by John Bemrose
Spied on Rowan today. I just got suddenly, awfully, worried about him. I was trying to paint, and I just knew he was in trouble. As if he had just stopped existing. I drove down to the school and sat across the road in the car. I thought, If he’s in trouble in the school, people will know, an ambulance will come. But what if he’s not there! Totally crazy. I knew it was crazy, but I couldn’t stop.
So I went to the office and gave them an excuse about needing to see him. The principal went down the hall with me and knocked on the kindergarten door. When Rowan came out, I could see in an instant he was all right. I wanted to fall on him, weep with relief. When the principal left, I took him down the hall and told him I wanted him to have some money. “Just in case,” I said, and I gave him a five-dollar bill. It was all I could think of.
I could see I had alarmed him. Maybe he lives over the same kind of abyss I do. Maybe I’ve put it in him – some huge unspoken fear. I’m always imagining the worst, which would be losing him. Erica said once: Be careful of thoughts. They have power.
It’s London. I know. If I care to stop, really stop and feel what’s there – it’s there. All the time.
Erica thinks I should get over London. She doesn’t know how hard I’ve tried. A woman’s body is her own, men shouldn’t decide for us, it’s not a child at that stage – I believe all that. For months at a time, I’m convinced. Then one day, rain falling, or I’m alone in the car, waiting for Rowan to come out of school, and it hits me. Her. I always think of it as a girl. The life I ended. I see little girls going past with their mothers and I think, That might have been her. Us.
Erica believes I should think of her as myself – she’s the self I haven’t let live. This seems reasonable, and I’ve had some dreams that supported it – the little girl in the park. Red hat. The seagull.
But then, why this guilt sometimes – a stone in my chest. And the wondering about what she would be like. The sense of the life she might have lived – that I deprived her of.
The future is real too. We say it doesn’t exist, but when someone dies, they are deprived of the future. I cut a piece of the future away.
Dr. Break (what a name for a doctor!) gave me the test results in his office. I was so upset I phoned my mother in Montreal.
Please don’t tell Dad. She wanted me to come to Montreal. But she was as confused as I was, I could tell. She did tell my father. One day he walked into my room and told me in no uncertain terms I wasn’t to see Billy again. He’d already forbidden it once, after catching us that day coming down from my bedroom. I was terrified of his anger. I didn’t see it often, but when he let it out – nuclear.
I think I was always afraid of his rage even when I hadn’t seen it. But I went up to Mad Jack’s again, everything in me trembling. I didn’t tell Billy I was pregnant. I didn’t want to hear him say, Let’s get married. I didn’t want to see him happy about it – because he would have been. Women on Pine Island don’t have abortions. They just don’t. I couldn’t have married him. I had no place for a baby.
Dad saw me coming back in the canoe – all hell to pay. Yelling through Inverness. Yelling about his brother, how he’d ruined his life by marrying the wrong woman, yelling about ancient history, about his own life gone wrong (I’d never heard that before). Yelling so hard he was weeping. Gripping me by the arm, making me promise I wouldn’t see Billy again.
I locked the door of my room and took off all my clothes and lay down on my bed. I was amazingly calm. There was another life in me. I remember the window was open, I could see the pines through the screen. A soft breeze. It was all so simple, really. I had a baby in me. I loved the baby’s father – why not have the baby? So simple – a calm, good place beyond all this insanity. The feeling lasted about an hour.
I saw Billy once more – went up to Pine Island. I almost told him, then I didn’t. What was the use?
The flowers in the market today. Little joy-bursts. I saw but couldn’t feel.
The flower seller’s wife – a cheerful woman with a black eye. Did he give it to her? We have no idea of other people’s lives. Dark caves, with secret entrances. If we could suddenly be transported into another person’s body, another life, and just feel for a few seconds what it was like, we might come back to ourselves with amazement. Shouting in amazement, that such other feelings, thoughts, were possible. Or crying out in horror. Or maybe it wouldn’t be so very different, maybe the old man whose face is covered in warts feels much like me – I hope not.
