The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (31 page)

“Oh Christ, woman!” he scoffs. “I'm not losing it! I mean, it's like a godsend! I've done an ostrich before, but never an emu!”

Nina laughs, and introduces herself. She and Emma can't refuse when he asks, half an hour later, if he can take them out for a liquid lunch.

Nina charms the pants off Professor Savage with all her knowledge about birds.

Emma looks at her with surprise. Nina is endlessly surprising. “I grew up in a house full of dead birds,” she laughs, explaining. “Fred—he's a taxidermist. Not professionally, but it's a hobby of his.”

“The antique dealer?”

“Yeah,” she nods. “Thing is, though, my mother can't stand to have the things in the house. That's what she calls them—‘the things.' ”

The things, Emma thinks. The wild things. Where the wild things are. “Where does he keep them, then?” she asks.

“In the garden shed, or sometimes in the deep freezer. My mother defrosted one once—she was a little hammered—little, that's an understatement—anyway, she thought it was a turkey.”

“What was it?” asks Professor Savage, curious.

“A cassowary.”

Emma doesn't want to admit it, but she's never heard of a cassowary.

“How fascinating,” muses Professor Savage. “Where on earth did he get a cassowary? I think they're an endangered species.”

Nina shrugs. “Through the Internet somehow. He's always on the Internet—usually downloading porn—it keeps him occupied so he doesn't have to deal with my mother. He belongs to some discussion group for taxidermists and they hold an international symposium every year in New South Wales. Must have been through that somehow.”

“Fascinating,” Professor Savage nods.

And on they go—birds of a feather, flocking together, Emma amazed and delighted with all that they share. When Emma tells Professor Savage that Nina is a sculptor, he becomes quite animated. Nina says she would be very interested in following their work: she'd like to replicate it by erecting an emu out of scrap metal. Professor Savage thinks it is a wonderful idea, invites her to sculpt alongside them, and Emma can feel herself go so red at the proposal that she has to stare at her shoes for the next ten minutes.

Emma hates to admit it to herself, but she thinks she might be a lesbian. She and Nina are doing stuff that certainly makes it look that way—and not just once, but repeatedly. She's slipping and sliding body first, with abandon. Laughing without restraint. Crying without provocation. A head on her shoulder, a nipple between her teeth, a tongue
down the length of her. A compulsion, an ache, a belonging so normal that she doesn't feel the slightest bit weird about it, although she can't stand the thought that some terrorists in grade seven knew her better than she knew herself.

Being with Nina is giving her a history. A context for interpretation. Like any archaeological find, a kiss is meaningless in isolation. No wonder she couldn't stand the purple peanut-buttered tongues all the girls in her classes seemed so hungry to swallow. It seems to be making a whole lot of sense, unravelling some of the confusion, simplifying things.

In the euphoria of it all, Emma feels like she actually wants to tell Elaine. “I think I'm falling in love,” she longs to say. She never spoke to Elaine this way about Andrew. She hadn't used words like “love” when she told Elaine about the brainy boy in the library. She had said: “intelligent,” “educated,” “big house,” and “big dreams.” And she had moved out of Elaine's house with the announcement that Andrew's world just seemed “more conducive to what she wanted to accomplish.” Those were the words she actually used. Jesus Christ, she thinks. How pompous, how desperately unromantic.

“I've met someone,” she tells Elaine when she's back one weekend visiting Nina. “And, uh, I thought maybe you'd like to meet her too.”

Elaine is surprisingly calm about the whole thing—so cool, in fact, that Emma is disappointed. Elaine continues plucking her eyebrows in the bathroom mirror. “Uh-huh,” she says, without batting an eyelash. She's getting ready for a date, another date with some guy who Emma knows she's “met” through a personal ad. Emma pictures a man with halitosis and white shoes. Pictures his false teeth clattering when he laughs.

“Mum? Do you hear what I'm saying?”

Elaine takes a swig from her Scotch glass and puts it down on the counter and quips, “Emma, you're always looking for a reaction!”

“Well, just a sign of life. A heartbeat or something.” It had always been this way. Whenever she or Blue told their mother anything of significance they were accused of being deliberately provocative, when all they really sought was the slightest acknowledgement that they had been heard.

