Falling From Grace

by Ann Eriksson

  “What about Bryan?” Grace reasoned. “He’s come all this way to see you.”

  I threw my hands in the air in frustration. Bryan’s arrival had knocked me sideways. I had considered him a fictional character, existing in text on a computer screen, a one-dimensional image in a photo, a duty to satisfy Grace. But he’d walked into my life, warm and breathing.

  “I have to see Paul,” I insisted.

  “Tomorrow, dear,” Grace said. “It’s late. Come home with me. You need sleep. Besides, I don’t know if they’ll let you see him.”

  Grace was right. When I dialled the hospital the receptionist asked, “Are you family?”

  “His girlfriend,” I lied. Grace let out an exasperated sigh.

  “We give information to immediate family only,” the woman said. “And never over the phone.”

  “But he has no one else.”

  “I’m sorry. You can try administration tomorrow.”

  I turned off my phone and shoved it into my pocket with a moan. My mother steered me toward the car. “Let’s go get your samples.”

  Other than two RCMP cruisers parked off to the side and a scatter of protest signs in the ditch, the blockade site was empty when we drove past. A handful of arrestees lingered at camp, packing up gear, bidding tearful farewells to their friends. A few supporters from Victoria who had avoided arrest opted to stay in the valley to supply the tree-sitters and were setting up tents. “We’re going to Vancouver to recruit friends to help Jen,” Chris and Sue announced, shoving the last of their gear into a duffle bag.

  Terry was on the radiophone. “Cougar,” he announced when through talking. “The company has moved in and they’re felling trees right around them. The police have read them the injunction and are telling them to come down. He knows if he does those trees are gone too.”

  “Tell them to stay put,” Grace said. “The police won’t allow them to hurt anyone.”

  I left Bryan with Grace, Mary, and Rainbow to pack up the tents and gear and hiked back to the scene of the morning’s crime. My stomach churned with nausea at the sight of the spatters of blood on the shoulder of the tree. I looked up, half afraid to see Paul’s body swinging above me in the canopy, the dark stain on his shirt. I hunted around in the undergrowth and found the video camera, still switched on but the battery dead, its contents to remain a mystery until back in civilization with an electrical outlet at hand. The crossbow was nowhere to be seen.

  16

  We reached the house well after dark. The headlights illuminated the steep, winding driveway through the trees to the house, which sat on a hill on the upland side of the east coast highway, the intermittent view of the Coast Mountains across the Strait of Georgia obscured by night. I helped Grace put out food and arrange towels and beds for the motley crew: Mary with a sleeping Cedar in her arms and a dirty-faced Rainbow in the guest room; Marcel on the couch in the family room. Mel, an early riser, was already in bed.

  I showed Bryan to Steve’s old room upstairs.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” I said. I handed him a folded towel and washcloth. “I can’t spend any time with you. I need to leave for Victoria in the morning. My assistant’s in the hospital.”

  “I understand,” he said. “After all, you didn’t know I was coming,” but a flash of disappointment crossed his face and I felt a sting of remorse at the way I had used him. I couldn’t deny a pull, a curiosity to know more than the name of his dog, his passion for rocks, his love affair with flat land.

  “Well.” He hesitated, and then turned away. “Good night.” He reached up for the doorknob and the familiar gesture startled me. Up. Always up.

  “How about a walk on the beach in the morning?” I said quickly.

  “Love to,” he answered. He gave a small wave and closed the door behind him. I lingered in the hallway, heart and mind a tangled web of confusion, and stared at the empty dwarf-shaped space he’d left behind.

  My childhood room hadn’t changed in the fourteen years since I’d moved out. Grace had hoarded all my childhood belongings: my wildlife posters, my fishing rod, the saxophone that I’d never mastered, and the rows of altered and handmade clothes in the closet. I peered out the window and into the dark yard where I could make out the white bars of the rusted old swing set and the leaf-laden limbs of the apple tree. I wished Patrick and Steve were home, my stalwart knights, my guardian angels. The three of us had played for hours at a time in the yard, Patrick pushing me tirelessly on the swing, Steve coaching me in the fine art of monkey bar gymnastics. They taught me to catch a baseball, spit a metre, and whistle through my fingers. I cried the day they left, both the same fall, Patrick for university, Steve for a construction job near Port Hardy. I didn’t see them much anymore. The occasional Christmas. Patrick taught college English in Manitoba, Steve was a building contractor in Powell River and the father of two boys.

