FOR weeks, I have been seeing Robert. Turning the corner of the grocery store as I walk in for frozen dinners and yogurt, disappearing into subway cars. Always he is wearing that light brown jacket he had in the ’80s and a pair of worn, baggy blue jeans. He looks like he did that summer, the summer of ’88, when we took the train to Moosonee, when we started spending money on ourselves, when we gave up, as my mother called it right up until she died.
He has a message for you, Joanie says, and she says that I should go. Three times in one week I heard about the place: the article in the doctor’s office, when I went for my mammogram and flipped open Budget Travel to those glossy pictures of the community’s iron gate, the summer-camp-like amphitheatre, and a medium peering down at her spread of tarot cards, then there was a book face-up in a sidewalk remainders’ bin, bearing a black and white image of Victorian psychics, and finally, the reassuring baritone of Michael Enright’s voice—next up, a town where the dead can talk—reverberating through my quiet apartment as I walked, towel-clad, to take a shower. I froze, leaned a naked shoulder against the plaster wall, felt a shiver under my skin. You have to go, Joanie says. He is close. Even I feel that.
• • •
In the hotel lobby, a framed sign says Absolutely No Séances! It’s crooked, hung on a wood-panelled pillar. A dusty Persian carpet is spread on the hardwood floor beneath a set of taupe wicker furniture. The pink and red cushions clash with the rug. The place is old, smelling of mildew overlain with the cloying fragrance of artificial vanilla from a plug-in air freshener. Out on the front veranda, half a dozen rocking chairs thump against the hollow floor. I hear people chattering, mostly women with their daughters and girlfriends, eager to reach their loved ones, find the person who can penetrate the distance, pull back the dead like hauling fish from the depths. I’m the only one who seems to be alone, apart from a white-haired, skinny man in polyester tan pants, thick-soled white shoes, and a plaid flannel shirt, even now, even in the high humid summer. He’s sitting on the wicker love seat, looking down. Against his leg he presses a glossy brochure and even from all the way over here, in line for my turn at the desk, waiting to receive an iron skeleton key with a large purple, plastic tag marked 42 in worn gold numbers, I can see the tiny image of a woman, hair short and black in a polished cap like a beetle’s carapace. I wonder if she’s the one I’m meant to go to, if spotting her miniature, smiling face like this, like a slight, secret thought that pulls you up into consciousness in the empty wasteland of the night, is a sign. But when I turn back from scrawling my signature in the register, he is gone.
• • •
Robert had his heart attack after our trip to B.C. We’d hiked too much, eaten too much rich food. Oysters dredged through bowls of foamy, golden garlic butter; hard walks over the forest’s uneven floor. Everything was my idea, even the tent trailer—a two-person contraption with shrunken canvas that dragged behind us as we floored the mushy gas petal up through the Rockies. Robert clenched the steering wheel, eyes flickering to the rear view, embarrassed at the lineup building behind us. Just put on your hazards, I said, exasperated, and his finger trembled as he fumbled for the button on the dash, pressed it firmly like a final decision. By then, we’d been married for eighteen years and there were cracks, subtle ones like the settling of foundation cement, not deep enough to do damage. Like a house, I told my sister, Joanie, who at 51 had never married, though she had birthed a child at sixteen, back home in Hearst, and given him up for adoption. Last autumn, after I was widowed, she was in the flush of new motherhood because he had found her, sent a card with a wide, choppy ocean on the front, a miniature dingy carrying a little blonde-haired girl and an orangutan, rowing. The card was creased, as if purchased years ago, never sent. Strange choice, I said. He’s a veterinarian, she told me. Her eyes had not stopped shining.
