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Authors: Rebecca Silver Slayter

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In the Land of Birdfishes (6 page)

BOOK: In the Land of Birdfishes
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FOUR

I
DREAMT OF OUTER SPACE
. I dreamt I was a child, paddling the darkness as I swam in a vast ocean of stars.

And then my dream collided with a sun-glared living room I didn’t recognize. I peeled my face from a rough wool blanket beneath me, squeezed my eyes shut again, and thought for several moments before I remembered where I was.
Dawson
, I thought at last. Oh hell. Then I opened my eyes and looked around.

It was a fussy, mismatched sort of room. All the furniture had flower patterns on it—the overstuffed cotton sofa beneath me, the sectional couch that faced it, and an armchair by the door—but none of the patterns matched, and the curtains were made of white eyelet lace that did not look entirely clean. I heard a floorboard squeak above me and stood up. She had told me I was cruel.

I knew the kind of look she’d given me. She was like people back home in Halifax, where people’s friendliness was a measure of how big a fool they thought you were. They liked the look of themselves doing favours and thought you might fall for thinking that was kindness. Annie’s eyes had said what she thought of her and what she thought of me. So I found my
suitcase where I’d set it down by the door and I left Annie’s house.

It was even hotter outside. The sun was so bright that, for a moment, as the door closed behind me, I couldn’t see anything at all. Then, when I squinted, I saw a street that seemed to have been peeled out of the Wild West. Elderly couples clung to each other and strolled down board sidewalks lining an unpaved road that shook brown dust into the air every time a car went past. The storefronts that faced me had signs painted in the sort of typeface usually reserved for phrases like “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” It was as if the entire town had at some point conceded that it would no longer be an actual town. Instead it had become a myth of itself: a museum harbouring its own memory of having once been a real place.

I followed the sidewalk I was on until its end, and then I got a glimpse of the river several blocks away and realized there was little more to the town than I had just walked and the distance between where I stood and the riverbank. Somehow it had looked bigger from far above.

I cut down to the next street below and saw a hotel sign. I pushed open the door underneath it and approached the desk inside, where a boy stood staring at something in his hands. He had hair combed over his eyes in stringy points and shoulders that poked through his T-shirt like sticks. “I need a room,” I told the boy.

“How many nights?” he asked, without looking at me.

“I don’t know.” I thought. “Maybe a while,” I said.

He shook his head. “No rooms,” he said, and I stepped
closer till I could see he had one of those little electronic games in his hand, and it was that he was staring at.

I put down my suitcase. “Where can I get a room?”

He shrugged. “Nobody’s open before June 14. Any place open now is booked.”

“But
you’re
open.” I wanted to snatch the game from his hand. He had a slack, sullen face, and I knew that behind his lowered lids, his eyes would have that dull, empty look all kids’ eyes seemed to have these days. I felt my heart rate become faster till I could hear the pressure of blood in my ears and throat.

“But we’re booked.”

“Booked until when? Can I get a room tomorrow?”

He shrugged again. “Don’t know. I’m just watching the desk for Ivan. Ivan said no rooms.”

“What do I do?” I asked. He hadn’t looked at me yet and my voice sounded too high, too thin.

“Lady,” he said. “Lady, lady, lady.”

“I’m looking for my sister,” I said softly, my voice anemic, my voice a bony hand reaching.

“So stay with her,” he said.

I didn’t mean to start crying. I never cried in public. But I did and it was then he put down his game and looked at me. At first I thought he was disgusted, embarrassed because I was old and a woman and maybe I reminded him of his mother, but he just stared at me and I stared back. He had long, dark, wet-looking eyelashes around his pale eyes, the eyes of a startled, lovely girl.

“Ivan will be back soon,” he said at last. “You wait there.” And there was no chair where he pointed, only a flight of stairs, so I nodded and wiped my face and stood by the stairs to wait for Ivan.

