by Ann Eriksson
Patrick pushed himself back from the table and stood. “Let’s open gifts. It’s Christmas.”
“No,” I stopped him. “Let him answer. What did you mean, Mel?”
Mel stared at his plate, at the brown scrape of gravy and mashed potatoes. “I meant . . . you’ll be alone. Dealing with a baby all alone.”
“That’s right.”
He lifted his head and met my eyes. “What will you do? There’s no father. Your baby won’t have a father.”
The rest of the family stood, chairs legs sliding across the wood floor, and moved toward the living room. I stayed rooted to my chair; my chest ached. No father.
Mel excused himself, gathered his coat and hat from the closet, and left through the front door.
The family departed at nine for the drive back to Qualicum. I hugged Steve and Patrick at the door. “Call if you need anything,” they said.
“I love you guys,” I replied, my throat tight with emotion.
“And never mind Dad,” Steve said. “He’s . . . well, he’s Mel.”
“Your kid has two great uncles,” Patrick added. “What more could it need?”
“Two great brothers.” I waved them out the door, squeezing back tears.
I put Rainbow to bed and fixed Paul a tray of food. I tapped on his door. “Paul, you hungry?”
No answer. I eased the door open with my elbow. The room was dark; he didn’t stir. He spent most of his time sleeping. I didn’t blame him, sleep a state I wished I could retreat to most days. Block out the world. I left the tray on the desk and tiptoed out. I lay on the couch and surveyed the mess of wrappings under the tree; the few gifts left were Paul’s. I should tie my confession up in a box with chocolates and a bow. Would he take the news any better than my father?
26
Rainbow brought Paul out of his depression. She made him snacks, crept into his darkened room, drew up the blinds, and camped on the carpet beside the bed to do her self-imposed homework.
“Paul, if you have five jelly bears and your mom gives you eight more, how many jelly bears do you have?”
“Paul, how do you spell canopy?”
“Paul, what colour should I use for this flower, a pink crayon or a purple one?”
When he didn’t answer she would answer herself out loud, and then carry on with her task, humming while she worked. She knew to find me if he had a seizure. He responded slowly. Nothing, then muffled grunts from the depths of the pillow. Two-word answers. Rainbow emerged from his room one day and rummaged though the fridge. “Paul wants a carrot,” she explained and returned to his room until dinner. A few days later I witnessed an exchange as I passed the open bedroom door on my way to the bathroom with a stack of towels.
“What do you want Santa to bring you?” Rainbow said to Paul. “I’m writing him a letter for next year.”
“You don’t believe in Santa.”
“No,” she paused. “But I don’t know everything.”
“You think it’s possible he exists?”
“Could be?” She poised her pencil over the paper as if to say, Do we want to take a chance? “I’m going to ask for a wagon . . . for Cedar. How do you spell wagon?”
“W-A-G-O-N.”
She formed the letters one by one, the pencil scratching across the paper, tongue between her lips. “Your turn. What do you want Santa to bring you?”
“A new brain,” was his answer.
The day after New Year, Paul laughed at an inane joke I made at dinner. Later, Rainbow found me in the lab downstairs cataloguing specimens. “Paul needs to go for a drive.”
“Paul’s not supposed to drive, honey.”
“No, you drive. He needs to go.” She thrust a newspaper into my face. “Here.” I studied the page, the tourism section of the local paper. A family posed in a stand of giant trees. The place, Cathedral Grove, a small park up-island protected for its old-growth, the giant trees bordering the highway and easily accessible. “He needs to go here.”
Rainbow kept him in suspense through the drive. “It’s a secret,” she explained from the back seat, and when we reached Cameron Lake a kilometre before the park, she ordered him to “shut your eyes and don’t peek.”
We pulled into the empty parking lot, the day too blustery and grey for tourists. Rainbow hopped out, opened Paul’s door, and guided him blind to an enormous weathered fir at the edge of the road, the trunk ridged with thick sheets of bark and clothed in green moss and lichen. “Tilt your head back . . .Okay. You can open them.”
