“Actually, that's my bed,” Sam said. “You sleep over there.” He pointed to the bedroll set against the opposing wall.
Isaac's eyes darted to the square broken-out window that faced the rear of Sam's towering home. He displayed a puzzlement that arrived and dispersed almost immediately. “You're the adviser,” he said, and rearranged his things.
For dinner, Isaac cut some stumps of wiener into a pot of baked beans that he warmed on the camp stove. It would be a long painful walk for the old guy to his usual begging position in Gastown, so Sam suggested he take a few days off, which he would reimburse of course. “I'm not sure I'm in need of too much free time to chew on,” Isaac said. “It's always done me no good in the past. But maybe I'll go collecting some bottles.”
While they ate, Isaac sucked brown sauce from the grey mottle of his beard, and it occurred to Sam that he hadn't touched his own shaver in weeks. He wasn't sure of the bank's dress code but could think of several bearded co-workers as proof he wasn't endangering himself. Granted, they were contained, manicured growths, clipped and neatly edged, not like the unruly mass of spindly blond that now abounded on his chin. The point was moot
anyway, because Sam hadn't been at the office as long as he'd had it. There was just so much important work to do with Isaac.
“So it's your in-laws, then? My condolences,” Isaac said swallowing. “Course I ain't never been married. But I managed to mix myself up with a few womenâsome good, some not close to good. But my overall experiences with family ain't what you'd call positive.”
“You ever get in touch with your parents?”
“Well, my older brother, he's batshit crazy, locked up since he was just a young one. Did something terrible to a woman was what people said. After he was gone, my folks weren't the same. They didn't take much interest in me no more neither, afraid I'd go the same route. That's mostly why I went up north to cut trees.”
After he'd packed, Sam did some dishes in a bucket while listening to zephyrs of air whistle through Isaac's nasal cavity. He'd bedded down, still in his coat, on his back with his head on his pack and his hands deep in his pockets. Sam knocked a tin plate against the galvanized watering can and Isaac's eyes opened, slick and yellowed in the moonlight.
“Can I put a question to you?” Isaac said.
“Shoot,” said Sam.
“Why you sleeping out here exactly?”
“Because I can't stand being in my own house.”
Isaac drew his hands from his pockets and threaded them behind his head. “I heard that,” he said, and re-attained sleep with an instantaneousness astonishing to Sam.
Sam flew out the next morningâa parabolic jaunt over jagged spires of grey rock. Dennis, Anna's father, fetched him from the airport in an immaculate hybrid car. He talked quietly into his phone as they loaded his bags and continued to do so while they whisked over a dead-straight road through an endless procession of camel-tinged foothills. Sam nodded off, and woke to his father-in-law driving with an impenetrable air, two thumbs hooked at the bottom of the wheel. While Sam had slept, a carpet of white cloud had appeared, ridged and crumpled, like the roof of a mouth.
“You're growing a beard,” Dennis said.
“It's growing,” Sam said. “How much I have to do with it is debatable.”
Dennis checked each of the car's three mirrors, even though they were alone on open highway. “Look, Sam, I don't hold it against you. Hell, I've always liked you, and God knows Gretchen and I have had our spats, but I've got to tell you that you have my daughter all twisted around.”
“She's the one who's still on vacation.”
“Son, I know you haven't had it easy. I lost my parents early on so I know the feeling, like there is no home left in the world, but you've got to give Anna a chance to think things through.”
“Thanks, but I'm not really in the market for fatherly wisdom, Dennis. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't offer my wife any, either. She's already got enough wisdom of her own to deal with.”
Dennis shook his head. “I just hope you are happy with yourself,” he said as he clicked a tiny box hung from his sun visor that retracted a wrought-iron gate from the mouth of his two-mile gravel driveway. When they reached the house Sam informed
Dennis flatly that he was indeed quite happy with himself and levered open his door.
Anna jogged out to meet him in a jean dress he failed to recognize. She'd cut her hairâhow exactly, Sam couldn't say, but it was angular and ill-suited to her easily flushed, curvy cheeks. These details dispelled any of the confidence he'd been able to scavenge during his flight; they spoke either of a dress rehearsal for a new life or of a regression to an old one.
