What Can't Be Undone

by dee Hobsbawn-Smith

  Ariana looked up from her corner desk. Up close, she saw that his fair hair was muddled with grey and two vertical lines cut deep clefts in his forehead. His hands on his cowboy hat were weathered but clean.

  “Can I help you? Your bill, maybe? My sister will be — ” Violetta was upstairs, rebalancing her blood sugars with a shot of insulin and a bowl of lentil soup.

  “Oh, no! I don’t need anything else,” he said. “You must be the chef-sister. I just wanted to say thanks, to you, and to my lovely server. Amazing.” Violetta glided down the stairs at that moment, and Gordon’s steady gaze left Ariana’s face for hers. “Everything. Just … amazing.”

  The garden looks nearly done, plants slumping from last night’s frost, when Ariana carries her basket out to harvest the last of the zucchini. She’s ready to rest, too. While she usually appreciates the constancy of their clientele, today she wishes they’d all just pack their bags and fly south, like the grebes and geese. The winter closure lets her recover from early mornings and long hours on her feet in the kitchen. Lets new recipe ideas bubble to the surface. Beyond the raspberries, she spots the new cherry trees, slim whips in a cluster, already planted.

  Vi looks exhausted, leaning on the kitchen counter, when Ariana returns with the vegetables.

  “Sit down, Vi.” Ariana drags over a stool. “Has Gordon left? I wanted to say thank you.”

  “You just missed him,” Vi says. “Stop fussing!” But she obediently perches on the stool. “I’ve been thinking, it’s been years since you had went out and had some fun. When did you last have a date, Ari?”

  “Not interested,” Ariana replies shortly. “I’ve got plenty to keep me busy here.”

  “I know you do. Just asking. You could use a break.” Her voice changes tone slightly, dropping. “That guy you met in Toulouse — ever hear anything from him?”

  “No.”

  “All right. You don’t have to snap at me.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to. My hands are full, Vi.”

  Vi hangs her head. “I know it’s on my account,” she says, flushing as she makes eye contact with Ariana. “But Gordon and I have been talking, Ariana.”

  “Yes, I know. I saw the trees, he’s already planted them, at the south end of the raspberry canes. Fast worker, that man.”

  Vi smirks. “He thinks we should build a berm. Plant more trees, a whole orchard. More berries. Turn the place into a real agri-tourism gate-to-plate destination. And make wines.” She gathers up the zucchini and heads for the sink without looking directly at her sister.

  “What are you suggesting? We aren’t wine makers, and neither of us has the energy or time to take on another project. It’d take years to learn how to make fruit wine.”

  “Gordon is. A wine maker, I mean.” Vi’s pale cheeks darken. “I’ve invited him to come back tonight. For an after-hours dinner.” She looks sideways at Ariana. “I want you there. At the table, I mean, with us, not in the kitchen.”

  “What? Why’s that? You never invite people to dinner.”

  “We want to talk to you. About … about the future. So let’s just eat what Grandmère would serve, right? Something simple, whatever you’ve already made. Bread, duck, beans. Don’t fuss. Please.”

  “What do you mean, the future? Whose future?” Ariana, mystified, standing flatfooted in the kitchen. Vi, smiling to herself, tidying the dining room.

  The women set the best patio table, but the wind blows in off the lake with a vengeance. It begins to rain, slanting drops that cut through the air and the lake’s surface. Autumn has arrived, abruptly, as it always does.

  “We’ll have to eat indoors, Vi. Sorry.”

  Violetta carries in the sunflowers, scatters their petals on the tablecloth, adds glassware, cutlery, candles. When the table is set, she restlessly washes and re-washes glasses, polishes immaculate forks. Ariana retreats to the kitchen and turns on the radio. When she lifts the lids of the pots, the aroma of anise-scented duck underlaid by earthy beans fills the room. Vi comes in, prowling the narrow walkway, picks up baking sheets and rolling pins, sets them down with a clatter and bang.

  Ariana nudges her. “For crying out loud, Vi. Go for a little walk, the rain’s stopped! I’ll call you.” She leans against the stove, watches the vast sky streaked with clouds. On the lake, the wild waterbirds are gathering, canvasbacks, buffleheads, teals, merganzers in matched pairs. They lift off in successive waves, heading south, their wings drumming, water slapping.

