Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  On a final, sombre hike along the treeline, Bella thought she spotted a tall figure rustling up ahead through the poplars. He threw a mammoth shadow, larger than most creatures drawing breath in the high alpine. Her heart did a flip-lunge as she followed him. Palming slick leaves, fighting slopes that tore at her itchy calves, she chased after the rustle and snap. Around a rocky ledge she clambered, higher, then another scramble upward, her lungs afire as she navigated a steep ascent across a narrow slope, calling out, “Hello, Hello,” in the swirling wind.

  He dropped away from her like a bent knee.

  Wet-boned, she let her body slide heavily to the ground. Hugging her knees, Bella cursed the storm, her throbbing calves. Then she leaned back against a wall of silver shale, and felt the mountain move beneath her spine.

  Bella rises before dawn and shakes out her tangled mess of brown hair. Wincing, she pulls a head strap over her thick-matted scalp to don her headlamp. It’s been three months since she quit the city. She’s got no choice but to make another trip to the local mountain town for provisions. Along a slope entirely absent of light but for her narrow beam, she scrambles down the mountain, picking a long, unsteady path toward the trailhead. Bone sore on the steep, zig-zag march, her bandaged ear aches. She stops to inhale a biting breath of air. The bitter cold is coming, she thinks, sniffing. She’ll need a down-filled, waterproof parka, insulated mitts, long underwear, plus more food stores to avoid being stranded on some cliff, dying of exposure.

  Arriving in the parking lot, she dusts pinecones and debris from her car and then steers the hatchback toward the far-flung mountain town. At a tiny café, she treats herself to hot chocolate before checking email at the old post-and-beam general store. Four urgent emails load from her oldest friend, Cynth.

  The last subject line reads, I need you now.

  Bella clicks.

  Please come back to the city. I’m in trouble. Can’t explain. Will you come?

  Draining her travel mug, Bella checks the email date again. Already three weeks old. It wasn’t like Cynth to complain, not even when they had shared that tiny, thin-walled college dorm room. Still, it was already September. Bella needed to return to the mountain, before the heavy snowfalls made his windward slopes all but impassable.

  This is serious, she thinks, reading over the emails again. And she hasn’t seen her old friend in months, so Bella fuels up the hatchback and speeds back to the city.

  Bella squints as Cynth mouths in the doorway, “I’m sorry,” then leads her to a teal wingback in the crowded living room.

  She sits, watching Cynth set down tea and a flower-shaped lemon tartlet beside her.

  “What’s happening here?” Bella says, looking around, puzzled.

  She notices Cynth’s husband first, then Raff, her brother, on the couch opposite. Her best friend, Louise, is leaning over a coffee table laden with mini quiches and a large fruit and vegetable platter. Dear God, Bella thinks, shaking her head at the sight. Arthur and her mother in the same room?

  “Seriously, what’s going on?”

  Her mother rises, glancing over at Cynth for a nod of consent.

  “Bella, we all love you,” her mother says, rubbing her trembling hands, “but we’re afraid you may be in trouble. You took off without a word. Three months and barely an email.”

  Bella shrinks in disbelief. Here goes her family again with the WOOF thing. Women who eschew social conventions. Abandon everything and book it for the airport. Outliers, her father loves to lecture. Wild Ones Over Forty, he likes to call them, summing up an article he read in a national magazine, citing two major studies with full-colour, illustrated charts. The gist of it was that, unable to face their disappointing futures or corrupt world views, WOOFs seek relief in reckless adventure. They wander freely for a time, aimless as cattle, but they always make their way back.

  “We’re here because we’re worried,” her father, Arthur, pronounces abruptly, gesturing to the room, then clearing his throat. “A WOOF can threaten the entire social ecology.”

  Bella lops a whipped cream pompadour off her lemon tart, licking her index finger bald. While her father continues to talk, she watches Cynth’s border collie dine, paws up on the coffee table, shredding two bacon-filled mini quiches. A herding breed instead of a child, Bella remembers Cynth saying, after a second round of Monte Cristo coffees.

  “Can you see it from our side?” her father asks, holding out his hands.

  “It’s selfish,” Raff grumbles.

  “We thought you were finally going to settle down,” Cynth adds, as if Bella’s slight were as deliberate as refilling the empty coffee cups around the room.

