by Cecelia Frey
He had chosen to let go of the past. He had chosen this woman who was walking beside him. Each step he took with her further defined who he was. He was okay with that. He lifted his face to the sun. He opened his ears to birdsong and human voices. There was tomorrow’s lesson plan, which, assuming there would be a tomorrow, he must look at this afternoon. But even that was too far in the future. Concentrate on the pathway before you, he told himself. It’s all you can know at this moment. This pathway and this woman who is walking beside you.
Helena’s step was light. Her spirits elevated by the morning, the scene before her, the man beside her, she did not ask herself if she was happy. Happy was too big a word, too big a thing to be. She was not sad or depressed or anxious, but … happy? Is happiness even a consideration? she wondered.
She had been happy with her sisters, three in a bed on a cold winter’s night. They would climb in with each other, hunker down into each other’s warmth, and tell stories. They had grown up and chosen men and taken different paths. That’s what happens to most people, so get over it, she told herself.
She had been happy with her sisters because she had not yet experienced anything bad happening to her. She had not been fully aware that bad things could happen. As a young woman, as a student, she had been in control of her life. At least, she thought she had. Then Ben had gone off the rails. Then she had obstinately driven the car that had killed her sister. How could life have been so cruel as to involve her in causing Amanda’s death? Life had played a terrible trick on her.
Although she would never again trust life, things were going well at the moment. In the past, she had been too trusting, but she had smartened up. No longer was she the wide-eyed ingénue of her youth, open and vulnerable to the world, who, with stars in her eyes, had married a man and honestly thought that she would live happily forever after. No longer was she the confident career-oriented smart young woman of her post-Ben pre-accident years. But these last two years, through Ben, she had been returned to a version of her early self-confident self, a version who no longer felt that disaster was lurking behind every bush. Still she had learned to keep one ear alert at the waterhole. And in her new wariness, her love for Ben was more realistic. She did not have to trust him one hundred per cent to love him. She could tolerate Ben as a human being and not expect him to be without fault.
She could and did acknowledge Ben’s help in her getting her life back together. The day of the pills, as her mind designated the event, she had stumbled her way back to him, crept up his stairs, knocked on his door, fallen into his arms. He had taken her to his bed, lain down with her and held her until she stopped shaking. He had fed her chicken soup and returned her to Esther. Later, he had been the one to suggest that she get a place of her own for a while before making decisions about them as a couple. He had walked her through the steps of returning to her studies. He had assumed that she had overdosed by accident and she did not set him straight. At first, she had been too sick to talk about it. As she recuperated, the words seemed too big, assigning importance to something that was actually quite trivial. And after another while she told herself a version of Ben’s story. She had wanted so badly to sleep, she had swallowed too many pills to help her sleep.
Neither had she told him the details of the time they had been apart. That time didn’t have anything to do with her life now or who she was now. It didn’t have anything to do with Ben. When she had been weak and sick, she had wanted to confess, but thank heavens she hadn’t. That sordid part of her life was a secret she did not want to share. She was thoroughly embarrassed and ashamed of it. Her penance was a ritual flogging of herself — how could she have been so stupid? How could she have picked up such sleazy types? How could she have not been concerned about catching some terrible disease? Secretly, she had herself checked thoroughly by a gynaecologist.
Also, she sincerely wanted to spare Ben pain. It was all very well to prattle on about free love but when one actually practiced it, usually there was a great deal of pain to one or more of the people involved. She and Ben had got their lives back on track. Why take a chance of pulling them off the rails again? And as those dissolute years dissolved into the past, they became ever more dim so that she could recall scenes but someone other than she was the actor in the drama. If she confessed, she would be telling Ben a story about a stranger, a stranger who, after all, had only asserted her freedom, the freedom of the individual to act as she chose. To act otherwise would be a betrayal of the sixties revolution, a revolution they had fought so diligently in their youth, a battle that Ben had believed in so strongly he had given up his country for it.
She did not consider these omissions to be lies. The information was not relevant to their life together. She was who she was, not who she had been. These things would not happen again. She no longer drank too much. She no longer collected pills. Her attempt at suicide was part of a distant past. She was like a soldier returned from a war zone who does not want to talk about it, who tries to live in the present. Mostly, she was successful.