  Vi returns, slightly out of breath. When she stumbles over the lip of the kitchen door, Ariana leaps, trembling, her arms open, remembering as she scrambles the graceful arc of Gordon’s rescue. Before Ariana can cross the kitchen, Vi regains her balance. Ariana feels a heavy knot beneath her sternum. She can’t guarantee their lives or their income, can’t keep Vi safe, can’t even catch her when she trips.

  “I’m all right.” Vi opens the cooler and pulls out a bottle, splashes wine into two glasses and sits on her favourite stool, her miscreant feet tucked under her. “The hospital isn’t our only anniversary, remember? Our fourth season, nearly done.” She hands her a glass. “Salut.”

  “Salut.”

  They sit at the counter in silence.

  Ariana hears the roar of a defective muffler. Gordon’s truck. The creases in Vi’s forehead ease as he hurries in and lightly kisses her tidy braid of hair. Observing that intimate gesture, Ariana wonders what else she hasn’t taken note of.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Did you tell her, Vi?”

  Vi’s face turns pink. “I was waiting for you.” She grabs Gordon’s hand. “We want to have a baby, Ariana.”

  “What?” The glass in Ariana’s hand almost slips through her fingers. Wine spills on her lap. Gordon, stifling a grin, picks up a towel and passes it to her. Ariana’s hands flutter. “You’ve never said anything about babies before!” Only once before — a wistful comment made a couple years ago, watching two toddlers with stains around their mouths follow their mother from stall to stall at the market, their chubby hands clutching half-eaten strawberries. Ariana had dismissed it as a passing fancy, far too risky for a diabetic with only one kidney and a short life expectancy. “Gordon? He’s like a brother! Isn’t he? Aren’t you?” She looks from one to the other.

  Vi starts to laugh. “A brother? That’s what you thought I felt? Oh, Ariana. You need to get out more.”

  Ariana flushes and ducks her head. “You could have told me,” she mutters. “Why didn’t you?” Her sternum contracts and releases. Gordon, his arm around Vi beside the maple trees. Catching her, his arms briefly suspending her above the earth. Blushing in the kitchen.

  “You said it yourself, you have enough to worry about, Ari.”

  “But a baby!” Ariana looks at Gordon. “This feels awfully out of the blue.”

  “Sorry, Ariana,” Gordon says, reaches for the wine bottle. “Can I?” She nods, and he refills their glasses, then pours a third. “We’ve been talking about it for awhile, but didn’t want to bring it up until we’d worked out the details. We’ve got it all figured out, and we want your … your blessing, I suppose. Your good will. I don’t want Vi to wait tables anymore.”

  “I’m with you there.”

  “I thought I’d build an addition onto the house, an east wing, so we wouldn’t intrude on you. Then a winery on the north side. I’ll put in more canes, they’ll be producing in two years. And more cherry trees. Maybe haskap, they’re doing well in field trials, and more rhubarb. Surprising, what good wine rhubarb makes.”

  “Grandmère made rhubarb wine,” Vi interjects, her eyes bright. “Remember, Ariana? No, maybe not, you were too young.”

  “Never mind the wine! What about you?”

  The sun breaks through the patchwork clouds, long shadows, surreal light.

  “What about me?” Vi touches her sister’s arm, gently, like leaves descending. “I love Gordon. This is more of a chance at life than I thought I’d have. It’s just like the birds, Ari
. Things come and go in their own time.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t mean I want to think about … you dying.”

  “Then don’t. But I want you to be to my baby what Grandmère was to you. When it’s time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You wanted to talk about what next, Ari. Well, what next has arrived, and it’s time to talk about it. No, don’t fuss. It’s a fact. All this day-to-day stuff is just detail. We have to talk about the big picture. About what might happen. I’ll need your help. With the baby, I mean.”

  “But, Vi — ”

  The lines in Vi’s face loosen. “Ariana, you know what’s coming. So does Gordon. I may have ten years.”

  Ariana shivers. Her innards clench and release, freeing a blur of relief and guilt and chagrin. She knows exactly what Vi intends to say.