  Her mother pipes in, “But you’ve always been so picky.”

  Picky we are. Picky women, Bella thinks, pressing the pulsing vein at her temple. Too discriminating. Too demanding. Like preferring her backpack to this plate full of I-know-better.

  True, she has never married.

  She did love Ben, an American lawyer she had met at an equities conference in Brussels. Not just in the heady hours of their London-to-Bruges romance-by-rail, but in the months after. Bella, Ben, and baguette, cycling through Alsace or contemplating a peek under the Pope’s robes in Rome. Sampling cave-aged cheese and Barolo from their terrace, watching sailboats cruise Lake Albano. Afterward they had crossed a stone bridge and he stopped her midway, clasping her hands in his, and called her a reservoir for his dreams. Later, the long-distance calls, the business-class tickets. Back home, she stitched together their panoramic passions, had them float-mounted on her apartment wall. Had she ever been happier? If so, she couldn’t remember when. The anticipation of their next reunion had stirred in her such a delicious longing that love seemed to hang in the exalted air where she walked. The secret was hers to savour. Save her, it just might. Love was the rarest of all disorders, she had thought then. Contract it, and the whole world could seem sacred again.

  He was married, of course. Most of her messages went straight to voicemail. During their meet-ups in New York, she wound up wedged into his barely furnished Manhattan studio rental, the smell of bergamot and vanilla on his shirts. He finally confessed a wife and a need to escape sexual incarceration. Bella countered that sharing a bunk in his wife’s prison cell wasn’t exactly her idea of liberation; and by the way, Fuck off and don’t ever call me again. After two light-headed years, their romance withered on its infested vine.

  Bella watched her life slowly unravel with a kind of perverse pleasure, while she slid deeper into the muck and mire. This sort of suffering was predictable, she thought, even comforting, drawing the support of indignant friends if she told them. She kept quiet. No, life’s real calamities always slammed into you sideways. She hated the end-stage dating of the over-forty woman. Daubing on extra primer and concealer, the cream blush and lipstick, always a shade darker than usual. The too-fruity wine, the two-for-one tapas shared with much older men who looked at her as if they were ready to flush out a badger. She pictured herself squealing in their slavering mouths and ordered a single tequila shot.

  More than once she returned home to wring out her heart in dry vermouth, orange bitters, and a splash of grenadine. Pink. Plunk. Perfect. Head back on the couch, shoulders sinking in front of the TV, fingering the cursed mammary mumps. Another late-night crime show on the screen. Splayed out on the coroner’s examining table, the woman’s parched body is a mess of tangled hair and bruises, leaves and dirt beneath the fingernails. Think she did this to herself? the detectives ask.

  With a start, Bella refocuses on the room, watching her brother angrily poke the air.

  “You’re in a rut, sis. Spinning your wheels. Come on home and grow the fuck up already.”

  Bella feels the coarse hairs on the back of her neck rise. She squirms, rubbing against the wool fabric to relieve an awkward lower-back itch.

  Look how they buzz and claw at the foothills of my life, Bella thinks. Even Louise keeps insisting she is something to salvage. Remember to knit
scarves and shelter kittens, Bella thinks, sitting stone-faced in her chair.

  Hungering after the last of the baby quiches, Bella leans forward while they chatter, grabs and gobbles a mushroom tart in a single bite.

  Her mother raises her hands in a gesture of despair.

  Everyone agrees she’s been acting strangely for months.

  Everyone’s sorry for missing the signs.

  Bella tugs at the stem of a large potted fern next to her chair. She can picture the glacial lake ready to unfold its winter wings, the morning sun draped over the ridge like a downy blanket.

  He is vermillion. He is Olympus.

  The late spring storms finally passed in the alpine. Bella climbed high above the treeline, stopping to draw crisp air deeply into her lungs. Looking out across a rising plateau at the snow-capped peaks, Bella settled her fast-beating heart. The moment flooded her with peace. The horizon was infinite.

  Millions of years ago, there were no mountains here. Just the outer skin of earth shifting, then colliding, becoming plates, creating mass, until the ground had compressed, pitching up sandstone and shale, becoming the very stones upon which Bella’s soul now rested.

