Poached Egg on Toast (31 page)

Ned has filleted and handed over the fish, winking at Sarah. Em and Sarah go out to the car, laughing.

“He comes to the restaurant every day,” says Sarah. “He wants to take me out. Don’t worry. He’ll get the fish smell off. I can’t believe I’ve never met him before. He was at a different school, that’s probably why. He lives with his parents in the west part of the island.”

She is still smiling.

“You’d think I’d learn,” Sarah says. “You’d think there’d be some way of getting it right. I feel as if I keep making the same mistakes. It’s so hard to give up something when you think it’s going well.”

They’ve cooked the fish and warmed the chips and carried their plates to the veranda. Em can’t take her eyes off the sea. Clusters of pink clouds drift sideways, creating an island in the sky, just above the horizon. She looks at Sarah’s face and sees only a trace of sadness.

But Sarah is staring. “Mom? Have you heard one word I’ve said?”

“I’ve heard every word,” says Em. “I’m thinking that you’re pretty hard on yourself.”

Sarah is silent, considering.

“Maybe all we’re really looking for is someone to tell things to,” Em continues. “Someone who won’t be offended if we break out in tears, or hysterical giggles, or even hives.”

But it’s the energy of loving someone, she tells herself. It takes so long to let go because of the energy. Why would anyone want to give up the exhilaration of love?

They both laugh, but sharply. Sarah becomes serious again. “What about you, Mom?” she says. “I mean—you can tell me to mind my own business—but it has been six years.”

Em looks away, feels her skin tighten around her. “I’m okay, Sarah,” she says. “I’m okay.”

They surprise each other with their capacity to imagine, to love. It is that complicated. It is that simple.

Michael picks her up and they drive inland, for a picnic. They follow an overgrown trail, single file, until they reach the clear waters of a tiny river that empties into the sea. They slide down an embankment and comb the dirt and stones until they have space to stretch their legs. They sit in absolute quiet—aware of the ancient smell of river; allowing the warming sun. They don’t move when the water ripples near their feet. A brown head, matted with water, lifts and stares. Unstartled, the head sinks and disappears. It’s a muskrat, its den probably farther upriver where the banks are muddy. Late in the afternoon, Michael climbs the slope, reaches for Em’s wrist and tugs her up the bank behind him. She feels as if she is being dragged. When they emerge from the trail and approach the car, a great blue heron lifts its wings and beats heavily away.
Remember this
, she tells herself.
Remember
.

Michael is away when Em takes four of her students to the indoor market in town.

I buy chicken
, says Diep, while she inspects and makes her choice.
The chicken used to be a egg
. The whole group is laughing while Diep counts out the money. Em looks up and into the face of Frieda, who is alone at the far edge of the market stall. There is a moment—not exactly of recognition—when Em sees the frown that crosses Frieda’s face. Frieda’s teeth press into her lower lip. She turns abruptly, and is gone.

Auntie Trinh has witnessed the exchange.
Finishee
, she says to Em, but Em does not ask what she means.
Finishee
. Em thinks of Frieda’s face and remembers that, never once, has Michael mentioned his wife by name.

The previous fall, during a week’s vacation from work, there had been a wild storm. Winds from the northwest blew day and night for four days. Michael, knowing she would not be able to get outside or go very far, arrived to see if she needed help. Wind battered the front window panes. The upstairs windows were coated with sand that splattered violently out of the air. Em had not felt locked in by the storm at all; instead, she’d experienced a sense of freedom, of space. She stood at the livingroom window and watched the far-off breakers build at the horizon and crash to shore, spume flying high. It was difficult to recall that the sea had any other face.

Michael walked up silently behind her. “Come to the kitchen,” he said. “I was outside and threw a bucket of water against the window. We can prop up our feet and look out and have tea.”

Instead, when she turned to him, they had gone upstairs to her room. In the midst of the storm that battered the house from every corner, Michael was more gentle and loving than she had ever known him to be—more than she’d have thought possible.

