Simple Recipes (9 page)

You’re afraid of why it comes to you, clear as a picture. You tell yourself you’re bound to Charlotte, but what you’re afraid
of is this: instead of getting on with your life, you’re following her. To make sure that she’s gone. To chase her out of
your life. In all these vivid imaginings, you are the spectator, the watcher, the one who refuses to leave until the last
act. You move through your emotions, anger settling on you like some forgotten weight. It makes you watch until the end.

So badly, you want to be the person who grieves for her. Not the envious one, the one whose heart has toughened up. You’re
standing on the road. There’s even a space for you. A bus stop, of sorts, lit up with harsh fluorescent lights. You never
stray from it. No matter what, come hell or high water, come death or disease, you’ll stand there watching it all unfold.

When you see the accident, you know it must have happened a hundred times before. The stretch of highway heading to Lloydminster,
straight as an arrow. Wide open, it tricks the driver into believing she’s awake.

You almost convince yourself you’re there, that it’s you, semi-conscious in the driver’s seat: exactly when you realize that
the car is out of control, that it cannot be undone, exactly when, you’re not sure. Even the impact seems part of your dream.
It knocks you out. But not before you see Charlotte, sitting beside you, the slow-motion crumbling of the passenger side.
Her sleeping body, belted in, thrown sideways. She’s in your lap, slouched awkwardly against your body. You know you’re going
under. The car. You have the sensation the car is closing in. Then you don’t even know it, you’re under, the three of you
in your seats.

Later on, Heather can only say,
We were speeding and the car slipped out of control
Hundred and forty kilometers on a flat stretch of highway. Over the ditch and straight for a tree on the border of a farmhouse.

When the crash comes, this is what you see: lights flashing on all around. Houses you couldn’t see for the dark. Snapping
to life. Hurrying out into road, all these people, half-dressed. Running in the dewy grass.

The car is wrapped around the tree, the interior light miraculously blinking.

You don’t want to be lovesick. You dream yourself sitting in an orange rocking chair, a steaming cup of coffee resting on
the arm, the chair tipping back and forth and nothing spills. As if you could do that.
Keep moving and the tiny thing you balance, the thing that threatens, stays secure. You love your husband, love him in a way
that makes you heartsick. You think it is irrational to feel this way, to be so overwhelmed by the small tragedies of your
life when all around you, there are images of men and women and children, in Dili there are the ones who never ran away to
hide in the mountains. You pray for them in the best way you know how. You picture them standing on the street on a summer
day, dust against their feet. You picture them safe. Before you know it, your hands are clasped in front of your face. It
takes you aback, the way you sit there, shocked and unhappy.

Hardly a month passed between the time you found the letters and the night the accident happened. In the morning, your husband
heard the news by phone. He stayed on the phone all morning, calling one person then another. He knew them all, Jean and Heather
and Charlotte, childhood friends from Saskatoon. You learned that after the car hit the tree, Jean and Heather stood up and
walked away. In shock, Heather started running, straight down the road. An elderly man, still dressed in pajamas, guided her
gently back to the site.

It was Heather who called your husband. “Charlotte was asleep the whole time,” she told him. “She never felt a thing.”

If your husband grieved, he did the gracious thing
and refused to show it. When you asked him how he felt, he held himself together. “I dont know,” he said. “It’s over.”

The expression on his face was closed and you knew better than to push. You left him alone in the apartment. It’s space that
he needs and that’s what you give him. No confrontation or rehashing of that small betrayal, though each day you tilt between
anger and sorrow. You expect his grief, are willing to understand it even. Still, he refuses to part with it — his private
sorrow is not on display for you. It belongs to him alone.

These days, he spends hours reading the paper. But you can tell that it’s only a cover. Like you, he’s thinking. Your house
is a silent place. The two of you, solicitous but lost in thought, the radio constantly murmuring in the living room. And
because you believe in protocol, in politeness and respect, you don’t ask him and you never mention her name. When you dropped
those letters into the trash, you were telling him the terms of your agreement. Don’t mention it, you were saying. Pretend
it never happened. Both of you like two cedars, side by side and solitary.

You’d never met Charlotte. You worry that it’s sick, this fascination with her life. But in the middle of the day, your hands
poised over the keyboard, you have a vivid image of her in the passenger seat, asleep and dreaming. Something in you wants
to reach your
hand out, the way children lay their fingers on the television screen. When the car leaves the road, you want to nudge it
back. Point it back on course. Let it not end like this.

Really, you are just a bystander. It’s your husband who should be there, standing in the road. You in the background, curious.
It’s your husband whose emotions run deep, who weeps the way he never did in real life. If this were a picture, you would
be a blur in the background.

Saskatchewan is a photo to you, a duotone of blue and gold. Wheat fields bent against the wind or motionless in the heat,
a freeze frame. There’s a picture of Charlotte when she was sixteen, a lovely girl standing outside of a barn laughing, dark
hair shaking against the blue sky. You have never been to Saskatchewan. Imagine a sky so huge it overwhelms you. Wheat vast
as the desert. You picture Charlotte on a dirt road somewhere, a road that cuts through a field. This is the way that you
remember her, because between you and your husband, she will always have a kind of immortality.

For a long time you think of her as the kind of person you would like to be. She is a farmer’s daughter, a one-time schoolteacher,
a bus driver. You think of her as a dreamer. People are drawn to her. They
say,
She really knows how to live.
Even you, in your make-believe world, are drawn to her. You watch the way her hands move, not gingerly, not tentatively.
You hear her voice. It booms through space.

