Berth

by Carol Bruneau

  “Okay.” I wasn’t convinced, but maybe hoping would make it so. “There must be something you can do, though. I mean, you can’t just…give in.”

  “Jesus, put you in charge!” He smirked. “You’d give the bastards what for. Rapunzel, up there in the tower.” Yawning, he rubbed his jaw. I saw myself in the lantern, vapour fogging the windows, the glare of the sky and mercury bright as tinfoil.

  “Maybe we should think about moving,” I said, as if light-struck.

  “Oh. Tess. Let’s worry about it when we have to.”

  ***

  The sky closed in again, grey and drizzly, clouds like smoke above the orange woods, as if everything were smudged with the same dull pencil. Sonny stayed home one Friday because of a sore throat, hiding out upstairs reading comic books—‘vintage’ ones, a word he’d picked up. Read a book; you had to keep at him. Don’t they have anything in that school library? He’d glue himself to The Hulk and Batman, stuff my brother and I read as kids. Show some imagination, I’d say. Climb the hill. Get some fresh air. It was hard not to think of the Lego languishing in his old room, though he’d probably outgrown it anyway.

  At least he was occupied and not out horse hunting that afternoon.

  It was cold enough for gloves, jackets with sweaters. In a blip of dying sun, the high-rises across the harbour blazed a steely orange as Hugh and I set off on a walk down the beach. I’d have just as soon stayed inside, frying bologna for supper. Cape Breton steaks, Hugh called them, though I didn’t quite catch the humour. We hadn’t made it to the grocery store.

  Moving at a clip, he leapt from rock to rock. The dog kept eating seaweed till I scooped him up; squirming in my arms, he was too big to carry. Hugh’s hair blew back in damp snarls, and he was whistling. It was hard to keep up. My sneakers kept slipping, and I pictured one of us snapping an ankle, Wayne coming to ferry the lucky person to Emergency. A bone would set in the time it’d take, never mind the city’s proximity. It was like gazing across at another galaxy; those blazing windows had nothing to do with us. Their lights would blink and bleed into dawn, always growing more distant by daylight.

  My feet squelched as I trailed Hugh along a mucky stretch. The sand stank like rotten eggs. Clam shells lay like notes ripped from scribblers, some whole enough that I wanted to save them—for what, though, ashtrays and candy dishes? Women like Joyce LeBlanc would know, and Reenie. She could have a house full of painted shells, art made of flotsam.

  Hugh stopped and shook out his limbs, almost shivering. He bent and hung his head, his hands pressed to his thighs. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just a little, I dunno, dizzy, that’s all.”

  An uneasiness burrowed through me. Worry. “What?”

  “Nothing. Too much fresh air, maybe. Too much of a good thing.” He smiled and picked up a knotted piece of driftwood like a staff, poking at litter that had washed up—the daily dose. “Ocean’ll take it away,” he said in that fake voice—his Passage voice. “What arseholes people are, Willa. Jaysus.”

  I set the dog down, hauling him away from a rotting bone. Hugh picked his way along like a heron. “Blame it on the boats,” he usually said, “foreign vessels. Makes you despair.” That’s what he’d said once finding a duck wearing a beer can choker, a six-pack of feathers flecked with bunker crude. Right now I was more concerned about him. I thought of that list of symptoms; what were they, again? There must be a test you could take if you showed signs…

  “Hugh—?”

  Oreo lunged, taking me with him. Being on his rope, there wasn’t much he could do to warn us.

  Hugh spotted it first. Something in the sand at the edge of the water, little waves pulling at it. Straining on his rope, Oreo whimpered then started yipping.

  Lying face down, the shape appeared to be a woman. The tide tugged at the strings of her red jacket and locks of hair laced with seaweed. Sand filled the ridges of her jeans. She looked like a swimmer who’d made it through a marathon and fallen asleep. Except for the sea filling her clothes, she seemed flattened, a paper cut-out doll.

  Hadn’t Charlie said once that drowning victims bloated, gases buoying them to the surface?

  That she was dead took a moment to sink in.

  Hugh pushed me so hard it knocked the breath out of me. I fled to higher sand. Shaking, I watched him bend over her. Oreo pulled and whined.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Hugh yelled, helplessly. He sounded stricken.

