Cracked Pots

by Heather Tucker

  “He’s gone?”

  “Just.” My legs are jelly as Ellis helps me stand. “Never seen Aaron anything but rock solid, but right now he’s broken wide open.”

  “A dolphin needs that, right?” I sponge up my snot with the too-long sleeve of Aaron’s jersey.

  “Right.”

  “Don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

  “Aaron took care of everything.” He tucks an envelope in my hand. “He said start by reading this.”

  Ari: You knocked down the walls and set me free, so I can do nothing less than listen to Ori whispering inside. That night at Lake Louise, I heard her voice, more of a song singing, that I was to let go but never ever say goodbye. Before you, I was bound. The unravelling has loosed a spirit thread, the end of which Jasper holds. When a dolphin and a seahorse fall in love, the only possible outcome is ever-changing magic in an unfathomable ocean that fits in a pocket of wonder.

  No matter my location on this planet, Sunday will always be yours, in my thoughts, my pen, my voice—however I can reach you, I will. Aaron

  That’s a clean break, Ari. It will scar beautifully.

  * * *

  Like a sturdy bra, Mina and Ellis give comfort and support from Vancouver to Halifax. Somewhere over the prairies, my lungs feel like a depressurized cabin. Tell me I did the right thing, Jasper. I could grow to love Peru.

  Peru is his hop to his next step to his next jump to his next hop, step, jump . . . leap, glide, flip . . . You see how he loved us. He’d swim in the bathtub for the rest of his life if we asked.

  There’s an infusion of oxygen as I sense Aaron discovering the list I tucked in his backpack: Gray Rock, Sunday, Listing, Dirt Year Clay, Freedom Love, Dolphin Shower . . . I sense his one-dimple smile as he reads the poetry he stirred in me.

  Freefall

  Hesitation, at the open door

  in the long uncertainty passion growing

  until gravity

  pushed.

  Some freefall through air

  he, through ari

  like wind through aspen, sun through water.

  Who flies without first the climb,

  the leap?

  And who absorbs the passing magic

  without looking up to his descending grace,

  that warm sou’wester, stirring, settling,

  forever freefalling in my soul.

  Ellis moves the arm rest and holds me through the descent.

  Sixty-Five

  William Walrus punches my ticket. “Imagine, our little miss off to university. No better place for a seahorse than Saint FX.”

  “Oh, come on. How the frig do you know I decided not to go to Dalhousie?”

  He smiles, returns my ticket, and opens his hand like he’s owed a penny.

  “No, William. It was a dirt year. No disasters.”

  “You, little miss, took hold, riding a wave that you knew would break your heart. It cost you.”

  “Aaron?” He nods and I hand over a penny. “You’re downright spooky.”

  “Eight down, just two cents to go.”

  “I can handle that, eh?”

  “On my whiskers, little miss. You’re well past the Oh shit line now.”

  “Who? How?”

  William winks and moves along.

  * * *

  I’m not surprised to find Aunties M&N and a lanky boy who prefers being called Mike Butters now setting up my new nest in Antigonish. The corner with the best light provides a little studio. On a pudgy red sofa is a gift from Aaron, a little mottled pup, maybe a beagle, spaniel, poodle combination. Too small to make the leap off the sofa, she soft-tumbles, then waggles sad-eyed over to me.

  Mary skritches the pup’s dangly ear. “You have her name?”

  “Sunday.”

  * * *

  Lying in the dark, snug in my featherbed, I understand pain as catalyst, pushing me from sleep to the blank page, then light cutting through the window, moving me to my sketchbook. Always, the lines, the shadows and light falling on the page, make his face. Sunday paws at my leg. “Hey, girl.” She’s grown too big for my lap but it’s her preferred perch. “This is Jake. He knows the language of a thousand creatures.” Her paw chases the pencil. “Just two classes, then we can head to Skyfish for a long weekend. Maybe by some luck he’ll come home for Thanksgiving.”

