Melissa noticed the train that was standing still on a set of tracks across the highway and decided to cross the asphalt to take a better look. She walked up to the car that was most heavily graffitied, an enormous rusted barrel with the fadings of the words “Government of Canada” on its side, in two languages, streaked with corrosion, mechanical grease, and bird droppings. It made her think about how far this one car had travelled, how many times it had made its way across the country. Then she thought about that greater context, picturing the nation's trains whistling over desolate tracks, then of its planes, like stubby pieces of chalk pressed sideways and pulling across the length of blueboard skies, and the night roads that stitched the cities together through a patchwork of cricket rumours and bat-fluttering expanses; binding us, dividing us.
But these thoughts were soon interspersed by wonderings about school and debt, about travel and where she would find the money to do it, thoughts about her life, about her chances of becoming just another woman living a mostly painless fifty-two-week-a-year emptiness, interrupted, at best, twice, by all-inclusive resort packages. Thoughts that, maybe, the chances were pretty good.
It's interesting how countries, considered Melissa, have a way of having their way with us. Though, she countered, so does the world really, our biology, our nature, time, the cosmos. They all have their way with us. In the end, those inspirational posters and movies and New Age propaganda professing how one individual can make an enormous difference are wrong. In the end, there is room for our smallness, our insignificance. Infinite room.
And maybe, thought Melissa, sensing this, however vaguelyâthe immensity of where and how we fit into it all, what we're forced to dwarf ourselves in measurement againstâit's almost natural that such an overwhelmingness manifests itself physically, inspires something tangible, like graffiti, something left behind for the wayfarer to read, see, witness. Even if it's simply to say, “I was here.
We
were here. Once.” Isn't that why people scratch their initials and names into newly paved slabs of cement, brandishing sticks to etch out letters and dates, children squatting down to push their palms flat into the congealing mud, why travellers, merchants, and crusaders of antiquity inscribed other cultures' holy buildings and landmarks? They were all saying the same thing really. They were saying, quietly, soberly: “We weren't important. We weren't someone whom you would normally remember, someone who altered a heroic past or a courageous future. And why didn't we? Well, it turned out to be much, much bigger than us, so big that we couldn't. But we
could
change this wall, this train, this rock, this bathroom stall. Maybe even with something aesthetic or poetic, something thought-provoking, challenging, something that we drew or wrote in protest, disgust, dissentâor maybe, maybe it was just
something
. But something that was ours. Exactly ours. Put down in precisely the size and colour we intended it to be. It's not much, of course, but it was born solely from our choice to leave it behind. This, here, is our paltry stain that we've chosen over sterility, our tiny peripheral shout over silence.”
Annette gave her quivering car horn a short bleat, and Melissa was soon sitting inside, pulling out and continuing their cross-country marathon. The next day, on the other side of Winnipeg, Melissa was behind the wheel and feeling suddenly settled, firm, her mind made up. She'd spent the entire morning thinking over the school year that she was going back to, affirming and reaffirming how certificates, diplomas, and degrees were just pieces of paper that had very little to do with knowledge, even less to do with intelligence, and absolutely nothing to do with wisdom. With the weightless satisfaction at having come to a decision, she spoke up, talking just above the radio. “Annette. I'm gonna drop out of university.” She continued to look straight ahead, at the road, while Annette grappled with the gravity of what she was saying.
It took a while. “And do what?” she asked incredulously.
Melissa gave a shrug. “I'll figure it out.” Nodding slowly, solid yellow line along the curve of the tarmac a creeping smile. “I'll figure it out.”
It wasn't a decision that Julie held in high regard; in fact, she thought it was the worst idea she'd ever heard. But she also understood her daughter enough to know that no amount of dissuasion was going to work. After a month of Melissa's lounging in her room, mugs of tea, scribbling in her notebooksâwith tiptoeing forays to the fridge whenever Julie was too far from the kitchen to intersect her, probably knowing what was comingâher mother finally implemented what she thought would be a reasonable renting scheme. No one likes a freeloader, she suggested. Melissa, stiffly agreeing, found a job at a café-bakery nearby, preparing salads, waiting tables, washing dishes, emptying a coffee cup with a tinkling of coins near the till labelled “Tips” at the end of every day. When it was slow in the afternoons, she read. And if the owner spotted her when she was, he would insist she clean the legs of the tables, the shelves, dust the light fixtures. He wasn't paying her minimum wage to just sit around you know.
