“What?”
“Think about it, if not for him, you’d be out east and Todd would be in Rockton.”
“What an awful, awful mess. Can you bring him over tomorrow?”
“That’d be a good start. Now, close your eyes for an escape. We’ve a bit of a drive.”
I drift through miles on the last of the high.
We picnic at Niagara-on-the-Lake, a fancy basket lunch that I’m certain Sabina packed. “Can we see the Falls? I’ve never seen them.”
He pulls two tickets for the Shaw Festival out of his pocket. “Later.”
“We’re going to a play?”
“Getting Married, then we’re going to the Falls. Does that scare you?”
“Right now, anything resembling life scares me.”
The play makes me laugh—almost. The Falls make us dreamy. Someone tapping on Aaron’s shoulder makes him turn. “West? Wow, Aaron. Great to see you, man.”
“Uh, Dave? What’re you doing here?”
“Sales convention.” He takes me in, forwards his hand, and shakes my cast. “Dave Harcord.”
“Sorry, Dave, this is Ari.” Aaron stuffs his hands in his pocket. “Dave and I are friends from high school.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“So, how about joining me for dinner?”
“Ah, another time would be better. I’ll be home July. Okay if we catch up then?”
“Sure.” He play-punches Aaron’s shoulder. “You old dog, you.”
The elevator glass mirrors us as we ride to the top of a high tower for dinner overlooking the Falls. Bottom floor, Aaron’s head focuses on the floor, travelling upwards with the ascent of the car, his eyes meeting my reflected ones by mid-journey. “I am an old dog, aren’t I.”
“You are who you are and nowhere close to who you’ll be. Besides, I love dogs.”
“Who I will be is what scares me.”
“Expand.”
“I sometimes wondered about a September where you came back and told me that you weren’t with Jake. It’s sick, I know, but I wondered where we could go.”
“If you really think we’re sick, I’m walking home right now. By myself.”
“I just mean that you and I are outside the lines.”
“Well, that’s your own bloody fault for staying inside the lines for twenty-seven years. Your psyche has to go for something big to break you out of the wading pool you’re in.” The hostess leads us to a table. “Besides, in lioneagle years, I’m forty-two.”
He half smiles, his dimple like a period on the end of a happy sentence.
I near collapse into the chair. “Would I wreck things if I put my foot up beside you?”
“You want your boot off?”
“That’d be like milkweed coming out of the pod. I’d never get it back in.” The pain in me is startling, stretching toe to tip. I leave the pills in my purse, needing the way pain masks the ache in my chest. “Are you thinking all this line stuff because your friend saw us?”
“Scared me a little.”
“Because he’ll tell your parents?”
“No. They know how important your friendship is to me.”
“Do they disapprove?”
“What they know is you protected your dog, and Mikey. Besides my mom’s years younger than my dad. They get it.”
“So, then?”
“It was more I didn’t know how to introduce you. Unlisted, undefined things make me feel shoved underwater.”
“Jasper, does this man need a swim with a seahorse or what. We’ll take you for a dip after dinner.”
“In the Falls?”
“Don’t be daft, man. I carry my ocean with me.”
“Actually, I’d welcome Dave suggesting I’m dating. There’s a girl believing I’m coming back to settle down.”
“You’ve never mentioned anyone.”
“Emily. We dated through high school. Probably would’ve married if I hadn’t stumbled upon her and Dave in the hayloft.”
“Ouch.”
“Luckiest break ever. Settling down scares the life out of me.”
“Mayhem-free settling is all I want.”
“With Jake?”
“If I could mend his life, I would, but, I can’t navigate my own sorry self.”
“Would you ever go back with him?”
“I’ll end up a solo seahorse if he doesn’t find his way back to our shore, but he has fathoms to travel, and I’ve been told, or more warned, to let him go so he can dive where he needs.”
“Will he be there when you go this summer?”
“He’s taken a job on a troller. Huey thinks it could be good for him, but I don’t. He hates hauling live creatures from the ocean and mariners are a rough lot.”
“Losing his hand, his music must be devastating.”
“Music’s in the soul, not the hand. It’s not lost; he’s just bloody set on proving to us that he’s like his dad.”
“What is it? Why? I mean why do you love him?”
“Imagine a little kid who only wants to find a home meeting someone who looks into all the rooms inside you and says, ‘I know this place, it’s the other half of my house.’ Jake and I’ve always had this connection, like he’s my front door and I’m his, and on opening we never feel any fuss about the mess, just open arms inviting the other in.”
“I’ve never felt anything like that, not even Linda.”
“You shouldn’t. Your match will be the one jumping over the threshold into the great unknown.” I check his face. “Made you shiver with anticipation, didn’t I.”
“Thought opposites attract.”
“If you’re an ion maybe, but in the animal world an inchworm does better snuggling up to another wiggler than an elephant, don’t you think?”
His mashed potatoes flatten under the weight of his fork.
“You and Jake are eerily alike.”
“Alike?”
