Everything Is So Political (19 page)

The coast like a birthmark on her life, permanently staining her genes. Christmas and birthdays spent in the arms of the background forest, the succour of rocky seascape.

Before him, the need for solitude had spoken to her like her father, reassuring and strong. Now—today—the aloneness is a source of anxiety and the solitude a bitter irony, a reminder that she doesn't know herself as well as the land.

He came as a contractor to replace the ant-eaten floors.

“You just moved?” he asked when he saw the boxes stacked in corners.

“Come home,” she nodded. “I was away.”

She unpacked as they talked and he worked and she felt something stir, but tucked it away when he mentioned a girlfriend.

After the floors, he stayed to rebuild the beach stairs. When all the work was finished and he'd gone, she was glad for a return to her quiet solitude and an end to all the noise, the whining saw and thumping compressor that had wound her up.

But as the next seasons passed and more weeks fled, time stretched into an indefinite distance. She began to see her life for what it was, disconnected and utterly alone. When she realized that his presence had been the last time she interacted with another, the recognition felled her, dropping her onto the floor to weep at her emptiness. The thought that there was nothing—not a thing—to look forward to overtook her mind and she thought about letting herself sink into the landscape, returning to the earth in the same way as the forest's old ones.

A season of gloom rode her heavily and then one afternoon she found his business card tucked in her door and the something she had felt in his presence stirred in her again. “Call me before the weather turns,” he'd written in round, schoolboy letters. “Let's go hiking
.
”
She could not remember what he looked like, but she remembered their talk of hiking.

The card and his invitation a turning point.

She had loved that he also loved the forest. After their hike, after a first winter of forest walks and beach fires, a hint of spring again: the understanding that his presence had revived her; the chance to talk and fight and love again.

But in every land the barrens.

She knew about his wariness for the sea, that he felt too exposed there and could not love it as she did. After their first few years, when he wanted to move, she went with him out of a sense of allegiance for what they had built together. On an acreage above the ocean he showed her how she could still watch the comings and goings on the water. But the new view was too expanded, too far away, and now when she stared out the windows it was mostly to gauge the approach of weather. Storm clouds and fog boiled down the strait in the winter, and if it was going to be another day of endless heatwave, she could see that too: miles of blue openness sat above the green-humped islands floating below them and nothing moved in the cerulean sky.

They had come to where they could live closer to the land, hoeing the gardens and mowing the fields. Except in the worst weather, they'd sit on a bench at the far end of the meadow, enjoying the dogs and building bonfires.

But at night she stared past the deck, straining to hear the waves and watching for the reflection of stars on water. Within a year she began to feel removed from herself, unraveled so far from the shore.

She missed the water's voice and the different shades of light reflected off its changing surface of waves and glass. At dusk she watched the mottled sea below, remembering the peculiar shades of black and orange that had rippled across the evening tide in front of the cottage.

His chagrin when he found her outside: “What are you doing here?” The way he caught at her elbow to pull her away.

Her averted eyes and mute refusal, reactions that angered him.

“Aw shit—stay there, then. Get depressed.” The shake of his head as he turned to go.

She could picture the sternness on his brow as he shut the door hard; the way he'd brood with long-legged stride into the woods. Sometimes, then, she would sigh and put on her boots to search him out, following the bark of the dogs to find his trail. When she caught them up she would say nothing, only wait for him to speak first, a sign that he had forgiven her. Then they would be a family again and she would pretend all was well.

But during the day her private thoughts swirled. Always, it seemed, she had to choose between the land and him. Between being alone in a place that fed her, or with him in a place that suffocated. Killing herself with or without him.

* * *

Perhaps she had felt the signs all along, chosen to ignore them.

She remembers how he sat with his back to her, elbows on the table, fists holding his head. In his voice the little death when he spoke: “It's time to move.”

The tightness in her throat as she waited for more. Asking finally, “Where?”

“It's too crowded here.”

From the kitchen she turned to search his eyes but saw only the whorl of his crown. “You need more space?”

When his fists dropped, he growled at her. At life. “Maybe I need my own place.”

The scrape of his chair as he stood to leave, as her eyes found the army of trees through the window.

* * *

On the shortest day of the year she is baking when she hears the familiar trample of dog paws across the deck. At the door she buries her face in their furry necks and wet tongues and her tears blur everything. When she stands again, he holds her for a long while before the oven timer dings to interrupt them. He talks excitedly, laying out photos while she upends muffin tins. She brings a steaming plate to the table and finds a row of glossy prints waiting for her.

“Saskatchewan,” he says. A hint of pride in his voice.

She nods dumbly, stares at the waiting line of pictures.

“A quarter section,” he breathes: “A hundred and sixty acres!”

Now she remembers: he'd gone there before, returned completely smitten. “The hugeness,” he sighed. “The emptiness.”

He stands beside her and the scenery in the photos bring a gone look to his eyes. He shakes his head and says, “You wouldn't believe the quiet.”

The first time he went to the prairies she welcomed the utter silence he left behind. Now she embraces his nonstop talk, the shattering of the emptiness as he describes the land he's found.

He saves the house for last. “Three bedrooms in these rolling hills that change colour through the day!” The landscape of southwestern Saskatchewan tugs at his bones as though he belongs there. “Sixty thousand dollars don't finish a 20X20 cabin these days, let alone a place this size!” Shoving the picture into her hand.

