February (11 page)

This was not a meal they had together, because she’d eaten already. She’d eaten with the kids because she was hungry and because she preferred to just watch him.

He would look down at the plate before he picked up the fork and he was still on the rig in that moment and he could feel the ocean under him, though it was a kind of motion he never noticed when he was actually on the rig. It was a motion he felt only on land, and usually when he was dreaming. He could feel the bed sway while he slept, but only on land. It was the absence of the motion that he felt.

He picked up the ribs in his fingers, pulled the meat off, and he licked his fingers. He licked his thumb first and then his index finger and his ring finger, and he took his time. He was mostly absent while he ate, not aware, intent on the food. He put the bones on a saucer.

Cal had two separate lives, and when he and Helen had the money together they were going to buy a convenience store with gas pumps. They had gone over it, and if they both worked at a business like that they were pretty sure they could make ends meet. They were certainly putting money away. But they didn’t speak of those plans. Because if they talked about Cal giving up the rig, they were admitting the risk. And it was something they had agreed never to admit.

. . . . .

Jane, November 2008

JANE TAKES A
bus into Toronto from the airport, and then a streetcar towards a hotel she remembers staying in before, but she goes the wrong way. She gets off and crosses four lanes of traffic, dragging her luggage. It is almost dark and very cold and she has a number of books in her suitcase. The sidewalks are full of ice and the wind is at her back. Her hair stands out straight around her face. Snow swishes across the asphalt in thin veils, coiling and twisting up towards the sky.

She had asked a man pushing a shopping cart for directions and now he is following her. His cart brimming over with garbage bags full of pop cans and plastic bottles, the wheels plowing through slush. Jane had given him money and he’d shoved the bill into his jeans pocket without looking at it.

The man speaks in a kind of stage whisper, his eyes shooting back and forth, watching the crowd on the sidewalk, his words a melodic, insistent patter about dolphins and the beauty of marine life, the sway and flow of the ocean, and the creatures that break the surface, flying up out of the water and splashing down. He makes an undulating gesture with his hand, whistling through his teeth, blowing hard bursts of breath through his wet lips like the sounds of a dolphin frolicking in the waves. Coast of Mexico, he says, shaking his head as if he can see it stretching out in front of him.

Jane excuses herself and ducks into a grocery store. She is hungry for something raw and sweet. Mist shoots down with a hiss from an overhanging shelf onto a bank of red cabbage and pale lettuce and bok choy and fennel. It drifts down onto the dirty beets and broccoli, and she runs her hand over the ruffle of wet herbs, the smell of earth and cilantro.

Jane passes over the green apples and buys a single peach that comes in a fluted paper cup of dark purple. She is ravenous. There are three tables gathered under the sputter of a nearly broken fluorescent light and she takes a napkin from a chrome dispenser and rubs the fruit. The peach is so soft it is almost rotten and she bites it right to the centre. The pit bleeds a deep crimson stain into the orange of the flesh. She tries not to think of the texture of the peach skin; the fuzz gives her shivers like someone walking on her grave. Juice dribbles down her chin and she can feel a flutter from the baby. Her chin is sticky, and her fingers, and they smell like summer. The tips of her ears sting from the cold, and as she rubs them they begin to burn. It is as if the baby has felt the erotic pleasure of the peach and has kicked out to tell her.

Back outside, the man with the shopping cart is waiting for her. The wind takes the heavy door of the store from her hand and smacks it against a cinder-block wall, and Jane struggles with the suitcase. One of the wheels is stuck in an iron grating. The man leaves his cart and grabs the suitcase, twisting it through, and then the shoulder strap of her laptop bag breaks.

And
boom
—she knows. She does not want to have a baby by herself. The world is full of suffering. It is dark and cold. She is afraid of all that could go wrong. She needs a father for the baby. She needs John O’Mara.

She thinks of that morning with John in Reykjavik, the Independence Day parade streaming past him, the brass and the drums and a glockenspiel, the crowds jostling against them both. How exhilarated they had been. He’d gone back to find her scarf. She’d dropped her scarf.

