these things the only difference among them is that of scale. We keep on walking toward clamour and then cannot accept what that clamour shows us. What did I do, after all, what did any of us do to interrupt the chain of events that led to catastrophe? In some way I have never really wished to acknowledge, my aunt, violent and disgusting though her actions were, was the most honest among us at the moment when everything she must have overlooked confronted her and outrage bubbled to the surface of her character. My uncle, standing naked with his face turned to the wall, betrayed everyone with his passivity. Full of fear and inert refusal, he may as well have been saying to his wife, mow the meadow, slam the flesh, take the responsibility. It is this lack of life’s energy at one pivotal moment that can in the end provoke tragedy. He could not bring himself to say the word stop.

  Mandy and I had still been in the yard when the police car drove back down the lane. As if they had never known us, Dolores and her brother, sheathed in sorrow, walked right past us on their way to the bunkhouse. We made no gesture to stall that short journey but followed the one police officer who had driven them back, walking behind him and into the house.

  My mother, aunt, and uncle were all in the kitchen. Someone, maybe one of the boys, had brought a couple of chairs back into the room and there was a bottle open on the counter; the two women each held a glass in their hand. It was now my uncle who stood at the window, a shroud of cigarette smoke around him, facing neither his sister nor his wife. He did not turn around when we entered.

  “Well?” my aunt said.

  The police officer removed his hat. A cursory discussion concerning the kind of papers needed to take Teo home followed, the fact that the police had been able to contact authorities in Canada who, in turn, had spoken with their counterparts in Mexico.

  My aunt said she had talked to the airlines; that tickets would be waiting at the airport. I realized that his would be the only time that Teo and his mother would be departing from the regular airport and not the cargo terminal.

  “Good,” the officer said.

  My mother offered him coffee. She was on her feet, moving toward the stove. When he shook his head, she sat the cup down on the counter. My aunt lifted her glass to her mouth. No one spoke. A momentous quiet filled the room, and I could feel the misery rising in me like dark water.

  “At least there is something to be grateful for,” the officer eventually said, putting his cap on his head and adjusting the angle of the visor.

  “Really?” my uncle said, still not turning from the window. “And what’s that?” These may very well have been the first words he had spoken all day.

  “At least no one was killed.” The officer had his hand in the lower pocket of his jacket. I could hear the jingling of his keys. “An hour later there would have been a number of cars on that highway. It could have been a disaster.”

  “But someone was killed,” my mother said, distress on her face and in her tone.

  “I mean, besides the car thief.” The officer had the doorknob in his hand. “It could have been a disaster,” he repeated.

  He let the screen door close behind him and descended the three stairs of the kitchen stoop.

  My uncle spoke one last time then, his voice broken. “I wanted to stop it,” he said. “But what could I do?” He had turned and was looking at me as he said these words, but there was nothing I could say in response. He left the house a few minutes later. He didn’t say where he was going, and no one leaned out the door to call to him, as we so often had in the past. We were no longer hoping to be taken along on an adventure. We no longer wanted to follow him. We no longer wanted to be in his company.

  “Open the window, Amanda,” my aunt said after he had gone, “and the one in the parlour as well. Let’s get the smoke out of this place.”

  II

  At the beginning of this summer, on a clear morning, the first Sunday of June and a full year to the day after Mandy’s death, a car I didn’t recognize turned off Sanctuary Line and inched its way tentatively up the drive. I was cleaning up after my breakfast and was doing the dishes from both that meal and the previous evening’s dinner, staring out the same window my aunt, and then my uncle, stood at all those years ago. I was trying to think more about Rob
ert Louis Stevenson than I did about Mandy, but I had recently read Mandy’s fourth-year thesis on Stevenson’s poetry, and even if I hadn’t, the two subjects were now forever connected in my mind. The poignancy of a young officer-in-training at a military college – one who would later die in active service – doing her honours thesis, after all her reading of contemporary poetry, on A Child’s Garden of Verses was almost too much for me to bear. She would have chosen this subject as a refuge, I expect, a revisitation of the time before everything changed and shattered. I remembered her saying that nothing would ever, ever be the same.