Over the course of seven months she managed to save enough for a three-week backpacking trip through Mexico. She was proud that she'd stuffed everything she needed into a single daypack but saddened by the loss of her separate camera pack on the second-last day of the trip (unsure of whether she'd fallen victim to her own absentmindedness or to an exceedingly crafty thief). With no pictures or room for souvenirs, the postcards on her mother's fridge were the only evidence that the trip had ever taken place. Her Spanish certainly hadn't improved, having pointed at bright fruits in the market, the vendors grimacing: “Qwantto qwestta senniorre?” Sometimes, a papaya in hand, breakfast bought, Melissa had caught herself imagining the way her father would never have been able to survive in such a place. Not the way she could.
The following year, Julie, who'd never been the nagging type, started to drop careful suggestions about what Melissa could be doing, directions she might think of taking. It continued until Melissa, fearing the strain that was budding between them, started looking for apartments, and soon found a place at Markham and Dundas with two other roommates, the rent a steal, even if her room was windowless and claustrophobic, and the closest laundromat was a solid hike away. She'd also found a better waitressing job, in a newly renovated restaurant, upscale clientele, people with three credit cards in their wallets and the unspoken notion that the service industry owed them something for it. She dated one of the cooks there, and after him, a friend of one of the other waiters, always tending to shy away from relationships whenever things began to take on a serious tone. She visited her mother at least once a week, making dinner with her like they used to, nursing gin and tonics while standing on either side of the island in the kitchen. News of Cedric sometimes trickled into the conversation, things that Julie had picked up from friends who'd seen him around the city or from the occasional phone call that he gave her, a quick exchange to make sure everything was all right, his expectation that it should be palpable. “So, sweetie, everything's going okay, yeah? Oh, just hold on a second.” Muffled voices slurring over the cupping of a mouthpiece. “Sorry, yeah . . . so, what was I saying?”
Then came the surprising meal when Julie confessed she didn't think Cedric was doing so well, that he'd sounded down on the phone, sunken. The grapevine had squeezed out the reason why, a simple enough story: he'd fallen for a woman who hadn't fallen back.
“But still,” Julie had said, watching the ice as she swirled it in her glass, “there was something in his voice I've never heard before, something . . .” she took a sip, swallowed thoughtfully, “trodden.”
“Well . . . good.” Melissa, unmoved, leaned up against the island. “No? It's good for him. I mean, welcome to the club with the rest of us susceptible human beings. Glad he could join us at some point anyway.”
Julie clicked her tongue. “Melissa,” she said, making her way to the stove to check what was in the oven, “you and your tolerance that knows no boundsâuntil it comes to your own blood.” She said this with a simple finality, not judging, not with the inflection of a lecture, just stating a bare and unpleasant fact. It was enough to get Melissa thinking a little more about it, though not quite enough thinking for her to change the way she spoke of him, to him.
Two years later, in 2002, Cedric invited Melissa out for lunch for her birthday and spent the first five minutes asking if she still had the travel bug, if she'd been anywhere lately, or had any plans to in the future. But the truth was that her interest in travel had since petered out, something that she felt, for no real reason she could put her finger on, a little self-conscious about, even ashamed of. Cedric almost appeared disappointed, telling her, shifting his utensils around on his serviette, how he'd been to Italy, how he'd decided that he just
had to
take a trip to Europe at some point in his life, and had gone alone, for a week, taking the trains around up north, the Alps on the horizon moving as slow as clouds. He'd taken lots of pictures if she wanted to see them, some time. Melissa, arms folded casually across her stomach, had a hard time believing him. It was astoundingly out of character; he'd always shunned everything that held even the slightest bit of risk, an inkling of adventure. She eyed him doubtfully, almost angrily. He wasn't supposed to change. It wasn't congruent with the way she saw him, some of the reasons she despised him. As they stood up from the table to leave, she felt it her duty as a waitress to point out that he wasn't leaving enough for a tip.