Later, he stood in the kitchen doorway, his face turned away. She was clearing the mugs, dumping the remnants of their tea.
Over
, she said to herself at that moment. We
both know it’s over
.

That night, though the storm subsided, she dreamed of waves rolling up through the field and crashing against the house. She dreamed an animal in the room, the blackest of profiles, its bleak closed jaws. She sat up and spoke to herself in the dark. “This,” she said, “was once about joy.”

Em stops at the restaurant to pick up Sarah after work. She slides into a booth and asks for a cup of coffee. Sarah is joking while she works behind the counter. She’s making her co-workers laugh.

She’s better, Em realizes, watching her. Sarah has always been capable of humour, but now it’s a tougher humour that will get her through. My adult-child, she thinks, smiling at the contradiction.

“Here’s your coffee, Mom. I hope you don’t mind waiting. There’s still cleanup. I might be another half hour.”

“I don’t mind,” says Em. “I’ll start the student work here instead of at home.”

She opens her briefcase and places the folder of loose papers on the table. She reads the first sheet, written by a student whom everyone calls Harry. Harry is not his real name but he’s never told anyone what his real name is. Harry is twenty-three, but she thinks of him as an old old man.

We meet another peeple, he writes. We leev our land. Sometim him leev her, her leev him. But that okay. That what we are capable. Sometim crying, sometim laffing.

Em stretches out both hands and covers the words.

What had taken her by surprise was the sensation that she was drowning. Michael returned from his last trip and walked away. He could not tell Frieda. That was all he could say. But Em had been cut adrift. She’d felt as if she were sinking into the sea.

She glances up now as a smiling Sarah comes towards her from the counter. There is nothing to be done but feel badly until you get to the end of it, she thinks. That is all. “Finishee,” Auntie Trinh had said, that day in the market. A finite word.
Finishee
.

Sarah slips into the booth.

“You know Ned, from the wharf,” she says. “He’s coming over tonight.” She grins. “I thought I was afflicted forever. Ruined.” She stops. “Hey, have I interrupted a heavy moment here?”

Em looks at her daughter, sees the fierceness, the old capability as it moves into place. It has always been there but, until now, Sarah hasn’t called it up for use.

“Yes, no, yes,” she tells her daughter. She holds the edge of the table because it is solid. She thinks of Frieda’s expression when they were face to face in the market, and admits what she has always known.
Frieda knew
. She slides her hand along the table. Looks through the windows in the direction of the wharf, the waves that slurp and lap over sandbars, the Gulf, the far-off river that reaches inside the continent for two thousand miles. In the distance, worn mountain ranges rise up like the slumbering backs of old whales.

She thinks of the open sea. How she strides into it every summer day, how she braces herself for the cold that pulls on her bare legs. Even on days when she doesn’t swim, she leans forward to splash water up to her face so she can taste the sudden salt.

She leans into the back of the booth behind her and has a flash of memory again: Frieda’s face at the market.
Sorrows to bear, sorrows to be borne
. She takes Sarah’s hand in her own and feels it relax, let go.

Run
, she should have told herself, long ago.
Run the other way
. Instead, she had chosen love—and deceit.

“Sorry I drifted,” she says. “I was thinking about some of the things I’ve learned.”
What we are capable. Meet another people. Sometim crying. Sometim laffing
.

Sarah gets up out of the booth. “Let’s go,” she says. “I’m moving on. No matter what has been left undone.”

On the third day of December, he wrote in pencil on the kitchen calendar:
Robin in front yard
. The robins had migrated before the middle of October, and he wondered what this stray would find to eat. It was gone by the end of the day.

December 24, he was shovelling snow from the path that led to the sheds and he looked up to the sky to see Jesus Christ reclining in the clouds. Details were vivid and clear. Christ was wearing a loose robe, and his eyes were kindly as he looked benevolently and sorrowfully towards Earth.