  I collect my professor’s scribblings—fresh, innovative, quirky, insightful—tucking them inside my gem room. Usually, I bump into one of them while reading my way across campus. My nose sniffs through Waiting for Godot while my belly thinks about second helpings of turkey. “Hi, Ari.”

  “Libby? What brings you here?”

  “Aaron sent me info on Peru. I-I . . .” Never in a million years would I imagine Libby to be the kind of girl to blubber. “Climb Every Mountain” seems more her anthem.

  “Come on, my nest’s just over this way.” I link arms with her. “Face it, girl, he’s your match.”

  She snuffles her nose on her sleeve. “What?”

  “Any woman with a single adventure cell couldn’t help but love Aaron.”

  “I-I shouldn’t’ve come.”

  “No sense delaying the inevitable.” She follows me up the stairs. Sunday stretches from her sleep off the couch and Libby goes right for a snuggle and I know—really know—I don’t want Aaron to be alone. “Had all your shots? Passport up to date?”

  “He loves you.”

  “He does and I love him, always will. You up to sharing him with me? Because there’s a thread connecting us that can’t ever be broken.” She must have been holding in the tears for a year. “Come to Skyfish for the weekend and we’ll settle these winds.”

  I load her in the truck and Sunday has a lap for the journey. She finally talks to the side window. “If I could have a finger of Aaron or a single minute, I’d take it.”

  “Libby, you’re looking at a lifetime of hoisting yourself up mountains and plunging over waterfalls in rubber rafts. And a finger isn’t going to cut it; the boy will have you doing it on a zipline over the Urubamba Gorge.”

  “How can you let him go?”

  “I’m not. I’m letting him grow.”

  “Without you?”

  “No, separate from me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Not sure we fully do either. It’s like . . . Last Christmas, we were in the Laurentians. At the end of a packed day, all our senses teetered on overload. As we watched the sun fall, we inhaled and at the exact same instant said, ‘Tomorrow we go home.’ My exhale was coloured with contentment, his with disappointment.” I wait for a face-connecting stretch of road. “What kind of love lets a person live their wrong life?”

  “I’d listen to him talk about you last year. You’d become mythical in my mind.”

  “Everyone’s mythic, but most never see it. I think you see your mythic existence. You should go. Dolphins do better in pods, than alone.”

  “A-a-after school? You’ll get back together?”

  “Not like we were. We’re exploring new spatially expansive, inner outer, planetary, microscopic cell terrain.”

  “Oh. How . . . what do . . . wh—?”

  “I see you understand about as much as Aaron and I do.”

  Mary comes out in response to the canine chorus. “Ari, you brought a friend.”

  “It’s a dolphin for Aaron.”

  “You shipping her to Peru?”

  “Yeah, the meddling seahorse is sticking his snout in again.”

  Libby bites her lovely lips. “Aaron will never look at me the way he does you.”

  “You’re right. When he looks at you, he’ll see open water. I’ll never see that look in his eyes.”

  “He’s blind to me.”

  “No. His eyes were just stuck on shore watching out for me. Aa
ron’s not drawn by normal girl bait. You have to lure him with things like . . . you long to teach devastated humanity the physics of hope while living in a treehouse.” I ready for explanation; instead she nods. “Good Lordess, I just quoted one of your diary entries, didn’t I.” I locate pen and paper and write.

  Westwind: The trouble with a nor’easter is she keeps stirring things up. This one is to settle hearts where they belong. Remember our conversation over dinner in Niagara Falls? Well, look who’s jumping over the threshold into the great unknown.

  Now, knock off all the ‘I shouldn’t, I can’t’ and leap. The only way to betray a seahorse is by not embracing love when it lands at your front puerta. Ari

  Sixty-Six

  A letter from Libby tells me she’s left for Peru.

  Post from Sadie, Jake’s foster sister, spills that Jake is shacked up with a jaded old fox.