  Stumbling towards him, I glimpsed what should’ve been a forehead, wet hair clinging to something black.

  “God damn,” Hugh was saying, his teeth raking spit, his voice almost a hiss. “A fucking jumper—you can tell. Every fucking bone broken. It happens when they hit.”

  “Oh my God,” I heard myself whisper. Vomit pooled in my throat.

  “Get the dog!” Hugh seemed to weave as he stood over the woman. Yanking her by the jacket he staggered, trying to move her to safer ground. I tried thinking of beached whales that people fought to save.

  “I’ve never seen a body before,” I tried to tell him, which wasn’t technically true. I’d seen those friends of Charlie’s lying in state. Gunshots and bugles had shocked the air at their funeral, bouncing off trees, igniting tears. And I’d seen my mother, though I’d been so little, and she a mannequin inside a big jewellery box on a berth of roses. I’d wanted my father to kiss her awake like Snow White. How will she breathe? I’d cried, thinking of insects Jason caught in jars, forgetting to punch holes in the lids. Honey, she’s gone, my father had said. Gone gone gone: the dark of the closet, later, when I hid and refused to come out.

  Somehow Hugh dragged the body towards the dune. I glimpsed the rest of what might’ve been the face—eyeless sockets, the nose eaten away, and a hole where the mouth should have been. The only thing proving it was human was the clothing. As if she’d been dressed for a hike when something snatched her.

  I threw up on the sand.

  Suicide, Hugh kept murmuring. The pup barked his head off. Suddenly I was plugged with fear. Sonny—was he still inside? Sweet Jesus, let him be in his room.

  The smell, when it reached my brain, was like the stench of something an animal, a dog, would roll in. A field of dead clams. The kind of smell you panicked at the thought of getting on your clothes or skin.

  Oreo had finally given up, and was licking his paw. Out on the spit, I saw the light come on in Sonny’s window.

  Hugh seemed calmer now, sort of, though I was still shaking. Thank God he knew what to do. “Come on.” He tugged at me. “I’ll call the cops and the Coast Guard. Not much else we can do. The cops’ll come out, and the examiner. They’ll curse her, you watch, for washing up out here and not someplace easy, like under the bridge, or the dockyard.”

  He didn’t need to say he’d dealt with this before.

  He went to put his arm around me, but I reeled away and was sick again. When I glanced up, he was kneeling by that filthy, icy water, washing his hands.

  The police boat docked at the wharf we never used. Hugh and I met them halfway down the beach. An officer was already taping off the pebbled part where Hugh had managed to roll the body. “Away from the dogfish,” he quipped when they reprimanded him for touching it.

  I should’ve run back and stayed with Sonny, who was holed up in the kitchen. There’d been no time to stop and explain anything. But I couldn’t pull myself away from the beach. She needs me, I thought, ludicrously. She needs a woman here, with all these guys—as if anything more could happen to her. The beefy, uniformed cops in their orange vests barely looked twice at me. It was only Hugh they had time for, and only just.

  “But who is she?” I murmured stupidly, as if they should’ve known. “H-how long—?”

  “In the drink?” One of the cops, a younger guy with short dark hair, finally glanced at me. “Could be nine months. Salt preserves ’em, and the cold.”
His expression was almost sympathetic. “But they’re not gonna look like Elvis.”

  That night in bed I held Hugh’s hands, slowly turning them over, studying them. The sight of them carried me out of myself. The most beautiful part of his body, his hands. It almost made me weep, touching his palms.

  “There you go,” he said, gently. “Read my lifeline. Go on. What does it say?”

  He was still jittery, too, but trying to soothe me. He brought my hand to his lips, drawing my fingers into his mouth. Curling my fist in his, he kissed me.

  It made me close my eyes, and I gagged as the image of that blackened face swam before me.

  “Shit happens, Tessie,” he whispered. “Life goes on.” Then he paused. “I’ve got a jam this week,” he said, his heartbeat miles away. “Will you guys be okay?”

  ***

  The body turned out to be an eighteen-year-old. An autopsy showed she died of drowning, and had been in the early stages of pregnancy. Foul play was not suspected, we heard on the radio some time later. Anyone who may have seen the woman was asked to notify police. That’s all they said. Her name was withheld pending notification of next of kin. There was no mention of how long she’d been in the water or where she’d come from.

