Architects Are Here (9 page)

The sun came up just outside of Whitbourne and the world was now coming into colour. David had been forcing the car, pushing it past the range of its headlights. Then a set of legs crossed the highway. The headlights rammed into the legs, a flare of moose, and a body rolled heavily onto the hood and smashed in the windshield and bent the door posts and landed in our laps. It was like someone had thrown a bunch of heavy luggage on us. We had seatbelts on. The impact knocked the light out of me, I couldnt breathe, and I woke up with a policeman shining a flashlight in my face through the passenger window. It was about six in the morning. The back of the moose was across my chest. The policeman was Randy Jacobs. Boys, he said. Boys youre some lucky. David’s hands pinned to the steering wheel. He could not get them out from under the moose. It took a winch and a jaws of life to open up the door posts. David’s hands all cut up from the windshield glass. That was the end of Zac’s car. We got home on the bus.

It was eight oclock at night and my father was standing at the stove, pouring dried milk into his second cup of tea. How’d you get home. And I told him about the accident and the bus. My father looking for David. He was shaken and he stared at me and saw the small cuts in my jacket from the nubs of windshield glass. Then he leaned towards me and hugged me. He said, Son, that boy is trouble.

The dog remembered me, and I stayed in the room that I’d grown up in, in the bunk bed below my brother’s. The texture of the masonite panelling and the slats of wood under the mattress above me. There is a prison which is the view from a bed, and this view slung me back into the confines of childhood, and I could handle that for about three days.

SEVEN

I
N THOSE DAYS
of Christmas I walked around my hometown, amazed that I had grown up here. I was all of eighteen. David borrowed his father’s car and we picked up Gwen Hurley and Maggie Pettipaw and walked through the Millbrook Mall. That’s where I saw Nell working at the photography shop, and she took my picture. She was getting off shift, and I saw her borrow a snowsuit from a waitress. She must have been pregnant then, though I didnt know it. Nell was taking a ride at night across the bay ice on the back of a snowmobile driven by Joe Hurley, I heard Maggie Pettipaw say this. So Joe was back in town and had called her. The snowmobile was a big purple Arctic Cat with a reverse gear and a heater in the windjammer and a stereo by Joe Hurley’s left knee. Even if this is what I am, must I defend it. Even if, does it mean I must dislike it. These are Nell’s thoughts. Even if I think it’s for the best, perhaps it’s not. For instance, Ayn Rand. Perhaps I’m not gutsy enough to know what’s best.

Joe Hurley was from St Judes. The Hurleys had built an extension onto their house. And now they were knocking down the house and building an extension onto the extension. Nell was having dinner with Joe in the house wrapped in vapour barrier. His brother, Gerard—who I went to school with—and the father, the one she’d met in the woods, Loyola.

Back at residence Lori Durdle said to her youre not going home, and couldnt understand it. Youre not staying here by yourself, she said, over the holidays. And she invited Nell to her home in Stephenville. It was flat, an air base, and Lori’s father had worked as ground crew for aircraft before he lost his hands in a sheet-metal machine. Mr Durdle played the accordion with his stumps and Nell was given a soft drink with a bottle of rum waved over it and on Christmas morning there was a pair of knit socks and trigger mitts and a toque and they were for her cross-country skiing, Mr Durdle said. They were made with Phentex wool which is not wool at all. A man with no hands had given her mittens. Lori’s mother wore a long white cardigan and she made apple pie and those chocolate cookies with mini marshmallows, cookies you kept in the freezer. Mr Durdle played cribbage and in the afternoon his brother came over with his family and they had a turkey for fourteen. In the living room an entire wall was a wallpaper mural of a riverbank in fall with a road beside it. The windows had white sheers and every house around had white vinyl siding. On Boxing Day the air base had a meet-and-greet and they rolled up the hangar door to seven American fighter jets and the pilots let the land crew sit on the wings and they served them cans of Milwaukee beer. These men were being trained to service the space shuttle, for Stephenville was one of three bases in the world on alert for an emergency shuttle landing. They had photos of the shuttle taped above red shelves of tools and, while they fixed and flew jetfighters, they sometimes talked about an afternoon when they might welcome the heavy fuselage gliding in for a quiet landing.