  The plywood and two-by-four platform they had built me in the apple tree appeared, in the dark, as a translucent skeleton in among the branches, my favourite retreat in my years alone with my parents. I wished I could hide out high in the branches now, avoid the inevitable persistent conversations with Grace, the uncomfortable silences from Mel, the complicated presence of Bryan. Where would the events of the past few crazy days take me? I climbed into the child’s single bed I would never outgrow, followed the path of moonlight across the wall, and worried about Paul.

  Bryan and I collided in the hallway outside the bathroom the next morning. “I’m ready for that walk,” he said jovially.

  My heart fell. I had forgotten, my thoughts on Paul and my departure for Victoria after breakfast.

  “It will have to be quick.” I cringed at the sharpness in my own voice. He’d come all this way. I could give him this one small thing. We found Mel hunched over the newspaper in the kitchen, cold coffee at his elbow, glasses on the table, scanning a column, nose inches from the type.

  “Hi, Dad,” I ventured, never certain of the reception I would get from him.

  He squinted up at me, then slipped on his glasses. “Faye?” He gave me one of his inimitable smiles—a bit of a guessing game. “Can you explain what’s going on? The house is full of sleeping strangers and she’s gone out for groceries.” The remaining colour in his already pallid cheeks drained away when he noticed Bryan.

  “Dad, meet Bryan,” I said. “Bryan, my dad, Mel Pearson.”

  “Nice . . . uh . . . to meet you,” Mel managed. He folded and creased the paper down the middle, then addressed an apparition floating in the air above our heads. “I’m off to the office. Tell your mother I’ll be late.” He grabbed his briefcase from the counter by the door and left; the screen door banged in his wake.

  Bryan watched the car turn the curve in the drive, headed for the college. “Is he always this . . . distant?”

  “More.” I pulled the paper toward me and read the date on the masthead. “Have I lost track of time. I can’t believe it’s Sunday,” I said. “Mel likes to pretend I don’t exist.”

  “No. He reacted to me, not you. He smiled at you.”

  “Well, yes. It’s not me he likes to pretend doesn’t exist, but my special attributes. You reminded him I’m a dwarf.”

  “Must be hard.”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “My parents treated me as special because I was a dwarf. My father’s an LP too.”

  “LP?” I picked up the paper and stuck my face through a hole cut from the front page. “I wonder what The Tribune has done to offend Mel this time.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of the Little People organization?” he said with surprise. “What do you call yourself?”

  I turned, still holding the holey paper in front of my face. “Faye . . . person. To tell the truth. You’re the first dwarf . . . sorry, little person I have ever met.”

  “You’re kidding.” He gawked at me like I was from another planet.

  “I grew up in small-town nowhere,” I said in my own defence. “With a mo
ther who acted like I was normal and a father who wished I’d disappear. After I left home, I was up a tree or lost in the library for ten years until I got my doctorate. Always the only dwarf on the block.”

  “Weren’t you ever curious?”

  “I contacted you, didn’t I?” I didn’t want to admit to him he was Grace’s idea. I opened the cupboard door under the sink and plucked a ball of crumpled newsprint from the top of a handful of orange peels and egg shells in the garbage bin. I shook off the bits of trash, unfolded it, and smoothed it out on the table. Splashed across the wrinkled front page of the widely circulated daily was a photo of me, tucked like a sack of potatoes under the arm of a police officer who the paper identified as Constable Hanson. The head of the biology department at the university would later describe the photo as an act of humiliation worthy of a PHD. The headline read, University Professor Arrested in Anti-logging Standoff.

  The events of the previous day crashed over me like a tidal wave. “I need that walk,” I said and led Bryan out the door.

  No wind on the bay and the sun beat warm enough to shed sweaters when we reached the beach. Seagulls reeled overhead and a seiner steamed out from the wharf in town, stabilizers up, engine at full throttle. The throb of the diesel engine thrummed across the water. We picked our way along a strip of pebble and shell beach, the extensive clam beds of the mud flat covered by high tide. Beach pea and grasses flowered on the foreshore. Other than a squawking pair of gulls and a young couple walking the tide line with their dog, the beach was deserted. The couple gawked at us when we passed, and when Bryan crouched to pat their dog, they whistled and the dog turned, tail wagging, and ran after them.