Richard came home today with tickets for New York. He means well – a surprise intended to cheer me. I feel sorry for him, putting up with me. Me with my uncombed hair and not even dressed yet, pretending to be delighted. I can’t imagine going to New York – the effort! Even the thought of MOMA leaves me cold.
I suppose we’ll go. I see Richard smiling, out of love for me – at least I think it’s love – and all I feel is a kind of pressure. I’ve always felt it around him. He knows what’s best for everyone and insists on it, for their own good, of course. It’s a kind of blind willfulness. The first time I met him I felt it. At our wedding too. There was a moment at the banquet – people striking their forks on glasses, that horrible custom, to make us kiss. Richard seized me, bending me right back in an elaborate show, making a real production of it. The complete ignorance, or at least sweeping aside, of what I am.
Richard can suck oxygen from a room. It was different with Billy. He creates a space I can expand into. With him, talking, I used to go on holiday; I made discoveries.
Idea for a painting. A man asleep with his mouth open. His mouth frowning. His whole face, body, slack, unconscious. While sunlight floods in from the window, making a glory of sheets, yellow wall, a child’s toy on the floor. What he doesn’t, can’t see.
We haven’t made love for three months. He doesn’t insist. I don’t know whether he minds or not. I mind: not not making love, but not wanting to. At twenty it was different. Sex: part of my love for the world. Indistinguishable from it. Who next? What next?
Thought of Billy today. That glimpse of Mad Jack’s as we went up to the Harbour (I often look there). A year since his last card from Florida.
I’m drawn to him so much these days, or at least the thought of him. His absence seems part of his ache in me, the emptiness. Sometimes I feel if I could reconnect with him, if I could talk with him about – anything – a lot of this would come clear. As if with him I could go back and reclaim my life. As if with him my mistakes might be dissolved somehow. Resolved? As if, as if. Erica’s probably right: I’m immature. Yet is maturity always the answer?
Can we ever really escape the things of our childhoods?
Read an article today about parents losing a child. Sometimes it drives them apart – sometimes brings them together more strongly. It’s been like that with Billy a bit – except, of course, that Billy isn’t here and doesn’t know. All the years since that summer, it’s been a bond he’s not aware of. It’s there in my attraction to him, like a painful little hook – the loss we’ve endured together, though of course he doesn’t know about it. I used to imagine telling him one day, when the moment was right, but somehow it never was.
I remember once, sitting up late with him in the Black Falls house, after Richard had gone to bed. He started to talk about having children one day. How he wanted to. How he wanted his son or daughter to have a different kind of experience from the one he had growing up.
I keep thinking of the land claim years. We had something then, the three of us. Something was in balance, or as near to balance as it was likely to get. Erica wanted to explore this today. Did I think of myself as loving Billy? As a friend, I said, as an old, dear friend. But I used to catch myself watching his hands, his mouth. Also, I had a sense around him of permanence, as if he’d been there from the beginning, like a twin.
And Richard? Erica said. Well, he’s my number-one guy, I said. My rock.
And how is it, living with a rock? Erica said.
I laughed while she waited, as she does.
I love him, I said. And this felt absolutely true. I was moved. But there was something sentimental in this, just a touch of maternal pity. What do I pity Richard for? For having to endure my moods? That, partly. But also because in some way he seems innocent. I know I’m in some way older than he.
I remember one time when the three of us were together. We had driven over to Maiden Falls for a picnic. Billy’s girlfriend was supposed to be there, but she’d had to go somewhere else. We sat at a picnic table overlooking the Falls. We were drinking wine. Richard started to tell a story about a paper route he had when he was a kid. He was doing imitations of his customers, or trying to. It wasn’t at all funny, but he kept pushing it, laughing hard at his own caricatures, as if he could compel a reaction from Billy and me. Anyone else would have sensed the failure and quietly given up. But he just kept pushing. I think Billy was as chagrined as I was, though we tried to laugh a little – to spare Richard.
