Monkey Beach (32 page)

“Yeah?” I said. I put my cigarette against my lips and I slowly inhaled. “Did you believe him?”

“I don’t see why he’d lie.”

“Cheese said you told him to go ahead and fuck me.”

“What?”

“Did you?”

His mouth opened and closed as if he was a goldfish.

“Cheese lies, Frank. He lies and he’s mean. Tell him if he comes near me again, I’m going to kill him.”

“Lisa,” Mom yelled. “We have to get ready.”

“Bye, Frank,” I said.

On the first anniversary of Mick’s death, Ma-ma-oo took me to the Kitlope to pick
ci’x°a
. The first night of our trip, we stayed in the Kemano fishing village. The yellow light of the fire shone through the crack in the wood stove’s door. I was glad we were sleeping beside it.

When I awoke, Ma-ma-oo was gone. I sat up quickly, wondering if she was all right. I had visions of her tumbling down the steps, unconscious in the outhouse, slumped over the boat. But when I stood at the porch, I saw her sitting farther down the beach. She
turned and motioned me to come sit beside her. “Over there,” she called. “Look.”

A single black dot broke the surface of the water and a curious head watched us. The seal ducked under, sending ripples through the flat water. We watched to see where it would come up. A raven made a trilling, bubbling sound somewhere in the trees behind us.

“You hear that?” Ma-ma-oo said as I came to sit beside her. “That’s a good sign. Good day today. Any other call but that one would be a bad sign.”

I was still watching the water, but the seal never resurfaced.

Near noon, we stopped at an old logjam near the beach. I finished my sandwich in four gulps, then flopped on the ground and stared up at the trees. Ma-ma-oo forced down half her sandwich, then asked if I wanted the rest.

The wild crabapples grow on trees at the bend in the river there. I reached up into the tangled grey branches for the hard little apples. She pointed out thick patches. I dropped them down and she put them in a bucket.

The second night, we set up camp on the same sandy beach where I’d seen the great blue heron. Ma-ma-oo made corned beef hash but rubbed her stomach, saying she’d had too many
ci’x°a
and gave me more than my share.

This time, I curled into her before she fell asleep. Her hands were cold. I shivered when she touched me, and she pulled the blankets over us. It reminded me of the last time, when we set out the tent and Mick was on one side of me and Mom on the other.

I was startled awake by the sound of footsteps crunching across the sand towards us.

“Ma-ma-oo,” I whispered.

The footsteps stopped a few feet away from me. I shook Ma-ma-oo’s shoulder and she grunted, unwilling to wake up. I turned my head slowly, but nothing and no one was there. As I was pulling the sleeping bag over my head, something bright streaked across the sky. I paused. The clouds had cleared, the moon was down, and the stars shone hard and unwinking white against the late-night sky. Another frantic streak seared its afterimage against the darkness. I closed my eyes and made a wish. When I opened my eyes, three falling stars, one after another, raced each other across the tops of the mountains. The frequency built until the sky was lit by silent fireworks.

When we got back to Kitamaat, I told Ma-ma-oo about the footsteps on the beach. She raised an eyebrow at me. “You don’t have to be scared of things you don’t understand. They’re just ghosts.”

When I dreamed, I could see things in double exposure—the real world, and beyond it, the same world, but whole, with no clear-cuts, no pollution, no boats, no cars, no planes. Whales rolled in and out of the water, and not just orcas either. Some of them were large, dark grey whales. Some of them were smaller and black. Hundreds of birds I’d never seen before squawked and chirped in the air, on the beaches, in the trees. Later, in the spring, the beaches were white
with herring eggs. Oolichans came next, filling the rivers so full with their shiny, shimmering bodies that I was sure I could cross it and not get my feet wet.

I began sleepwalking and, Mom and Dad told me, I sometimes picked things up, stared at them, put them down or walked in circles. I awoke from one of my wanderings to find Erica and Aunt Kate leading me home.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Erica said. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Hello, Aunt Kate.”

She put an arm around my shoulder. “Hello yourself. We almost hit you, you know. You walked right in front of our car.”

“Did you?” I looked around but couldn’t see their car. “Where did you park?”

