In the Land of Birdfishes (4 page)

We were thrown forward with the hideous sensation of impact, our momentum colliding with something unmoving. It felt, briefly, as if the bus beneath us had been set free from the road.

We came to a stop at the side of the highway. From nine rows back, I heard the driver curse beneath his breath, it was that quiet. He stood up and looked out the windshield for a long moment, and then he pressed the button to open the door and climbed down. The lucky ones on the right of the bus leaned over to peer at him down there and report back to the left side of the bus.

“What is it?” asked the permed woman in front of me. “Is it a person? Oh my god, is it a child?”

Someone at the front of the bus called, “He’s got a cellular phone. He’s calling someone.”

“Oh my god,” said the woman with the perm.

I suddenly felt a sort of peace come over me. It was like sliding into a very deep tub of warm water. It was something I was inside.

“I’m going to see what’s going on,” a man at the front of
the bus said. He was wearing a dark suit and a black fedora, like he’d left some other time to take a seat on this bus.

“Me too,” said a young woman beside him, and suddenly, half the passengers were on their feet and pushing their way through the aisle and down the steps to the ground outside.

“Rochelle,” I said softly, and then louder. I even touched her, just a little on her shoulder. She still slept, the book against her chest and her face turned to the side in such a way that her neck looked like it was broken. Girls her age didn’t think about their necks. Or what might be under the wheels of the bus they were on. “
Rochelle
.”

Her eyes flickered for a moment, and I told her to move over so I could get past. “Hurry,” I said.

I was among the last to leave the bus. Outside, we waited ten feet back from the driver, who knelt to peer into the ditch.

“It’s an animal,” said someone, and I heard the disappointment in his voice.

“It’s a bear,” said the driver.

“Is it alive?” I heard myself ask. “Did we kill it?”

The driver stood up. He was a short, delicately built man. I could see in the way he carried himself what disdain he had for us. “I called it in,” he said. “They’ll see that the people who need to know are told. It’s not our business. They’ll send someone out here to clean up. And shoot the animal if need be.”

I felt myself wander forward with the other passengers until we were just behind the driver, like we felt safer with him in front of us.

“Look,” a child’s voice said, “it’s moving.”

It looked like a wet heap of brown fur, its face turned away from us, except for its paws, which were turned so that we
could see the dark pads beneath them against the grass. Its rear paws moved slowly, slightly, as if they were paddling in water. Viewed like that, with the underside exposed, they had the shape of human feet.

A few people lit up cigarettes and the driver watched them for a moment, and I thought he would tell them to get back on the bus, but instead he reached into his pocket and withdrew one of his own. He lit it and began walking down the highway, away from us, as if he’d leave us there.

I watched a man position his wife and daughter at the side of the road and crouch to photograph them with the bear behind them. The wife buried her face in her daughter’s curled, dark hair. She was laughing and holding her daughter as tightly as she could.

It was the best I’d felt in months. As things had gotten worse and worse with Stephan, I’d felt myself learn how to be in a room and leave it at the same time. His sharp words, his irritation, and then his silences made a balloon out of me. I felt myself go floating up and away, from a string that grew longer and longer. I’d feel afraid and then I’d find myself thinking of something else. Like things came very, very close to me but never quite arrived.

There was a stink in the air, and we all smelled it and knew it was coming from the bear. A constellation of flies was circling above him, waiting.

Once when I urged him to see the psychologist his neurologist recommended, Stephan had crumpled up the paper with her number and thrown it at me. “Which of us needs help here?” he asked me. And for a moment, I was a woman who wasn’t sure. And then I was a balloon, far, far away. But when he left, I figured out pretty fast the difference between me and
a balloon. I hit the ground like a VCR. And I knew then that he’d been right. And I was crazy.

Except that, at this moment, I could see the bear and could hold the thought of the bear in my mind for minutes at a time and not think of anything else. Of how I was standing or of who was behind me or even of Stephan. Even of Stephan. But I could turn my back on the bear and begin walking back to the bus and stop thinking of the bear. I was going to be all right. I was saner than anyone on the bus.