  I was thinking about Emily Dickinson too – Mandy had written that Stevenson’s sensibility, though more masculine and meant for children, was not unlike Dickinson’s in its focus on smaller more fractional images. She argued it was merely a question of a light or a dark palette, comparing lines such as “I dreaded that first robin so” with “A birdie with a yellow bill, Hopped upon the window sill” or “She died at play, Gambolled away, Her lease of spotted hours” with “When children are playing alone on the green, In comes the playmate that never was seen.” But all those tombs and death beds; and all that hopeless love in Dickinson’s poetry signalled from such distance; and death himself such a courteous and much anticipated caller, all this was making me edgy in spite of the walk I’d taken earlier in the morning. I had passed through the old neglected orchard where the twisted trees had once again erupted into the kind of blossoms that should make the heart glad but in my case did not. The blossoms, the tombs, Mandy, and Teo were all mixed up in the way I was looking out that window, watching the unknown car come slowly toward the house. By the time it came to a halt and an attractive, dark-haired man had emerged – he seemed to be all legs – I was on the path to meet him, arms folded across my chest, defensive, the words “Can I help you?” delivered, I admit, with a touch of sarcasm from my lips.

  “You’re Liz,” he said quietly.

  “Am I?”

  He looked around the property, taking in the blossoms, the fieldstones of the house, the lake with the arm of the Point over the lake’s shoulder. “It’s beautiful,” he said, glancing toward the beach. “There are fossils, of course. She said there were thousands of them. She called them stone snails.” He was fumbling in one of his pockets. The sun was making him squint. Eventually I found myself looking at an ammonite curled in his open hand. I knew who had given it to him. I knew then. I knew who he was.

  Mandy’s distress, her suffering, standing there right in front of me: the utter embodiment of tall, dark, and handsome.

  I held up my hand. “Don’t say anything.”

  He touched my arm as I moved away from him, then immediately withdrew his hand. I was heading mindlessly in the direction of the beach. “Hold on,” he said. “Please.”

  He was following me now. “Don’t – say – anything – else,” I warned. “I really think you should leave.”

  He did not say anything else, but he did not leave. He sat down on the pebbles by the shore and put his head in his hands and began to weep.

  You should, at the very least, have arrived in full dress uniform, appeared on the lawn like the controlling authority I was certain you were. Or battle dress would have worked as well: jackboots, and weapons, and camouflage. “The brute, brute heart of a brute like you” was a line I had read somewhere in one of Mandy’s poetry books. You should have had official papers in your hand, a search warrant, orders for my arrest, even your own commission would have been more appropriate than the one stone remnant of this place that Mandy had taken with her into battle. Instead you stood there in jeans and a T-shirt, your fist relaxed and opened, the fossilized memory of an extinct species resting in your palm, your expression pained, concerned.

  And you looked far too young, in spite of the odd trace of grey in your dark hair, too young, almost boyish, your shoulders stiff and awkward, a peculiar shyness in the way you held your head when you glanced at me, then glanced away. Then you walked on to my beach, Mandy’s beach, you sat down and wept, and I was a witness to your grief.

  I said nothing. But you stayed.

  “I went out to the graveyard earlier,” you said, throwing one stone after another into the water, the way every male I have ever known has always done when confronted by that pebbled beach. You were too young, five years older than Mandy, middle-aged really, but nothing like what I had imagined. An amalgamation of hunger, curiosity, and sorrow was almost palpable in the air around you.

  “You knew about me,” I said.

  “Yes, she talked about her cousin Liz.” You glanced at me, and then away again in that shy manner. “She talked about you, your butterflies.” You lifted your head and examined the air, but I’m sorry to say there was not one monarch in the vicinity at that moment.

  “You knew that Mandy and I talked.”

  “She never told me you talked about me. But I knew.”

  I didn’t respond to this, mistrustful, for a minute or two, of your motives. Had you come here to win me over?

  “Second generation,” you said, when you caught me looking at you. “So no accent.”

  I knew then that for years whenever a look of suspicion crossed anyone’s face, you would think it was your race they were questioning.

  “What’s your name?” I asked. “Major? Colonel …?”

  “Vahil,” you said, ignoring my reference to rank. “My name is Vahil.” When I was silent, you told me this was a Kurdish name.