• • •
The walls in my room are covered in climbing green vines and pink rose blooms that look like they’ve faded from red. There’s a double bed with shrieking springs. The coverlet is cream-coloured with a nubby texture and a silky fringe. There is a sink in the corner, with old-fashioned taps, and shared showers and toilets across the hall. Through the single, small window I can see a row of yellow, blue and white Victorian houses, trimmed in gingerbread. Shingles hang over their stained-glass-panelled doors: animal medium, tarot card readings, spirit message work. I let the sheer white curtain fall and dim the sun. It is a beautiful August afternoon; I really should be outside. Through the metal screen, I hear happy, distant voices, and a woman at the microphone in the amphitheatre. I’m getting an M, she says. I see a pile of books by a bed.
• • •
Robert and I have no children. We tried for years. When nothing happened but my regular period, showing up each month like a surly, passive teenager, I went to a Chinese doctor and drank cup after cup of bitter, dirt-tasting tea, a different one each week. In his office, I shrank back on the cold cot as he thread stainless steel needles through my skin. Whenever he hit a point of built-up tension, I felt the release like pure electricity, like a fingertip glancing an open circuit. It was uncomfortable. All that time, those long years, trying that and even more, were uncomfortable. Robert told me it didn’t matter, but I could never believe him, was not convinced that inside himself he didn’t harbour regret, like sediment gathered in his blood. One day, it drifted into his heart, and that’s what killed him.
My sister shakes her head. She is a nurse, pragmatic, practical, always searching out the obvious. He loved you, she says, wanting to reach for my hand but resisting. Her fingers close gently into a fist on the table’s edge. He would have done it all over in a heartbeat. The exact words he used. Maybe she’d heard him say it.
• • •
We didn’t bother to stop in Vancouver. It would have been a nightmare driving through with the trailer—all those busy streets and last-second turns. At Horseshoe Bay, we caught the ferry to Nanaimo, took the space of two cars. Robert didn’t want to leave the driver’s seat. In hindsight, I think he was already getting ill, his face pasty and grey, a sheen of oily sweat on his brow. How he kept licking his lips. I should have known, is what I want to say, what I want to somehow tell him, and also, I’m sorry, for the life I gave you, the loneliness you never expected. In the back of the car, his fishing gear was piled up, a special salt water rod that wouldn’t rust, that he’d just bought. Gently, with the promise of soup and a cup of coffee, treacly sweet the way he liked it, a treat of eighteen percent cream, I enticed him to the upper decks. Outside, the wind was so strong, it lashed the sharp points of my hair into my eyes. We sought the shelter of the ship’s lee side and alone on the deck but for the cigarette smokers and a young man with dreadlocks that looked dry as hay, a pipe hidden in his cupped hand, we saw the killer whales. Two of them, breaching side by side, and after they dove down, a pool of stillness appeared for a moment in the ocean’s dark churn. I gripped Robert’s cold hand and warmed it between my own as we stood against the railing, the smell of marijuana like incense in the air.
• • •
I wake, alone, in the late afternoon. I am still not used to the hollow that my body pushes against, the empty air where once there was form. Robert’s girth, broad shouldered, a hefty gut on him from the time he turned 45. Nowadays everyone says that’s a sign, but we were never ones to baby our mortality. From the time we were young together, we enjoyed life, didn’t restrict its pleasures: ate butter, fried foods, in balance, I suppose, with organic greens and grapeseed oil in place of olive in the pan in later years. We didn’t smoke, only drank too much during those two years in Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan when Robert was getting his start in the news room and there wasn’t anything else to do. We were in our 30s then. Who doesn’t do that?
Genetics, Joanie says. You can’t fight them.
She says that for me but also for herself, as a way to shift the conversation. I’ve heard it all before but I smile as she tells me again: the remarkable way her son, Allan now when she had named him Stuart, swings his hand to the right, fingers flipped out, in the exact same dismissive gesture she uses, how his forehead creases like hers when he’s listening hard.
Robert’s father died at the age of 58. A massive heart attack in the underground quarry in Goderich where he worked as foreman. They found him face down on the edge of a snow drift of salt. The air glimmering and sharp, I imagine, because I’ve been there, because Robert and I did a tour of that place on another, different trip.