  A glacier had transplanted him here. “I’m from a family of drifters,” he joked, while she tiptoed through wolf lichen, across alpine meadows carpeted in bell-shaped flowers that tinkled where she walked. Standing amid bright blooms, their pointed tips like a fine brush dipped in scarlet-coloured paint, she watched the tall flowers bend with the wind, casting a ruby blush across the mountain face.

  He was soaring and serrated, his shoulders set wide and snow-capped. He claimed to have lived here for over a thousand years. So she stood spread-eagled against his mighty rock cliff, sidestepping across shallow footholds, hands bloodied, chest out, aching for air.

  He was all ridges and tumble. A stable, solid, impenetrable mass. Picking her way around his saw-toothed peak, she grew taut in calves and thighs. Her back ached as she leaned into sheer rock, scaling the granite rock face, her arms wide, fingertips wedging into cracks so sharp they shredded her flesh. Pouches soon formed beneath her eyes. Wind hurled, leaving her skin raw and coarse as she scrambled around limestone ridges.

  She trekked on. Set up camp, tore down, wearing her moveable shelter like a second skin.

  Occasionally she thought she heard a cellphone warbling in the wind, and later, in a sharp clap of thunder, she recalled the awful bang-click-bang of the MRI. Then her mind began to cast dark shadows. All the trails were overgrown, she thought, the rocky path impenetrable.

  Keep moving, he whispered, when she slipped on a patch of loose shale or missed the mark, spraining her ankle on a giant leap from a thick-bedded plateau.

  The summer came. Drifted.

  When hard winds swept up his scree slopes, Bella dropped below the treeline, slept curled in his valley cradle, her mouth wreathed in mist. She bathed in the basins of cascading waterfalls, their icy drops like nimble fingers running down her spine. An indelible silence enveloped her, hung in the air where she walked. Bella could find no words for the weight lifting from her.

  She grew dandelion fingertips, felt unbranched, twiggy, and lean. Her life a hollow stem, untamed, spreading grace.

  When hunger devoured her on overnight expeditions, he urged her to nibble the inner bark of a balsam fir. She ground down the bark to make a bitter meal that carried her longer than any freeze-dried packet. Craving sweets, she wandered along the treeline through the twisted woods, found a patch of plum-coloured berries falling like pearls from a string. Swallowing a handful, she felt her old life slipping away.

  What more could she want? To taste destiny in her dreams. To bleed her life history where he scratched.

  Rushing headlong into autumn, she felt sand and silt flushing her veins clear. It was inevitable that the earth would shift.

  Bella watches her work friend Kate rise from a leather armchair in Cynth’s living room, elbows flexed, hands on hips.

  “Bella, you left me. Not even a note goodbye. Then they hired some MBA at work, with big tits and eel teeth, to replace the CFO. She’s ready to fire the entire floor over our latest losses.”

  Watching Kate’s eyes fill, then her expression flatten, Bella’s gaze drifts toward the open window.

  “You left me alone,” Kate repeats, wiping her eyes. “Don’t you even care?” Her friend sips her cold coffee then slams the cup down, leaving it trembling in its saucer. “P.S. Everyone at work thinks you’re a nut job.”

  “We’re not here to label,” Cynth chides.

  She exits and returns first with more fresh fruit and cheese, then a selection of bite-sized toasts draped with smoked salmon, and paper-thin slices of beef. Setting down the last oval tray, she addresses the room: “Statements not accusations, okay?”

  Bella thinks she hears her father mutter “WOOF” through his mouthful of brie.

  “Maybe what’s happening to you, honey, is like a syndrome,” Arthur observes, distractedly. “Like IBS or ADD. A dysfunction of modern times. Not entirely your fault.”

  “If life is a signpost, this is your U-turn, sis.” Raff nods. “We’re fed up with your extreme bullshit.”

  Bella resists the urge to swat at the warbling refrigerator hum. Her knuckles are marred with tiny cuts, a swampy-looking tangle of hair falls over her ears, clinging to her cheeks. She leans toward the cool air wafting in from the window, feeling a sharp tingle, like stinging nettles gripping her spine. Her mind wanders along the wide-open grasslands, begins scaling the high alpine.

  Louise repeats, “So, what are you prepared to do to save yourself?”

  Backcountry prohibitions:

  Do not climb above the treeline when lightning strikes.