I hovered close by; his seizures often followed a shock or surprise. He stared up through the foliage and stroked the trunk, working his fingers between the ridges of bark as if trying to push through the thick skin of the tree into its living interior. “How did you know I missed this, you two?” he said softly.
“Surprise.” Rainbow danced at the end of his arm, his fingers in hers. “Surprise, surprise.” She pointed above Paul’s head. “What’s that?”
A black scar bruised the heavy bark of the fir. “A lightning strike,” I explained. “Probably from hundreds of years ago.”
“Was there a fire?”
“Without fire, these Douglas-firs can’t reproduce,” I said, imagining the scene. The lightning strike, the flame travelling along the ground like a lit fuse, devouring the dry underbrush, the years of accumulated branches igniting in its path. When the temperature of the fire reached flash point, flames exploded into the canopy like bombs. Whole trees splintering with the force of the created wind that flung entire trunks up and out of the fire and into the surrounding forest. Over days, the fire would have run its course, the ground sterilized by the intense heat. The only survivors a few thick-barked Doug-firs. The rodents would move in then from adjacent forest; deer mice and shrews would dig truffles from the ground and scatter the nitrogen-rich fungi across the forest floor, fertilizer for the sun-loving seedlings. Fire was a gift to this forest. A healing catastrophe.
We crammed together into a blackened hollow at the base of an ancient fir, my camera set on timer aimed from a stump on the opposite side of the trail. Rainbow and I stood upright, two forest elves, Paul jackknifed above us. “We’re like a family,” Rainbow said, linking her arms in ours. “A people sandwich.” I stuck out my tongue, Rainbow stretched her lips sideways with her thumbs, and Paul crossed his eyes, two fingers wiggling behind Rainbow’s head like antennae. The camera gave a click and a flash. Outside the hollow, a winter storm howled. We had ignored the sign at the entrance that informed visitors to vacate the grove in high winds. Windfall presented a constant threat to this vulnerable remnant of old-growth surrounded by clear-cut. Six years earlier forty-three trees had crashed to earth in a storm on a single night.
Paul came alive those few hours in Cathedral Grove. We wandered the trails, reading the interpretive signs out loud to one another along the way. Wind and Fire: Natural Agents of Change. Nurse Logs: Nannies of the Forest. I noticed Paul studying me throughout the day and found myself turning away from his gaze. We discovered a passageway cut through a recent windfallen tree, fresh sawdust in fragrant piles on the ground. Paul showed Rainbow how to count the concentric growth rings on the face of the cut. The task of calculating the age of the tree—one ring per year—took them half an hour. “Six hundred and thirty,” Rainbow announced.
We walked to the far end of the park where a small group of protesters had held off the construction of a parking lot for more than two years before the parks department gave up. High in the canopy, the remnants of platforms remained, scraps of two-by-fours nailed to branches. A tattered blue tarp flapped in the wind. Ecojunk littered a small clearing full of logging slash: the shredded shell of a large canvas tent, a rusted metal chimney jutting out through the centre of the roof, a pile of empty tin cans and plastic bottles. To the north, clear-cut stretched from the road to the mountains.
“I guess civil disobedience can work.” Paul kicked aside a broken lawn chair.
“A small victory,” I
countered. “I heard loggers burned one of the activist’s cars.”
We stopped at a coffee shop for a drink and a sandwich on the way home.
“Hot chocolate, please,” Rainbow said in her politest voice.
“What size?”
“Small.”
“Tall hot chocolate,” the woman called out to her partner in the back.
“I wanted small,” Rainbow protested.
“Yup, here small is tall,” the clerk assured her.
Rainbow turned her questioning eyes on me. “Hey,” she said. “Small is tall and tall is small.” She slipped one hand in mine, the other in Paul’s, and sighed with contentment.
Rainbow fell asleep in the back seat of the car halfway home, a chocolate moustache on her upper lip. Midwinter sun dipped behind the mountains and the light faded into dusk, into the dark possible only in winter. Rain speckled the windshield, the wipers sweeping the drops away with an intermittent swish. Paul turned the radio on low, leaned back against the seat, and closed his eyes. His face appeared strained. Had it been too much?