The dolphin man is going up the stairs of a streetcar backwards, dragging her suitcase.

What about your shopping cart, she shouts. The suitcase bounces and jitters up the steps, and the streetcar’s folding doors clamp shut on it and open and clamp shut again. Then the dolphin man is inside, knocking his way to the back, the suitcase smashing against knees and hips.

Mexico, yeah, Mexico, he whispers. He squishes his way through to the back of the streetcar, and he sits next to a woman who gets up and moves, and he slides to the window seat and slaps the seat beside him, and Jane sits next to him. The man has a pitted complexion and he is unshaven. His front teeth are grey and soft looking and a few are missing. He speaks to Jane as if they are deeply involved. He speaks as if his life depends on convincing her of something obvious and urgent.

Surfing off the coast of Mexico with a pod of dolphins, the man says. Hundreds of those babies, they were just playing with me, man, leaping out of the waves, they were dancing, those fellas, they really knew how to have fun.

Jane saw so much of this craziness while writing her thesis on the homeless in New York. She interviewed two hundred vagrants, an ethnography of indigence in the slums and projects. She discovered that the cold and the rain, hunger and loneliness, made people delusional. It was no more or less complicated than that. The world fell away from them or it blew through them. Scraps of dreams blew through.

This man will sleep outside tonight, Jane knows. The streetcar’s brakes wheeze and there is a crowd waiting at the next stop. Someone dings the bell and the cold rushes in and swirls down to the back.

Jane thinks of John the morning after she first slept with him. She’d wanted a lamb kabob and he had found her one and then he said: Your scarf. Where’s your scarf? And she touched her neck. The booming drums, and then somehow he ended up in the middle of the marching band, and he bent down, and when he stood up he got knocked on the head by a tuba. The members of the brass section scattered and the parade got backed up. There were unharmonious groans from the trumpets, and then they reformed the tight marching lines, eyes bulging with consternation, cheeks full of spittle, and John had her scarf. His fist shot up in triumph: the scarf of shantung silk she’d bought for herself in Santa Fe.

More dolphins than you could imagine, the man on the streetcar says. I was filled with wonder. Coast of Mexico, coast of Mexico.

John had dragged her into the National Theatre of Iceland after the Independence Day parade. How dark after all the sunshine. He’d found a back door because someone had said
architecture
, someone had said
closed to the public
, and there was a ballerina in the middle of the stage in a tutu and a mask of silver glitter. She raised her arms and spread two giant wings of white feathers, and she rushed towards Jane and John, and just as quickly rushed away on her toes. The janitor threw them out at once. He reprimanded them in Icelandic and then told them in English: Get out, damn you.

More dolphins than I’ve ever seen in one place, the man says. His eyes are glistening with tears, or perhaps because he has spent the day in the wind, or maybe his eyes are infected. His cheeks are wet and his eyes rheumy and bloodshot, lids puffy. I’m a marine biologist, he says. Or I was. It was the most beautiful sight I ever saw, them dolphins. He wipes one of his cheeks with the back of his hand.

They accompanied me, the man says. He is looking deeply into Jane’s eyes, an unblinking scrutiny, and of course she is tired. But she feels close to this man. She is astonished by how much she feels for him. She loves him. It might well be love. Perhaps she is coming down with something. A profound tenderness. She wants to be accompanied, that is all.

A little-known fact, the man says. Dolphins often try to have sexual intercourse with their trainers. He smiles at their audacity.

Yes, Jane says. I’ve heard that.

The Independence Day parade in Reykjavik had flooded into a town square at the bottom of a hill, and there was the transport truck: a black cab and silver grillwork and a lengthy cargo container as big as a bungalow. A strongman had stepped out of the crowd. He wore black Lycra and his head was shaved and he had a strut. He raised an arm and curled his fist and turned the fist in towards his own forehead as if it were a threat he had to protect himself from by staring it down. The muscles in his arm were bowling balls. Two men in white overalls came out from behind the truck. They were carrying a huge tangle of straps and ropes and chain, and they strapped a leather harness onto the strongman.