  “Street kid? Listen, they’re out there. Prostitutes, pushers.” Hugh shrugged. “Happens a lot, I’m afraid. More than you’d like to think.”

  He was cleaning his sax at the table, getting ready to go out. “She had to come from somewhere,” I said, wiping up around him.

  “Well, yeah. They usually do.”

  “Hugh? What if you had a daughter?”

  “Yeah?” He looked kind of startled. “Ah, Tessie. It’s not that I don’t feel bad for her, whoever she was.”

  “A daughter—think of it.”

  “Um, yeah?”

  I thought of the girl in the photo upstairs. “Say, like the one you said went to law school. You know, the one who…from an earlier family? The one…you said…went sliding off the rocks, you know. For fun. Swinging from the lantern and all that.”

  “Family?” He tugged my hair, kissed my ear. “It’s only been couples out here, Willa. Far as I know. Guys and their women. Thrumcap’s no place, really, for a kid.”

  19

  RHUMB LINE TRACK

  When he left I went on autopilot, keeping busy—one of those bizarre tidying jags. Anything to take my mind off the dead girl and the light and all the things that could go wrong. As Sonny sulked over his math, I toyed with the idea of tackling the mess upstairs, the piles of junk people had been collecting for, what, a century? What did people have against throwing stuff out? Hugh was just as bad: “Never know when you’ll need it,” his motto. I was the queen of sorting and trashing. Only natural, after the moving we’d done.

  But I thought again of the girl’s photo and those clothes, and decided to start downstairs. The bedroom, the closet—the only real one in the house, crammed with Hugh’s stuff. There was a cardboard box and a binder full of musty sheet music, with a review of a gig he’d played in Montreal, and a map of Vancouver tucked inside. I opened the box. A tangle of stuff was held down with a paperweight—a beach stone with a painted-on blue jay, not tacky but quite well done, with dozens of brush strokes for feathers. Putting it back, I dug through some papers—old boarding passes, ticket stubs, serviettes from some fast food places, and a piece of loose-leaf folded several times. People say women are packrats, but look at men! Charlie had saved receipts for everything: had he ever thrown anything out? In this regard Hugh wasn’t much different, but at least he’d thank me.

  The loose-leaf looked to be a letter, with typing on one side. Haven’t met, it said, but my family believes you know my sister. The last we heard she was in B. C., but that she was moving east. We haven’t been in contact for two years. Friends of hers said if we reached…The top was missing, and the bottom illegible, as if the paper had got wet, but you could just make out part of a signature: something something Preston.

  No good comes to snoopers, I know that, but suddenly I was a cat chasing a string, looking for the rest of the letter. Having no luck, I refolded and tucked the paper among some others. There was a bank statement thanking Hugh for opening an account, a receipt for his sax and a pay stub from a hotel on East Hastings in Vancouver, dated a few years back. I picked out a couple of restaurant serviettes. One had scribbling on it. In this town name marithon missing you like craze. Got ride with some redneck from Alberta. See u soon, OK? Cant wait to u no what. Luv u 4-ever, J. A chain of Xs and Os looped around the logo, a chicken wearing a cowboy hat. The writing was small and childish, that rounded, bubbly hand like my own as a teenager, Is dotted with happy faces.

  Just a kid, I thought numbly, a kid who happened to be in lust. How could you blame her? Still, something pulled inside me and the room’s starkness sharpened. The poor thing—though every girl went through it, to some degree; who at that age doesn’t mistake lust for love? I thought of my high school boyfriend’s groping hands. Guys, even guys like Hugh, had no idea how it feels to wear your heart on your sleeve. You had to pity any girl who did. But even as pity swelled, another feeling rushed in; pride; the calm, sweet knowledge that Hugh was mine. It was like winning a lottery and having the world walk by unaware. Blind luck, what some people called grace. The trouble is, realizing what you have makes you muckle on tighter.

  There was a glug. Sonny stood in the doorway, drinking pop. He stared, lowering the glass. “Mom? What’re you doing?”

  I closed the box as if it contained kitchen stuff. “Not a thing, darling.” But my face was hot, my breath a butterfly high in my chest. “Now, about that long division…”

  “Math sucks hard.” His grumble seemed far away.