S
PRING, THEN SUMMER
. In July, just three weeks before her due date, Nell made an appointment with social services. She signed the papers and she did it alone. She had a coldness, or perhaps it was distance. She saw the writing hand and it was not the hand that belonged to her eyes. I will live on no matter what happens to the people around me. A nurse nudged her while she was sitting there signing the paper. The nurse needed a sink to wipe grease off her hand. They were not being respectful. She met the doctor who would deliver the baby, Dr Manamperi. He sat down to talk to her, and as they spoke he took a mango out of his pocket and cut it in half with a scalpel. Then he peeled the mango and he offered some to her. My brother was visiting, he said. He brought these from Chicago.

She ate the mango. Youre not from here, are you, he said. And then he laughed.

This was my way into Canada, he said. Two years in this hospital. And now I’ve been here five years.

He had been written about in the paper. He had survived a skiing mishap. Dr Manamperi and two colleagues were to spend five days in the woods. His friends were on snowmobile and he was to meet them on skis. He was flown in by a bush plane. They had the frozen pond marked where the plane was to land, and Dr Manamperi would ski all day and meet his friends on another pond thirty miles to the west. They had his supplies. It was a cold bright December morning. He skied all day. He had a topo map in a clear plastic bag strung around his neck. He had an apple and a chunk of cheese and a mango. He was aiming for a knoll on the horizon. And when the sun touched the knoll he stopped skiing and checked his map and looked at the hills around him and the path he’d taken all morning. By four oclock he knew something was wrong. He had been forcing the landscape to agree with his map, but now he knew that he wasnt where he was supposed to be. The men on snowmobiles should be on that knoll, and there were no tracks or any sign of anyone. It was getting dark. He had no matches and no tent. He checked his compass and he skied on until midnight. And now he understood the mistake. The bush plane had dropped him on the wrong pond, though he did not know which one. He did not know where exactly he was. The men could be twenty miles away, but in what direction.

He built a snow wall and slept out of the wind. The stars were bright and very cold but he took the cold. He preferred the cold to the wet. If it warmed up he would be in trouble.

He studied his map. There was a grey line that dropped south of the highway and crossed the lakes. If he made for that line he would intersect it at some point, and then he might find help. He would have to ski for three days to meet the grey line.

He peeled and ate the mango. He pushed snow into his water bottle and melted it in his chest pocket. But it did not melt fast enough so he had to find brooks that were running into the ponds. He skied night and day, resting for an hour every four hours. He was afraid to fall asleep and he hoped it would not get mild and rain on him. He skied towards the grey line, and on the night of the third day he was worried. He had not crossed it. He built his wall and knelt behind it and drank the brook water and ate half of the apple.

Then a light snapped on. A prick of light in front of him. And, in the dying sun, he saw the faint silhouette of transmission lines.

He skied towards the light. It was dark when he got to the hut. He skied up to the door with half an apple in his pocket. He knocked. Then tried the door but it was locked. Then a latch shunted across and the door opened. It was a woman. Hello, he said. My god, she said, come in.

What Helen Crofter saw was a brown face burnt with frost. I’m with the paper mill, she said. And youre lucky I’m here.

There is no luck, he said.

O
N A THURSDAY
in early August Nell was admitted to Western Memorial Hospital. She gave birth and Dr Manamperi let her hold the baby for a minute. It was a boy. A nurse came back with the sheets she had signed a few weeks before. You havent put down the child’s father, the nurse said.

Does it matter, Nell said.

The father’s name has to appear on the forms.

So she wrote down a name. She knew that Arthur would be mad at her, so she did not put his name in. She wrote down Joseph Hurley.

Then Dr Manamperi had to check the baby’s heart rate and that was all she saw of the child. She lay in bed for three more hours but felt strangely kept. Like someone had used her to have a baby. Yes, she felt used. But they would not let her go. Was it much meconium, I mean we had meconium. Her breathing was elevated. Could be pneumonia. So they left her in the room while two other women had their children and were let go. There were children all over the place and she felt like maybe they were making a point, could she just see her baby once more.

