The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (18 page)

As Elaine watched the bus pull away, she replayed the sickening memory of having abandoned her children long ago. She didn't often give in to guilt, but here in the moment of seeing her child leave her behind, sadness overwhelmed her. She had put Emma and Blue on a bus together when they were small, hung signs around their necks, and left it up to fate and someone else's driving to get them to their destination.

In the most horrible chamber of her heart, she had wondered whether they would even make it to Niagara Falls. She had entertained the thought that perhaps she and Oliver would arrive in their new city
to discover that they were still on their honeymoon; that the past several years had just been some awful nightmare. In that imagined reality, Oliver would be meaningfully and lucratively employed, and she would be writing some bound-to-be best seller and baking bread to soothe her soul between chapters. Children would only be a concept: a nice, theoretical subject they occasionally discussed over some civilized meal and a bottle of wine.

In that moment, years ago, she had wished her children unborn. Now they were leaving her. She deserved it, she supposed, but she could nevertheless feel her heart breaking as she was left to stand alone. A husband who had betrayed her and lost his mind, or perhaps the other way around. A daughter who had packed her bags as a teenager, adopted a new family and a whole new idea of herself. And now her son, a troubled, high school dropout, leaving on a bus for somewhere simply because it was anywhere but there. She was the only one who hadn't moved.

In that moment in the bus terminal, Elaine was more aware than ever that she was indeed their mother. She had spawned likeness: she had produced two more aliens in the world.

Blue dreamt his way to Lake Superior. Dreamt of white mountains. He was shouting across a valley at a tiny figure standing at the summit of the next peak. “Dad? It's time to come down now,” he shouted. “You've been there long enough.” But the figure didn't move. “Are you stuck or something?” he continued. “Do you want me to come and get you?”

At that, the figure started to run. He slipped on a patch of ice and went crashing down the far side of the mountain. Blue knew there was no way he could have survived that fall, but when the figure disappeared
from sight he started to run down the side of the mountain to rescue him. He would keep running, running through centuries of snow, until he found the body.

Despite himself, Blue started scratching a letter to Emma on the back of a paper bag. She'd said, “I'm going to miss you,” and the words had stayed lodged in his stomach. It only looked like he was the one leaving, really, she'd gone long ago. There was more, so much more he could have said.

He stuffed his mind with straw for two days as they crossed the Prairies. He thought of himself as a silo standing solitary on the horizon. The light in his head didn't switch on again until they stopped at the bus station in Calgary, where he stepped off the bus for a cigarette. Disembarking, he looked around furtively: this was the epicentre of Oliver's new world, he could feel it in his bowels. This was the West, where business was booming, all concrete and cars and signs pointing toward “New Communities” where houses spawned other houses and crept up hills overnight without regard for geography or humanity. He bought a stamp and mailed the letter to Emma that he'd laboured over despite himself. He had his first shit in a thousand miles, pulled his cap down over his eyes, and boarded the bus again.

The mountains rose up higher and higher on either side of him, funnelling him into bittersweet thoughts of life when there was only one road ahead. He remembered the rarest of days. Oliver had taken Emma and Blue on a spontaneous outing one fall afternoon when the leaves had started to become crunchy underfoot. Together they had picked a bushel of McIntosh apples on a farm at the base of the Niagara Escarpment. The two of them had watched in amazement as Oliver stood against a tree and ate an entire apple, including the core.
He spat the seeds out and said, “This is the only part you can't eat. They'll get lodged in your appendix and sprout roots.” They believed him: pictured tree branches growing out of his ears. Thought of the appendix as fertile ground for rooting badness. Blue thought that's why his math teacher died of cancer. He remembers her sitting behind her desk one day and eating an entire orange, including the peel. “She has tumours,” they said later, and he pictured her face buckling in response to the orange grove growing under the surface of her skin.

Emma and Andrew didn't even say goodbye, they just picked up shovels and started digging a trench between them. She hurled words and accusations and he just lobbed them back into her court.

“Remember you told me to tell you when I thought you were going crazy?” he said.

“Well, I said
if
, not
when
.”

“Well, you're either going crazy or you're just showing your true colours. And believe me, they're not pretty.”

The hollow within was now two parts hurt and two parts guilt-tinged regret. She had hitched a ride on Andrew's satellite and breathed artificial air for almost three years, and in the process, if she really faced the truth of it, she'd sacrificed Blue. With Andrew's departure she sank down in the bath and washed him away. Underneath all the dirt she was covered in bruises, big and blue, just like her brother, the boy who'd once carved his initials into his skin so that he'd never get lost. He was moving elsewhere now, moving west, and while she could handle the scars left with Andrew's departure, without Blue, she felt battered and unhinged.

There was no map any more. She could either bounce out of orbit into some eastern fringe where the sun stank and the dust storms were blinding, or she could follow in the well-worn footprints of a man who'd gone nowhere. Otherwise, she could chart a different path, even if it meant moving like a starving dog sniffing everything she came across in the hope of finding some nourishment. Burying her nose in the backs of strangers in elevators; her tongue twisted in foreign manes of hair, inhaling sweat and licking hairspray. She'd find something human, something outside herself.

