The two were shaking her. They shook her so hard she thought her arm would break. Their garbled faces moved in and out, sharpening and blurring, it was like looking up through the wavering surface of a lake. At some point she realized it wasn’t her family at all.
It was Jacqueline wearing a mask and a stethoscope around her neck. She was poking Yasmeen’s arm, talking like she had marbles in her mouth. Yasmeen tried to turn her head to see who else was there, but she had no strength in her. Her head felt heavier than a boulder. Jacqueline was slapping at her arm. It felt like a hundred wasps were landing there. One squeezed through her skin and didn’t come out. When Yasmeen tried to cry out, the water level began rising, pooling in the small depression of her throat, rising over her mouth and ears and nose, pulling her down past the swaying tendrils of ancient sea organisms. Down, down, down toward the ocean floor.
•
Yasmeen was right on the money. She’d been pregnant. The strip would have come out blue. It would have kissed its lucky stars, donned its tap shoes and belted out a tune. Hello, ma baby, hello ma honey. Hello, ma ragtime gal. The whole world would have known about it.
One minute she was, and then she wasn’t.
Jacqueline was holding a clipboard and trying to keep everything professional. It had been a boy, with detectable body parts, eyes, a tongue, fingers and toes. Jacqueline kept reassuring her that none of it was her fault. These things were all about probability and about nature regulating itself.
Yasmeen wanted to see it, but Jacqueline advised her against it. Anyway it was only a clear sac with fluid inside. Yasmeen refused to listen. She stared ahead in a stubborn daze until Jacqueline told her Inuit co-worker, a girl named Alacie, to go bring it. Jacqueline sat Yasmeen up and smoothed her pillow. It felt cool on her back.
Alacie returned with the cloth-wrapped bundle. She handed it over to Yasmeen. It hardly weighed a thing. After holding it she decided she didn’t want to see it after all. It was enough to know she had failed at being a woman. She had failed a natural, simple task, one that every day, in every corner of the world, in opulence and squalor, others had succeeded at, some just squatting naked over the earth. Doing it on autopilot, a dozen times or more.
Non-viable was how Jacqueline kept referring to Yasmeen’s child. Not a human name but a scientific term. No different from the vocabulary used to signify a grotesque deformity like webbed fingers or a cleft in the toes, or a single eye in the middle of the forehead.
“Just toss it into the honey bucket,” said Yasmeen with cool detachment. She didn’t want to think about it anymore. She just wanted to get on with things.
Jacqueline ordered Alacie to take it away. She prescribed painkillers and asked if Yasmeen was ready to see Joanasi. “He’s really anxious. I’ve never seen him look so scared.”
Yasmeen nodded weakly. The room was swimming.
Elliot stepped forward and cupped her hand in his. “You had us all scared shitless, kiddo.” His face was so close she could smell his mouthwash. It made her feel sick to her stomach. She turned away from him. “Iris and Sam both wish you a speedy recovery. They’re at school holding down the fort.”
Paulussie poked his head out from behind Elliot, looking like an old toy that someone had left out in the rain. He was gaunt and unshaven and his eyes had little red veins floating in them. He patted her on the arm. “Don’t worry about school,” he mumbled. “Sarah can fill in for a couple of days.”
“Nakurmiik,” she said, straining to see where Joanasi was. “Thank you.”
Jacqueline bustled back in her scrubs and hospital shoes. She shooed everyone away with her hands. “Enweille! Décrisse! Time to give this lady some rest.”
Once they were gone Yasmeen spotted Joanasi standing near the exit, sipping from a Dixie cup. His black cap was pulled down over his eyes. Jacqueline dragged a chair to the gurney and waved him over. “She’s all yours.”
Joanasi pushed the chair aside with his foot. “Aippangai.” He stood over her, gripping the bed rail. His eyes had a teary sheen. He removed his cap and leaned in close to her face, sniffing her eyes and ears and neck. “Tutigumallipaa,” he whispered. “I want to kiss your small brown rose. I want to make it better.”
She squeezed his hand.