Jane wants to call the father of her baby again. That’s what she wants. Jane will call him. What if she needs him? What if raising a child requires the kind of strength she does not possess?

The strongman had leaned away from the truck and the chains went taut. Then he staggered, one step, another, then another. A cheer went up, a roar, and the transport truck rolled several yards.

I have to call someone, Jane says to the guy on the streetcar. She whispers so as not to startle him. But she wants to explain. There’s a guy I have to phone, she says. She clicks her purse open and digs for her cellphone.

Dolphins try to have sex with their trainers, the guy whispers back. But of course they don’t have the right appendages for that. They don’t have, you know, those things, but they’ve been known to try.

I’ve got a card, Jane says. She takes John’s card out of her wallet. She presses in the number and lets it ring.

Hello, John says.

It’s Jane Downey again, she says.

Don’t hang up, John says.

Okay, she says.

Promise you won’t hang up.

Okay, I won’t hang up, she says. The streetcar pulls up to another stop and the man beside Jane leaps up and past her, and stands in front of the doors looking at his feet, and then the door swings open and he turns back and calls to her: There’s a storm coming.

Where are you, John says.

I’m in Toronto, she says. She looks out the window as the shops slide slowly backwards and begin to flick past.

Actually, she says, I’m lost.

. . . . .

The Empire State Building, Late November 2008

SO YOU’RE BRINGING
her home, his mother says.

We’re going to meet up, John says. In Toronto, and come on home from there.

But he is thinking about his childhood. Those moments of almost paranormal sensitivity a child feels. The sinister shimmer—a child intuits the toaster; he feels the toaster being a toaster. He looks at the toaster and the toaster looks back. He sees how things were put in place before he arrived. Small things. An eyelash on his mother’s cheek. The adding machine
ka-chunking
with a vengeance on the dining room table late at night. His mother lost a contact lens and it fell through the veranda floor and his father found it in a spider web.

I love you, his father would say, and then shake his head at the enormity of it. Don’t you ever forget it.

John’s father would tell stories at night, lying on the bed between John and his sisters; they were all squished in and you couldn’t move. Someone was always falling into the crack between the bed and the wall. His father’s hands tucked under his head, elbows jutting up, as he told stories about princesses and monsters and journeys through enchanted forests and buried treasure. Stories about bravery and trust, enduring love.

John sees that all these things existed before he came along—the eyelash, the toaster, the parties—and it is a revelation of rock-your-world proportion: each object and moment belongs to itself, has always done so, and this is not something he can put into words. But sometimes he feels left out, outside of the world. It is late afternoon in New York. John has arrived from Singapore. Somewhere he has heard that if you drop a penny from the top of the Empire State Building it can kill a man on the sidewalk below.

I thought telemarketer, his mother says. But it’s you. You’re in New York now.

The truth is, John says.

Last night when you called, all I could think was, his mother says.

John remembers being in the back seat of the car with his sisters and going down Garrison Hill. Coming up over Bonaventure, his father would gun it, saying they were going straight for the harbour. He and Cathy and Lulu in the back and his mother in her red wet-look hotpants suit. His stomach would lift when they went over the top of the hill and came down, like being in an elevator. The little bounce the car made. The girls screaming. His mother wore big sunglasses and hoop earrings and she had long legs, and his father tended to her hand and foot. Flying over Garrison Hill, the east end lost in fog. The bells of the Basilica.

Or the washer overflowing. John thinks of that. The washer gagging and spewing with every grinding revolution of the parts inside. His parents in the bedroom with the door shut.

Don’t come in, Johnny, we’re napping.

But there’s water all over the floor in the laundry room.

Don’t come in here, Johnny. We’re asleep.

But John had felt their wakefulness seeping through the door. He had felt their urgency. What John sees, when he looks back on the half-forgotten intensity of childhood, is the bald innocence of his parents.

So what we thought, John says, we thought we’d come home. And stay at your place and just get this sorted out. Jane says she’s almost seven months and I think we have to sit down.