“I'm pleased,” she says quickly then, pouting to apply her lipstick in the mirror.

“Pleased?”

“Well, at least it means you won't go and get pregnant.”

Emma takes what she can get. At least she's not displeased, even though she's not displeased for the strangest of reasons.

“I just want you to be happy,” Elaine admits.

“You do?” Emma can't help saying.

“Of course I do! Both of you. I just want you and Blue to be happy,” she snaps, making it sound much more like a command than a wish.

Emma's got hundreds of bones to deal with, all scattered in front of her, none the slightest bit like another. One by one, Emma brightens and disinfects each with bleach, lays it down, identifies it, and labels it with black ink. Each vertebra, each rib, each digit of a six-year-old female bird, slowly and painstakingly, cleaned, identified, and labelled.

Beside Emma's table of bird bones, Nina has accumulated a scrap heap of tangled metal. Nina picks a piece of metal for each one of the thousands of parts of the bird—welding certain pieces together, filing others to shape, bending flexible bars of a mattress for ribs, creating a cascading wave of increasingly larger bolts for each vertebra of the bird's spectacular spine.

At night, Emma retreats to the library to do research about the emu's habitat and diet. In one series of photographs, an emu bounces freely across the desert terrain of the Australian outback. In another, it's presented on a plate as carpaccio-red, raw, and sliced over Boston lettuce and drizzled with honey mustard dressing.
Mmm, mmm
.

She's copying down the recipe for Nina when she notices the cover of the latest issue of
Scientific American
. A major breakthrough
in quantum mechanics. Some physicists have apparently found that elusive quark named Truth. She secretly hopes that Andrew has totally missed the boat on this one. Curious, she picks up the magazine and flips through the article in search of Andrew's name. She doesn't find it, only the revelation that the discovery of Truth wasn't an end in itself. A team of scientists had located the quark only to discover they had ten thousand new problems to solve. Truth was apparently full of secrets and lies.

Blue's been talking about truth lately, talking about Oliver, about finding him, speaking his mind, putting an end to all this. He and Amy use the word “closure”—new to their vocabulary thanks to the nice lady he continues to see. Emma suspects that if they found Oliver, the truth and reality of him, they would find that, like Truth, he concealed thousands of other secrets. Tip of the iceberg, can of worms, that idea but stronger. More like the killing fields of Cambodia where the discovery of one skull assures you there are ten thousand more.

While Emma busies herself with the resurrection of the holy flightless one, Amy and Blue plan their journey. There are all the practical considerations to do with money and the shop, but things are slowing down naturally with the colder weather—people forgetting their skin as they cover up for winter. He'll direct his few booked appointments to Mitch and take a commission for doing so. He'll close for an extended Christmas holiday. He'll think of this as a long-term investment.

Although no one's been asked for their opinion, everyone seems to think it's a good idea. Nina thinks it will be cathartic, even Elaine seems to buy it, whatever “it” really is. She's given Blue an envelope for his journey. A note wrapped around a photograph of a wild-haired man
in a poncho. “Your dad,” she's penned. “In the good old days.” Emma, seems to be the only one who has any doubts.

Imagine
. Just imagine. Imagine you could shrink at will. Imagine that the world was just one big jigsaw puzzle and you heard that the last piece was lying on a beach on the West Coast. Imagine that you hitchhiked out west with a knife down your pant leg and called that the Quest for Closure. Your girlfriend, unknowing and well intentioned, her head on your shoulder, sleeps through Manitoba and wakes up in the Prairies, pasty-mouthed and confused. She's had a dream that the two of you have just adopted a black Lab from the Humane Society, but in one of those horrible moments where you wish you could just turn the clock back by two minutes, you've driven the Jimmy over the dog's front paws. You comfort her in the only way how—kisses followed by sick jokes. The two of you are dying to get out and have a cigarette.