An hour passed while I stood by the stairs. Not one person came in or went out the front doors, and the boy didn’t raise his eyes from the game in his hands. Eventually I sat down on the bottom step, and the boy said nothing. The room was so dim that I struggled to keep my eyes open. It was warm and airless and lit only by a narrow barred window facing the street and a piano lamp on the glossy desk shielding the boy. I couldn’t tell if the wallpaper was pink or brown, but a headache had begun pounding behind my eyes, and I slowly came to feel as if the walls were the colour of the inside of my head and its pain. Finally I stood up.

“Listen, kid,” I said to the boy, “are you from this town?”

He set the game down on the desk and it made a series of tinny sounds. “No,” he said, “but Ivan is.”

“I can’t wait for Ivan,” I said. “I’ve got to find my sister. Listen, kid, I have to tell you something and you may not be ready to hear it.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I have to tell you that it is rude to play with that thing when someone is talking to you. You’ve got a job here, do you understand that? It might not seem very important to you, and it isn’t really a very important job. It’s kind of a stupid job. But when somebody is here for a reason that is important, like if somebody is here to find their sister, you’ve got to do better than this.”

He blinked and then the door swung open. “That’s Ivan,” he said, glancing at the door.

Before I turned, I leaned over the desk and said, “The whole point is to look at people and listen to them. The whole point of the whole thing is to not be staring at some goddamn video game.”

“Like life, you mean?”

I wondered if he put gel in his hair to make it into those little points, if he was so stupid he thought that was the kind of thing he should spend his time on, or if he was just so dirty, his hair found its own way to looking stupid.

“Like life,” I said and looked at Ivan, who crossed the room with a sigh. He was a dark-haired, heavy-set man whose features seemed to have retreated from his wide cheeks and jaw to crowd the centre of his face. His eyes were so close together they almost crossed as they stared at me.

“You need a room?” Ivan asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Ivan unhooked a key from a line of nails behind the desk and handed it to me. “Taz, get her credit card. It’s a no-smoking room. No pets either.”

Then Ivan climbed the stairs, and only after he had disappeared did I remember that I hadn’t asked him if he knew my sister. By the time I turned back around, Taz was handing me back my card. “All done. Enjoy your stay.”

I slept until past dinnertime. When I woke, I was shocked to realize I had fallen asleep right on top of the plaid bedspread. “You think they wash these for every guest?” I’d always told Stephan when we stayed at the motel by his sister’s place.

My headache had somehow gotten worse while I slept. Rubbing my temples, I stood and looked out the window at the town below. It was so small and yet I hadn’t a clue how to find her in it. I would have to ask someone—who knew how many people—till I found someone who could tell me where she was.

Exhausted at the thought, I sat back down on the bed. No one knew I was here. There wasn’t anyone to know, not really. With Stephan gone, and the only people we’d met in Toronto friends of his from work. I’d had a few friends left from the university I’d taught at in Halifax, and when we lived there we’d have dinner with them once in a while. But they weren’t the kind of friends you kept in touch with once you were gone from a place. So there was no one but Stephan to tell that he had left me.

It was thinking that that made me realize I could just as easily leave this place as stay. No one would miss me if I left. My sister, wherever she was, would have long ago stopped wondering when I’d come for her, if she ever wondered at all. The few people I’d met would be glad enough not to see me again—Annie and that boy at the desk. If I could just get a ride somehow back to Whitehorse, I could sleep away the four-day drive home and it would be as if all this had been a dream. There’d be nobody I’d even need to confess how stupid I’d been to—it would be as if I’d never come and I could resume my life as if I’d never left it.

But at the thought of turning the key in the lock of the front door of our house, I felt a chill. What life, after all, would I be resuming? I had only a part-time job teaching rudimentary grammar to Korean immigrants, and nothing to spend my days on except thinking about a long trip I’d taken to find no one and then come home again to no one.

I couldn’t stand being in the hotel room. I noticed a faint stain on the quilt by my hand or maybe just a worn spot, something that reminded me of the hundred other bodies that had slept on it, fucked on it, sat at the bottom of the worst of their godforsaken lives on it and tried to weasel out of the one thing they’d meant to do. I had to leave.

I grabbed my purse from the bedside table and hurried out the door and down the stairs. Taz didn’t look up as I passed him, and I slammed the front door behind me as I stumbled down the steps onto the street.

