Losing It (15 page)

Useless, she thought, but she didn’t tell him to stop.

There was no point going to the falls themselves, a body would be quickly carried downstream by the violent pull of the current. There was a safety fence, but Julia knew her mother would have found a way around it – she’d gotten out of Fallowfields, hadn’t she? She’d probably crossed the bridge on Hog’s Back Road, paused to look down at the roiling fury, then had fallen over right there just from the awful pull of it. From this angle down below Julia could see the jutting grey cliffs, the hump of rock in the middle of the maelstrom, the swirling, foaming, roaring tonnage of falling water.

“Scared!” Matthew said.

“No, you’re not,” Julia snapped.

“Yes, scared!”

“Just go to sleep!” she said, knowing he wouldn’t. He started to whimper. “Shhh!”

“I can hold him,” Donny said, but Julia refused again. She couldn’t possibly entrust him to anyone else tonight. Then it occurred to her that she’d forgotten about her headache, but with the thought it came surging back.

“Slow down!” Donny said, but what was the point of that? They were only postponing the inevitable. Her head would just burn, burn from the inside, become completely unbearable. Better get it done now. “We might miss her!” he said, farther behind than before. He could look back in the bushes, uncover every twig if he wanted.

There was the water now, calmer, almost subdued at the base of the falls. She turned off her flashlight, weak as it was. Better to let her eyes adjust, watch the black water turn grey, the sky lighten to dark blue, purple. Shadows of trees, the murmuring of the ripples. In many spots here the river wasn’t more than a few inches deep. But her mother still would have found a way
to drown. This Julia knew: it was the final punishment for selling the house and moving her, for not taking her in herself. This horrible death, with no doubt about who was responsible.

“Do you see her?” Donny asked, coming up from behind. He shone his flashlight up and down the river. The light beam reduced the field of vision considerably. Everything outside of it disappeared in black.

“She’s here. I know it!” Julia said.

She waded into the water. It was frightfully cold. Her running shoes were soaked and frigid in an instant. She let out a harsh breath then kept going. It had to be done. You carry the child, let it take over your body for nine months, then you have to squeeze him out. There’s no other way, either you do it or you die, or you let some doctor cut it out of you like a tumour or a stone. You don’t think your legs can spread wide enough, you feel like it’s going to rip you from your vagina to your throat, but you do it. Drugs help but it’s still impossible and yet must be done. Like this. One step after another, slimy rock and silty bottom. You cannot fall; your child is strapped on; you’re walking for two.

“Do you see something?”

Julia took a step, balanced on a small rock, then took another step and sank down to her knee. There were even deeper sections. That’s where her mother would be, she thought. Dragged under by the current, her twisted body. A rock wobbled and Julia nearly went over. She fought upright, drenched the other leg in stretching for a more stable perch.

“What do you see?”

Something silver in the water. A hand? Julia bent over, so carefully, with Matthew’s enormous weight on her front. It would be so easy to fall over. She could feel her back resisting, complaining. A hand? No. Something else. Not a body part.
Julia was relieved and disappointed. It could just be a tin can. Deeper than it looked; she had to lean and hold herself back at the same time. Her knee buckled slightly but held. The water was screaming cold on her arm but she stayed silent, the way she had in the hospital with Matthew. What’s the point in yelling? You have to go through it. It’s a debt that must be paid.

“What did you find?” Donny asked, shining his light, temporarily blinding her.

She started screaming then. It came from her bones and shook the night.

“What? What is it?” Donny yelled.

“It’s the ricer!” she wailed, waving it around, unmistakable proof. “My God, oh my God, it’s my mother’s ricer!”

There were blankets on the shore and searchlights, men wading in the frigid waters, poking with sticks, police dogs sniffing up and down the shore. It was out of Julia’s hands. She was wailing now, inconsolable. She shook with cold and fright and exhaustion, with hunger and fear and the dread of night. The big officer stayed with her and patted her shaking, huddled body from time to time. At any moment the men with the sticks were going to pull up her mother’s body. It was going to be black with muck, lifeless. The sight would sear itself into Julia’s soul. She’d been entrusted with her mother’s care and had sloughed it off to incompetents in order to save money.

Why hadn’t she spent more time observing the security precautions at Fallowfields? One afternoon’s visit was hardly enough. She could’ve asked for references and followed up, phoned the relatives of some of their other residents. She was a researcher, it wouldn’t have been too difficult. A little effort, some imagination, and all this would have been avoided. What
a pitiful dishrag she’d turned into: one small child and her world had sunk into mush. She pictured her mother wandering stupidly, blindly, all alone on the bridge, mesmerized by the pull of falls, no one around to hear her screams. In the middle of the city, in the middle of the day! Losing her balance, falling over, slamming her head on a rock on the way down and then the merciless current rolling her light frame, her fading little body, sweeping it away in slow motion while no one helped.

What had Julia been doing? Taking forever to get Matthew ready to go out. Planning her kitchen renovations! She retched suddenly but nothing came up; there was almost nothing in her stomach.

