by Claire Tacon
We have more pizza than mouths. The cheese slides off the tomato base and oil pools in the pepperoni slices.
Richard warns Stephen not to eat too much.
“Is it like swimming?” Max asks.
It’s a question that Richard likes answering. It launches them into a discussion about the origins of old wives’ tales. For a brief few minutes, the meal feels comfortable.
When the waitress brings the bills, she’s made a mistake and put one of our orders on Bernie’s. Richard asks her to bring a new set of cheques.
“It’s fine,” Bernie says. “May as well just pay it.”
“No, I’ll give you the cash,” Richard insists. The rest of us clam up, nervous.
The two of them lock eyes and I expect Richard to push the issue. Instead, he leans back in his chair and puts his arm around Stephen. “Thanks then.”
“Thanks,” I repeat.
Now that we’ve eaten together, it would be strange to sit apart for the game, especially with my mother there. We find her a folding chair so she can have a break from the wheelchair and Linda steadies the seat while I help my mother make the transfer. For the first time, she doesn’t put up a fuss with the assistance.
Stephen favours his left leg as he warms up. He’s not limping exactly, but he must have hurt his ankle. The coach notices too but Stephen refuses to sit down. He cycles through all the same drills as the rest of the players. Still, every so often I catch him shaking his leg, trying to loosen the joint.
“Who are they playing?” I ask Richard. The other semifinal finished after we left and I can’t read the scoreboard.
“Dartmouth.”
Even though they’re undefeated three years running, we’re still hoping for a win after the excitement of the morning’s game.
We get steamrollered, five – nothing.
I expect the boys to be released, but there’s an end-of-tournament assembly. All four final teams line up on the pitch and an official struts out to meet them, followed by three assistants. Someone whispers that he’s the MLA. Starting with the fourth place team, he shakes each player’s hand and hangs a medal around their neck. As he reaches the third place team, music blares over the speakers, a bombastic classical score that’s being butchered by the scratchy PA. In the crowd, a kid howls like Chewbacca at the end of Star Wars.
After the medals are distributed, the MLA invites the coaches up to present the MVP awards. I’m not surprised when the shaggy-haired centre forward is called up by the Yarmouth coach. He accepts his trophy and stands there for a minute while the photographer snaps him shaking hands with the officials.
“Do you think?” I ask Richard.
He shakes his head. “Max’s been on the team longer.”
He’s right—Stephen didn’t even play the whole season.
Our coach gives the usual speech about how it was a strong team, how difficult it was to pick just one player. “This year,” he says, looking out over the line of expectant thirteen-year-olds, “the Canning MVP is going to most valuable pair. Max McInnes and Stephen Bascom, come on up.”
My body launches into ecstatic choreography, drum-rolling my arms and jerking my legs into hop-kicks. Richard hoists Luke onto his shoulders, the two of them screaming “MVP, MVP.” Bernie’s already out on the field snapping pictures. Linda’s hugging everyone. Even my mother’s beaming, clapping her hand against her leg.
I’m so happy for them I start to cry, laughing as I wipe away the tears. By the time Stephen reaches us, Richard looks close to tears himself.
“See,” Luke says, “it was like the Olympics.”
Stephen loops the medal over his brother’s neck.
We should be getting back so the boys can pack for tomorrow. As I gather our stuff together, Linda walks over with the trophy. “There’s only one.”
Stephen doesn’t care. He’s already said Max can hang onto it.
“They can share,” she insists. She promises to bring over a set of the pictures from Bernie’s camera. “I can print them off at the Superstore, no problem.”
When they say goodbye, Luke and Lisa don’t really know what to do. Stephen and Max bump fists and Stephen promises to talk to him soon on IM. It doesn’t take long. Then we’re left standing there, awkward. Linda pulls me into a hug and tells me to call her if I need anything. She smells like apricot lip gloss.