The sun was still high and bright overhead, and I squinted as I made my way along the sidewalk with the idea of the river in my head. I got as far as I’d gone earlier in the day, and then I turned down toward the water and kept walking. Down by the shore I could see a couple dozen people gathered, and I could hear a woman singing.

As I got closer, I could hear her voice rise and fall in the air. A guitar rang out. She hit a high note that seemed unlikely, even impossible, her voice flickering so easily all the way up there and down again.

It was music like the folk songs of my childhood. Earnest, not tired like most music I heard these days. It was some kind of love song she was playing. I could tell that from just the sound of it. How it made me think for a moment again how easy it would be to go home. How I might go about finding him, how I might ask one more time for him to stay … the other words I might use to convince him.

I crossed the last street before the river and climbed down the hill to where people were gathered in front of the woman with the guitar. She was just finishing her song when I took a seat on the grass not too far from her. I realized she was scarcely a woman at all; her face was still round and girlish and almost too large for her slightly plump but delicate frame. And then I realized that some of the words she sang weren’t English. She had light brown
skin and black hair. Maybe she was Native Canadian. Or were they Inuit here?

An old man seated beside me put two fingers in his mouth and whistled when the song ended. The singer said she would take a short break. I heard again the scrape of our front door against the floorboards as he closed it behind him. The sound, still in my ears, was getting louder.

I suddenly realized that Stephan didn’t know where I was. If he were to try to reach me. I pictured my kitchen, yellow in the afternoon light. I pictured the phone on the wall, ringing.

“Mara?”

A young woman, maybe ten years younger than me, stood before me. She had a broad face and long black hair. An Indian woman—no,
Inuit
, I thought. The woman stared at me, and I stared back.

“You aren’t Mara,” said the woman slowly.

I was confused, and then I understood.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Mara’s my sister,” I said. “She’s my sister. You know her? You know where she is?”

There was no need for the woman to look at me with such mistrust. Like she thought I was a liar or dangerous. The woman stepped back and looked over at the singer, who was holding her guitar by the neck and leaning against the gazebo, talking to a dark-haired man. The woman reached into her pocket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it with her face down.

“Okay,” she said. “How come I’ve never seen you before?”

“I haven’t seen Mara since we were children. I came here to find her. Is she here? Can you tell me where to find her?”

The woman exhaled smoke in two columns through her nostrils. “Okay,” she said again. “I think you better talk to Jason.”

I felt myself get angry. “Who’s Jason? Where’s Mara?”

The woman narrowed her eyes and said, “Jason’s her son. You stay here and I’ll get him. You stay here.”

As the woman walked away, turning once to look back at me, I was suspicious. My father had not said anything about Mara having a son. Why should I have to speak to this child instead of to my sister? I was tempted to leave. Then I wondered, And go where? I thought again of my kitchen.

The singer was staring at me. The woman who’d spoken to me approached her, and I saw the singer put her hand over her sweet, pretty mouth and nod.

“Who are you,” said a man’s voice.

I turned around and saw the man who’d been talking to the singer. He was maybe in his twenties. He had dark, narrow eyes. His face was angry, but as I looked at him something loosened in his mouth and eyes.

“You aren’t her son,” I said. He was too old. He did not look like her. He was a liar.

“Ma,” he said. “Who are you. Who the hell are you,” He looked younger now than I’d thought. Maybe just twenty or even a teenager. He stepped toward me and then he was in my arms. I didn’t know who opened whose arms first.

“I told you she looked just like her,” said the first woman to the singer, who now stood beside us.

As fast as he was in my arms, he was out of them. “What are you doing here,” he said. “Why’d you come here.”

“I wanted to see Mara. I wanted to see my sister.”

“I told you,” said the woman. “But older, right? And those yellowy streaks in her hair. Mara never dyed her hair.”

I spoke to the boy. “Can you take me to—”

“She’s dead,” he said and turned his back to me. “Which one of you wants to buy me a beer.”

The sweet-faced singer answered quietly, “I will. Let’s go, Jason.”

BOOK: In the Land of Birdfishes
9.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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