  ***

  Sonny stayed at Derek’s the night of the party, the big one in November. We nearly froze going over in the boat with Wayne. The plan was to drop Sonny off on our way to town. There wasn’t room in the truck—oh, lovely—so he and I rode with Reenie in her Toyota. I hadn’t seen her since the first day of school. She hardly spoke, except to ask Sonny about his favourite sports—“Don’t have any,” he said, “my mom won’t sign me up”—and what he wanted to be when he grew up.

  “How would I know?” he answered, as if she were a Star Wars droid. I’d have answered the same. Reenie was a queer duck, like Hugh said.

  Derek’s mother waved as Sonny disappeared inside. She was a tiny woman, tinier than she’d seemed the day Sonny had come home wearing the fish hook. Reenie peeled off without a word, racing to catch up to Wayne. You could see the two of them in the cab of the truck, Wayne and Hugh. Reenie lit a cigarette, rolling down her window a crack.

  “You been to this place before?” she wanted to know as we started over the bridge. I shook my head. “Ah,” she said.” Quite the clientele, eh.” She smirked, and her mouth had that look, like cement. “I guess the guys’ll play wherever people’ll have ’em, right? Wayne says that’s how youse met—at a dance.”

  “Um, well ...”

  We drove through the city and some subdivisions till there wasn’t much but woods. As the road twisted and turned, the harbour came back into view. Reenie slowed down like a little old lady. Finally we pulled off in front of a building that looked like an old school, with a sign that said Silver Sands Social Club. A crowd milled outside.

  “Here we go,” said Reenie, lighting another smoke as a drunk reeled up to the window and asked if she was going far.

  “Just got here, bud,” she said, quite patiently. The guy draped himself over her door and she had to give him a push to get out.

  “Hey honey, who you shovin’ aroun’, eh? C’mere, honey, an’ I’ll push ya roight there agains’ the wall.”

  Drunk laughter followed us up the steps and somebody else stumbled out, diving for the railing. Reenie butted out her cigarette on her boot heel and stuck it back in the package, then pushed ahead
like a politician. She popped a piece of gum into her mouth, her jaws working as we pressed inside. There was a crowd and the lights were low, though the band was still setting up. A woman in a backless dress was talking to Hugh as he ducked about, helping Wayne plug things in. “Most of these guys’ve been drinkin’ since noon,” she said, sliding a bottle of vodka behind the drums. Darrell, the guy with the bad perm and the Mustang, slid his arm around her, then he went up and spoke to Hugh, passing him something—money, maybe.

  Reenie was yakking to some woman with streaked hair; they seemed to know each other. She pointed to someone staggering past and asked, “Who is that arsehole?”

  “That’s my husband!” the woman shrieked with laughter. Reenie doubled over. “Oh my fock!” she howled.

  This was going to be interesting. I ordered myself a beer. The band was doing a sound check. You could barely see them for the crowd; the stage was a platform with a disco ball spangling the tops of their heads. I glanced around for Paula, Emily—those wholesome partners. They weren’t there, unless they’d worn disguises. Taking my drink to a spot by the picture window, I watched a light blink across the water. Thrumcap, it struck me with a wash of recognition.

  Reenie promptly got pissed, copping sips of Smirnoff behind the stage. Wayne hardly looked at her, which made me think of parties at the Mess, where having a smashed wife put the fear of God into a guy—like having a loaded rifle on the dance floor.

  The band started off with a few standards—light jazz. People banged their glasses on the tables. Reenie just kept drinking.

  “Elvis!” someone screamed. You could see Wayne eyeing Hugh, Hugh shaking his head. The singer, Danny, scratched his ear and leaned into the mic. The woman I’d noticed earlier talking to Reenie stumbled up and dropped to her knees before him, snaking her hands up his shins. Everyone watched. The disco ball made the place a migraine waiting to happen. Hugh closed his eyes and tilted his head and blew. Opening them, he searched the room. Our eyes met and he smiled for a second before looking away. The woman on her knees crawled to him and I felt myself freeze. She clung to his jeans like a toddler, gazing up adoringly. God, it didn’t get more pathetic. Suddenly people were clapping—the entire room—like in some jungle ritual as she pulled herself up, rubbing against him.