Her heart was still in hiding, though, when she received a letter scribbled onto a paper bag.

Blue was obviously on a quest. One that didn't include her.

Blue's bus pulled into a fairytale-like strip of hotels and stores running through a valley in the middle of Banff National Park. A picturesque oasis at the base of ragged grey mountains. It humbled him to look up. As he stood on the main street, with his heavy knapsack cutting into his shoulders, he marvelled at the inconsequence of being human. He had always felt small despite his size. Here, his size didn't matter.

He made his way to the youth hostel, where, for twenty-two dollars a night, he could rent a shared room and pee in a communal toilet at the end of a drab hallway. His roommate was a big lug of a guy named Mitch from Montreal. Like him, Mitch had come west for some unspecified reason. Blue suspected the reason might have been criminal in nature, but he could tough it up as good as the next guy, so Mitch treated him like a buddy and gave him the alternative geography of Banff: the map that detoured around ski trails and sporting equipment stores and fine-dining establishments to the places where guys in the know could buy pot, party after hours, and find girls.

Blue liked the bitterness of Banff and the community of exiles who congregated in these hidden places. Apart from the mountains, they
were the only relative constants—a small core of workers who stayed through the seasons and drank, played pool, hung out, and complained about their shitty jobs and the fact that their managers were telling them they were going to have to learn Japanese.

Within three days of his arrival, Blue had a job in the laundry room at the Ptarmigan Inn. The job had its humiliations, but it included accommodation in the basement of the hotel, so he and Mitch divided up what remained of their jointly purchased case of beer and he moved up the street and underground.

Blue had never imagined he'd have to learn a new language to work in a laundry room. He wondered if there were really words for things like fluff and fold and permanent press in Japanese. He closed the Ptarmigan Inn-issued pamphlet of
101 Useful Phrases for Doing Business in Japan
, and picked up a pen. Perched on a bar stool, eating bacon and eggs at three in the afternoon, he wrote to his sister again.

God, I almost sound happy, he thought, putting down his Niagara Falls pen. He burst out laughing.

“No more coffee for you today, big boy,” said the waitress.

He folded the letter like an accordion and scribbled his phone number on the back.

Emma did the unthinkable and reached under the lab table to squeeze the thigh of the graduate student who was the teaching assistant for her osteology course. She felt his thigh tighten instantly, and she exhaled with the relief. Somebody could feel her presence: she must be alive. He kept his eyes fixed on the tin plate of charred animal remains in front of him, but his pupils dilated, becoming black stars.

She daydreamed them into the desert. They were excavating a castle. Him in shorts, the sun beating down relentlessly, their mouths like cool water in the blessed shade of a lonely tree. She worked her fingers between the buttons of his Levi's, crawling in to nuzzle hard warmth. His black stars exploded into black holes, compelling and vast. He let out his breath and Professor Newman turned around and gave him a disapproving look.

Alone in the lab on Thursday evening they analysed the patterns of wear on a set of human teeth. She offered to bite him but he ignored her. He talked about difference in wear patterns in carnivores and herbivores while she moved her toes in his lap and his breathing became heavy.

His name was Peter and he lived with Patti Summers, the thirty-year-old wonder-child with a tenured job in the department. They had met on a dig in Jordan two summers ago, but that didn't seem to be stopping him from letting Emma crawl under the table and take him and his sweet smell of soap and pepper into her mouth.

He pressed himself against her back and pushed her gently down the stairs into the basement of the building. He lay on top of her on the hot, dusty floor by the boiler. A bigger boiler, a different boy. But when Peter looked into her eyes she didn't see anything familiar. She could feel him retreat, going limp, shrinking, and waving bye-bye: I've got to go home to Patti. “Very sexy,” he said, shaking his head. “But very impossible.”

Under his weight her tears began, running down her face and into her ears. Once she'd started, she couldn't stop. He pulled her into his lap like a child and held her against his chest. She buried her face in the side of his cliff and he apologized over and over again in the dust of the basement. “Very sexy,” he repeated. “But very impossible.”
Very tragic, really
. She was crying almost, but not quite a river.

Emma was horrified to see Patti marching down the hall of her residence at the end of that week. Patti was screaming at the top of her lungs, calling Emma things she never would have imagined a professor saying. “You fucking bitch!” she screamed into Emma and Ruthie's room. Other students poked their heads out into the hallway and stared. Emma closed the door in her face, but Patti kept on yelling.

“Holy shit,” Emma said, crumbling against the bookcase. Ruthie, who was sitting down at her desk with her back to Emma, didn't turn around. “Ruthie?” Emma said weakly.

Ruthie remained still. Emma said her name again and finally Ruthie turned around reluctantly and said, “What is it, Emma?”

“I'm sorry about that.”