  Do not feed or harass wildlife.

  Never shortcut switchbacks.

  Do not urinate on rocks.

  Foraging below the treeline in the mid-August heat, Bella stopped to stuff a sanitary towel down her climbing pants. How many women bleed out in the woods, she wondered, rubbing the rough, raw skin around her mouth. Collecting a few dead pine branches, she began to pick the mud from her heels, notched and nearly worn flat from all her footslogs. Sniffing the spicy scent of fall on the horizon, she grew wistful. How often had she followed the sure and steady path for approval, to feast on the fat of it? Fuck Aunt Flo. Fuck the Dow. Fuck her mother’s manic repression: two graduate degrees, a seniors’ trek to Vietnam, yet still afraid to offend telemarketers.

  Hop-stepping side to side in front of her tent to better position the pad, she remembered a female comedian saying a sanitary napkin was the equivalent of a man wearing a hot dog bun to work. Across the stage the comedian had strutted, swinging an imaginary briefcase, stopping to adjust her bun-crotch every few paces. Ketchup. Menstrual blood. Life spilling out between the seams, Bella thought. Forget bullshit regrets.

  The audience had roared as the comedian went striding down the aisle. Adopting a deep masculine voice, she had pointed to the indiscreet bulge between her legs. “Can you see it, Al?” she had asked audience members. “Does it look okay from the back, Frank?”

  Bella chuckled out loud, zipping up her pants in the liquid hour before dawn.

  Back in Cynth’s living room, Bella begins laughing.

  Louise interrupts to ask what is so damn funny. Louise is no WOOF. She has two kids, the body of a porn star. A job in real estate, with custom signs and a corner office. Her sprawling ranch house is flooded with natural light, features an all-white European-style kitchen where once, just once, Bella shared a kiss with Louise’s husband, Ray. He had pressed up against her in the kitchen while they were full of good port and cheesy shrimp puffs, Bella too shocked to thwart his advance. She pushed him away afterward, trying to ease the awkward transition. Louise was running late, off showing warehouse property to an out-of-town developer, when they got the call. Bella and Ray took a taxi to the hospital. In the waiting room, the resident drew Ray and Louise aside to explain about the ventilator. Bel
la watched them barter with God but finally lose their eldest son to a massive hemothorax. She remembers the grief pile the couple made in the waiting room while she hovered near the nurses’ station, her boozy breath masked by blue mints, shame spreading in her, crossing the territory of uninhabitable grief.

  “I know the urge to escape,” Louise says, rubbing her hands as if closing a deal.

  “WOOFs end up suffering because they are without a purpose,” her father explains. “Where is all this leading you, hon?”

  “This is Middle-East crazy, sis,” Raff says, arms folded.

  Louise tries to conjure a smile, her eyes downcast and dim. “Stay with us, Bella. Don’t go back alone, or you’ll be wearing a fleece-lined straitjacket by winter.”

  Watching Louise, Bella has the urge to boil some white willow bark to ease her pain. She looks hard into her old friend’s tired eyes and sees stands of trembling maples, their limbs spilling crimson leaves.

  At the end of a late-August day, Bella noticed the alpine grasses were spiked golden brown. The nights had grown thick soles, went trudging across the hard earth, stamping cold into her aching bones. Her fingers and feet were swollen. She began to feel tired even on short treks and by mid-afternoon craved a bottomless sleep. Fists curled up beneath her chin, elbows tucked tight against her ribs, she felt the growing lumps beneath her armpit and collarbone.

  Darkness sipped at her soul. Coyotes patrolled at dusk. Wolves roamed the open slopes. Retreating to a hidden limestone cave, Bella lay awake for hours, fearing the firelight could not warm her. A brutal sorrow choked her dreams. When she closed her eyes, her life was a flickering shadow against the wall, a trace of the woman she had meant to be. The encroaching nights, the pang of diminished hope, and lost chances ran loose and treacherous in her brain. She was prey, and he was anchored. His mass was no compass.

  Come back to the city with me, she begged him. I’m naked. A sitting duck here. Please.

  He asked her if he were to quit this place, how would the moon know how far to rise? There were rain shadows to cast, valleys to carve. For longer than she had roamed the earth, his jagged ridges had been a platform for the brightest star in the sky.