I drove along listening to a guitar solo. The news. An earthquake in Brazil. Fighting in Somalia. Grain prices dropping.
Paul switched off the radio. “Were you planning on telling me?” he said. “Or was I supposed to guess?”
I concentrated on the guiding lines of the road ahead, the reflectors at the edge of the shoulder.
“I know I’ve been self-absorbed, but I’m not blind.”
“I tried,” I managed. “I told you in hospital as soon as I knew.”
“I was unconscious,” he said. “Not fair.”
“And I tried to tell you at China Beach.”
“Your point?” he said. “It is mine, isn’t it? Unless you met a guy while I was in a coma.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think you needed more stress.”
We fell into a weighty silence, the headlights from oncoming cars illuminating our faces. My knuckles ached from gripping the steering wheel.
“I suppose you’ll move back to your apartment soon,” I said.
“You want me to leave?”
“No . . . no”—my heart pounded—“you can stay as long as you need to.”
“What about—” He stopped in mid-sentence and switched the radio back on. “Never mind.”
We drove the rest of the way home without a word between us. Paul carried a sleeping Rainbow in from the car to her room. I went to bed, my back sore after the long drive, and picked up a forest ecology paper I had neglected to work on for months, Oribatid mites in temperate rainforest canopy. I read through the abstract, crossing out words and sentences, scratching notes into the margin, a futile distraction from the playback of our clumsy conversation in the car that ran over and over through my head.
A tap came at the door. I put the paper onto the bedside table. Paul limped across the room, his expression unreadable, but his cheeks more full of colour than I’d seen since before his fall. Rainbow was right; he did need the big trees.
I made space for him, plumping up a pillow against the headboard. In the early weeks after I brought him home from the hospital he had often visited me before bed like this to talk. “My shrink,” he had dubbed me, but he hadn’t visited since the onset of his seizures. I knew he wasn’t in my room for idle conversation. I braced for his decision to leave.
“Time for the loony hour.” He settled back against the pillow.
“Yes, the dwarf and the lunatic.”
He propped himself onto his elbows and furrowed his brow at me. “Why do you make jokes about yourself?”
“If you can’t beat them . . .” I avoided his accusing gaze.
“Hey, never mind,” he said, his voice husky. “Thanks for today.”
“Rainbow’s idea.”
“Do you think I can ever climb again?”
“Sure, a person can do anything they want to if they want it bad enough.” I laughed. “I sound like Grace.”
“Wisdom must be hereditary.”
He slid his hand across the bedspread and onto my stomach; the heat from his fingers burned through the fabric of my pyjamas. “Do you know the sex?”
“It’s likely a tumour.”
He sighed. “No more jokes,” he said. “I suppose everyone else knows.”
“That I’m pregnant, yes. But only Grace knows about you,” I confessed.
“What if I wanted to stay?” he said. “For good.”
“You don’t have to. I’ll . . . we’ll manage.”
He reached over and put his hand again on my swollen belly, tracing a circle around my navel. “No doubt you will. But I didn’t say have to, I said want to.”
I picked up his hand and returned it to his chest. “I don’t want or need a reluctant partner.”
“I don’t see you twisting my arm.” He trapped my hand in his.
I sighed. “The baby is a dwarf.”
“Great,” he said firmly.
“You don’t mean it.”
He cupped my cheek, his hand soft from a lack of physical work. “If this baby is anything like you, I’ll be a happy man.” I stared at him. “Besides,” he went on. “I can’t climb trees for a while and I expect you’ll need a nanny.”
“I don’t want a nanny. Or an occasional father who comes by once in a while to babysit. Besides, you’ll want to be free when your right woman—”
“Faye.”
“—comes along. Remember Tessa. She’s promising. Forget about Mary, though, if she ever comes back.”
“Faye.”
“She’s abysmal, and you never know who’s around the corn—”
He leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth. “When I said I wanted this, I meant the package deal.”
He kissed me again, then slid down and rested his head on the package. “Two for one. What a deal.”