“We almost had a baby in there.”
She brushed her thumb over his lips, unable to face his disappointment. Her arm was heavy from the sedative. “Shhh,” she said. Her eyes fluttered, unable to stay open. Each time they closed, he disappeared.
EIGHTEEN
She awoke suddenly to the shatter of glass. The hairs on her nape were standing on end.
Joanasi was still asleep beside her, serene, slack-jawed, a long dry rattle in his breath. Blankets kicked away, his penis was resting across one thigh.
She checked the clock, thinking maybe she’d imagined it. The exploding glass. Since her miscarriage, she’d been having unsettling dreams. Sometimes they felt so real she thought the bright, waking world was the fictitious one. Sometimes, just after she woke up, she felt the ghost of what had attached itself, briefly, to the wall of her uterus.
She and Joanasi never discussed the baby she had lost. They never made a plan not to, they just sort of carried on as though nothing had happened. They took on activities that lasted most of the day, like ice fishing or going out for fresh drinking water, chopping up the ice and hauling it back by Skidoo. They binge-watched bad TV, played endless rounds of Yahtzee, backgammon. Whenever Yasmeen tried to bring it up he got very quiet or changed the subject. She couldn’t tell whether he blamed her or just accepted it as one of life’s inexplicable hardships, a devastating experience to live through and bury. Once, not long after it happened, she whispered an apology while he was sleeping, an emotional “sorry I disappointed you.” A baby in the North was a celebrated event—even more so than back home. She said she hoped she could do better next time. She knew he heard her because he nodded with his eyes still closed and then rolled over and went back to sleep and they never talked about it again.
She turned on her side and closed her eyes, hoping to drift off. The next time she awoke Joanasi was nudging her in the ribs. He ordered her to stay put while he zipped up his jeans and disappeared barefoot down the hall.
Yasmeen found his T-shirt on the floor, poked her head through and pulled her arms gingerly through the sleeves. Tender from her ordeal, the slightest exertion was still an effort. She went to the window. An orange pall hung over the village.
“I told you not to move,” said Joanasi. His voice caught her off guard.
She turned around. “I was just, I just wanted to see what—”
“You don’t listen very well.”
He flopped down on the bed to pull on his socks. “My shirt,” he said, holding out his hand.
She shrugged it off quickly, ignoring the discomfort it provoked. “What’s happening out there?”
“Put something on, you’ll catch a cold.” He cupped his hand to light a cigarette while she wrapped herself in the blanket.
“It looks like a fire,” she said.
“Stay here. I’m going out to see.” He left without kissing her.
It was 3:30 in the morning. With all that was going on around her she knew her chances of getting to sleep again were nil. She decided to get dressed. Just as she was dragging a comb through her hair, the phone rang.
The way Elliot was shouting she had to hold the receiver at arm’s length to decipher what he was saying. “It’s fricking insane!”
“Is it a fire?”
“Yeah, it’s Sarah’s church and it doesn’t look good.”
“Oh my god.”
“How can you sleep through all the fuss?” he hollered. “Almost everyone in town’s out watching the spectacle. They can’t get it under control.”
“I’m up now. Where are you exactly?”
“I
just came home for a sec,” he said, “to get some sweaters and blankets for people. There aren’t enough out there and the kids are freezing.”
“You don’t have to scream, I can hear you.” She held the phone to her ear with her shoulder while she rummaged through the drawers for her long johns. Focused on the fire, she almost forgot her pain. “I’ll meet you at the church.”
She joined a stream of people headed for the billowing columns of smoke, some on Skidoos, some on foot, still half-asleep. Approaching, she saw the water truck parked just far enough from the flaming structure to avoid being consumed by it. Three men with hoses were struggling to contain the blaze, but their lacy arcs of water kept freezing on contact with the air, tinkling down every which way. One of them was Tommy, she was almost certain.