  We walked along the beach to the spot where Teo and I had sailed our paper boats and I pointed out the shelves of limestone and we talked about how the fossils came to be. You asked if you were keeping me from anything and I said you were not and took you inside and made some sandwiches for lunch. We sat on the veranda, ate, and looked at the lake. You smiled when I told you about Mandy and all the swimming, how she would stay in the water until her lips turned blue and her shoulders shook.

  “She was like that on the ground, over there, as well,” you said, “always staying in. Once she had taken something on, she would never give it up.” You paused. “Even me,” you said. “She wouldn’t give up – even on me.”

  We both became very quiet then, you with your face averted.

  “She was the one who was going to shine,” I told you. “We all thought nothing was ever going to interfere with her steady intelligence, her full engagement.” Nothing, I thought, but the love that blindsided her and left her breathless in the midst of combat duty. “Even the idea of battle itself intrigued her, the strategy, the team spirit. She talked to me about that.”

  You nodded. “But over there, there are no clearly defined battles. Nothing is the way you think it will be. There are no teams. Just people, and all of them being hurt in some way or another. Physically, emotionally.”

  “Yes, she used to talk about that as well.”

  You pulled your wallet from your pocket then and showed me a picture of a kind-looking woman and two boys, their bright faces aware of the camera, anxious to please an invisible photographer. I didn’t even ask you where that photograph was taken, where you lived, but I knew that you lived there, wherever it was. The woman was wearing a hijab and her arms, long like yours, encircled the two children.

  “So you are married after all.”

  You laughed in surprise and told me that your father had taken the picture when you and your brother were children. As you returned the wallet to your pocket, you became serious again. “No, not married.” You paused. “Muslim.”

  “Mandy never said anything about that.”

  “No,” you said, “it was too complicated. Even we could barely talk about it. She tried, but there was this conflict in me, all the time, and my family … I asked her not to say anything. I wasn’t the only Canadian Muslim there, of course. And not the only Muslim in Petawawa either. One of my cousins” – you looked at me and smiled – “and a couple of others, only acquaintances really, from the Ottawa mosque. But if they had known … it is a small communi
ty.”

  They wanted Canadian Muslims to join the Armed Forces, you explained, especially those who spoke Arabic, which you did, you do, a bit. You paused after telling me this, ran your hand over the surface of the old table that sat between the two chairs on the veranda, and picked up one white stone from the collection I had made there. “I joined as a peacekeeper. I was a high-school math teacher before.” You smiled, and I thought, Here is Mister Military: a Muslim, a teacher. “And then, six months later,” you said, “we entered the war.” You told me that, in Kandahar, you had arranged informal prayers for the Muslims on the base. I was intrigued by this.

  You were not yet an imam, you explained. “I never would have thought that it was in me,” you said. “I wasn’t even very religious before.” You looked out over the lake. “But there was something about being over there.” You ran your hand back and forth along the arm of the chair. “It wasn’t long before I knew what I wanted, what I had to become.”

  “And Mandy knew too … that you were moving toward a decision.”

  “Yes.”

  “She went to military college because of the peacekeeping,” I said. All that searching and rescuing, I thought.

  “I know,” you said. “I loved that about her. That, and the poetry.”

  I showed you the twisted trees in the orchard, pointed to the wood lot, explained how the land had been sold to developers of estate housing. You asked about the monarchs, and I told you about them as well. You said you already knew about the butterfly tree, and for the first time I thought about Mandy lying in your arms, painting a picture of this farm, the summers of our childhood, and wondered how should would have painted it. Would the palette have been bright or dark, or that combination of shadow and light she wrote about. Chiaroscuro.

  Back inside the kitchen as I made tea, you mentioned the prayers again. “Over there,” you began, “we … the North American Muslims on the base … needed something, some connection to our own world.” The desire to tighten that connection kept coming to you, you said, over and over when you were leading those prayers, or in the midst of manoeuvres, or, sometimes, even when you were with Mandy. It grew larger as you walked up and down the Middle Eastern streets through the unimaginable heat, acknowledging the quiet devotion of people caught in the teeth of chaos.