“Near the bay. Does your mom know where you are?”

I blinked, dizzy and cold and still not focusing on them. “I think so.”

“Let’s get you home anyway.”

“Oh, look. Is there a party going on?”

“What?” Erica said.

“All those people are going into that house. I don’t recognize any of them.”

“I think she’s still sleeping,” Aunt Kate said.

“No,” I said, realizing that the people were ghosts. “They must be an escort. Someone in that house is going to die.”

“She’s sleeping,” Erica said.

Mom and Dad brought me to the hospital to find out what was wrong. The doctors did test after test, but
couldn’t find anything. I was watching a nurse line up bottles that I realized would have to be filled with my blood, and as soon as the nurse picked out the needle, I left. There was no way I was staying around for that. The hallways were filled with ghosts. They stood watch over their families. Some of them watched me with strange, sad eyes. When I came back to my body, the nurse had called the doctor and they were watching me curiously. They said I had been walking around and around the bed.

The doctor took Mom and Dad into a separate room and they talked for a long time. I stayed in my body while the nurse took my spinal fluid. I squeezed my eyes closed and thought about going out on the boat with Ma-ma-oo.

Pooch knocked on the door when the nurse left. “Hey, heard you were in for some tests.”

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“My gran’s getting some tests too. She’s just down the hall.”

“Is she all right?”

He nodded. “Are you?”

“Yup. Healthy as a horse.”

He sat beside me on the bed. “I was talking to Frank the other night.”

“Oh.”

“Did you guys get in a fight or something?”

I frowned. “I guess.”

“He’s pretty mad at Cheese. I couldn’t get him to say why. Gave him a black eye and a fat lip. Isn’t talking to him. Won’t talk about you. What happened?”

I picked at a loose thread on my jacket. “Nothing.”

Pooch rolled his eyes. “God. That’s exactly what he said. Is it something Cheese said?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” Pooch said. “He can be an asshole. Just ignore it. Frank and me are going to a party tomorrow. You want to come?”

I shook my head. “Can’t.”

He patted my shoulder. “I gotta get back to Gran. See you.”

When we got home, Mom gave me cookies and a blanket and let me watch TV until I fell asleep. Dad woke me up later and said I should get to bed. He tucked me in, kissed my forehead.

“No sleepwalking,” he said.

“No sleepwalking,” I agreed.

Look closely at the skin on your wrist. The blue lines are arteries. They are blue because they carry oxygen. If you pinch off one of these arteries, your hand will tingle. You have blocked the artery and your muscles are starving for oxygen, giving you pins and needles. If you climbed Mount Everest and got frostbite on your hands, they would turn black and die. Among other things, the arteries to your hands could no longer supply blood to the muscles because they would be blocked. The amount of damage would depend on the severity of the freezing or blockage.

When oxygen-rich blood is pumped out of the heart to the body, it travels up through a large tube called the aorta. The heart feeds itself through two
large arteries that come off the aorta and fork down like lightning over the heart muscle. If the arteries are narrowed with plaque deposits, your heart will tingle. These unpleasant pins and needles in your chest are episodes of
angina pectoris
, often shortened to angina. If the plaque breaks off and blocks the arteries that send blood to your heart muscle, your heart will starve. This is a heart attack.

All heart attacks cause damage to your heart muscle. The severity of the attack depends on where your artery is blocked. If one of the smaller branches is blocked, you will have a tiny heart attack. If a main branch is blocked, you will have a severe heart attack.

Skinny Point is one and a half kilometres north of Monkey Beach. The tides are strong, and mix everything up, so the five families that used to winter here could fish just in the bay and get both halibut and cod. If I was going to stay the night, I’d go to the house near the beach, a triangular building set back in the trees. The beach is rocky, and sea gulls squall over resting spots. A brown seal barks, lifts its head and wriggles, arguing with its neighbour. I move away from the shore so my propellers won’t get caught in the kelp.

The creek to the left of the house leads up to a lake, where there was the last official sighting of a sasquatch. Or, at least, trappers had found a footprint in the mud, as long as the stock of their rifle. Ma-ma-oo said the two men who saw it are still alive. I’m sure she said they saw it.