Thalo Blue (49 page)

Similar to the amount of press the family received in the stillborn memoir, in the will, there came no mention for his eldest son to receive any of the kindling wealth. Near the end of the reading, there was only a snippet of text directed at the boy he had not seen since before the tongue of manhood had long ago begun to lick the hair from his scalp and the sparkle from his eyes:

“You have turned your back on your upbringing, your name and all that you are. I have been grieving for you longer than you will be for me.”

<> <> <>

Still unmarried, both David and Leighton brought their work to bed with them every night for too many years and lived in separate cities for too many more, putting off their wedding out of perceived necessity. When asked why the marriage was being delayed, the answers ranged from
Our careers are just getting started
to
We’ll just get our student loans taken care of first and then concentrate on a family.
They were so focused on doing the right thing and told themselves and each other that to bring children in to such a work-focused marriage would be horrendous and unfair. So they waited.

Have your kids before thirty-five
, everyone had told her and David.
The chances of problematic birth increase by a full quarter after thirty-five.
And she started to. Or at least she and David had tried to do that. They went to expensive fertility specialists and racked up an even greater financial gravesite. The process was long and difficult and, on many occasions, both of them would wail at one another over dinner or in the living room. They would get so frustrated and angry. At themselves, at each other. They wanted to quit, to just stop trying. But they didn’t. And, like a gift from God, Ashleigh was born when Leighton had just turned thirty-seven. Davina came two years later.

But last year, when Ashleigh was nearly five and Davina was just past two, Leighton died in childbirth. She was forty-two and her third daughter was stillborn.

David was left with the unenviable duty of burying both his third princess-girl and his bride of seven years. The baby girl’s birth certificate and death certificate had to be filled out with the same date,
on
the same date. Ink from the same pen, even.

He put the name Leighton on both, because it felt like her death, and her mother’s, had killed him twice.

<> <> <>

David fell away from the world then. For nearly a year he changed diapers and warmed food for his two daughters in a cloudy haze that he would one day barely remember. In a frozen landscape of noise and filth, he had fallen against the headboard

of his bed, unconscious, and he woke up with silence inside him. Noise came back like a slowed-down rush of water over an embankment. There was a smoldering cigarette on the rug near the foot of his bed which would burst and pop at any moment. He saw Ashleigh standing nude with her bare feet dangerously close to its orange-yellow glow and the vines of gray wafting and threatening. And he
heard
Davina howling with sobs at the top of her lungs from somewhere else. Beyond the fog and his naked little girl, the front door of the Langtree house banged and banged. And finally, out from its casement it was pushed—the pounding had not been in his head. Men from the bank and officers of the law rushed forward with more sheets of paper in hand, notices of foreclosure, notices to vacate. They were identical to the yellowing notes already tacked to the little house’s wooden door.

It was the end and it was also the beginning. Like the perceptible snap of a twig in silence, David came back to life. Consciousness flooded his vision. Awareness, unfelt in months and months, had burst back full-fledged. He lost the house that had been under his and his wife’s name. But he still had those two little dark-haired princess-girls.
How could he have been so stupid?
It was remarkable to him now, as he drove through upending darkness, that any of them had survived.

But this job, the one in Richmond at the boys’ school, would set things right. After the house had been taken, David found himself and the girls a small two bedroom place for a couple of months. Because of his dwindling performance and a lack of attendance, he had lost his job at the high school where he taught mathematics, drafting and auto mechanics. He was living on credit now. The money was in short supply and all he had to his name was this old car, a heap of junk now that had been pristine when he bought it. It would be a miracle if it brought them all the way to Richmond without incident, and it would also be a miracle if the next gas station would accept one of his overdrawn credit cards.

His plan seemed impossible. He pushed his heavy black-framed glasses back up his nose and leaned a little further over the wheel to see the ever-shortening expanse of road in front of his head lights. He started to panic about how difficult it might be to sell this clunky lemon once he got to Richmond.
That’s all
, he thought.
Wow ‘em at the interview tomorrow, then sell the car for enough money to cover two months’ rent and the minimum payments on three of the four cards.
Then he could use those again for more groceries. No matter how he phrased it in his head it sounded foolish. He forced himself to pull it together as the nose of the gold Thunderbird edged closer to the snow-dusted rock face to the right of the narrow roadway.

He had never driven in the mountains, had never even
been
to the mountains before, but had heard a million stories about the dangers of logging trucks and roads that could vanish into thin air before your eyes. The voices of the friends he still had echoed in his head and his wariness was multiplied because he wasn’t sure if his old white-wall tires had enough tread left to get the car out of a tight spot if one should arise. Leighton and he couldn’t yet afford a new car with the house, the loan payments, and then the fertility clinic bills, so they had priced out a set of new tires for the T-bird, planning on making it last as long as they could. But they hadn’t got the tires before—

Ah, the cost of education
. No one ever tells you what it will take from you. All you can see are those dollar signs at the end of the stage, as a colored tassel bobs in your periphery and the grey-haired dean offers his hand and a rolled up piece of paper. Not one gives you even a hint what it’ll be like out there. Even though every one of them has been here before.

David wiped at his nose to push up the specs again. The sweaty knuckle of a finger pushed against the lens, leaving a smear there which made one of his headlight beams a blurry blob of yellow on falling white flecks. He cursed under his breath but he didn’t dare take his hand from the wheel for more than a second. He didn’t dare to wipe the glasses on his shirt. He was nearly blind without them and his concentration—even through a now foggy lens—needed to remain on the sheen of winding road ahead.