As I grip the handlebars on my mother’s wheelchair, Bernie looks at me sidelong. It makes him seem wounded, and I get that same pang I got years ago, surprising him in the cab of the truck. I wave goodbye to avoid any physical contact. “See you soon.”
“Yep,” he says. “See you.”
Richard leads the charge when we get in, reminding the boys to check if they’ve left anything in the bathroom, bedroom, living room. I busy myself making dinner, frying onions on the new electric pan. Stephen thuds downstairs. “Dad wants to know if you have a tensor bandage.”
I head up to the linen cupboard to see if there are any left and if they’re usable. Packed away at the back shelf, I find two old ones. Despite the fire, they still smell of sweat and elastic. We go into the bedroom and I get Stephen to sit on the mattress and prop his leg up on my lap. I pull off his sock and find the ankle’s quite swollen. I prod different spots to see what hurts. It’s sore, but he’s still got a lot of extension and can point and flex without wincing.
“Did it hurt the whole game?”
“No.”
“Was it when the kid tripped you?”
Stephen looks up at me as if he’s nervous he’s going to get in trouble. Richard comes in with a plastic bag and packs Stephen’s sneakers in them. “Your ankle’s worse than a pregnant woman’s,” he says.
“I’m impressed you kept playing on it.” I hold the end of the tensor with my thumb and start winding it around the arch. “This too tight?”
Stephen shakes his head.
“The games were pretty exciting this weekend.”
“You don’t have to lie,” he says, poking at another bruise on his leg. “I know you don’t like soccer.”
“I really enjoyed watching you play.”
Richard looks over my shoulder at the bandage. “Your mom was ready to ream the ref out for calling offside in that second game. If I hadn’t told her that he had a bad angle, she’d have gotten the team a red card.”
Stephen laughs, despite himself.
There’s only one hook for the bandage—the other one must have gone missing years ago. I rummage through the bedside drawer for a safety pin and carefully thread it through instead. “Keep your foot on the dashboard for the drive.”
I say it to Stephen, but it’s Richard who nods.
It hasn’t seemed real until now. They’ll drive away tomorrow and I’ll stay behind. I wish there was something profound I could say, something to bind us all together as a family. Nothing comes. Richard works right up until we eat and by then we’re all so tired that we scarf down the eggs, not paying attention.
The boys want to talk to their grandfather before going to bed. Richard agrees on the condition they keep it short—he’s waking them up at six-thirty to get on the road by eight. While the boys chat, Richard and I wait downstairs on opposite sides of the couch, each pretending to flip through a newspaper. Terrence and I haven’t spoken since the karaoke fight and I’m not sure how much Richard’s told him. I lower my paper to ask, only able to get out the words, “Does Terrence?” before my throat constricts.
Yes, Terrence knows.
After a few minutes, Stephen calls down that they’re ready for bed. I get up to tuck him in, but Luke’s still on the phone. He asks his grandfather if he’d like to say goodnight to me too. My heart’s thudding as he holds his arm out for me to take the receiver. I make a quick exit to my mother’s room before answering, shutting the door and sinking down to the floor.
It’s difficult to get out a simple hello. Everything’s gone numb except for the parts of my body touching the phone—the folds of my ear pinche
d against the hard plastic, the slight vibration of speech through the receiver, my shoulder pinning the mouthpiece to my chin.
“Stephen tells me you’re staying.”
I mumble out an apology for the way Luke set the conversation up.
We’re quiet for a long time. There’s nothing that I can think of to say to him. I’ve never felt more sick over something I’ve done.
“I’d noticed that things have been strained between the two of you all summer,” Terrence says. “It’s a difficult position. As a father, I’m angry. I’m very sad for my family.” He pauses to take a swallow of something and I get a picture of him sipping a Carib by his condo window, the Kensington hipsters drinking on the patio across the street. “But a marriage is its own ecosystem. It’s hard for someone looking in to understand.”
