A Small Part of Me

by Noelle Harrison

  ‘The sea!’ Cian cheers and bounds across the sand towards it.

  The ocean sparkles before her. She feels like she’s standing beneath it. Big waves rear to crash down on their knees in front of her. The water is the purest shade of blue. There are only a couple of surfers around, and a lone stranger walking a dog. The mist rises off the beach, like vapour lifting off her fears.

  She takes Luke’s hand. It seems the most natural thing to do.

  ‘It looks preternatural,’ she whispers.

  He plays lightly with her fingers and turns to her. His eyes are as wide as hers.

  ‘I had forgotten,’ he says. ‘It’s like seeing it for the first time again.’

  Cian has already kicked off his runners. Luke and Christina take their shoes off, tie the laces together and sling them around their shoulders. Cian skips in front of them, delighted by the imprints his feet are making.

  They walk barefoot. Fine white sand is scattered on top of packed, moist golden sand. It looks like sugar frosting. Each step they take pillows out on its damp surface.

  Christina glances behind her. The deep, dark viridian shades of the rainforest hang behind like a backdrop, a cool mist steaming off it. In front of the trees lie stacks of driftwood, like giant slabs of white ivory. The beach itself is clear, apart from the odd fossilised urchin or purple mussel shell. They turn to the left and she can see a lean, flat band of white beach all the way to two hulks of dark rock, lapped by the sea. The dense, damp world of the rainforest mixes with the sharp, crystal air by the ocean. Bands of mist streak the air between it and them.

  Everything here is pared down to its essentials – big sky, crashing waves and white sand. Here nature is truly awesome and it humbles her.

  LUKE

  Luke remembered sitting crouched at the prow of Jimmy Star’s boat watching the red orb of the setting sun sink into the choppy sea. The world that was spread before him didn’t look easy. Almost immediately he felt sober again.

  When he got to Tofino he started walking. He didn’t think twice about going back to Gail and Jeff. He was young and strong and full of determination, and his legs took him right out of that town, as fast as they could away from everything that caused him pain.

  When he was sixteen he thought that he could make it on his own. He could do better in the new world, make money. He didn’t need his family. Now he realised it hadn’t just been a matter of walking away. His heritage was inside him, in his veins, in his blood. He couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  The last time Luke had seen Long Beach it was almost dark. He had turned off the road that fateful night and wandered down the beach, sure he would find shelter behind a stack of driftwood, somewhere to sleep. As he was walking he saw a big glass ball, about the size of a grapefruit. It looked magenta, like the red sun he had seen sink out of the sky a while before. He knelt down and picked it up, recognising it as one of the Japanese glass fishing floats that would get washed into shore. In his grandfather’s day these had been a dime a dozen but he had never seen one in his entire life, not in all the years he had been down on the beach at the guesthouse. He took it, wrapped it in his shirt and put it in his bag. He believed it to be an omen.

  The next day, when he looked at the float again he was surprised to see that it was amber, not red. It was the colour of a beer bottle. It made him want to drink.

  He gave it to Teri the day they got engaged. She was confused by it, saying it was a very unusual engagement ring, and he had immediately regretted giving it to her. She still had it though. It was on the windowsill in her kitchen, gathering dust, and he could see it from the road every time he went to collect Sam. It blinked at him in the dappled light.

  The float was a thorn in his side, a reminder of what he became. So many times he had wanted to charge past Teri, grab the damn thing and fling it out the window. He could see it now, shattering into shards of deep, dark orange, splintering all over her immaculate backyard, looking like just another smashed beer bottle.

  GRETA

  Afterwards they lie still in each others’ arms listening to the ocean and the wind. Not until the sun is high in the sky does Henry slowly gather himself up.

  ‘When we get back,’ he says, ‘we’ll find your daughter.’

  Greta sits bolt upright. ‘We will?’ she asks hesitantly.

  ‘Sure we will,’ he says. ‘We’ll go to Ireland and find her.’

  ‘You’ll come with me?’

  ‘Greta,’ Henry says sternly, ‘I don’t want you to ever be on your own again.’