God, it felt lonely out here. All around was darkness. At odd intervals of the journey there were thin lines of white—mountain peaks presumably—but for the most part they were invisible guards that stood cloaked in themselves and the night where they lived. Black on black. Silent and staring. But what were they guarding? He had not passed another car for an hour or more, and found himself expecting an opposing set of headlights around every bend. Yet none came. And the snow, while still light and fluffy, was coming down stronger. Even so, the air was tranquil. Nothing howled against the windows. He envisioned standing outside himself on the edge of the roadway in the quiet. But it felt longing and distant to do that so he pulled himself back inside the car almost immediately. His grip tightened on the steering wheel.

David had tried the radio before the dinner, gas and smoke stop in Canmore, but had found only static. He left it tuned to what sounded like the strongest am signal but had shut it off. Now, feeling a little fatigue, he reached a reflexive hand down to the knob on the T-bird’s dash to give it a flick. The static was there, but in its squall, he thought he heard a tune. A tender finger played with the knob, alternating between a firm grip on the wheel as he navigated corners and over increasing ridges of soft powder and a loose touch on the radio dial.

The song came up then:
Sixty Years On
. He recognized Elton John’s long drawn voice atop the caressed keys of an imaginary piano. He thought he remembered the lyrics for this one. And he was right. The static seemed to swell and recede as he made his away around elbows on the narrow roadway. The rock face came closer, then allowed a shoulder, then came close again. The song drifted in front of the static in the signal and then behind.

To his left, pieces of guardrail flashed metallic in the yellow tint of the headlight beams. They were, like all the trees beyond them, dusted in snow that was falling heavier the further west he went. There was so much snow coating things this far out that it actually seemed to make the night a little brighter. There was a subtle glow on that guardrail, and on the dead-looking branches just on the other side of it. Beyond that thin strip of wintered foliage, the edge of the roadway gave way to a declining slope. It was a stark angle with rushing waters of a river not far below. David caught glimpses of its white-capping surface, its turbulent rapids, when the road and the edge came to him and the car at a certain angle.

Tricks of geography
, he thought. More specifically, tricks of
geometry
. Given the T-bird’s distance from the river’s farthest edge and the angle of the slope down to it, there was a formula that could be derived to figure out the distance straight down to where the river was churning away. He could use that to presume when and how much of the rushing waters he would be able to see but there was no time for that now. Luckily, though, the song and the quick mathematical diversion had refreshed him a little. How much further did he have to drive?

He thought he could actually hear the river down there, among the rumble-hum of the Thunderbird’s engine and static-mix of the radio. But no. He knew that was his tinnitus, an indistinct drone that sometimes came to him in his ears. At times, and he could never discern exactly why, it sounded like a metal-grating buzz. It came particularly loud and noticeable when he was tired or anxious. And the current moment would qualify as both. He tried to force himself calm again.

Looking over a shoulder at the back seat to check on the girls again, taking his intent eyes from the road for a fraction of a second, David scolded himself. They were still sleeping soundly, like two beautiful princesses, the same girl on the outside, but two different souls within. Ashleigh and Davina.

Elton John’s tune finished, Then Pink Floyd’s
Remember a Day
played with its spooling guitar squawk rising and lulling, and then it stopped abruptly before the end, leaving just a moment of dead air. But another song began in the static haze that threatened to overtake the music completely. It was
Behind Blue Eyes
by the Who and David thought it ages since he had heard this one.
Cripes
, he thought, breathing a clean sigh.
Must be some late night DJ veering from the playlist.
It’s either very very late out here or very very early but there’s someone out there in the nethers, spinning these tunes, playing them just for me. And he must be feeling pretty secure with his job at the moment.

David smiled.

There in the dark.

On the roadway of packed snow, polished over.

They were going to be okay. David and his girls were going to come through this. They were going to be fine. The drive where his knuckles were white on the Thunderbird’s wheel would end. This intolerably lonely night with unseen mountains pressing in on all sides and that quiet river below would be in the past. Morning would come. The job interview would work out. And the bills—
somehow
—would get paid. His little girls were there. Those little dark heads of hair seemed to say that to him, seemed to say that all three of them would be okay.

He worried, laughable to say this in his head now after so much had been corrected, that he had gone insane. There in his bed, reeling from Leighton’s death, and baby Leighton’s too, he had found himself thinking the strangest thoughts. He had come to that part when there was no more sleep to be had but morning was a long way off. No more sleep left to take, that’s right, but more night than can be handled unless you drown it away in unconsciousness.

But he laid there awake, eyes open, floundering in strange ideas. There came a point when he was certain that he would stand up from the mattress, pull on a shirt and pants and go out into the night. He would say to himself, yes, just need cigarettes. A pack from the launderette down the road. But he would get to the launderette and he would not come back. He would keep going. Just keep on going.

That was an insane thought; those were insane nights. A long way from this one. They were times when thinking that you are insane precludes
being
insane. Can a person already mad
know
that he his mad? Or would that person have to still retain sanity for such a thought to occur?

It was a whirling circle on top of itself, round and round, again and again, topsy-turvy. A problem with no solution. A mathematical impossibility with no correct answer. He pushed passed it. And he stayed. He had to.

How could he not? Those were his princess-girls.

All three of them were going to make it through.

<> <> <>

Another set of headlights finally came. They blinked past an invisible corner up ahead in the dark and then were gone again. And to David, they seemed to be coming incredibly fast. He tapped his brakes and immediately the back end of the Thunderbird fishtailed a little. The rear of it came side to side in a gentle sway and his sweating fingers coiled tighter around the wheel of the beast, trying to tame it.