A number of activities are not recommended for a man with uncontrolled seizures. Driving, flying, climbing trees. Apparently, making love is not on the list.
27
Mr. Kimori’s house was sandwiched between two highrise apartment buildings downtown, the front garden of the brown stucco bungalow a tidy rectangle of grass, the brick walk swept clean of winter debris, a single ornamental plum tree in the middle of the lawn in early spring bloom. Rainbow swung the stone weight hanging from the bell chimes at the door, the metallic ringing of the clay circles mingling with the traffic noise from the street. Mr. Kimori opened the door dressed in a pullover the colour of moss and a pair of black sweatpants.
“Paul, Rainbow, Faye, Grace.” He smiled broadly and beckoned us inside. “We’re all here now,” he said with satisfaction. “Happy Chinese New Year. Gung Hay Fat Choy. Welcome to my home.”
“But you’re not Chinese,” Rainbow protested.
“I have many Chinese friends,” he answered. “I embrace any excuse to celebrate. Come in, come in.”
We stepped inside and he swung the door shut on the outside noise. Rainbow handed him our contribution of lilies, apple juice, and Grace’s homebaked banana loaf.
“I thank you for this unnecessary gift.” He patted her on the top of her head. “You’re growing.”
Rainbow beamed. “I’m in grade two,” she said proudly and took his hand. He led us into the living room, where people filled the chairs, the couches, and the floor, or milled around a table in the corner.
“Hi.” Terry walked over, a wineglass in his hand, and clapped Paul on the shoulder. Paul winced. “Oh, jeez, I’m sorry.” Terry stepped back, wine splashing over the rim of his glass onto his corduroy shirt. “Great to see you, though.” He pawed at the stain with a paper napkin. When he caught sight of my bulging belly, he exclaimed, “I heard you guys were preggo.” A tense silence followed. “Faye,” he said, unfazed. “I wanted to ask your opinion. I was watching this program the other day about dwarf tossing.”
“Dwarf tossing?” I answered, bewildered.
“Guys in bars pay dwarfs to let them throw them as far as th
ey can,” he said. “On to mats, of course.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I glared at him.
“I thought it was interesting that the dwarfs defended their right to be tossed. It surprised me—”
I was about to walk away when Esther interrupted. “Nice of Mr. Kimori to have a get-out-of-jail party. Here, Paul.” She offered him her chair. “You need this more than I.” He sat, face strained.
“It was a mistake to bring you,” I whispered in his ear. “Let’s go.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Can you find me a beer?”
“No alcohol,” I said.
He made a face. “Tea?”
I threaded my way through the crowd to the food table, aware of the furtive glances from people as I passed. Most of the original protestors were there: Chris, Jen, and Sue from Vancouver. Grace was talking to Billy and a small woman with dark permed hair. Squirrel sat alone by the door. We’d all done time, one way or another. There were three conspicuous absences. Marcel was still in northern Quebec; he sent frequent newsy letters and photos of snow and polar bears. No one had heard a word from Cougar and Mary since their disappearance.
The table was fixed with food and drink, including a variety of meats and a generous amount of beer and wine, noteworthy as Mr. Kimori was a strict vegetarian and tee-totaller. And a gracious host. I poured a cup of tea and loaded up a plate with sushi, a delicate ham sandwich with the crusts removed, and a handful of roasted soybeans. I returned to find Paul absorbed in conversation with Sue and Chris. “Stark naked,” Sue was saying. She addressed me when I walked up. “Cougar stripped naked and smeared himself with shit, came down from the tree, and ran off through the forest with two officers after him.”
“He’s bad news.” I handed Paul his teacup.
“Sue and Chris are getting hitched,” Paul said and raised his cup in the air. “Cheers.”
“Thanks,” Sue said. “And congratulations to you too. Wow, a baby!” I sought out Paul’s eyes and was relieved when he reached over and took my hand. Sue looped her arm through Chris’s. “The protest was intense, especially when we smuggled supplies to the tree-sitters. No other partner could understand what we went through.”