  ‘But do you think she’ll want to know me?’ Greta asks nervously,

  ‘That I don’t know, but you have to give it a shot, for everyone’s sake. By the way,’ he adds cheekily, ‘if you were married in Ireland, does that make you a bigamist? Am I shacked up with a felon?’

  ‘Oh no. Tomás managed to wangle an annulment. We had limited contact when I first moved to La Conner.’

  ‘I think I’d like to meet that man,’ Henry says with an edge to his voice. He pulls on his hat and walks over to the old radio, switching it on. ‘I’d better check the forecast before we set off,’ he says.

  Greta starts to pack up. The morning’s events have left them short of time now, but she feels so relaxed that she’s unable to hurry.

  ‘Darn, the batteries are gone.’

  ‘Have we spares?’

  ‘You know what?’ He comes over smiling, ruffling her hair. ‘That’s the one thing I forgot to pack.’ He sniffs the air then.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ he says. ‘The conditions have been perfect all week.’

  Greta looks at the water, smooth as a mirror. ‘Remember, Henry,’ she says, ‘it can be deceptive here. Once we get out of the passage it could be really choppy.’

  ‘We can manage that, can’t we?’ he says, packing up. ‘It’ll be good to have to put a little bit of elbow grease in. Tomorrow we’ll be back to our old soft lives.’ He chuckles.

  A short while later they’re spinning through the passage, hushed by the awesome shadows of the mountains on either side. They paddle side by side and Henry takes her hand as they lift up their paddles and float through a narrow channel between a little island and a rock.

  As they emerge out of their sanctuary into the inlet, Greta suddenly feels anxious. The water is incredibly rough, dark grey with the wind, and the sky is almost the same colour. They bend over their kayaks, pushing their bodies forward and frantically paddling. The noise of the wind fills her ears and Greta ploughs the water with forceful strokes, bracing her legs to stay steady. She can feel the chop from the ebbing tide, its force pulling her along. Breakers wash over their laps and she’s keenly aware that they don’t belong here. She imagines the sea spurning them, angry at their presumption to want to cross it, to think that it would remain tame for them.

  There’s a noise. She hears it over the sound of the wind. At first she thinks it’s a gunshot and she looks wildly about, but there are no boats, no ghastly day-trippers here to try to shoot bears. It’s when the rain starts pelting her that she realises with horror that the noise is thunder. The sky is black now and the sea unrepentant. They’re jostled up and down on the waves, like two flimsy sticks. How could this have happened so suddenly?

  She looks over at Henry. He’s shouting something at her. It’s hard to hear him above the rain and the ocean but she sees him pointing his arm towards where they have come from. In the passage they could take shelter.

  She fights against the sea, coming as close to him as she can.

  ‘Can we make it?’ Greta gasps.

  ‘Course we can,’ he says, smiling at her, leaning towards her and trying to take her hand. But she can sense his doubt.

  Now as they paddle she can feel the swell increasing and hear the rumbling roar of the wind and the thunder. The rain is stinging her face and she feels terrified and exhilarated all at the same time. All her life force is concentrated in this one effort and she takes the lead as she paddles against th
e tide back towards the still lagoon of their earlier idyll. In this moment Greta feels something else around her, an energy or a force propelling her, helping her to stay afloat and move back across the angry water. Her heart rises in her chest as she nears the rocky entrance to the passage, its opening like a necklace of bony teeth, and with relief she glides through it into sudden calm. Euphoric with her achievement, Greta laughs out loud. It’s still raining here, the water dancing on water, hard and keen, but at least they’re out of the wind. They can go back to where they camped last night, dry out, wait until the storm passes.

  ‘We made it,’ she says triumphantly, turning around to Henry.

  But he isn’t there.

  Her blood freezes. She looks through the lashing lines of grey, back out to sea, the violent water.

  ‘Henry!’ she yells.

  Then she sees it. His upturned kayak. A slither of yellow bobbing up and down with the swell.