  “If we do have a child, and if … when … well, I want you to help Gordon raise it.”

  Vi’s voice trails off.

  Ariana looks at Gordon, his hands sheltering Vi’s, and understanding flickers, like light on the water. “But I’m not mother material.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. What do you think you’ve been doing for the past four years, caring for me?”

  “That doesn’t make me a mother!”

  “You’re right. Sorry.” Violetta reaches out, her hand nesting on Ariana’s skin. “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. We can learn together.”

  “And the restaurant?”

  “Listen, Ari, I don’t know all the answers or what will happen. I don’t. But I’m willing to take it on trust if you are. It’ll all work out. Always does.” She looks curiously at Ari. Winks, her sightless eye a moon in the fading evening light. “You’re over-thinking this. What does your gut tell you?”

  “My gut?” Ariana breathes in. “I don’t … ”

  “Do you need some time to think about it?”

  “No, Vi. I don’t need to think about it.”

  The lake is still, the autumn moon re-emerging as the rain slows. Ariana slings a jacket over her shoulders and leaves Vi and Gordon together in the kitchen. She can see the shadows of their figures move close together as the patio’s outdoor lights flicker on. Something close to envy fills her as she watches them dance.

  Wandering along the path beside the lakeshore, tears on Ariana’s cheeks feel cool in the breeze as she tries to imagine Vi’s crooked smile superimposed on a child’s face. She pulls her hands from their pockets. Wide palms. Square knuckles. A maker’s hands. So like Grandmère’s. Ahead of her, several coots stop squabbling and lift clumsily into the air with a heavy drumming of wings.

  The envy fades, replaced by a current of possibilities. She wipes her cheeks with her jacket sleeve and stoops, picking up a smooth small stone that just fits within the cradle of her palm. A rapid release, and it skips across the lake, one two three four five skimming arcs that the avocets ignore. With a bobbing nod of her head, Ariana enumerates each quick touch of stone to water. She lifts her face to the birds, their impermeable bodies graceful in the air, their beaks pointing south. Their parabolic lives will bring them back in the spring. That much is a certainty.

  The Quinzhee

  HE WAS FOURTEEN THE YEAR WE built the quinzhee, and I was seventeen, the youngest kid in grade twelve. Old enough to know better, our taciturn Irish mother was in the habit of saying. She never said it to me again after he died, but I have said it to myself often enough.

  I have trained myself to never utter those words to my own son or daughter. But they reverberate in my head as I watch my twins go out into the sunlight, intent on testing themselves against the world. That is ridiculous, I know. All of life involves risk, and they could shatter their fragile bodies by sheer happenstance on the sidewalk right in front of this house. I am a cautious mother, in a way I never thought possible when I was seventeen and invulnerable, and Leo grows impatient with me even though he understands. “You have to let them go, Jess,” he says. But today, on the first anniversary of my mother’s death, it is too late to beg her forgiveness, or Jeremy’s, and I cannot find an olive branch within me to extend to my own hand.

  We lived south of Calgary, in the foothills near Priddis. God’s country, my Alberta-born father liked to say. On early spring mornings, riding my horse through the aspens, when the light lit the far flanks of the Rockies, I knew he was right.

  Jeremy was bouncing in his seat on the school bus one afternoon. “A quinzhee’s the coolest thing, Jess. You heap up all this snow and then you hollow it out into a dome. I want us to build one. It won’t take very long, and it’ll be fun.”

  “Jere, it’s freakin’ cold out there.” It was minus thirty-two that February day, and had been for a week.

  Leo was in the seat behind us. He pulled his toque over his curls and shook his head at my brother as he made his way up the aisle. “My stop. Man, are you crazy? See you tomorrow, Jess. Call me if you need help with your Chaucer. I think I have it figured.”

  I nodded gratefully, then let myself be persuaded by my brother. Anything sounded more appealing that afternoon than reading Chaucer. I didn’t understand him at all, kept skipping ahead to the Romantic poets, Byron, and Shelley’s skylarks. I wanted to write odes to birds too, and kept a journal of all the birds I saw. On our morning walks to the bus, the chickadees and nuthatches hung in a cloud above our heads, eager for the peanuts I carried in my pockets. They’d swoop down, falling like a piece of heaven onto my palm if I stood quietly and held out a handful. I had wings of paper describing them and other birds jammed in every pocket of every jacket I owned.