“I used to think the fog rolling in was his kindness spilling out. The kindness from you these years has soaked to my dry roots. Without you, Mikey and I would’ve become dust.” His hand feels fragile in mine. “You and Jake are the same good clay, but the elements have shaped you differently. Your solid life has given you wings at your core and Jake’s life on stormy seas has given him an anchor at his. And there’s the music situation.”
“Music?”
“You’re afraid to let yours out and he’s terrified to keep his in.” Candlelight pools in the water glass. “And you know why that is?”
“Fear?”
“You both know that when the music ends, you come to a silence where there’s no option but to listen to your inner animal.”
“You still believe I have one.”
“It’s getting harder and harder not to reach in and grab hold of it.”
The napkin spirals in his hand. “Are you caught between an anchor and a wing?”
“More suspended. You’re both the loveliest bits of my past. Jake, I hope, is my future.” My eyes lift to meet his. “You, I think, are my present.”
His smile is small, like a new leaf. “Is your foot up to a stroll?”
“Long as I have you to lean on.”
We walk, arms linked, stopping at a little jut to soak in the coloured lights. The spray makes me shiver and my hair party. “This has been as perfect as this birthday could be.” I tip-toe up and kiss him soft on his lips. “Thank you.” He wanders my face, risks settling in my eyes. I taste the salt on his thumb as he touches the healing line on my mouth. The pull of his hand under my chin brings my lips to his. Jasper whispers, Everyone needs a kiss on their birthday. I receive the gift, open and long. He gives more and more and I respond with a tiny bit of tongue. You’re allowed eighteen kisses.
“How . . . how can I be doing this?
”
My fingers feel the racing in his chest. “According to a wise bear, you have to, like taking medicine.” He takes a big dose and licks the spoon.
The years of longing in us, colliding with the feeling of my house being swept over the Falls, leave me trembling. My knee buckles.
“Come sit down. I’ll get the car.” He parks me on a bench, drapes his jacket over my shoulders, and runs.
On the drive home, as he talks me around the world, I’m thinking about his lips on mine and that I’m a few kisses short of the eighteen allowed. He helps me to Mina and Ellis’s door. “Ari? You okay?”
The anticipation of more kisses is snuffed by a shoulder aching up into my ear and a foot throbbing like an abscessed tooth. “I ask this in the most unromantic way imaginable, please throw me on a bed.”
Fifty-Four
Dead men, lost men drown me in terminal sadness. Mina stuffs my backpack and nudges me out the door. “Go with Mikey and Aaron. Mikey needs to see you’re breathing. The fresh air will do you good.”
Aaron is wilderness man. Everything he does—tent raising, snatching fish out of thin water, gathering wood, making fire—both anesthetizes and puts me in heat. I tame my hair and crawl out of the tent. Aaron asks, “Mikey asleep?”
“Sound.”
He invites me to a sit by the fire. I curl close, absorb his goodness. His chest is solid beneath my cheek and his heart beats: want-want, want-want. I take in the stars over his head. He explores them in my eyes. “What’re you thinking?” I ask.
“Nothing.” Sizzling sap spits.
“Liar, liar, sweatpants-on-fire.”
“You really want to know what thought flew through my head?”
I nod.
“You’ll think I’m nuts.”
“Then maybe I won’t feel so lonely.”
“I didn’t write a list.”
“What? There’s no list?”
“No, I don’t mean the list. I mean for this weekend. I just threw stuff into the jeep and picked you up.”
“Are you saying there’s no food?”
“There’s food, but it’s the kind of unlisted mess that has us eating hot dogs and chips for breakfast.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“Not having a list scares me and the fact that it scares me feels an awful thing.” He leans against the log, holding me, nuzzling my head-top, searching for a way to lay out the tangle in his head. “When I was ten, I was painting my uncle’s shed. The sky was loaded with these mashed clouds and I said, ‘I wonder what it’d be like to go right into them.’
“Uncle Pete put down his brush and said, ‘Whenever there’s wonder, you gotta go right into it.’ We just got in his jeep and left. Approaching dusk we stopped. He lifted the seat, tossed out gear, and we were set up in a wink. Next morning, we sat through that hour when the air colours and I had my first coffee ever and we grabbed handfuls of nuts and seeds from this big bag liberally peppered with Smarties. I marvelled that a man could eat such a thing for breakfast.” Aaron snugs me closer, pulling the sleeping bag over my wrecked shoulder. “We drove until the mist of cloud surrounded us. The falling sun caught the wet air and I felt like I’d entered a hidden dimension of time and space.”
I savour the slow drift of his hand down my body and back up to my cheek, lifting off my skin with each pass over my breast. Jasper meddles, Go into the wonder, Aaron. Go into the wonder.
Stop it. We won’t ever betray Jake.
Twenty minutes into a log-leaning, fire gaze, he sighs. “Never had that feeling since. I’m forever circling the wonder, watching like a spectator, never venturing into the heart of it.” His finger traces the scallop of my bra, venturing a quarter inch under the lacy wave, like a balcony sitter moving down to the second row.
I tilt my head back. “Are you wondering right now?”
“More than I ever have.”