  And, strike three, Jillianne has a stroke.

  Auntie Dolores uses gentle words like “mild” and “transient.” “She was seeing spots, her speech got slurry, then she said her world tilted, but it’s passed.”

  “How, Auntie? She’s just twenty-two.”

  “They found a tiny hole in her heart. Let me see, I wrote it down, a ‘foramen ovale.’”

  “Can they fix it?”

  “She’ll have an operation on Friday.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  The surgery was invasive, but by Sunday Anne is sitting, smiling, eating pudding. The intern stays, answering questions, I think because he’s never seen so many pretty girls in one hospital room. Jennah points to me and says, “Tell that one right there that her sister’s going to be fine.”

  Dr. Adorable says, “She shouldn’t have another concern related to this.”

  I ask, “What caused it?”

  “It’s congenital. All babies have it, but the hole usually closes with the first breath.”

  Jacquie hands me my jacket. “Jennah, Jory, and I are staying until there’s nothing that needs doing, so go back to school without a worry.”

  Anne says, “Hey, Ari. I have a kintsugied heart. How about that.”

  “Think maybe all of us sisters do.”

  Sunday is wearing a bonnet and dress when I go to pick her up. “Far out.”

  Celine says, “She can keep ’em.”

  “Thanks.”

  Arielle says, “Wait, I’ll get the panties.”

  “Awesome.” I stuff them in my pack. “Give Leo a big hug from me when he wakes up.”

  Dolores provides a care package, not just driving snacks but home cooking to last me a week. It’s something all my aunties do, and Mum never did.

  * * *

  November sludges in, damp, gray, and ugly, and with it comes a weightiness I’ve never known. Ever. Not even when Len died. What new hell is this?

  Jasper is quiet, see-sawing between panic and despair. Jake’s with Dulcie? The name sounds like the sad tunes he used to play.

  The floor of the sister-house has recovered, yet I can’t shake the feeling that it is riddled with holes. Nothing feels safe or solid.

  And nightmares arrive, ones I never had back when Nat was found, stranglings and being stuffed in a vent. I wake, choking, reaching for air. What the hell, Jasper? I turn on the lights and wait for morning; too many mornings I sit, and sit, and sit waiting for night.

  My paintings are twisted and screamy, my writing black, and sometimes Sunday pees on the floor because I forget to take her out.

  Whenever the fragrance of a summer fire wafts through the window, I climb onto the small balcony and my neighbour, Greg, passes his joint through the bars. He sits easy against the cold brick. “Professor Anderson posted the psych results. You got top mark.”

  “No great feat when your family wrote the book.”

  “Really?”

  The weed fires red. “Yep.” I’ve read my psych text cover to cover. Went searching for more. Until now, “troubled” labelled my family. In this place of higher learning, Appletons are called what they are—deviants, narcissists, incestuous, addicts—and hearing voices is a whole other kettle of crazy. The diagnoses decompose like beached whales in my head.

  “What’d you do your English essay on?” He passes me the rest of the joint and lights another.

  “Call It Sleep.”

  “I just reworked an essay from high school.” His head twitches with his laugh. “Bad idea. My mom’s going to pitch me in the gulag at my grade.”

  “They don’t send report cards home at university. Lie.” I pick blisters of rusty paint from the railing and memories of the craphouse fester like an abscess.

  “She’ll find out. She teaches Russian lit here. Wanna come over?”

  My head folds to my knees. “I just want to sleep.”

  I see the rabbit in him: the silence of his hop over the rail, the softness of his hair, the twitch of his smile, his longing to copulate. Rabbits are no match for a lioneagle, still I let him push me inside, pull off my sweater and jeans, and kiss my neck. We drop to the bed like the last leaves clinging to the November maple.

  After he’s done, the line of his back looks broken as he sits and pulls his shirt over his head. “Gotta go.” A string of light snakes across the floor. “See ya.” He steps across it, disappearing through the window.