  Mom always wanted to know what we were up to, and her County Cork accent got thick when she thought we were heading for trouble or when she decided Leo had been in my room for too long. But we managed to duck out of the house unnoticed. Jeremy detoured to the barn and came back with grain shovels over his shoulder, Mario, our giant black schnauzer, plunging ahead. Cold settled on my cheeks and forehead, numbness that I impatiently smothered with my scarf. Jeremy led me to a clearing, a stone’s throw from where the lane’s double track curved toward the house, on the edge of the south pasture, aspens lining the north edge as a windbreak. It was a strategic spot: close enough to the house to meet Mom’s approval, but out of her actual sight. The snow lay untouched except for the deer tracks to the edge of the dugout, and the kiss of a pheasant wing alongside the imprint of a claw.

  “Here! This is perfect!” He showed me where to heap the snow, and we shoveled until well past sunset, sweat collecting along our backs and ribcages under our parkas and thermal underwear. I cut snow in perfect blocks that seemed to be made of nothing but light. Each block shattered when I dropped it from my shovel onto the growing pile, its mass reduced to crumbs of nothing.

  “Jere, it’s gonna take us forever. This stuff doesn’t look like it will ever be solid.”

  “Come on, Jess, just a bit more.” Jeremy looked frail, but he had been shoveling grain since he was a grasshopper, his skinny arms toughened into wire. I bent and carried, cut and dumped, finally throwing down my shovel and collapsing into a drift of untouched whiteness.

  “I quit.” I stretched my arms, then moved my legs. “Help me up, Jere, I’m stuck.” After he pried me loose, I turned and looked. A perfect snow angel. The adjacent snow pile was close to four feet tall. Astounded, I paced off its perimeter. “Thirty-four steps! Wow, Jeremy! Is that big enough?”

  My brother smiled smugly. “Nearly twelve feet in diameter, Jess. We’re halfway there.”

  A shadow fell across the slanted incline of snow, Dad tracking us down. “You kids! Haven’t you heard your mother calling you for supper?” His voice was as sharp as the wind that caught my face full on. I was immediately aware that the sweat on my skin was cooling, and snow was wadded under my jacket.

  Jeremy walked beside Dad, talking with his hands as he explained our efforts, and I entered the kitchen alone to get both barrels from Mom. She slammed an empty pan onto the counter and crash
ed the oven door shut before she turned to me. Her black hair was pushed untidily behind her ears, and the lines around her blue eyes were stretched as tight as her voice.

  “Where have you been? Where’s your brother? Jeremy! Get in here! It’s nearly minus forty! I’ve been worried sick. Jesus Mary, Jess, what were you thinking at all? You’re old enough to know better.”

  “Sorry, Mom. I lost track of time.” I shrugged and headed upstairs to wash, Jeremy close behind me.

  All that week after school, while I cradled the phone and listened to Leo read his idea of what Chaucer should sound like, Jeremy went out to the snow pile with a shovel, then pored over a heap of library books, anything with something to say about quinzhees. At supper, he recounted his findings. “Listen! This is so cool!” he said, practically levitating off his chair. “Every quinzhee has to sinter.” He launched into a complicated explanation of powder solidifying by heat, then sidetracked, taking a wild guess at the height of the growing snowpile. Our dad, the former bank manager turned rancher, observed Jeremy’s enthusiasm with approval, and demanded that he calculate the volume and weight of snow shoveled. Jeremy, his hair still damp from sweat and exertion, struggled with the formulas, counted on his fingers, then forgot the task in favour of expounding on the origins of quinzhees among the Dog-Ribs and Cree up north along the Canadian Shield. “And the Métis trappers too, so they could stay out overnight on their traplines. Hey Dad, we could set up traplines!”

  “Mister research king, how about you spend less time on quinzhees and more time on your homework?” Mom laughed, but she didn’t sound amused. She was leery of Jeremy’s propensity for research, stung by his announcement one day that her Celtic name meant ‘sorrowful’. “She died of a broken heart, Mom. How cool is that?”