  CHRISTINA

  The water inches towards Christina and makes contact with her toes. She winces. ‘It’s cold!’ Her teeth chatter and she looks like a little girl, hopping on her tiny blue feet.

  ‘This water comes all the way down from Alaska,’ Luke says. ‘It’s like melted glaciers.’

  ‘Is that why it looks so clean?’

  ‘It’s pure liquid ice,’ he replies.

  ‘Tell me about your family, Luke,’ Christina says, lacing her fingers through his. ‘Who will be in your village when you return?’

  He waits a while to answer. ‘My grandfather, I hope. My parents are dead, but there’s all my aunts and uncles, three of my sisters and their children. And then there’s the cousins.’

  ‘You’ve a large family.’

  ‘It’s part of our culture.’

  ‘It’s part of ours as well. It was always hard being an only child. All my friends had at least one brother or sister. They always had someone to play with.’

  ‘Being on your own breeds self-sufficiency.’

  ‘Didn’t work for me. I was very needy. I probably still am.’

  ‘There’s no woman I know who would have done what you’ve done, come all the way to Canada with your little boy so you can find your mother.’

  ‘And there’s not many women who lose custody of their own children either,’ she adds bitterly.

  He says nothing and she silently curses herself for bringing that up again. She doesn’t want self-pity.

  They walk on and she closes her eyes, smelling the sharp tang of the ocean, feeling a sense of freedom course through her veins. If only she could feel this all the time. When she opens them again Cian has already reached the rocks and is clambering over them.

  They approach the large wet boulders, which look almost black against the white sand. She can see sea urchins in the water and several fat starfish sucking onto the rock, alive and full-blown. She starts climbing up towards Cian, who’s sitting on the top, bellowing, ‘I’m the king of the castle!’

  They sit on either side of Cian and he shimmies down between them. The three of them look out at the sea, the endless horizon.

  ‘Luke?’ Cian asks. ‘Will you tell me a story?’

  She looks over at Luke, his body a powerful silhouette against the midday sun.

  She watches him as he leans back and looks up at the sky. ‘My mother was from a place called Bear River and these people have a story about the thunderbird and the whale. Would you like to hear it?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Cian says, jigging up and down on the rocks.

  ‘Okay then. The people of Bear River used to walk over the mountains looking for medicines and lucky charms, so on their return there would be many strange stories of things they had seen. One time, one such group was walking in the mountains and they saw smoke in the distance. As they came closer they realised that the smoke was coming from a house. One of the men from the group crept up closer to the house and looked through a crack in the walls. Inside he saw a woman weaving mats from strips of bark. Suddenly he heard her say, “Come in, don’t stay outside where it’s cold, come into the house where it’s warm.” The man accepted her invitation and the woman asked him to wait until her husband came home with a whale. The man was mystified how a mere mortal could bring a whale all this way up the mountain. Before long the sky darkened and hail began to fall, with thunder booming. He looked up at the sky and saw a massive bird. He had a large curved beak and a horn on top of its head, with eyes like an eagle, though many times larger. He could see lightning flashing from the eyes of the great bird and knew it to be a thunderbird. The man watched the great bird as it came closer, a whale in its talons. It dropped the whale and landed, and then, to the man’s astonishment, its body opened and out stepped a young man! From that time the people from Bear River, or O-in-mi-tis, my mother’s people, used the thunderbird as their crest.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a thunderbird?’ Cian asks excitedly.

  ‘No, I don’t know anyone who has. I think it’s just a legend.’ Luke folds his arms and looks out to the ocean. Christina can see sorrow in the way he sits. She wonders about his mother. He hadn’t told her when or how she died.

  Cian is up on his knees, peering out to sea as well. ‘Luke, where are the whales?’

  ‘Oh, they’re way out,’ he says, spreading his hand.

  ‘Mammy, can we go in a boat and find the whales?’ Cian pulls on her arm and she looks down at his charming blue eyes.

  ‘It’s not that easy.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Sure,’ Luke says, looking at her enquiringly. ‘Maybe once you’ve settled into Tofino, and if your mom wants to, you can come to my village on the island and I’ll take you out.’