“Dad, it's the only real money they make. I think another couple bucks wouldn't put you out on the street, would it?”
Cedric rolled his eyes and dug into his pockets for some more change. “So it falls on me to pick up the slack of their stingy employers, huh?”
“Yes, St. Francis, it does. Actuallyâforget it.” Melissa tossed a few dollars onto the table herself. “Can we go now?”
Melissa turned twenty-four, then twenty-five in the same apartment and job, the same disenchanting relationships, the same budget of just breaking even at the end of the month but with different books, art exhibits, and repertory films to give it all some flavour, as well as different places to sit with her notebooks on her lap, scribbling, always scribbling. It was probably enough, but it sure wasn't what she had in mind while crossing the country with Annette in her hand-me-down car when she was full of a fuel that she was sure would always be inexhaustible, the momentum that had seemed unstoppable, now rolling to a gravel-crumbling stall. She told herself that she needed a change, or at least to be open to one, should the opportunity present itself, never imagining that it would arise in the shape of shovels and a mud-caked wheelbarrow in her mother's backyard.
She'd gone there during the day, working the dinner shift, and had brought along a load of her dirty laundry. It was the spring of 2005, and her mother had decided to give the backyard a facelift, getting the idea from a neighbour who had a long mound of creeping plants and splaying flowers. Melissa stumbled into an awkward conversation with one of the landscapers, a man named Troy, and the next afternoon, when Julie was out shopping, she invited him in for a coffee at the end of his work day. It came out that this was the last day he would be working there, repaying a favour to someone in the business, having brought the rocks down from a quarry up north. He worked in the field, did exactly the same thing really, but out of a small town in cottage country. He couldn't take the city, he'd said, too many people, too much noise and traffic and bustle. He had a nice place up there, tall stands of trees, a creek running along the border of his lot, hummingbirds at the feeders he put out every spring. She was welcome to come and visit sometime, make a day trip out of it, see something new, he proposed. Troy didn't quite understand the way she smiled at the offer and would have felt uncomfortable about it had she not quickly mentioned that she would be driving up north next week, which was a lie, but one she was willing to work around.
Melissa borrowed Julie's car the following Saturday and pulled into Troy's modest house in the picturesque town of Haliburton, where she stayed until Monday morning. On the day she returned it was raining, driving back through windshield-wiper squeaks, the sky not appearing nearly as dreary to her as it did washed and vernal and fresh. The trips to his house became a bi-monthly practice, then a weekly one. Until the snow had fallen, and the roads had become precarious, Melissa even sliding into a ditch on the way once, when he brought up, only for discussion he asserted, the possibility of her moving in. Melissa hardly had to think it over, the prospect of such a monumental reconstruction of her life so welcome that she couldn't pack her clothes and sublet her room fast enough. Thinking all the while of pippin-peppered snow crunching underfoot, of roads slinking away into the dark, leading nowhere; of winter branches dangling to the ground to point into curling drifts and tree wells, small stories left behind on their surfaces in the font of animal tracksâumlauts, tildes, circumflexesâpunctuation that was both perplexingly foreign and universal.
Like most things in life, Melissa's move to Haliburton turned out to be even more than she'd thought it would be, and less. To start with, it wasn't a ravenous love that she felt for Troy; it was a slower, gentler kind, not as much falling as it was a careful kneeling, an easing onto a forest floor, where she would make small adjustments until she was perfectly comfortable. Then there were the things that had seemed so wildly eccentric at first that eventually became everyday: the radio stations with the call letters “Canoe
FM
,” keeping pet food inside for fear of habituating bears, fake woodpeckers on power poles to stop the real ones from nesting inside, people driving short distances with
ATV
s, wild turkeys on the roads crossing languidly enough to delay motorists.