In the background, there’s music playing—an opera I can’t place. I’m concentrating so hard on it, hoping it’ll carry me through this moment, that at first I don’t realize that my crying is audible. My breath escapes in short gasps.
“Richard doesn’t know this and I’m not planning on telling him,” Terrence says. “When he was in college, there was a woman I worked with, a young teacher—twenty-four, twenty-five. She was born here, but her parents had come over from St. Lucia. It lasted the better part of the school year until her father found out. One night, he and his friends jumped me outside the school. I had to explain to Evelyn why I wouldn’t be pressing charges.”
He takes another sip of his beer. In the other room, I can hear Richard saying goodnight to the boys.
I ask Terrence why it happened.
“Things had gone flat—there was tension about money.” He sighs as if hashing out an old excuse. “But mostly, it didn’t feel like I was doing it to Evelyn. That insight didn’t come until afterwards. In the end, I had to convince her that what happened was the anomaly, not the pattern.”
“Will Richard?”
“I don’t know,” Terrence says, his voice falling. “I hope so.”
This is what it would be like, I think, to still have a father. This is what it’s like.
When I hang up, the boys are asleep. I kiss them goodnight anyway because I’m not sure when I’ll get to do that again. For a long time I sit watching them, the way I did when they were babies.
I think about my mother, alone in her new home. After all these years, it seems impossible that I was once inside her, that she carried me for nine months just as I carried the boys. It makes me think about the umbilical cord that attaches mother to child, child to mother. It makes me question in which direction the bond is stronger. Thirty years from now, I’m not convinced that Stephen and Luke would choose to stay with me. I’m not convinced I’d want them to.
When a soil is removed from its environment and lands as effluvium or alluvium, it becomes part of the new soil. Subjected to new weathering and secondary processes, it slowly becomes unrecognizable from the original. That’s why it wouldn’t have worked with Bernie, why I’ll never again be my mother’s one and only. I made my choice a long time ago and it’s too late to change my mind.
I hover outside Richard’s closed door, the light long since turned out, straining for any indication he’s still awake. Nothing. Downstairs, his laptop case is propped against the door, ready for tomorrow. I open it up and plug it in. At first I consider typing him a letter, using Terrence’s words to plead my case. Then I open the file with his article, save as copy, and cut it down to the guideline.
The sound of water in the pipes wakes me up. It’s already seven-thirty and Richard’s busy organizing the exodus, trying to wrangle the boys and their belongings. Catching him alone is going to be difficult. I go back downstairs, still in my pajamas, and start mixing up pancake batter. It’s from a box, just add water, but it’s the closest I can get to giving them a send-off.
I thought we’d all sit down together, but in the end we eat in shifts. I’m the only constant in the kitchen, doling out pancakes from the fry pan. Richard eats his leaning up against the wall while the boys are doing a last sweep through the house.
He forces a grin before I can speak. “At least you’ll get the bed tonight.”
“Will you call me when you get in? Just to let me know you arrived safely?”
He’s eating in massive bites, spearing his fork through three layers of pancake, shovelling it in. “I’ll probably pick up another cell so you can call the boys or they can call you when they want.”
“Can’t I call the house?”
“We’ll figure it out later.”
He’s dangerously close to finishing his food, the window for conversation closing.
“Can I make you another?”
“No.” He rests his fork on his plate and pats his belly. “This is plenty.”
Even if Terrence is right, Richard doesn’t want to talk now.
I tell him that I love him but Luke bounds in with his suitcase, almost knocking his father over. All of Richard’s attention switches to our youngest.
Upstairs, I check on Stephen’s ankle and re-bandage the tensor. “You can get some ice on it tonight from the motel.”
“It’s fine, Mom.”
“Get your Dad to check on it, just in case.”
“It’s fine.”