Blue and Amy do hitchhike. Not the wisest move, but Blue seems to want to make the journey in the roughest way he can. A tortuous emotional journey requires an equally dangerous mode of transport. They ride all the way to Vancouver in the back of a pickup truck, wrapped in sleeping bags, rubbing cold noses, Blue's hands buried underneath Amy's sweater. She is full of love for him on this journey. She loves his courage. She loves his innocence. She loves him because he is the first guy she's been with who doesn't treat her like she's a weak little girl.

She remembers when she first met him and they went camping. He was determined to catch her a fish, and when he had no luck with the rod he even stood in the stream and tried to spear one for her. She
waded into the river and put her tongue in his ear and convinced him to give up. They swam upstream instead, where they spawned like horny salmon.

“In the winter, I'll dig a hole in the ice and catch you a whole school of fish,” he told her. He had wanted to ice-fish ever since he'd first watched Red Fisher—the guru of the Canadian fishing world who littered his Sunday fishing show with passages from the Bible. They had never been believers, but Blue begged Elaine to write a cheque for Red Fisher's book of religiously inspired poetry about fishing. It came in a brown paper wrapper and was inscribed to Blue. He kept the poetry under his pillow and he carried the slim volume with him to the Sportsman's Show at the CNE where they had heard Red Fisher would be a special guest.

Blue's whole body trembled when he saw Red Fisher. “Go up and say hi,” Emma had encouraged him. Blue practically kneeled at the towering giant's feet as he mooned, “You're my hero.”

“That's just fine, son,” Red Fisher bellowed largely, patting him on the head without looking down and walking on by.

Blue just stood there in bewildered silence, willing himself not to cry. Red Fisher had just come ashore and landed like a beached and bloated whale. Blue was nothing more than an inconsequential minnow—too small to even consider frying for breakfast. And all that talk about brotherly love.

So much has happened since. Red Fisher was the first of Blue's heroes to betray him.

The salt of the Pacific tastes like sweat to him. The taste of fear. Reminds him of standing in front of his father, not knowing how to anticipate his reaction as he held out offerings, like a pilgrim visiting the shrine of some unpredictable God. Some days, Oliver would be grateful. Take the sweater Blue offered him and say he was glad it was wool because acrylic didn't breathe. On other occasions he would bark, “Do you think I'm a beggar?” and throw back the used item of clothing in disgust.

Blue had kept trying, though; trying to make him happy, proud. Trying to find himself a father: to locate a paternal pulse in the unpredictable mass of Oliver in front of him. The man who once built him a bicycle. Gripping the handlebars of a familiar yet dangerous beast. He'll never let go: he's still holding on for his life.

Blue and Amy are staying with Amy's ex-stepsister-in-law in Vancouver. It's a long and complicated story that no one can keep straight, but it seems Jolie was once married to Amy's stepbrother, Michael. Michael apparently went and moved to Israel and enlisted in the army and blew his own head off with an Uzi somehow. But that was
after he and Jolie had already split up. Nobody was ever sure if it was an accident.

Jolie knows what Blue is going through; she knows that nothing hurts like a heart. What Blue seeks is reunion, and letting go. He seeks an end. He knows that ends are supposed to involve forgiveness, at least in Hollywood, but the fantasies of meeting Oliver are often full of revenge. He'd like to be able to say, “See, Dad, I'm not a faggot. And I'm not a loser, or a wimp. I'm tough, tougher than you could ever be. I've got a girlfriend and I'm running my own business. Successfully. Can you see me? This is me. Not you. Not a byproduct of you.” He'd like to be able to say that and believe it. He'd like to see himself reincarnated as nobody's son, but try as he might to disassociate himself, the toxic residue of past life continues to contaminate, and that's why he's here.

He carries a picture of Oliver around to all the homeless shelters, asking anyone if they know the man. There's a lot of shaking of unwashed heads. He does the rounds every other day because there's a near-daily turnover of staff and he wants to be sure to ask as many people as possible. Amy doesn't accompany him on these visits. Sometimes, if he gets chatting with the staff, he stays for lunch. Eats a bowl of dusty soup and breaks bread with a bunch of foul-smelling men and asks them, “Are you anybody's father?”

“Not just anybody's,” one old man says, shaking his head. “I'm Isabel's father.”