• • •
The trail to Inspiration Stump leads through the pet cemetery which isn’t kept up. Purple-blooming periwinkle winds up around a leaning wooden cross that says Fluffy in a scrawl of black paint. A clay angel sits, half melted from the rain, on the edge of the forest of tall hardwoods. Through the trunks, there is the constant shuffling of leaves, the flash of sunlight and shadow, the flicker of ribbons tied to low branches.
In the clearing, I sit on a bench for the final service of the day. Most of the people there must have eaten because it’s my stomach that growls into the silence as the medium climbs on top of the large trunk, his eyes closed, concentrating. He leans his ear toward the audience. Embarrassed, I press the palms of both hands against my roiling insides, trying to shush my hungry belly’s complaints.
You, says the medium. You in the black shirt, green scarf. I am curled into myself, around my hollow core. You, he says again and someone nudges my shoulder. Honey, it’s you!
I look up.
Kathy, he says.
I shake my head. No.
Three women call out: I’m Kathy! That’s me!
The medium looks flustered, a wash of pink in his cheeks. His eyes slide to the woman to my left, a gap the width of two bodies between us. Her face is tipped up, mouth slack. A friend clutches her hand and their entwined fingers press against Kathy’s bare, boney knee. I see a dog, the medium says, and Kathy squints as she searches her mind. My cousin has a dog. He died last year.
Ronnie, Rowan, the medium mumbles.
Robby, says Kathy.
I stare at her and then back at the medium.
You loved this animal. You miss him. You walked with him. He pushes his fingers against his forehead, pinching the skin over his skull. I see water. Kathy looks confused.
Slowly I raise my arm but the medium does not see me. Someone in the back has leapt up. I had a dog named Ronnie, she shouts, and someone behind me gasps. When I was a child, she says, and bursts out crying, cupping her mouth, nose and chin in both hands. Weeping, she drops to the hard seat as the medium tells her that it wasn’t her fault, this is the message he’s getting from the small, grey terrier he can see now and I stand up, push past Kathy, excusing myself, a quiver in my nerves, heart trembling, as I walk back through the woods.
You come to places like this and expect to be called out. You come, expecting glimmering eyes to fall on you, flutter closed, and a voice to speak, clear enough to not be questioned: I see him, newly passed, and he wants me to tell you he loves you, he does not blame you, you were his best friend. The trip to B.C. was the best trip ever. Those walks on Chesterman Beach. The fires at the campground in Tofino. The afternoon out on the ocean, fishing for mackerel and salmon, a surprise for his birthday. All of it. He loved it.
He loved you.
At the cemetery I stop and sob like I’m barking, like part of me has something serious to say. There is no one there so I sit on a tiny bench beside a gravestone bearing a framed picture of a black mastiff, deep jowls on his face, and let it out. The voices march on at the gathering, prodding great distances, and I suppose I came looking for one I’ll never hear again, the reminiscing we would have done, canceling out the stress of the extra weight we were pulling, the real fear we felt when we hiked up the stony coast and the tide came in, blocking the passage back. Turning it all into adventure. The revision that youth can do.
• • •
I go in search of supper but it’s too late. All the little restaurants set up in former parlours, serving cranberry tea and apple pie to ladies on new age book club retreats, have closed. There’s only one answer and that’s to drive toward town.
At the corner of the main highway and the road leading to Lily Dale I find a tavern called Brixies Bar and Grill. In the parking lot, six Harley Davidsons are lined up in a neat row, and I wonder if they had to work at that or if they’d practiced enough to get it right on the first try. If Robert was there, the sight of the bikes would make him nervous and his hesitation would bolster my nerve. For five minutes, I sit in the car, checking my phone to see if my sister has texted but the screen is blank apart from a picture of Robert, his features scarred by tiny icons. I slide the icons to the side so I can see his right eye, the glint in it, the laugh lines, one half of his smile. A fragment, still with me, a shard.