Later, he and Billy explored the gorge while I sat and sketched. They were like two boys leaping over a gap in the rocks, one after the other, peering into a pool. I remember that very clearly. I loved them both.
Richard flips to the final entries. They are made in pencil, not ink like the others. And they are brief.
What does it mean to love somebody?
I suppose that I have to ask tells me something – but enough?
I HAVE TO LIVE.
In the mirror’s pool, his own face is pouched with shadow. Unable to sustain its stare, he turns from the dresser. He has thought of his life as being a certain way. Childhood, law school, meeting Ann – a comprehensible story, both like and unlike other stories – a basis of fact he could count on, that he could recite to others: here is my life. Now in the dusk-lit room he sees that for all these years, unknown to him, another story has been unfolding in front of him, under his own roof, in the bed beside him. It is possible that his own story, the one he has been telling himself about himself and Ann and Rowan, is only a subplot to this other. It is entirely possible, in fact likely, that it is false.
Shoving the journal back where he found it, he shuts the drawer.
In the morning, he drives up to Carton Harbour. Parking beside Whitbread’s, he walks to the water taxi depot and within a few minutes is sitting beside the driver of a fast launch, on his way to Pine Island. He hasn’t been on the reserve since the days of the claim, and when they swing around the last point, the familiar huddle of rooftops appears above the bay where the same dock still floats, surrounded by the same mob of steel boats, stirring in their bow-wave.
Leaving the dock, he crosses the beach and climbs among the small houses where, through a screened window, the sounds of Saturday-afternoon opera drift from a radio. In another minute, he spies the blue house amid its cloud of cedars. Billy is sitting outside, at small table in the shade. At the sight of him, heat floods Richard’s face and chest, and he has the sense his arms have been drained of their strength; but he keeps on, aware now that others are here. Behind Billy, a boy with long hair stands swinging a bat; a second boy, a little fellow who wears his oversized ball cap backwards, stands beside the table, watching Billy thread a rawhide lace into a catcher’s mitt. Noticing Richard approach, the boy at first stares unselfconsciously, then at once, as if confused, his gaze dissolves into blankness. Billy looks up then, just as Richard stops before the table, and begins to rise slowly to his feet. Richard’s breathing is shaky, and he feels an urge to throw himself at the other man. But he manages to say, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you. Not yet anyway. Look, can a guy get a glass of water around here?”
Billy hesitates, then, gently turning the little boy by the shoulders, he sends him off toward the other, who has fallen motionless with his bat. “You guys go on to Mike’s now,” he says, as he walks toward the house. The boys trail off, the little one casting backward glances until they disappear.
As Richard waits for Billy, he fixes blankly on the lake. He can no longer remember why he has come; he is not sure, any more, what he will say. He feels he is waiting for understanding to arrive – from out there, maybe, where a herd of tiny islands has paused in the sun.
Ahead of their canoe, islands detach themselves from the wooded shores – advance, loom, and fall behind to the steady bite of their paddles. Small sandy beaches drift by, solitary rocks surrounded by water, cliffs where ferns stand motionless in the shade, hillsides deep in pines. On a low point, a tent has been pitched. A striped towel drapes an overturned canoe. The little camp passes with an air of preoccupied stillness – perhaps its occupants are having sex or simply sleeping off the heat of midday. Ann watches the meshed doorway float by like a last outpost of civilization. She is bound for more extreme places. Sweat trickles from under her wide-brimmed hat, stings in her eyes. She would love a swim but judges her chances slim just now.
In the bow seat, Billy is at war with the water, stroking as if bent on shovelling the whole lake behind them – a pace he has kept up all morning. Several times she’s asked him to slow down, and though he does for a while, whatever it is that’s driving him soon takes over again. They are heading north, to the cabin on Silver. She sympathizes – Silver is so important to him – and apparently he thinks that going up there will help, will even heal, though really she is guessing, for on the subject of Silver Lake he has remained stubbornly uncommunicative.