She holds the photo away from her, as though to see it better. “Stark,” she says of the empty scenery. His lip curls and he snatches it from her fingers. He scoops the entire row of pictures from the table, slides them into the top drawer of the desk.

All evening she wanders about the house, seeing and touching the things they'd collected. Driftwood made into a lamp. Paintings of tugs. A maple table refinished together. Would all of it fit in such a big, open place?

She is afraid of that prairie bigness, of standing in the middle of ancient grasslands and feeling the overwhelming proof of evolution. Dinosaur remains in every canyon, cattle bunched against the nonstop wind, harsh temperature extremes, and lack of water. And the people, another special breed, their interdependency in that wide open heartland.

When he finds her on the deck later, his eyes are on fire. “That house here would be at least $300,000.”

She cranks her neck to look up at him. “Is this about money?”

“We could retire.” He looks through her to the ocean below, head shaking in disgust.

He dangles another carrot.

“No possibility of seeing your neighbours, let alone hearing them.”

The list of items included with the property make him salivate, a child imagining Christmas morning with everything he wished for: “A half ton 4X4. A snow blower. A tractor.”

He exhales loudly. “A simpler life,” he declares.

All that land to get lost on,
she thinks.

She cooks dinner while the six o'clock news reports increased break-ins and muggings, deaths due to overcrowded hospitals. She blocks out the details of the Picton murders by wondering what must have happened to the man during childhood.

From the computer room his voice wafts into the kitchen: “That's the best kind of furnace.”

She pads to the doorway. “What?”

“A wood-burning hot water furnace,” he reads from the screen. “Best kind for heating.”

She lifts her eyebrows then bounces her chin, a nod of sorts. She turns away.

“And all those tools!” His enthusiasm chases her.

She bends to look in the oven's cavity then closes the door and leans on the counter, red lobster oven mitts at the end of each arm. She stares at the trees outside, sees them swaying. With laughter? She takes a breath then asks the question: “Are we moving to Saskatchewan then?”

He enters the kitchen, eyes wide. “Yeah?” he asks, breathless.

And she holds her own breath as he squeezes her in a bear hug. But something inside leaps and flips and she remembers the symptoms from before: on the cliff in Portugal; searching for trees in the city; leaving the ocean….

Over dinner he is chatty, talking about cattle ranches in the hill country, long hot summers on the flats. How she'll love the solitude and miles of walks through coulees, those dry, deciduous glens he wants to call home.

She smiles at him but her heart rebels.

Spring

He will go first, set up the new home while she oversees the finalities of the house sale. The truck heads down the driveway and he waves out the window, dogs and furniture piled high in the back.

He has been gone only two days when the letter comes. She stands in front of the mailbox, holding it, examining the curly writing from a Saskatchewan address.

She carries it home and puts it on the kitchen counter. Every time she passes it by, the sky blue of the envelope looks up at her. Trying to be innocent, she thinks.

He does not answer his cell phone when she calls to tell him about the letter. She leaves a message but neither does he call back. She waits a few days then puts the blue envelope away in the drawer with the photos he has left for her. To remind her where they are going.

She examines how she is feeling. Tired. Nauseous. Betrayed. And she wonders about her decision to leave, to follow. If she goes, is she, too, a traitor?

She goes back to the shore, to the landscape that speaks to her in a way people do not. In the new garden she buries her hands in a bed of weeds, beginning the process of turning the soil. The ground is cold, so cold, but she is at peace. Behind her the protection of the rainforest, in front the rush of crashing waves. She is come back to her inheritance.

It is not yet true spring, only early February, but at the shore it is already mild. She has seen no bears yet. No cougars or elk; no animal sighs of any kind. The aloneness both terrifies and pleases her: she listens to the birds and is grateful for their presence.

With her hands in the still-dead soil, she bends to her task, feeling her connection and kneading it, working it. Then, out of nowhere, a sudden recollection halts her mining hands.

A teacher's words: “The only thing vouching for our existence is how—or if—we are remembered.”

She sits back on her heels, wondering why she has thought of this. And what it might mean now.

Then the next thought:
Who will remember me
?

Her life as a series of homelessness in different places, from one landscape to another, one house to another, always searching for the best place to put down roots, to feel safe, to feel ‘belonged.' But of human connections there is only his.

* * *

In the old desk she finds the blue envelope and his photos of the prairie house in that midst of empty country. She holds the envelope in her hand before dropping it back in the drawer to stare at the picture, trying to imagine him there. If he planted some trees, or if there were a garden…

But she is from the coast, raised on this slide of granite into the ocean with its seaside smells, slimy weeds, and razor-blade barnacles. Could she live beyond sight of the ocean? Beyond the trees?

* * *

He calls eventually and she lets him know about the letter, but he denies knowing anyone in Saskatchewan who would write him a letter.

“Shall I open it then?” she asks.

The smallest of hesitations before he says, “Sure.”

A blast of perfume makes her gasp when she tears it and he asks too quickly, “Who's it from?”

Her throat swells with panic and she chokes on her words: “I think you know…”

His sigh the only admission of guilt. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“I shouldn't come out then?”