My lips slide into the curve of his neck. One button slips away, two, three . . . four. I kiss his chest. He inhales with my hand’s descent, his leg opening, extending as I stroke his thigh, each ascent bringing my hand closer to where he’s swollen beneath his sweatpants. His face lifts to the bend and sway at the top of the trees. He makes not a single sound when I venture under, taking him in my hand, leaf on water light and slow. He lets me bring him to the mountaintop and push him over the edge, drawing in great wafts of air as he tumbles like a rock off a mountain.
I snatch the towel drying by the fire to mop him up, lean back against his naked chest, pulling his paralyzed arms around me, breaking a long silence with “You think your sleeping bag’s zipper is compatible with mine? I really miss being held.”
Middle of the night, sandwiched between him and Mikey, Aaron pulls me close, his hand venturing under my T-shirt, opening full on the lace covering my breast. “I can’t—”
“You don’t have to.”
“No, I can’t stop wanting you. I try, but I can’t.”
“Stop torturing yourself with the past and future. Just hold me now, please.”
When light surfaces me, I wait under the warm sleeping bag, weighted under the feathers of a dream, Natasha on the swing, Oh, Ari, look at the trees waltzing with the wind. My wooden lids lift. Aaron and Mikey are gone. I braid my forest-wild hair, swipe my teeth with my T-shirt, and crawl out.
The trees are heavy with dew. “Where’s Mikey?”
Aaron hands me coffee and points to a rock where the boy sits hopeful with his fishing pole. “I’m worried about him. He hardly talks.”
“He lost his brother.”
“And he almost lost you.” Aaron looks at the lake, not me.
“Aaron, please don’t pull away from me. I can’t handle losing anybody else right now.”
“I shouldn’t have . . .”
“I did the doing.”
“But I—”
“I warned you, Westwind, nor’easters mess everything up.” My blue enamel cup fits in a knot on the log as if a fallen spruce comes with coasters in Aaron’s camp spot. I head into the woods.
“Don’t get lost, Ari.”
“I already am.”
* * *
Mina turns on the hall light and finds me huddled in the corner. “Another nightmare?”
My head wobbles. “Len left me in a church. He didn’t want me anymore. There were hands waiting to grab my ankles if I got off the pew.”
“In dreams we replace what we’re most afraid of with the person we feel safest with. It helps us work things out in a safe place. How old were you in the dream?”
“Li-li-little.” I blubber, stutter. “I want . . .”
“What, Ari?”
“To be held.”
“By your papa?”
“I want Jake. I want Aaron to give back my dog.”
Mina helps me off the floor. “I’d hoped O’Toole being arrested would make the nightmares stop.”
“It’s just made everything bigger.” I despise the whiny snivel my voice has these days. “I keep seeing Todd’s little room. He never even had a chance to be happy.”
Mina settles behind me on the bed. “I had Todd in grade nine, the kid most destined to die confined to a La-Z-Boy. He wasn’t the chubby guy that people liked. Kids tortured him. When I saw him at the volleyball party, I couldn’t fathom it was the same person. Don’t tell me he never had a chance to be happy.”
“He was discovering his happiness, and when it comes to the root of why he’ll never find it, you come to Hariet Appleton.”
She turns to the ceiling. “Do you know how many times I’ve asked myself why I didn’t think to include Todd the day I came to invite you and Mikey to join us? If I had . . .”
“He was an unlikely white knight, but he protected me and Mikey all the time. Whenever I thanked him, he joked that his size was useful for something.”
“That’s a big sadness, too. Words and colour have left me. Like they’re disgusted with me.”
“They’re just giving you a little time and space.” Gently, she massages my shoulder. “How was your camping trip?”
“Mikey had a little rest from all the horror.”
“And you?”
“Aaron can’t get past the shalt nots.” I tuck my loneliness under the quilt. “I’m so heaved up inside, it’s just best not to get mixed up with me. If I lose him as a friend, I couldn’t bear it.”
“Are you coming back to do grade thirteen?”
“Dalhousie doesn’t want a broken volleyball player. Jake is breaking my heart back home. Aaron can’t love me here. I just want to run away and find June.”
“Only one anyone can find is their own self.” She captures my hand reaching for the pills on the nightstand. “When has there ever been a time for you to just love school?”
“Not since landing with M&N when I was eight.”
“There’s no high school in Pleasant Cove. Come back here and get your marks up. It’ll give you options to forge your own destiny.”
“Seems anything I forge dissolves to ash.”
“Lioneagles arise from ashes.”
Fifty-Five
Aaron West is an unlisted wreck. He opens his mouth to speak and ends up chewing air. He moves in like a kiss might be coming, then dusts a used-up eyelash from my cheek. I bring lemonade to his table. “I asked for Coke.”
“Good lord, West, as if you need more caffeine.” I ignore the other customers and sit. “Let this worry go. We’ll sort things out in September when you’re one hundred percent student, not a teacher.”
“You are coming back?”
“I’ve no clue where I belong.”
“Me, too. I feel so stuck and at loose ends.”
“Wait ’til after my shift. We’ll talk then.”
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