Of course, she would always regret Amanda and her own self-centred stupidity. She would always regret that she had been such a mean older sister. But she could not change the past. In the past she had made bad choices, but now she was making good choices. No longer did she feel defined by those bad choices but, rather, by the choices she made now. She believed now that she had a choice, that her future was not foretold by fate. She was not a victim. She would live day by day, making the best choices she could at the time. And she consciously tried to be a better person. She tried to act with more compassion and kindness toward her fellow creatures. She tried to be more aware of what was going on with the people around her. She tried to sympathize with Esther. It was just that Esther was being so stupid, letting George get away with too much. And not only George, but that person, Veronica. To walk away and leave them with everything! It was insane. Esther had not even taken any money out of the marriage. She insisted that she had money of her own, a small investment from their parents’ estate. She was sure that if necessary George would help her but so far it had not been necessary. While she, Helena, kept at her about getting the finances down in writing, Esther kept prattling on about how things happened for the best.
Helena had no patience with Esther’s putting herself in the hands of a benign God who worked everything out for the best, but she had learned to tolerate Esther’s references to such a being. Instead of saying “tommyrot,” she smiled sweetly and nodded her head. And she had to admit that in some ways Esther was coming along quite nicely. She was not quite as soggily sentimental as she used to be. While she was still primarily driven by emotion, at times she could think things through using reason. A new pragmatism had taken hold.
Helena was equally pleased with her own progress. The past two years had definitely been a learning curve, she, too, was coming along quite nicely. She had learned to deal with pain — she had learned not to hold on to it, to let it flow in and out. This was an important lesson because everything caused pain — the past, the present, the knowledge that none of them could ever return to their light-hearted youth, the knowledge that she and Ben had destroyed innocence for each other. Ben’s smile was not the unguarded smile of the young man she had married. In it she saw a reflection of her own caution, not so much an inability to trust the situation completely, but, rather, the knowledge that things can come at you. Unexpected, dreadful things can happen without warning, but she had learned not to fear the future. She felt strong enough to endure, to accept whatever came. She could live with that as a truth, most of the time.
She tried not to think in terms of mythologies. She tried not to look for deeper meanings. No longer did she wonder why she had chosen that particular spot beside that particular playground where that particular child was standing on the sidewalk with his hand outstretched. It had all been, quite simply, a series of events. Why wouldn’t she chose that playground, it had been a
deserted place. Why wouldn’t she throw up, her stomach a roiling mixture of whiskey and fizzy sweet pink pop.
No longer was the hand that had directed Ben to Amanda mysterious, nor was the happenstance of Amanda’s words in the car the night of the storm. “Ben loves you,” the words that would eventually bring her up out of the cold black water. Those words were not Amanda’s foretelling of the future, as though she had known that Helena would need Ben, would need her words referring to Ben, to help her sister find her way back. Helena had come to the realization that none of it was a miracle. Why wouldn’t Amanda say those words, they were part of the subject under discussion.
She intended walking clear-eyed and clear-headed into the future guided by rational thought. She admitted that she did not know what the future would bring, but at the moment she felt optimistic about her strength and the strength of her will to cope with whatever that might be. She was making good decisions, she was back in control, she felt strong, she felt good. She trusted her new strong self. She had gone through a bad patch but she had emerged the other side. She slipped her hand into Benjamin’s where it was curled inside his jacket pocket. They looked up, at the trees, at the river, at other walkers and joggers. Mostly they smiled and even when not smiling, their faces wore pleasant aspects.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks as always to Willie Fitzpatrick, Dixie Baum, Sue Hirst for suggestions and lots of laughs in the process, to Barbara Scott for her editing sensibilities, to Pat Allan for the title. Family and friends, what would I do without you?
Thanks to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for providing financial support.
A special thank you to Luciana Ricciutelli, Editor-in-Chief at Inanna Publications, who must have incredible focus and endurance.
CECELIA FREY is the author of fifteen books of fiction and poetry as well as works of non-fiction and award-winning plays. She has worked as an editor, teacher, and freelance writer, and has for many years been involved in the Calgary literary community. Her short stories and poetry have been published in dozens of literary journals and anthologies as well as being broadcast on CBC radio and performed on the Women’s Television Network. Numerous reviews, essays and articles have appeared in a wide range of publications including newspapers such as The Globe and Mail and journals as varied as Westworld and Canadian Literature. Her novel, A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing, was shortlisted for the 2009 Writers Guild of Alberta (WGA) George Bugnet Fiction Award and she is a three-time recipient of the WGA Short Fiction Award. Her most recent publications include novels The Long White Sickness (2013) and Moments of Joy (2015); and a collection of poetry, North (2017).