At ten o’clock Richard grabs the last bag from the house. The boys stand outside by the car and wait for his okay. The time has gotten away on me. I’m not sure what I expected—tears from Luke, maybe. There’s nothing. The boys each give me a hug. Richard puts his hand briefly on my shoulder. “We might call tonight, depending on cell service in Quebec.”
It feels less like our family is falling apart than that they’re leaving for a day trip to Halifax. Richard backs the car out of the driveway and the three of them wave when they reach the road. I wave. They wave. The car lurches forward, past the tree break and out of sight.
I start with the bathroom. The chalk blue’s pretty, but the paint bubbles up in sections and it takes a while to figure out how to apply it evenly. I forget to put down a tarp and have to pause several times to wipe a drip off the tub. As I work, I keep listening for the thud of Stephen’s soccer ball against the outside wall. It feels like he and Luke are going to rush in at any moment, bickering as usual, wanting me to mediate. Instead, the house stays quiet, the only sounds coming from the squeak of the paint roller and the jiggle of the ladder. There are only enough trays to work with one colour at a time. I finish the bathroom, but there’s no point washing up because it’ll need a second coat.
I look over my notes for Clarence, but I’m going to need a computer before I can get much further. I make a note on the back of my hand to ask Richard to ship out my laptop. There are a few changes Clarence could implement as soon as next spring, but the bigger ones will require significant investment. Until this year’s harvest receipts come in, we’re not going to know if he can raise that kind of capital. The smartest thing to do would be to twin the proposal with the Acadia course, get the students involved as a pilot project.
There’s nothing else I can get started on around the house without outside help. There’s nothing I couldn’t be doing at a distance.
I visit my mother in the late afternoon, but Mary’s there with another friend from the co-op. They’re watching reruns of Wheel of Fourtune and Jeopardy! The answers to the final puzzles are “Spelling Bee Hive” and “What is the Chrysler Building?” My mother and I barely speak.
I’ve bought a cheap microwave and I heat up a Jamaican patty for dinner because I don’t feel like cooking. The pastry goes soggy in the microwave and a tongue of ground beef and oil spills out from the seam. I set it down on the milk crate and grab a rag to wipe up the splatter in the oven. In the end I don’t feel like eating.
The phone only rings once.
It’s Irene, calling to invite me to Linda’s bridal shower.
First thing in the morning, I go to Evangeline Beach because I have to get out of the house. It’s drizzling as I drive over
the bridge from Port Williams and it’s hard to tell the grey of the clouds from the grey of the water. The campground is quiet except for a few gulls cawing and a thumping sound in the distance like a wooden spoon in a metal bowl. There aren’t any other cars in the visitor lot.
I walk back through the forest trail that Bernie and I walked down years ago. I sneak past a cottage where the path ends and scurry down to the beach. The shore isn’t private, but I don’t want to have to talk to an angry property owner about using his access point. The tide is going out and there’s still a slick over the sand. Water pools in my footprints. I wander out towards the red cliffs—pocked sandstone that will one day be the clay beach. There are bird nests in the tops, fist-sized cubbyholes.
I wonder where the boys are now. I check my watch again—seven-twenty. They’ve been gone eighteen hours. They didn’t call last night so Richard might have driven straight through, which would put them approaching Cornwall—four more hours to go. More likely, he stopped late, probably before Montreal. It’s possible that they didn’t have phone reception. I try not to think of the other, darker possibility that my family is functioning just fine without me. The boys have been on sleepovers, but never even to summer camp. In ten hours, this will be the longest we’ve ever been apart.
All over the beach, little bubbles are sprouting in the surface from the tiny mud shrimp that burrow in the sand. The sandpipers have begun to flock, soaring over and landing on the beach to feed. They walk without knees, their funny bodies like the molecule models Stephen and I used to make for science fair, Styrofoam globes on pipe cleaner legs. They eat noisily, chattering and scuttling across the beach like it’s some merry all-you-can-eat buffet. I’d like to take a picture to send to the boys but I don’t have my camera.