Julia heard a commotion in the distance – dogs barking, men yelling – but she couldn’t look. It was the body. They’d talked about this very thing countless times over the years, that strangely serious though mocking tone that her mother would adopt whenever they passed by a feeble, wretched old soul.
“You will not let that happen to me. I’m telling you now, if I’m drooling in bed and muttering, you have my permission to take me in the backyard and shoot me. Just bury me in the back garden by the rosebush. Not the rhubarb, I don’t want you making jam out of me later on!”
Smiling at her little joke, at the way Julia couldn’t figure out whether to take her seriously.

“Ma’am?” the big officer said. “Mrs. Sterling?”

“
There’s your father’s shotgun, he taught you to use it for a reason. If I’m ever moaning about my lost knitting like Mrs. Abelnorth, if it ever comes to that, you’ll know what to do. That’s a darling. Did you write to Mrs. Henley? You should thank her for the hairbands she gave you at Christmas
.”

“Mrs. Sterling!”

“Huh?”

“I just got word from one of the hospitals. A woman has brought in someone who fits your mother’s description. Pretty disoriented. Her son found her wandering around here this afternoon. Do you want to come with me to check it out?”

Julia looked at him the longest time. It was
so
cold!

“I think I need to stay here,” she said dully. Then suddenly, “Where’s Matthew?”

“I have him. He’s fine. Sleeping away!”

Julia looked up without comprehension, finally said, “Donny,” as if practising his name.

“You should come with me to the hospital,” the officer said again. A persistent grip on her elbow, she had to rise. But this is where they were going to find the body! What about the dogs? What had they been barking at? Julia peered into the gloom to see what the dogs were doing.

“We can come back here if it doesn’t pan out,” the officer said.

11

J
ulia Carmichael. Three years ago, when Waylun Zhi said to choose a personal word pattern for the microcosmic meditation – something relaxing yet powerful, full of grace, energy, redemption – the first words to leap to Donny’s mind were
Julia Carmichael
. He’d been standing in Waylun Zhi’s little studio in the tree-hugging position, knees bent modestly, back straight, arms rounded in front of his chest as he tried to relax, to focus inwardly, to channel the energy of the universe through his own sacred vessel.

Julia Carmichael.

The in-breath, when the energy wheel in his middle source opened like a petal to the soft heat of spring, was
Julia
. The out-breath, when the wheel tightened like a ball being squeezed in all directions at once, evenly, not hurried, as if wringing out all the bad energy and toxins accumulated in the body – that was
Carmichael
. He said the words, and although he was supposed to be standing without mind, in emptiness, he usually thought of a specific image: Julia Carmichael in tight, faded blue jeans and a velvety-soft, form-fitting purple sweater, with
her dead-straight, shining blonde hair combed down her backside, standing outside the gymnasium before the Christmas term History exam, two pens and three pencils gripped lightly in her small right hand, and who gave a shit what Mr. Wilkens was going to ask anyway?

She was sitting beside him now in the squad car, older, with shorter, more ordinary hair and a thicker body, suddenly much more human and approachable than that younger version. Her child was on his lap and Donny was breathing with the cosmos, thinking
thank you, thank you
with every tingle of energy that squirrelled up his spine, circled his brain, dripped down his front to his middle energy reservoir buried behind his navel. Waylun Zhi said that he should have faith, that if he repeated the sacred patterns daily, worked towards no-mindedness without hurry, without ambition or goal or desire, but faithfully, with an open heart, then balance would be achieved and great channels of life vision would open up to him. His health, his disposition, his energy for work and love, all would improve. Good things would happen because of his positive thought energy. You couldn’t predict exactly what they might be, but a diligent practitioner would be in a steady, peaceful state, ready to accept the gifts of universal harmony.

Julia was holding her temples, now, drying her eyes. She was full of a seasoned, more vulnerable beauty than when he’d sat behind her every day and rehearsed, fruitlessly, snatches of nervous conversation.
Did you get the assignment done for Billings? What’s happening with your science project? Are you going to the __?
The __, the whatever it was – the football game, the fall dance, the Christmas concert, the event, the non-event, the nothing, the excuse.
Will you go with me?
Five words, impossible to articulate, but whirling inside his head day after day.

Now here she was, in a different lifetime almost, so small beside him, her head leaning on his shoulder, everything up to him.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I think we’re probably going to find your mom is fine.”

She didn’t respond.

“What do you call your grandmother?” Donny asked Matthew. “Do you call her Nana?”

“Gamma Lenore,” the boy said. “She’s bongo.”

He was younger than his friend Ramone’s kids, was full of spark and kick. His eyes were never still but constantly roamed over everything.

“She’s what?” he asked.

Julia shifted slightly, didn’t look at them but seemed to be listening.

“She eats nappies!” Matthew blurted.

“What’s a nappy?” Donny asked.

The squad car pulled up in front of the hospital’s main doors. It was a sprawling, weathered, brown brick building covered in ivy turned rusty now with the cold weather.

“It’s a napkin,” Julia said, getting out. “My mother poured her wine on her napkin a while ago, put it on her plate, and then started to cut it with her knife and fork. For Matthew it was a real highlight.”

They followed the police officer into the dull corridors of the aging building. The officer was tall and rectangular and had a head that looked as if it had been carved out of a tree trunk. Like Ian Lambton, who used to play for Brookfield and then went on to four seasons at tackle with the Rough Riders before they went under.