In the Land of Birdfishes (7 page)

The air was hot and dry, and the sun was burning the back of my neck and the part of my hair.

“You’re a liar,” I said softly.

The boy didn’t turn around, but the woman who had brought him there watched me. “He’s telling you the truth,” she said.

“What’s his name?” I asked. “What did you say his name was?”

“It’s Jason,” said the woman. “I’m Minnie, and that’s Angel”—she pointed to the singer—”and you’d better tell us your name.”

I told them my name. Angel turned and looked up at me from the corners of her eyes and then turned her face down again. She fiddled with her hands and touched Jason’s sleeve, but he didn’t move.

“What happened to my sister?”

Minnie looked sharply at Jason.

“When did she die?”

“Don’t you get too excited. It’s been a long time now. Maybe five years she’s been gone now,” said Minnie.

“Six.”

Even Minnie flinched. She nodded at Jason, who stared fiercely at the ground, as if he’d said nothing.

“It was sudden,” Minnie said. “She didn’t have any pain.”

Jason stood up.

Suddenly his hand was in my face. I drew back, but he held his hand close, his thumb tucked into his palm, so that I could
hardly see. “How many fingers am I holding up,” he said. “How many fingers.”

“Get away from me,” I said. “You’re not her son. She was so gentle.”

“How many fingers.”

“Four,” I said. “Get away from me.”

He took his hand away and looked hard at me. He was much taller than I. “How come you can see,” he said. “How come she was blind and said it was something that happened to both of you.”

I felt a hand at my waist and realized Angel was there beside me. She looked up at Jason, and he took his eyes off me to look back.

He was breathing deep and hard. “Who is she,” he said.

“It’s Mara’s sister,” said Angel. “You know she had a sister.”

“Why didn’t she come before.”

“I don’t know,” she said softly. “I wish she’d come sooner.”

Jason began to walk away from us.

“Jason …” called Angel.

He had this energy about him like he might suddenly stop walking and reach out and throw someone to the ground. I was trying to figure out how to leave. I was dizzy and tired. Far, far away, light was leaving my kitchen.

“I have to go,” I said. I left them standing there, and I found my way back to the hotel. I climbed upstairs to my room, which exhaled faintly sour-smelling, warm air as I opened the door. It must have been late. It must have been nighttime by then. The sun was high in the sky, and I slept in its suffocating heat.

I woke from a dream of Stephan. Immediately I was unable to remember what he’d been telling me. I knew if I moved, the dream would be lost forever, so I kept my head still on the pillow and closed my eyes, digging deep into the dark there. Reaching back for my dream. Then I heard my name again.

“Aileen?”

I hadn’t realized until I heard it again that it was the sound of my name that had woken me. And then a knock on the door.

“Aileen, are you in there?”

I stood up slowly and went to the door. Through the peephole, I saw a face I didn’t recognize looking back at me. Then I remembered her name. “What do you want, Angel?” I said through the door.

She apologized for waking me, but said Jason wanted to meet me at a bar in an hour. I didn’t answer, and she knocked again. Her face was anxious and I was tired.

“How’d you know where I was staying.”

She turned her face down. “I asked Ivan about you. There aren’t very many places open now.”

I slipped the chain lock off and turned the knob, peering at her through a crack just wide enough to rest my face between. “I don’t have a real good reason to believe that roughneck kid that can hardly string together a sentence is my sister’s son. But what I know for sure is that you aren’t anything to me.”

Her eyes watched mine for a moment and then she bobbed her head, like she’d understood something. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I lied to you. I didn’t ask Ivan. I followed Jason.” The sides of her mouth turned up, but she wasn’t smiling. “
He
followed you here.” Then she turned away and headed down the stairs. I listened to the creaking of the steps under her feet and then I heard the front door close.

I tried to sleep again but felt smothered by the hot, airless room. “Are we that far north that it would be too many goddamn miles to drag a goddamn air conditioner?” I said out loud. The walls were so thin I thought maybe down at the front desk they would hear me.