  ‘Do you have a boat?’

  ‘Nope, but I’ve got plenty of cousins who do. We’ll find someone to take us. What do you think, Christina?’

  ‘I think that would be nice.’

  He grins, but still his eyes look sad. ‘Good. That’s a date.’

  Unable to sit still any more, Cian starts sliding back down the rocks. She watches him as he goes down, his skinny arms and legs propelling him. On the beach he runs over to a pile of driftwood, his feet almost kicking his backside as he leaps across the sand. She sees him hunt for a stick. He pauses for a second, then starts frantically drawing lines in the sand. She looks back out to sea, the relentless fall of each wave, the reassurance of nature.

  ‘That’s the only story I remember my mother telling me,’ Luke says softly.

  Christina touches his arm, hesitantly. ‘When did she die?’

  ‘I was only eight,’ he sighs. ‘And then my father died a few months later. It sounds terrible now, if I tell someone, but at the time I was okay. I don’t think I even cried. I left the island not long after,’ he adds. ‘I went to live with my big sister, Gail, in Tofino.’

  Christina wants to ask him more, but he’s completely still beside her and the sound of the ocean holds her tongue. She senses that he doesn’t want to say any more. Moments pass and then she speaks.

  ‘All this clarity.’ She points at the horizon. ‘The immensity of the ocean and the sky, the swell…all these things must inspire you.’

  ‘You inspire me too.’

  She laughs, embarrassed, looking down at her toes. ‘How could I? I’m no portrait.’

  ‘It’s not how you look, it’s who you are. You know, when I first met you I saw blue, this shade of blue,’ he says, pointing at the ocean, ‘with a white edge to it, brilliant and startling. It’s the colour of your healing, your soul’s search for relief.’

  She knots her brows and looks at him. She’s never heard anyone say such things before, yet she understands him perfectly.

  He looks at the ocean again and says, ‘In each moment we make a choice.’

  ‘I know.’ Her voice rises barely above a whisper. She pulls her knees up and hugs them. The ocean beckons to her, draws her in, and she feels impelled to speak.

  ‘Cian could have died.’ The words are wrenched from
her gut. They feel like poison on her lips. ‘He could have died because of me.’ She’s afraid to look at Luke, so she ploughs on. Maybe here on the edge of the world she can find redemption.

  ‘I can make all sorts of excuses, say I was sick at the time or it was just an accident, but I knew what I was doing. I did. I had been okay. I had stopped drinking and I was taking anti-depressants. Myself and Declan were both really trying to make things work…’

  ‘Then what was it? What made you want to start drinking again?’

  She shivers and holds her sides. ‘Johnny. It was something Johnny said. I wanted to go to a parents’ association meeting at his school, I wanted to get involved, but he wasn’t having it. Christ, I’ll never forget the look on his face when I said I was going, the absolute horror.’ She laughs bitterly. ‘I suppose he couldn’t think of anything worse than me mixing with his friends’ parents. He said I was a disgrace. It sounded so funny, that old-fashioned, fuddy duddy word coming out of his mouth. His mother was a disgrace.’

  Her throat has gone dry but she keeps on talking. She has to tell Luke now, before she meets her mother, before anything else happens. He has to know the whole of her.

  ‘Because I hadn’t been drinking for a few weeks the booze really hit me. Before I had been able to drink a bottle of wine and still drive no problem. But then, I only had three glasses and I was all over the place. I didn’t know it, though. Of course I didn’t.’ She starts to cry, her tears hot with shame. Luke says nothing but she feels him take her hand and finger her ring.

  ‘It’s all a blur, really. I went to collect Cian from school as usual and they said I was driving practically in the ditch. It happened in a flash. One moment I was trying to put a CD into the CD player and the next we were off the road. It was strange. I was screaming but my voice was outside of myself.’ She can feel the tears trailing down her cheeks. ‘I was fine, not a scratch, but they weren’t so sure about Cian. He was unconscious…’

  She starts to shake. She turns and looks pleadingly at Luke. ‘He was so still.’