Inside, I’m surprised to see the old man from the lobby. He sits at a table for two, one shoulder leaning against the wall, shirt sleeves rolled up. I see his face, tipped into a book, reflected in a huge mirror emblazoned with the Budweiser logo. We are on the dining room side, the only people there except for a couple and their small boy who is drawing with a ball-point pen on the menu. The mother asks him once and then again, a shrillness growing in her voice, what he wants to eat. The father leans back, staring down into his phone, thumbs jabbing. Dodged a bullet, Robert would have said, whispering over his beer.
I order a glass of red wine, a burger and fries, without seeing the menu and sit at an un-cleared table. In the dim bar, the bikers are playing darts, slapping each other on their leather-clad shoulder blades, one in an olive drab T-shirt that says GREEN TEAM on the back. A baseball game is playing on the television. The man from the lobby holds a Caesar, rim crusted with flavoured salt, a leafy rib of celery jutting out. He takes a drink, sets it down, and with the fingers of his left hand he pulls the psychic’s brochure out of the pages of his book and lays it on the scarred surface of the table, tapping absent-mindedly on the image of her face. When he catches my gaze, he smiles tremulously, blinking twice before he quickly looks away.
Still, I lean sideways, extend an arm, trying to get his attention. Excuse me, I say, and then when he doesn’t look, I say, Sir?
He turns, the swivel of his head as slow as deep grief. His blue eyes are red-rimmed and watery and he waits without speaking. I decide to just say it: Can I see that?
He lifts the brochure. This?
I nod, and he looks at it, then me, then hands it over. The paper is slippery in my fingers and the sharp edge instantly gives me a paper cut. I flinch, press the fine line of blood into an unused white napkin. Her name is Willa. She brings through identifiable spirit entities. I remember Robert’s ashes, blown back by the wind. Our nephew, his youngest sister’s son, lifting his small hands to catch the fine drift. Have you used her? I ask the man.
He scowls, then rocks in his chair, uncomfortable. Well, no, he says. She’s my daughter.
I am startled. Really?
A curt nod.
I expect more: an enthusiastic recounting of how she always had the gift but instead he returns to his book then glances back. I’m just visiting. From South Dakota. Where I have a ranch. Each sentence its own issued truth. Voice strained, like it hurts his throat to speak, he asks, And you?
Right then the waitress comes with my drink, a halo of light around her blonde hair from the video lottery terminals, and past her, I see movement, between the bar and the pool table, that tan jacket slipping out of sight. I almost stand up, almost shout out his name but instead I take a gulp of wine as soon as the waitress sets the glass down.
You all right? the psychic’s father says.
I swallow the strong merlot and turn to him as I’m breathing in through my nose, trying to smile. I’m not sure, I say.
I’m Wayne, he says, and he reaches for my hand.
• • •
When the tide gushed in, black and deep, we didn’t know what to do. Robert panicked, pacing back and forth on the small stretch of trail not blocked by then with ocean water. Around the corner, a short scramble over slippery rock, was a cove where we’d had our lunch of pastrami sandwiches and carrot sticks and plain potato chips. We’d found a fire pit blocked in by driftwood benches, a dream catcher hanging overhead in an arbutus, a blackened and bent aluminum pot dredged in the fine sand, half full. That was where we spent the night: sleeping in each other’s arms to keep warm against the cool, briny wind after we managed to build a fire, plucked blue mussels off the rocks, steamed them in sea water until their hinges released. It is my favourite memory of that trip, possibly of my whole life so far: watching the crescent moon pierce the sky over the ocean, my ear pressed to the buried, distant thump of Robert’s beating heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lauren Carter is the author of SWARM, a dystopian literary fiction novel that the Toronto Star called “one of the more realistic recent imaginings of the shape of things to come,” and Lichen Bright, a poetry collection. She has recently finished a second collection of poetry and is at work on two new novels and a book of short stories. She lives in The Pas, Manitoba where she blogs about the writing life in the north at laurencarter.ca
LF #079 © 2015 Lauren Carter. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, April 2015.
Image created by José Manuel de Laá, from The Noun Project.