Only a week ago there had been a fire in Kaivittuq, just north of Saqijuvik. It destroyed an entire house in three hours. News of it spread through the communities as quickly as the fire itself. It didn’t take long for the authorities to call it arson. Elliot’s version put all the blame on a teenager who’d been hot-knifing hash all night. At some point, the kid ran around the perimeter of his house squirting gasoline while his blotto girlfriend sat on her Skidoo hollering, “More fire, more fire!”
Yasmeen couldn’t shake the image from her mind, the bright embers of the flicked cigarette skipping across the fuel, the drawn-out millisecond of absolute stillness before the blue woof of combustion.
By the time she arrived on the scene the church was engulfed in the blaze, bright flames pouring through the windows like lava. Embers fell from the sky like orange snowflakes, snagging their points on neighbouring houses and telephone poles before seething into ash and fizzling out altogether. Yasmeen put an arm around Sam, gave her a squeeze and said, “Hey.”
“Holy crap,” said Sam.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Should you even be out here in your condition?”
“I’m okay.” A sudden updraft sent glass and other bits of debris shooting out of the building. She shuddered. “God, I hope no one’s inside.”
“I doubt it, not at this hour,” said Sam.
Yasmeen spotted Elliot out of the corner of her eye, distributing blankets while Jacqueline trailed behind with her tote of medical supplies. Though Yasmeen kept talking to Sam, her attention was more focused on the crowd, scanning over people’s heads, trying to locate Joanasi. “Sarah must be devastated. Where is she, anyway?”
“I heard she’s home, praying,” said Sam. “The sister took the kids.”
“And Paulussie?”
“Nobody knows.”
By 5 a.m. the church had dwindled down to a skeleton of itself. Yasmeen waited until the last wall collapsed and decided it was pointless to stay out in the cold while the rest grizzled to ash. There was still no sign of Joanasi.
On her way home she passed a woman carrying an infant on her back. The woman was walking at a rapid pace, too distraught to notice the baby squirming precariously in her amautik. Yasmeen worried that if she didn’t stop her and say something, the child would tumble backwards out of the hood. She retraced her steps, smiling in a gesture of great compassion. “Your baby, it’s upset.”
The woman stared gravely.
Up close, Yasmeen saw that she was much younger than she had originally thought, a teenager. She removed her mitten to shake hands, but the girl scoffed and kept walking. Yasmeen couldn’t understand how she had possibly offended her when all she had done was reach out to a fellow human being. How could the girl not have seen that her intentions were pure? The reaction baffled Yasmeen. It was a slap in the face. Yasmeen shook her head and slid her mitten back on. Continuing on her way, she ran through the scene again and again, wondering how she could have played it differently. All the way home she registered a foul taste in her mouth, the sooty residue, acrid and granular, of the demolished church.
•
At dawn, the faithful and the curious returned to the ghostly ruin to see what was left of it and to salvage whatever they could. The cooled relics were collected into heavy-duty garbage bags along with charred prayer books, a coffee machine that had melted into a smooth black lump, a single claw of the baptismal font. Here and there, red-hot coals seethed and glowered, but mainly it was a repository of ash and rubble.
Later that afternoon, officers from the Sûreté du Québec arrived to investigate. They wrapped the site with reams of yellow plastic tape that said “Police Line: Do Not Cross.” They went door to door with a notepad asking if anyone knew anything about how the fire started. By the end of the day Sarah’s church—or what was left of it—was officially identified as a crime scene.
Iris asked Joanasi to make an announcement over the FM that school would be closed for a couple of days to give everyone time to recover. She offered Sarah the gymnasium for the next few Sundays to hold services if she felt like it.
“What were you doing there,” said Joanasi, “after I specifically told you to wait at the house?” He was searching impatiently for something to make a filter with, not caring what it was as long as it did the job. He tore a strip off the back cover of her book of crossword puzzles.
“Everyone in town was there.”
“I told you I would take care of it.”
“What’s the big deal? Elliot called and asked for help passing out blankets. I met him there.”
Joanasi retreated into silence. He pinched some tobacco from a cigarette and rolled it into a paper with the hash, refusing to look up. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not. He called me to come.”