At last, I threw on the lightest shirt I had and the only jeans I’d brought and left the hotel. I stopped at a restaurant on the way, but it was even warmer inside, so I took my sandwich to go and headed down to the river again. I passed where Angel and the others had gathered hours before, but they were gone now. The bank settled into rock and then to river. It was not such a steep walk down to the blue moving water. It looked so cool and fresh. I slipped my shoes off and stepped carefully down the rocks. I reached a foot into the river.

I’d never felt anything so cold in my life. It burned through me and I burst out laughing. I could hardly feel my foot and would not have been surprised to see it bobbing out to sea. I felt awake.

It was astonishing how swiftly my whole body was cooled by a moment’s submersion of one part of it in the chill water. Now I felt more sure that the sun was lower than it had been and that the air was loosening its hold on the day’s heat. I crouched down onto the rock and then spread both legs out and plunged each foot into the water.

Again I laughed.

And then I reached my hands into the water, so that I nearly fell in.

I was no longer young. I was, I supposed, middle-aged.
And I’d been an only child for six years and had not known it. And now I knew.

My hands burned and my feet burned and I thought my heart would stop. Stepping out of the water, I rubbed my hands and feet till the blood flow returned to them. Then I put on my shoes and walked back up the hill. Mara was so frightened of water. In that moment I could remember as closely as if my sister’s damp, relentless hand was still in mine, how she had cried when our father taught us to swim.

I wasn’t surprised when I saw Angel sitting there, beside the road, watching me and playing her guitar.

“You followed me again?” I asked.

“It was Jason who—”

“I know,” I said, and she went back to her song. I couldn’t figure out how I hadn’t been able to hear her singing all the time, her voice was so clear now. I told her I was sorry and she nodded.

“We’re late,” she said, putting her guitar away and it made a soft thrum of sound, knocking against the case.

The bar was called The Pit and it was a good name. It was a good name for a place that felt like a basement but wasn’t. It was the sort of bar I would have avoided back in Nova Scotia.

Angel and I took a place at a table along the back wall. I wondered why bars like this were compelled to line their walls with rusted bits of trash and kitsch. Why did they want this refuse to speak of the kind of place this was and what was kept in it?

The waitress was pretty and young and all wrong in this place. She was polite enough and brought us two pints that Angel ordered. It was the type of bad draft beer that tastes too
sweet and then leaves its sour fingerprints in your mouth for hours afterwards. I drank it fast so I wouldn’t taste it. I didn’t see Jason anywhere.

“Maybe he didn’t believe me that you would come,” Angel said quietly.

“Maybe,” I said, “he just didn’t give a shit.”

Angel turned her chair so she could see the door, and she watched it like a dog with its eye on a bone. I was grateful she didn’t want to attempt some sham of a conversation, but it made me nervous to watch her in profile, staring steadily ahead and hardly blinking.

The waitress came and asked me what I wanted. I looked down and saw my glass was empty. “Another,” I said. “Something in a bottle.”

He hadn’t left a phone number for me. I didn’t know where he was staying, if he was even still in Toronto. He’d only been gone a few weeks. Was it stupid to leave, when the only way we could reach each other would be for him to find me in that house? He knew where I was if I stayed there. If he doubted. If he hesitated.

“We’re like an old married couple,” he used to say if I was naked in front of him unceremoniously. Cutting my toenails into the trash or dressing in a hurry in the morning. “We
are
an old married couple,” I’d said to him. Again and again, he said that, I said that. I’d thought there’d be things like that we’d go on saying all our lives.

It could have become the kind of thing we’d look back on later, together. Not an ending, but a strange time that we got through, together. Maybe he was at my door the day after I left. Maybe he was at a bar somewhere right now, thinking of me, growing tipsy and dizzy with thinking of me.

“I’m going to find Minnie,” Angel said, getting out of her chair so fast I gasped in surprise. “Maybe Minnie will know where he is.”

I nodded. She walked away, and the eyes of the dirty men with their backs against the bar took the long measure of her and the way she walked across a room and out a door.