  “I might bite,” Bryan joked.

  I forced myself to concentrate on the conversation, preoccupied by the irritation of the newspaper photo, my anxiety about Paul. “I came around a corner in downtown Victoria one day and the woman I ran into screamed.”

  “I don’t blame them,” Bryan said. “I’d scream if I met me in an alley too.”

  “Isn’t it an issue of common manners?”

  Bryan stooped to pick up a fragment of sandstone from a dry clump of sea lettuce. He turned it over in his hand, examining it closely. “Any fossils around here?”

  “I know a place where you can pull them out of the cliff by the dozens.”

  “You’ll have to show me next time.” He tucked the rock into his pocket.

  I struggled with the insinuation of next time. We reached the boulders at the end of the beach before I figured out why walking with Bryan felt odd. I didn’t have to work to keep up.

  “I’ve never seen this much water.” Bryan gazed across at the mountains on the mainland. “Reminds me of the prairies. The long vista. I have to admit, the forest yesterday made me claustrophobic. All those trees and no view.”

  Forests claustrophobic? The views were merely closer, more intimate than the ocean. I grew up in the interface between forest and sea, comfortable in both. I tried to imagine living in a landscape with few trees. “Did you know the Inuit have twenty-six words for snow but only one to describe a tree. Nabaaqtut. The word means ‘pole,’” I said. “Their term for forest, Nabaaqutut juit, ‘many poles.’”

  “Interesting,” Bryan said. “The big trees are amazing though. I saw a picture in a book where eight couples waltzed on a stump. ” He paused. “I could grow to like it?” The note of uncertainty in his voice drew my focus back to him. He wore jeans and a T-shirt with the slogan I Have Rocks in My Head, his sneakers wet on the toes. An educated, soft-spoken, easy-to-talk-to man.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked.

  “You know . . . the conference.”

  “No, why did you come here?”

  “I wanted to meet you.”

  “Why?”

  “I liked the photo you sent.” The ocean and the clouds were reflected in the lenses of his glasses. “I think you’re beautiful.”

  No one had ever called me beautiful. Not the few men I had dated. Not my brothers. Not Grace. Cute, strong, independent, smart. But not beautiful. I turned away, embarrassed by the tears suddenly streaming from my eyes, over my cheeks, and off my chin onto my shirt. Bryan stepped toward me. “Faye?” I held up my hand to stop him. I collapsed onto the sand and, amid the watery odour of seaweed, poured out to Bryan the events of the past weeks: the protest, my arrest, the timber markings, the marbled murrelets, the attack on Paul. My only omissions, my unrequited feelings for Paul and our night encounter in the tent.

  Bryan listened, gazing out to sea. He offered me the edge of his sleeve. “May I hug you?”

  I hesitated, overwhelmed by the sense of trust I felt toward him. He pulled me to my feet. The soles of our shoes crunched on a pile of dried kelp. Our bodies came together like two interlocking pieces of a puzzle, my cheek against his chin, my breasts against his chest, hips aligned, knees to knees, and his arms circled my shoulders. A perfect fit.

  “Dr. Faye, Dr. Faye.” We stepped apart. Rainbow sprinted along the beach toward us. Grace, Mary with Cedar, and Marcel were climbing down the bank beyond. Rainbow’s hair flew behind her, her face flushed with exertion and she skidded to a stop in front of us. “Are you and Bryan going to get married?” she panted.

  Bryan and I laughed awkwardly.

  Rainbow danced in the sand, hips and arms undulating like a hula dancer. “Dr. Faye and Bryan sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Bryan with a baby carriage.”

  “You monkey.” Bryan dove for her. “I bet you’re ticklish.” Rainbow screamed and ran laughing through the shallows, water splashing behind her with each step, Bryan after her, laughing too.

  • • •

  “I could get used to the coast,” Bryan said later, after breakfast, while he packed his luggage in the trunk of his rental car. “Interesting rocks out here.”

  I rested my shoulder against the side door and slipped my hands into my back pockets.