“I mean about the blankets. You weren’t helping, I saw you talking to Sam.”
“What, you were spying on me?”
He stuck the joint between his teeth, rummaging through his pockets for the lighter. His eyes swivelled up at her while his thumb spun the little wheel to ignite the butane. A tall flame shot up, casting him in an orangey glow. “The point is, you didn’t listen,” he said. “Did you?” He tossed the lighter on the table, but it ricocheted off and landed on the rug.
Yasmeen kneeled to retrieve it. Joanasi took three quick hauls on the joint, half of his face in shadow. When he offered it to her she wrinkled her nose. “No thanks, I’m not into it tonight.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Okay. More for me then.”
“I don’t appreciate you accusing me of lying,” she said after a long pause.
He blew a wall of smoke at her.
“Look, I know you’re upset, but that’s no reason to—”
“To what? To be mad when I ask my girlfriend to do one simple thing and she disobeys?” He smoked the rest of the joint until it was down to the filter and then crushed it in the ashtray.
She stood up.
He glared at her. “Aippaq, where are you going? We were talking.”
“I feel like coffee.”
A peculiar look came over him, as though he were trying to recall an important fact he had once heard. She could almost see the gears of his brain on overdrive. After a while his face brightened. He went to slap his knee but missed and hit his thigh instead. “Funny, you don’t look like coffee.” His laughter echoed throughout the room.
She rolled her eyes and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Did I say I wanted any?” he grumbled, when she returned with a mug for each of them. He stretched his legs out across her coffee table.
She put a cup in front of him and went to sit on the floor with hers. “So leave it.” She tapped out the cards and dealt herself a hand of solitaire. “More for me.”
He stood up and lit a cigarette. “Hey! Am I invisible here?” He bent down and mussed up her game.
She remained poker-faced through his little tantrum. She reached for her cup and took an extended sip of coffee. “So, let me get this right. You’re allowed to come back late from hunting and make me wo
rry all night but I can’t go outside in plain sight to help out when there’s a fire?”
“I told you already!” He let out a loud, fish-smelling burp.
“Uh huh, right. You got home late, so you went to your mother’s instead. You didn’t want to wake me.” It was their first real argument. She hoped he would see that he was being unreasonable. How could he not?
He flopped back down onto the couch. “Every time I got my head turned you’re with that guy, Elliot. Does he turn you on or something?”
“What? We work together, we’re colleagues.”
“He’s always flirting with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
His eyelid twitched. “A fire—since when is that work?”
“I told you he called me, I didn’t call him. And, anyway, Sam was there too, along with Jacqueline and Iris. We weren’t out there, the two of us, alone. Christ, the whole town was there!”
He stared vacantly, flicking his ashes into the coffee that he wasn’t drinking. “Yasmeenaapik,” he finally said. “Qaigit.” His eyes had shrunk to BBs. He looked half-asleep, which was how he always looked when he was stoned.
“What?”
“Just come.” He pressed his nose into her forehead and inhaled her deeply. He scissored his legs apart and gestured for her to sit between them. “Let’s forget about all this fire business.”
She leaned back into him as his hand reached around to unzip her. He dipped three of his fingers inside her and moved them around until they were coated with her glaze. He brought them out and slid them under her shirt, lathering her nipples. “Now isn’t this better than talking?” he whispered in her ear.
She rolled down with him onto the floor and went to remove her clothes but he grabbed her by the wrists. “No,” he said. “Me, not you. You owe me.” Like an Arabian prince he sprawled out while she slowly pulled off his jeans, socks, shirt, while she lowered his boxers to release him. He spread his legs apart and said, “Put it in your mouth.” She moved onto all fours and lowered her face over him, his smell so concentrated she almost gagged. He steered her closer to him. He used both of his hands. “What are you waiting for?” he snarled. His fingers dug into her scalp. She parted her lips as he pushed in, gently at first and then with exhausting resolve, struggling to get hard. They waited impatiently for his tiny spasm, the single, essential, involuntary jerk, but instead he went limp and slid out of her mouth. He blinked up at her.
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