“I like this,” she said tugging on his beard, enough for him to wince.
“It's not a joke,” Sam said.
“Didn't say it was. It's cute,” she said, nearly giggling. Her apparent glee also unnerved him. She had a way of becoming giddy as she approached the summit of an anxiety. Though he'd visited the house before, she commenced a jolly tour.
At dinner, Cricket viewed him from beneath her party hat with a mixture of pity and skepticism, as if he were a thoroughbred limping to its trailer after a race. Earlier, she'd looked up from a book and called to him but then went rigid when he lifted her warm frame to his chest. While Sam ate, Anna's mother, Gretchen, moved about the kitchen and scooped various salads of grilled vegetables onto the plates of Anna's three sisters and their athletic husbands. Dennis leaned back in his chair at the head of the table with a self-satisfied look. Perhaps it was that he'd grown up in a house of silent, brooding suppers eaten with a book, or in one's own room, but Sam had always felt interrogated and judged by the expectations of festivity.
After dinner, they all sat in Dennis's basement home theatre for a viewing of Cricket's favourite animated movie. When
it was over, Cricket tore into her presents with a feral tenacity. Dennis had given her a hand-tooled child-sized saddle that was wrapped in pink butcher paper tied with twine, and he insisted on strapping it to his back to go galloping her around the room, whinnying. Sam had been so consumed with getting Isaac settled that he'd neglected to buy his daughter a present, so he'd stopped at a cash machine in the airport and withdrawn one thousand dollars, which he stuffed into a deposit envelope procured from the same machine.
“Good work, Sam,” Anna said, as Cricket fanned the bills with a somewhat horrified expression. “Thoughtful.”
After the gift-giving, he and Anna slipped out for a walk on her father's ranchland. Sam kicked at dense tufts of bristly grass and nearly began a series of doomed, potentially spiteful sentences that he thought better of. They ascended a long rise of dusty ground that banked east in its climb up the ridge before halting at a post-and-rail cattle fence that ran for miles in each direction. Past the fence was a steep grade that fell into a splayed valley of verdant grass where a few hulks of cattle stood chewing, inert as mailboxes. The spring sun was weak, but Sam was winded and Anna had produced a dark spade shape on the upper back of her T-shirt. When they reached the fence she stepped ahead and put her back to it in the way Sam had seen her lean on numerous bars in college.
“I've enrolled Cricket at my old schoolâshe'll be starting in September.” This she said as if it were something they would both have to endure, like bombings, or a depression. This private school was, from what Sam had heard, a place where uniformed girls learned to beekeep and Nobel-laureate political science
professors came to describe to the girls the workings of the Canadian parliament.
“She likes her school,” Sam said.
“A school is a school last I checked.”
“What about her old friends?”
“She's already made a few new ones at equestrian camp.”
“She's been taking riding lessons? She's terrified of animals!”
“Dogs. She's scared of dogs. And you'd have known about this if you'd returned some of our calls,” she said.
“I've been busy with something, I've been doing some advising.”
“Well, a guy named Alphonse called from your office. He said you haven't been there in weeks. They were wondering if you were okay. Christ, Sam, if you are that busy
advising
someone else, you could justâ”
“It's a business relationship, Anna. Nothing more. It's about the only thing I can handle right now. And neither of you is exactly eager to talk to me anyway.”
She gasped and appeared to consider saying something biting, then released a long breath and turned to face the valley.
“I've made a decision,” she said. “I can't live in Vancouver, but I might be able to live with you, on my terms.”
Sam could hear her father's authority behind her words and it riled him. “On whose âterms' do you think I've been living for the past five years? Vancouver was your idea. You're just too selfish to appreciate the sacrifices I have made.”
“Why must the root of every problem exist entirely outside of you?” she said. “It seems a little suspicious, don't you think? Seeing how you're here too?”
This was the kind of misdirection from the real topic of discussion that Anna had honed in law school. “You just can't take criticism,” Sam said.