Stephan would get halfway to one place and then turn around and go back the way he’d come. He reached decision like steel reaches flint—a snap of thought and a glint in the air and then all was certain, but fitfully so. A question or a glimpse of something in the distance and everything could be changed. I’d seen it before, how I’d say something dull or too cloying and he’d become hard and far from me, defensive and even cruel. I’d feel him leave the room from across the table. There would be no way to bring him back into it. I could only wait until he saw a woman be kind to a dog, or a warm wind pushing the curtains apart and entering the house before a storm, and something would alter in him again and he’d be mine. He had the caprice of something horribly light in the air. A falling leaf that is lost to you at the last possible moment, that is taken by a wind so slight you only know it by the sudden, surprised emptiness of your open hand. I saw him at my door. It was yesterday, it was seven o’clock last night, it was exactly right now. That moment, whenever it was, would keep all of his secrets. His back at my door, his hand on the bell, peering through the window for light inside—what he looked like, what he thought of as he stood there before my empty house. His return to me would be forever bound to that moment, in conspiracy with a regret or hesitation I would never know of. Because I hadn’t been home when he came back to me.

“Another,” I said.

A bluegrass band was playing at the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed that they’d stopped tuning up and started playing real songs, but now the hands of some nicotine-faced man were fluttering up and down the neck of his guitar, and an ancient-looking singer was baying.

A plywood door swung open beside the bar and slapped against the wall like it was hardly worth the effort to stay on its hinges. Jason walked through the door and leaned against the bar and a beer slid in front of him. He picked it up without paying and began to drink. The old men at the bar were speaking to him, but he kept his eyes on the band and his mouth shut around the neck of his beer.

There was nothing of my sister in him. By now, I supposed, my sister would have looked old like me, but I remembered her soft, pink face and corn-coloured hair. His eyes were a dark slice across a hard brown face. There was no gentleness to him. There was swing in his walk, in his weight against the bar, but it was a violent sort of swing. Like there was something in him so fretful and charged, he was full of the mysteriousness of it. Like he was the wonder of something that might soon happen. You’d watch him, close to you, like you’d watch an animal that had been raised without kindness.

So then it was a man from here who had been the father of my sister’s child. How did Mara find her way here? How funny that Mara, sightless, had made it so far, when I had hardly left the Atlantic.

I watched a girl approach Jason and get maybe half his attention for her trouble. He drank and watched the band while she looked up at him, laughing. Finally, the girl turned away, bored, and watched a piece of hair wind between her fingers. Jason looked up then and saw me.

Where was Angel and who the hell was she to have left me alone like this? She seemed sweet as pie, but I could tell there was steel in her someplace down deep. Maybe she’d planned this whole thing. To leave me here, drunk, with an empty glass and no way to go to the bar without speaking to him, and no way to leave the bar without speaking to him.

“You know you look like her,” said a man’s voice behind me.

I turned around and saw a hippie-looking fellow in a loose-brimmed green hat with shaggy grey hair around a shaggy grey face. “Mara? You know Mara?”

“I heard her sister came up here. I heard her sister didn’t even know she was passed on. That true?”

I pushed back my chair. “I don’t see how it’s at all your business.”

The man’s face lost its earthy geniality. I saw it slip off a face as hard as Jason’s. I turned my back while he was still putting his backcountry charm back together, and took my empty bottle to the bar.

“One of these,” I said. I tapped the bottle with my finger. “The ones with the horse on them.”

I grabbed the beer from the bartender’s hand and looked at Jason over the bottle as I swung it up in my fist, like I used to drink as a teenager at the harbour. After I’d got switched over to the regular high school, the only kids who hadn’t minded me hanging around were greasy-haired punks who’d dare me to dump bottle after bottle of whatever booze we could get our hands on down my throat. It made them like me, how I said yes to everything they could come up with. “You’ll do anything,” they said, and I wasn’t stupid enough even then to think it was admiration in their voices, but what it was was close enough. They thought I was fearless.

“Where’s Angel,” Jason said.

“Went looking for Minnie. Or you. I don’t know. So where’s your father?” I settled my back against the bar, beside him.