  “I’d need a view of the ocean, though,” he went on. “You could teach me to appreciate trees.”

  You could teach me to appreciate you. But in a strange, twisted way I could admit only to myself, Bryan’s disproportionate limbs, his dwarfish features, repelled me. What’s wrong with me? I dug my toe into the grass beside the car. I’m no different. I longed to be back in the canopy with Paul.

  “Can we keep writing?” Bryan leaned over and covered my hand with his. “I’d like to keep abreast of your criminal activity.”

  The warmth of his palm permeated mine. I liked his sense of humour. “Sure,” I agreed with a cautious smile. “Why not?”

  “Hey, there’s an LPA conference in Seattle in September,” he said. “Why don’t you come?”

  “Only dwarfs?”

  “There’s always family too. It’s great,” he said. “For three days you don’t feel so different.”

  “I can’t.” I shook my head. One little person at a time was enough for me.

  Bryan climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  As I leaned on the window frame, I noticed the extenders on the pedals. “Rental companies have extenders?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I carry them with me.”

  As I watched him drive away. I recalled a term he used in an email about the challenges of living in a big world. Environmental disability.

  “There’s no such thing as a disability,” he explained. “Not when the environment is designed to accommodate everyone. Like extenders on a car. A blind man with a talking computer. Or a wheelchair ramp. Imagine an average-height person in a house designed for little people? Who’s the disabled one then?”

  • • •

  Paul had fallen from old-growth rainforest straight into the ICU; his new environment was white, hard, and antiseptic. A high bed in a glass room behind locked glass doors. No twittering birds or wind through the branches, only the blink and bleep of monitors above the bed and the
hush-ha of his breathing apparatus. The nurse checked his vital signs every ten minutes. His status, number 1 on the Glasgow coma scale—no response.

  A visit to Paul meant a ride on an elevator—the buttons too high for me to reach without standing on my toes, arm stretched to maximum—followed by an endless walk along a quiet hallway to a boxy white waiting room. A buzzer on the wall for entry.

  The two shift nurses assigned to Paul—Corrie, a sweet straightforward woman in her thirties, and Daniel, an older man whose solid presence reminded me of my brother Steve, advised me to assume Paul could hear. “He knows you’re in the room,” Daniel whispered. “I know he does. Talk to him.”

  I pushed a chair to the head of the bed and climbed up. He lay on his back, still as death, head shaved, burr hole drilled through his skull to relieve the pressure of fluid building up on his brain from the impact of the branch he must have hit during the fall. Head elevated to prevent the cerebral spinal fluid from leaking out of his body. His beard gone to accommodate the respirator. His naked face, ashen and smooth, appeared younger, more innocent, vulnerable as a newborn. I touched the dressing on his shoulder where the bolt had entered, his left femur—broken—a titanium rod pinned the ends of the bones together. The surgeon, whom I had convinced that Paul was my fiancé, had assured me the leg and shoulder injuries would heal with little if any residual effects. With physiotherapy and patience, he would climb again. But the head injury? No one could say. Until he awoke . . . if he awoke.

  The mystery of the human brain.

  “Did I ever tell you about my trip on Radeau de Cimes?” I watched his eyelids for an imperceptible tremor, his hand for the twitch of a finger. Nothing. Paul, you in there? “Did I tell you about the jungle from above?”

  Radeau de Cimes. The raft on the rooftop of the world— a triangular web of inflated plastic tubing supported a mesh floor the size of a public swimming pool. Suspended by cables from the undercarriage of a multicoloured dirigible, it rose from the forest floor through the trees—a rainbow of colour illuminated by the ascending sun—and emerged above the Amazon rainforest canopy like an alien ship. The balloon cruised above the rumpled treetop where the tallest of emergent trees broke through the canopy like spires. The raft skimmed the brain of the world, the green cerebral cortex of living valleys, hills, and canyons. Gas hissed from the balloon on its descent and the raft settled onto the surface of the canopy. A flock of parrots exploded squawking out of the treetops. The arbornauts, roped to the raft with safety lines, scurried like spiders across the mesh floor. For an hour, we clipped branches, netted insects, read instruments, took notes and photographs. At a signal from the crew, we darted back to the balloon. With a roar, the canopy raft lifted from the trees and moved on to another patch of forest.