Arthur banged the snow from his boots and went into the warm kitchen. He stood awkwardly, pencil in hand, wondering how to mark this on the calendar, knowing it for the momentous event it was. He decided on the abbrieviation
CHR
. If Ada were to ask, he’d say Christmas, one day until. Something like that.

January 31 was the coldest day Arthur had ever lived through, all the years of his life. He walked as far as the clump of trees in the middle of the field and stumbled back to write in his black diary:
I thought the sky above the planet would crack. I understand now, what the medievals saw when they described the dome cupped over the flat earth
.

Ada only raised an eyebrow when she came across notations on the calendar. Ada had her three meals to cook every day, which she liked to do, and she had her friend, Elizabeth, who lived on the opposite side of the field. Every Thursday night, she and Elizabeth went to town to see a movie. Ada did not feel the need to write any of this down.

April 16, Arthur wrote on the calendar,
The blooming of the lily
, though he hated lilies; they reminded him of death. Ada had brought this one home on the bus from town, and carried it in her two hands across the field as she walked from the bus stop.

These were the weeks when Arthur worked furiously in the garden, keeping an eye on grackles that strutted like executioners in their blue hoods. He had to put up with them at his feeders if he wanted to keep the jays.

May 26, he entered in the diary:
Mewling and caterwauling in the trees. The orioles took the string 1 chopped for them, and disappeared.

That was the same morning he and Ada had the fight over what she’d given him for his breakfast, though he made no entry to mark it.

He’d only mentioned, albeit complainingly, that he was tired of eating poached egg on toast; he’d had it three times in the past ten days.

“I wouldn’t be fussy if I were you,” said Ada. “There are only so many breakfasts I can think of to make.”

That’s when Arthur should have kept his mouth shut, but instead he shot back, “Why I could think of a hundred breakfasts, each one different from the last.”

“I’d like to see the day you’d come up with a hundred breakfasts,” said Ada, “even in your imagination. Especially when you’ve never cooked so much as one for yourself.”

They sat to a meal together later the same day, but the next morning Ada did not get up.

Arthur posed upright in his chair in the living room and waited, and then he went to the kitchen to put the water on for his tea. He returned to the chair and waited again. Ada did not get up.

He tore a piece of paper from a pad of yellow foolscap.

Corn fritters, he wrote. His stomach contracted in hunger, from the writing of it.

Corn flakes, he added. These were pretty harmless.

muffets

shredded wheat

He paused and inserted as a heading, Occasional which he underlined.

Ada had to be pretending to be asleep; he knew for a fact that she’d never in her life stayed in bed so long.

kipper snacks

sardines, plain

sardines with tomato sauce

sliced tomato with black pepper, on toast

fish

He changed his mind about fish, and turned it into a heading of its own.

Fish

bass

trout

pickerel

salmon (canned)

sole

finnan haddie

He heard Ada stir and he hid the list inside the dictionary. He got up and put on his jacket and went outside. He walked as far as the trees in the middle of the field. There was a small rise there, and he could see all the way around in a broad circle. He placed each foot deliberately, rotating one hundred and eighty degrees. He thought of the word
view
, and remembered discovering in the dictionary that one of its meanings was “footprints of the fallow deer.”

When he’d been a young man and had taken his rifle to the woods, he’d been excited by the stillness, the sudden startle of the deer. But there were no footprints this day. There’d been none to notice even before he’d marked on the calendar six weeks earlier:
The last melting of the snow
. It had been twenty-three years since Arthur had hunted. His rifle had been resting in the gun rack all of that time.

He stayed outside the rest of the morning, and tried to expand the breakfasts in his mind. Without enthusiasm, he could get no further than
finnan haddie
.

Lunch was ready when he went inside, and he was glad to get some food into him. As soon as Ada turned to the dishes, he sat in the living room and went back to his list,

cottage cheese

apple fritters

Jello–orange

      –cherry

      –blackcurrant

      –lime

He included only the flavours he would eat, and he counted each as a separate breakfast. He created another category.

Cold Meats

chicken loaf

Delicia loaf

mac & cheese

head cheese

bologna, fried