Even of Stephan.

Climbing the steps, I heard a cry behind me. “It’s moving!” a woman shouted. “It’s trying to get up!”

The driver began herding the passengers back to the bus. I looked out the windshield and tried to see back down in the ditch, but the bear looked motionless. “Stupid bitch,” I whispered to the bear. “She doesn’t know a thing. Not even a dead bear.”

Because when my father told me where she was, I hardly knew even how to find it on a map and it was too far for me to imagine a way across that kind of distance or what I’d find when I had crossed it. Because when he said her name, it was the first time either of us had spoken it in decades and I realized I had all these years imagined she was long gone from any map, that I had somehow understood the world to have removed her in some permanent way, like death removes someone. But even death leaves a mark, the place where the person was, the things they left behind, and when she was gone, my life closed up around her and there was nothing left except my own reflection in the mirror, which would sometimes startle me for how much it looked like her. I never thought of looking for her because
it never occurred to me that she had gone somewhere where I could follow after.

My father was dying for a long time before he was dead. He must have told me to visit her a hundred times before, at the end, I found out where she was. I hadn’t seen her since we were children and she was put in the custody of a second cousin in Alberta, while I was sent to a great-aunt in Halifax, who said she couldn’t care for two children, let alone one of them stone blind. (It was only what she called Christian charity that kept her paying my tuition at the boarding school I was sent to after it was discovered that one could not go to school with boys and girls who could distinguish each letter on the page if one could not do the same. That if one was legally blind, it was, in the end, not so much more helpful than being blind the way stones apparently were.) At my father’s funeral, the second cousin’s daughter came down from Ottawa. She told me the name of the town where my sister had moved years ago. Somewhere in the northern territories, farther away from my home than anyone I knew had ever gone. Long before Stephan left me, I had meant to find a way across the map to look for her. But there was always a reason not to go.

I hardly knew I’d slept except that when I opened my eyes, the seat beside me was empty. A man with a dark, beautiful face was sitting across the aisle now.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Excuse me. Do you know where we are?”

“Well, you just missed the coffee stop in Fort Nelson, didn’t you.”

“How far is that from the Yukon?” I asked the beautiful-faced man.

“I guess we’re going to cross the border before dinner, that’s what I would say.”

“Oh.” I stared out the window, where hills were climbing higher into the streaked sky and disappearing behind us. “I guess that’s the last stop. I guess we’ll all have to get out then.”

“Mm-hmm.”

I took a deep breath as he turned his face toward the window. “The thing is,” I said, “the thing is, I just realized that I’m not sure where I’m going.”

“Bus is a good place for someone in that situation.”

“My sister’s in Dawson City. It’s up there above Whitehorse, the Greyhound attendant said.”

“Sure.”

“The Greyhound attendant said there’s no bus to Dawson City. He said I could get a plane, but … I don’t like to fly. And I don’t drive.” I flinched at the wheedling tone in my voice. I heard what I was, a middle-aged woman, all but lost, clutching at the mercy of strangers. Stephan had once said, irritated and trying to hide it in a joke, that I would be needy if I had any social skills. He told me it was only my congenital churlish streak that drove people away before I had a chance to cling to them. “He said I’d have to buy a ticket for a tour bus, but I don’t even know how to find one. I don’t know anyone in Whitehorse. I … I don’t even have a winter coat.”

“You can always wear all your clothes together. Just layer them up.”

“I didn’t bring much …”

A woman’s voice from the seat behind me said, “He’s teasing you, honey.”

I turned around to see a brown-haired woman who was either young-looking for her age or old before her time—there was some war being fought on her face but it was unclear who was winning.

“You don’t need a winter coat in Dawson in June,” the woman said. “We got plenty of winter when it’s winter, but we sure as hell get summer. I left three weeks ago and it was already getting warm.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I got a load to pick up in Whitehorse, before I head up to Dawson, but you can ride beside me if you want. I’ll be driving all night, so if you can stand another six hours on the road, I’ll get you there first thing in the morning. Annie.”