“What you do is not criticism,” she said. “It's vivisection.”
Exhaustedly, she turned and started back down the hill. Sam followed some paces behind, his eyes cinching up from the low sun now dipping into the far-off hills.
Back at the house they had more cake and Dennis popped some champagne. Anna spent the rest of the evening in a determined sulk, and Sam suffered the chattering inquiries of her sisters with a brittle smile.
That night, he woke to blue spindles of light twisting on his ceiling, cast by the swimming pool that lay beyond the sliding door of his guest room. He rose and ascended the stairs to his daughter's room and stood by her canopied bed. He hooked a whip of hair behind her neat ear, recalling that the only effective way to soothe her as a baby was to clamp her to his chest and jiggle her with the vigorous, nearly imperceptible speed of a paint mixer. Forgetting his beard, he kissed her and she batted groggily at her cheek with a wrist.
Sam knew his marriage was in a condition way past hope. His terror he now reserved for the life in store for Cricket. If they separated, she would be unscrewed from him, every minute of every day not spent with her a counter-clockwise crank. She was a happy, adventuresome kid who would adapt, and as there were simply more of them here, she'd be helpless to the magnetism of Anna's familial cabal. Sam set himself down on the carpet at the foot of Cricket's bed, inhaling a dusty puff that rose from the thick, white pile. He considered for a moment relocating to Calgaryâ
he could implant himself on the periphery of their lives, perhaps retain possession of at least a pittance of their affectionsâand admitted this to be his only recourse if Anna decided to stay.
Sam left early the next morning and checked into a motel beside the airport. He spent almost a week there, stacking greasy room-service plates outside his door and taking shrivelling hour-long showers where, in the dizzying steam and torrential fury of the motel's Herculean water pressure, he held tight to the grippy stainless-steel bar affixed there for the disabled. Emerging pink and flagellated, Sam would crawl into the tightly made bed in search of refuge from the polar climate visited upon the room by an inadjustable air conditioner. He'd kick the sheets out from the corners and behold channels that advertised pay-for-view movies in short, entertaining nuggets, all he could stand to watch.
On the plane, Sam offered himself the sad consolation that he hadn't told Anna about Isaac. He could only imagine her lawyerly unpacking of the ethics of what he was doing. He was using him. He was enacting a dubiously selfish plot in order to convince himself, and her and Cricket and everyone else, that he was actually a good personâa point that Sam couldn't say wasn't entirely true.
When Sam returned home and opened the gate into his wife's garden, he couldn't believe what was there. Hoses were spritzing a fine mist skyward, sending shimmering sails of rainbow light to unfurl across the yard. Each of the beds was meticulously weeded, the earth black and freshly turned with ruby worms straining for air. New tomato plants were carefully staked in beds that had
previously been empty. A few lavender bushes had exploded in a purple froth and there was a walkway that Sam didn't remember, made of flat polished stones that meandered from the peeling side door of the shed all the way to the rear of the house. Even the grass bore a lush, perky resilience. “Wow,” Sam said.
“I think you might have a nitrogen problem,” said Isaac, appearing behind him in a dirty undershirt and cut-off trousers. “Too little, I mean, and too much potash. I got you a compost going over there. But if you want, you could piss on the beds. It might help. That's what I been doing.”
Isaac pointed a trowel over Sam's shoulder. “That there parsley's gone to seed, don't blame me, nothing I could do, you should eat it up soon as you can. Oh, and you wanna wrap that elm in foil this year or the army worms will strip it clean come winter.”
That evening, they pulled two wicker garden chairs from the rafters of the shed and sat out in the sweet night breeze drinking lemonade that Isaac had squeezed fresh.
“You been gone a while. Which I guess could mean it went good or bad depending,” Isaac said.
“Not the best,” Sam said, taking a long slug of lemonade.
“She'll come around.”
“No,” Sam said. “Not if she's smart she won't.”
They sat for a bit, watching tiny grey birds flit and dogfight amid Isaac's handiwork. After a while, Isaac went and relieved himself into the kale bed at the side of the house.