  I leave my window open for a boy without dreams. He hops in and out of my bed, disrupting my nightmares and filling empty space. Term end, he helps himself to two hundred dollars stashed in Len’s pot. “Makes us even for all my dope.”

  The pot tilts, graceful and slow, hesitating at the shelf’s edge. I dive, desperately trying to cushion its impact. A dozen pieces scatter like a spent blue rose. I lock the window, then gather every shard and sliver.

  * * *

  Mid-December stings white, crisp, and blue-skied. A package arrives from Aaron full of pictures and shore treasures. He looks tanned and joy full. Ari: You won’t believe this. Tino arranged for supplies to build a school. I eat an entire tin of Mary’s fudge that I brought as a gift for my favourite professor. I feel sick.

  Least you feel something.

  I pick up the ringing phone. “Merry Christmas, kitten. Found what you’re looking for. Irwin did set up that store caper.”

  I swallow fudge-flavoured acid. “Oh. Hang on to it for me.” I sponge up tears spilling down my cheek. “I got a letter from Aaron. That was really nice of you.”

  “A perk for being in the construction business. Have a good little holiday.”

  “You, too.”

  Mina calls, inviting me to visit. “Can’t, Mina. I have a ton to do.”

  In truth, I’m ahead. Working at the easel fuels the pain in my shoulder, so I do it, hour after hour after hour. Biology, like a scab, is a thing I can’t stop picking at. Library shelves groan with devastating accounts of humanness and inhumaneness. My classes—English, sociology, psychology—reward exploring especially dark themes.

  Mina says, “You sound kind of blue, Ari.”

  “What luck for an artist, eh?”

  * * *

  Classes end on a Friday and an expanse of three weeks at home is mine for the nabbing. I’m marooned on the bed. Only Sunday’s whining gets me up. I have weed. I have Dilaudid. I prefer the pain. Raising my arm is as good as cutting used to be, but without the mess.

  Monday morning has the painful stab of brightness that new snow brings. I open an eye to Sunday’s sad-eyed stare and Jasper poking. Get up, get up, get up, get up, get up . . .

  Shut up.

  Know what we know?

  You’re going to bloody well tell me, aren’t you.

  There’re a lot of ways to die, and there’s not much control in it.

  What’s your friggin’ point?

  Dying is pretty random. How we live, not so much.

  That�
��s it, library ban for you.

  We know this, not from books; we know from Appleton to Irwin, Koshkin to Trembley, West to Zajac; there’re a lot of ways to live.

  So?

  So, get up, get up, get up, get up, get up . . .

  It’s like a mosquito I can’t crush.

  Get up! You are Ari Lioneagle and Sunday and me are your sidekicks.

  I haul myself to a sit. Please, please, just shut the frig up.

  * * *

  Mary tries to enter my silence over Christmas. “What is it, Ari?”

  I shrug. “I just feel so weighted. I’ve lost Aaron. Jake.”

  Nia sits on the coffee table. “Losing love isn’t what’s pulling you under. It’s time for you to exercise your limbs on your own. University is your time to open windows, sort through rooms, study treasure maps, look behind doors, explore new corridors.”

  “I was loving school until I got those letters from Libby and Sadie.”

  “And you got that call about Jillianne.”Nia says.

  “She had a little hole and they fixed it.”

  “The tiniest of holes can cause a great deal of damage,” Mary preaches, “And before you can mend a pot you have to know where the crack is.”

  “I do know. Jake has fractured me beyond repair.”

  Nia says, “The Ari we know can rise above a lost love.”

  “So, what’s this shit I’m sinking in? Mikey’s off my back. Mum’s ash.”

  “My guess is there’s a fracture in your own core that you couldn’t tend to because you were so caught up holding everyone together.”

  “But I don’t stuff anything. I rage against the dying light all the time.”

  “Good.” Nia hands me my coat. “Wood pile’s low. Get out there and split some logs.”

  * * *