You play a game with her. The kind of game friends play to pass the time.
If I was an animal, what kind of animal would I be?
You tell her she is an elephant, a tiger, a gazelle. Your husband, she says, is a camel. He is a long-haul kind of man. But
what are you? A tern, she says. You do not know what this is. A bird, she says. It flies over the sea. It is swift in flight.
You imagine it is the kind of bird that could fly forever. Given the choice, it would never land. You say this is a fault
and she laughs. She says you see the negative in everything. She has a smile that fills the room. What kind of person are
you? There’s some part of you that’s glad she’s gone. Glad that all those qualities, that smile, that confidence, couldn’t
save her.

You make a list of all the things you’re afraid of: Nuclear catastrophe. Childbirth. War. A failed marriage. As if there is
any equality between these things. You know that writing them out will not make them go away. But the list worries you. You
don’t want to be selfish. Walking along your Vancouver street, you press a blueberry muffin into the hand of a young man sitting
on the sidewalk beside his dog.
There’s an apple in your coat pocket you’re saving for someone else.

At home, you and your husband lie beside each other in bed, sunlight streaking through the blinds. You lie motionless like
people in shock. A part of you knows that you’re doing everything wrong. You know it, but still, you’re sitting at the kitchen
table each day, working hard. While researching Japanese glass floats, you come across the
ama
— divers in Japan’s coral reefs who, with neither wetsuits nor oxygen masks, search the water for abalone. For up to two
minutes at a time, these women hold their breath underwater. Their lung capacity astonishes you. Some of the
ama
are as old as sixty. Imagine them dotting the water, chests bursting for air, going on about their daily work.

One night, when neither of you can sleep, you take a late-night walk together. Through sidewalks coated with autumn leaves,
you walk hand-in-hand. It is three in the morning and the streets are empty. A car turning the corner sweeps its lights across
you, then disappears. You can hear it travelling away from you, you listen until the sound evaporates. At one point, in a
gesture that reminds you of children, your husband swings your hand back and forth, and your joined arms move lightly between
you.

The road you are following goes uphill, ending in
a circle of mansions. There is a small green park in the center and this is where you and your husband stop, turning slowly,
examining the houses, trying to guess if the mansions are really abandoned as they appear. Nothing stirs. Out here, in this
dark patch of land, it s easy to believe that only you and he exist. In the quiet, your husband hums softly, a tune you can’t
identify. He catches your eye and stops abruptly. You look at him with so much grief and anger, it surprises you both, what
you can no longer withhold.

He tells you that it is unforgivable, what he has done. But he cannot go back and he does not know how to change it.

Something in your body collapses. It just gives way. Maybe it is the expression on your husband’s face, telling you that there
is no longer any way out. You tell your husband youVe been seeing strange things, imagining cities youVe never visited, people
youVe never met. You say, “I cannot go on like this any more,” and your own words surprise you, the sad certainty of them.

He paces behind you, nodding his head, then begins walking the perimeter of the park. As he walks away from you, your husband
raises his voice, as if he believes that no one can hear him. Perhaps he no longer cares if anyone does. He tells you more
than you can bear to hear. He says that when he read Charlotte s letter, he was devastated. He wished her
so far away that he would never see her again. He talks and he cannot stop. He says he is afraid of being alone, afraid of
making terrible mistakes. He is ashamed of being afraid.

This is what you wanted, finally. Here is his private grief, laid out in view of the world. But your chest is bursting with
sadness. You are not the only ones affected. There is still that woman who haunts you. What will she think of all your efforts,
your tossing, your fear and guilt? How long will she remain with you?

Out front, the houses are still. You stand on your side of the park, watching for signs of movement, expecting the lights
to come on, expecting people to come hurrying into the road.

In the end, you know that the two of you will pick yourselves up, you will walk home together not because it is expected or
even because it is right. But because you are both asking to do this, in your own ways, because you have come this far together.

For a long time you stand this way, the two of you hunched in the grass. In your mind’s eye there are people all around the
world turning, diving, coming up for air. Your husband and you in this quiet circle. He crouches down to the ground, face
in his hands. There is Charlotte, asleep and dreaming in a car moving through the Prairies. Your husband comes to his feet
and looks for you, through the dark and the trees. One perilous crossing after another.

I
t is Kathleen’s idea to go back to the house. She knows the bus route, a number 16 up to 49th Avenue, then east to the dividing
line where Vancouver rolls into suburb. Lorraine, who is ten years old, is only following along, keeping her older sister
company.

At the bus stop, Kathleen fishes coins from her purse. When the bus pulls up and swings its doors open, they hurry up the
stairs. Outside, the city blurs by until the neighborhood changes, the streets and shops suddenly familiar. Passing the flower
shop on Knight Street, Lorraine has a sudden vision of her mother standing, on the sidewalk there, her hands roaming the plants,
her face lit up by the bloom of color. Kathleen rings the bell for the stop and they
climb down. Half a block away from the main road, their old house comes into view.

Lorraine barely recognizes it. She stops on the grass out front and tries to imagine herself sitting in the front window.
She can almost see her mother there, sitting on the steps, straight hair blowing loose across her face. She imagines her father’s
white pickup turning in the driveway, her father running up the stairs and disappearing into the house. Lorraine watches the
windows for signs of movement, but there is none. It is the third Friday in September, and they have come all the way across
the city to visit their old house and mark their mother’s birthday.