And she could bear his silence, his attack on the water, were it not for her sense that his behaviour is in some way directed at her. Driving up that morning to Pine Island, her canoe in tow, she found him in a dark mood. She asked if he’d changed his mind, if he’d rather go alone. When he ignored her questions, she demanded, bluntly, to know what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, he told her. She did not believe him. And so she dropped the matter, thinking his ill humour would pass once they got out on the water. But presented, hour after hour, with his feverish paddling, she finds herself dreading the days to come.
Yet they had been getting on so well. The previous week they had driven to Perry Rapids Lodge, on the Armand River, for a few days of fishing and sketching among the pinkish cliffs around the rapids. He’d been out of the hospital for three weeks, and she felt he was much improved – more relaxed and readily affectionate. No one had ever come as easily inside her guard, or been as welcome there. And there was something else: a subtle confidence, a sense of deeper reserves. He told her he had lined up some jobs at the Blue Osprey and was even thinking of getting back into band politics. He’d told her, too, about how he and a couple of his old ball cronies were hoping to get a boy’s baseball team together on the Island. Apparently his nephew Jimmy and a friend of his had brought him back to the sport again. But there had been trouble. The friend, Dwayne, had overdosed on something and had to be taken to the hospital. Billy had clearly been shaken. “It never stops,” he said, speaking with a tone of inevitability, as if this was something he had always understood.
After being with her for much of August, Rowan had gone back to Black Falls to get ready for the start of the school year. Ann was planning to stay on at Inverness until the end of September, to get as much painting done as possible before she moved into a rented place in town. But even with Rowan at the cottage, she’d been able to work three or four hours a day, the only time when she was tolerably free of anxiety about the pain she was causing. She was still not sure whether The Last Woman needed more work, and in the meantime, she had started in on a series of three smaller paintings. Rowan, for the most part, seemed to be adjusting to the new rhythm in his life, though it sometimes broke her heart to see the brave face he put on. When he asked when she and Richard would be living together again, she told him, “Honey, I don’t know. But you’re always going to have two people who love you more than anything.” He answered with terrific fierceness:
“But I want you to.” And he had gripped her arm so tightly, it hurt.
Three or four times a week, she and Richard talked on t
he phone. Dialling his number, she would find herself looking forward to hearing his voice – needing to hear it, really, for their life together still had its place in her. And often it was good for a few minutes, but then his anger would begin to seep through. At times, she felt, his vulnerability was palpable. Once, awkwardly confessional, he admitted he had been doing “a lot of hard thinking” about himself. “I haven’t been there for you, Ann, not really – always working. And I haven’t been the best listener. I want to change that – want to mend things with you. We can do it, I feel that very strongly. We’ve already come through the worst – I know we’re on better ground already.” She was moved by his sincerity, yet like a forcefield coming down the wire, she could sense his old willfulness. She wanted to tell him that people don’t change, at least not very much, only circumstances changed, but it would have been unfeeling to say so. She said something vaguely encouraging, instead, aware that she had not thought hard enough about what their separation meant, or where it was leading – the subject was simply too painful. She only wanted to cling to the ledge she had hauled herself onto, it was all she could manage.
Steeling herself, she’d told Richard that when she moved back to Black Falls for the winter, she was intending to rent an apartment of her own. After a long silence, his voice came, thick with rage: “This isn’t what you led me to expect.” It took several calls before they settled back into smoother relations. Would she ever live with him again? One day, she came across a book he’d given her years ago. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century was not something she would ever have bought herself, and indeed she hadn’t been able to read more than a few pages. So much goodwill, on both sides; and yet, in some fundamental way, they had always missed each other. And it was her fault, primarily, wasn’t it? For she had wanted stability and goodness and a certain kind of maturity; and she had found them. But even at the time, she knew she was pushing against the grain of her own instincts. She had been, in her way, as willful as he.