I was confused for a moment before I realized the woman had reached a slim hand around the back of the seat. I took the hand. “I’m Aileen.”

“So, you like to dance, Aileen?” asked the beautiful-faced man.

“Oh, I love to dance,” Annie said.

“Aileen here looks like a dancer.”

“That long neck,” said Annie.

“I don’t dance, no,” I said quickly.

“I saw this movie once,” said the man. “Or was it a dream?
Pomegranate
, it said at the beginning, like in this old-fashioned writing. Must have been a black and white movie.”

“Oh, I saw this one,” said Annie.

“Starts out, there’s this pencil making a line down a page. It’s all quiet, so you just hear the scrape of the pencil on the paper. And then the line bends a little and it’s drawing the side of a face, you realize. Just one line to stand for the side of someone’s face.”

Annie nodded, as if she were helping him along. For a moment, all I could hear was the man’s low, gentle voice and not anything else. Not even the sound of our front door, closing again and again.

“There’s a voice, but you can’t see who’s talking. He says, ‘I draw no one but her. I draw her always.’ And then you see a woman dancing, and she’s young and beautiful. Oh she’s so young. She’s a ballerina. She’s dancing and dancing in this studio and all the light gets in from the windows. And there’s this man, he’s a different sort of dancer. But he gets in there and he’s dancing with her, in this different sort of way. It’s beautiful, the two of them together. They go on and on, they dance everywhere, all over the room, for days and years. There are things going on around and behind them, because they go so many places and such a long time goes by, but I don’t know what those things are. Then one day he looks for her there and she’s gone. The room is full of little girls dancing, children in skirts spinning around and around, but none of them is her. Even though he knows that, he grabs one of the girls, so he can see her child face and look at it up close, and he says again and again, pressing his cheek to her little-girl face, his voice so sad you know his heart is broken because it isn’t her, but he doesn’t even know that, he wants it to be her so bad,
‘Pomegranate
…’

“And then you see a bus making its way down this skinny little road around this big hill. Coming down the hill. And the sides of the bus, it’s all covered in ads like they are. But the ads are drawings of the dancer’s face. All over the bus. And at the back of the bus she’s sitting, with the road just sort of disappearing in the glass behind her. With her ballerina hair and her ballerina face and her ballerina eyes that could be anyone’s
eyes. Just looking. All finished something. And you hear the voice from the beginning, and he says, ‘It is not so very hard to draw a woman who was happy.’”

“What a great movie,” said Annie. “I love that one.”

“I think it was a dream,” said the man with the beautiful face.

“It reminds me of something,” I said. I tried to remember what it reminded me of and then I realized. “One time my husband was driving and we saw this man just lying in the snow, it was winter, he was just lying in the snow beside the sidewalk across the street. So my husband stopped the car. He pulled over. All this traffic, people walking by, but my husband stopped and ran across the street—it must have been thirty below, and the man was out there with no coat or gloves or anything. I watched him from the window. My husband pulled him up to his feet. And then he started to go over again, taking my husband with him. But Stephan caught him and put him on his feet. And then he gave him something, money or something, and talked to him for a minute. I was getting angry because I was waiting. But he came back in the car and just started driving, without saying a word. I looked back just in time to see the man fall, slowly, slowly, slowly, like someone had a hold of him, all the way to the ground. He hit the snow and just lay there. My husband didn’t see. I just never knew a person who would do something like that before. Who would go pick up a man on the sidewalk.” I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know why your story reminded me of that.”

“It’s about beauty,” said the beautiful-faced man.

“And there’s the falling part,” said Annie. “That’s sort of like dancing. A lot of those dancers, they jump in the air so
high, and I just think, oh boy, she is going to really hurt herself when she comes down! I got a sister that used to do ballet. Her kids do it too. But they don’t hurt themselves. They land like snow does, soft like that, like they’ve got their own invisible parachutes. But right up till that last second, sure looks an awful lot like falling.”