Arthur had been there. He’d been in and out. He suggested a hotel. I didnt want to say anything, he said, but I could hear the doppler going down. The baby’s heart rate had been a hundred and forty beats per minute before he was born, now it was dropping below a hundred.

Youve seen the baby.

They told me not to touch him too much, because he was breathing rapidly, more than a breath a second.

Youve got such a warm and cold heart, she said.

She got out of her gown and a nurse helped her dress and the nurses, she realized, were both sympathetic and judgmental. Then Arthur booked her in at the Holiday Inn on West Street. It was the last thing she was expecting to do after she gave birth, was stay in a hotel.

T
HE HOTEL BECAME WRONG
. The same emotion that she’d had at the hospital was visiting her here. She had to be self-reliant. She was packing her bag when there was a knock on the door and she said come in but she had the door on the chain. She went to the open door and it was Joe. There was someone with him further in the hall. She opened the door.

Youre doing okay are you, Joe said. You remember my dad.

It was Loyola with his arms full of shopping bags. He had baby blankets and diapers and bottles and some clothes that still had their price tags on them. He was looking around for the baby. Hello, he said. How’s the youngster.

She brought them over to the hospital. This is your family? said the nurse. This is the father, Nell said. They’ve come to take the baby home.

S
HE TOOK THE CITY BUS
back to residence and knocked on Lori Durdle’s bedroom door but Lori wasnt there, it was August and Lori was back in Stephenville working at the mall. She phoned and Lori’s mother said for her to come and visit and she did, she took the bus into Stephenville and she curled up in Lori’s narrow bed until she came home from work. Lori made her tea and buttered toast cut into triangles. My god you got more guts than I got, Lori said. The next afternoon Nell heard the soaps on the television and dragged herself out with the blanket and pillow and Lori made her a can of condensed soup and they watched three hours of soaps, eating soup and crackers.

Then Mrs Durdle had the Hurleys on the phone. She was talking to Loyola. It was Joe’s baby, that’s what the nurses at the hospital were after saying. Mrs Durdle thought Loyola should know about that but Loyola said he already knew and that it was all taken care of and the baby was sitting right there beside him in the bassinet.

Joe Hurley came to visit. He said, Why didnt you tell me. I’m set to go now. I’m all signed up I got no way out.

He was flying to Petawawa for training. My dad and mom, he said, theyre going to take care of Anthony. I mean I had no idea, right? I had a job with Richard and I turned that down. I couldnt see myself in the middle of a continent like in Santa Fe. I want to go overseas. Is that all right with you?

Anthony, she said. You named him Anthony.

O
NCE THE BABY WAS GONE
she found she couldnt live in Corner Brook. She’d been sending messages to Richard. First it was about Joe Hurley and the baby and then their messages accumulated in emotion and commitment. It was easy to promise things in these computer messages. It felt like souls were talking without the bodies interfering. The good soul. Nell had a good soul, she had just veered into bad behaviour. Richard said she could come down and work for him in Los Alamos. She could have Joe Hurley’s job. And while she was independent and free, part of freedom’s cliché is being blown by the wind and wind comes from some deliberate force. That’s when I saw her again, in this window of being pushed around by many impulses. I was home for the summer working with my father on building houses up on Bliss Street. It was a Sunday morning and I was coming home from a party at Dave’s. It must have been about six in the morning, I was cutting past the green side of the Anglican church on West Street. And she was sitting on a park bench with Joe Hurley. They had the baby with them. I noticed Joe because he had a new haircut, he had joined the reservists and his ears were bare and white. They had obviously been arguing but now they were exhausted. Joe Hurley with a little bit of the woods on him, like he might have sawdust in the cuffs of his jeans. And so they made an incongruous pair to be having a baby but at the same time, as soon as you see a couple like that, you make allowances and they both warp into other characters capable of new behaviour and being parents.

That summer I was playing squash with Dave and Dave was using his father’s office. We played at the Grenfell gym and I went by to get Dave at the office when I saw Nell again. Her dark shiny hair pulled back tight. She was surprised by us.