“No,” he said. “No. Thanks. Couldn’t get away.”
He could see she was hurt by the curtness of his refusal and he had to bite his tongue to let it lie. He stood listening to Mercedes and her daughter walk down the hall to the elevator, taking in one long breath after another. Thinking,
That’s done
. And feeling no relief with the thought.
Billy-Peter’s truck was still parked in the gravel driveway when he arrived home in Calvert. Lights on inside as dusk came down, smoke rising out of the chimney, a fire laid in the wood stove to cut the evening chill. Wish sat in the car outside the house awhile. He was surprised to see Billy-Peter’s truck for some reason. He was surprised to see the house itself. He couldn’t remember the drive home, thinking about Harris, about losing Anstey just before the Japanese surrender.
In the last two days of his life, Anstey fell into sleeps so deep it was a kind of unconsciousness. He was oblivious to any movement or noise around him, to pain or discomfort, to his own hunger and thirst. They knew the war was all but over by then and somehow it made Wish feel more profoundly impotent that there was nothing they could do to help. The British doctor lifting the blankets to examine Anstey’s blue feet, the progress of the mottling as it crept to his knees. Anstey surfaced occasionally to ask what day it was, what time of day. He asked for Wish and Harris by name and nodded almost imperceptibly when they answered him. Then he went under again, for hours at a time.
There were spasms of inarticulate panic at the end, Anstey’s head ratcheted off the bed, the blind eyes wide, his jaws working as if the air was emptied of oxygen. Harris with an arm around his shoulders to ease Anstey down, whispering to quiet him though there was no indication he could hear a sound. Anstey slipped back into a dead calm within seconds, but the useless urgency of those moments made Wish nauseous. It was like being forced to witness an execution over and over again. Harris brushing Anstey’s forehead and cheeks with his fingers, his shoulders shaking. “That lousy fucker” was all he could choke out. “That miserable cunt.” And there was no question who he had in mind.
They cremated the corpse as soon as Anstey died, and Wish smuggled his ashes out of the camp the following night. Carried the urn and a flashlight in a cloth satchel, wheeling a bicycle he’d found propped against the wall of the main guardhouse. He half expected to be shot but no one paid him any mind. Some of the guards had deserted in the days since the explosion, the interpreter among them. Those who remained oversaw the camp with a blankness akin to that of the woman he’d seen nursing her child in the city. As if nothing visible to the naked eye held any significance.
He was too weak to ride the bicycle uphill, leaning on the seat and the handlebars as he struggled up the inclines, catching his breath as he coasted down the other side. At the French Temple he touched the Virgin’s feet before picking his way through the crowds taking refuge inside. He’d planned to say the rosary but civilians in various states of injury and distress were camped around the altar and he went straight to the basement.
He wandered the corridors, pushing doors ajar, shining the flashlight along the walls. Eyes staring back at him in every one of them. When he finally located the crypt, someone was stretched out asleep on the floor there as well. He picked his way over the man and played the beam of the flashlight over the shelves until he came upon a handful of names and units he recognized. He placed Anstey’s remains beside them and turned to leave, the light flicking over the sleeping figure. Wire-rimmed glasses folded and placed on the floor near the man’s head. Wish’s scalp prickled and he stood still until the dizziness passed. He crouched beside the man then. A smell of alcohol rising off his breath. The dark mole high on the left cheekbone.
Nishino had made himself at home in the room: a scatter of clothes, a mug, several bottles of the alcohol Wish had brewed at the camp, half a dozen votive candles for light. A bucket in one corner that stank of shit. He’d abandoned his uniform for civilian clothes but the kit bag still sat in a corner. Wish stepped over him carefully, raising the flap to look inside. The handgun in its leather holster. He glanced over his shoulder at the sleeping man and tried to think, think, think. Considered shooting him right there, a bullet to the head to finish him. He didn’t know if any other soldiers were camping out in the church or if they’d bother to come after him if there were. He took the holster from the bag and crept out the door. He emptied the chamber of ammunition, slipped the bullets into his breast pocket. Stepped back inside, replaced the gun and holster in Nishino’s kit bag.
He knelt before the Virgin outside the church, whispered a quick prayer. Pulled the bicycle out of the bushes where he’d stashed it and started back to the camp, euphoric, resolute. The phrase
The Lord hath delivered him into my hands
running through his head as he went.
Billy-Peter came to the door of the house. “Supper’s ready,” he called.
Wish opened the car door and shifted his legs out, using his hands to help move the dead weight of them. He didn’t know if he’d be able to stand and he hung on to the doorframe a few minutes to be certain. He leaned into the car to grab the coffee he’d picked up for the trip home and carried it with him. He staggered slightly as he came into the kitchen, caught himself on the kitchen table.
Billy-Peter said, “Jesus, Wish, that’s not the hard-on throwing you off your stride, is it?”
“Got a headache,” he said, walking by Billy-Peter toward the back bedroom.
“I’ll lay your supper in the oven, will I?”
He didn’t bother to answer. Closed the bedroom door behind him.
It was mid-morning the next day before he woke. He sat up on the side of the bed and looked slowly around the room, trying to guess the time by the fall of light through the window. The bureau top scattered with loose change and coffee mugs. Empty plastic hangers in the closet, a pile of dirty clothes on the floor beneath them. He felt viciously hungover, low and uneasy, though he couldn’t for the moment place the cause. He picked up the nearly empty Tim Hortons cup from the bedside table and took a cold mouthful.
He hauled on the pants and shirt that were lying on the floor by the bed and walked out to the kitchen in his bare feet, still trying to do up his fly. Found Billy-Peter sitting at the kitchen table with Mercedes and her daughter and another woman he didn’t know. All of them drinking tea like it was any old morning. And the whole of the day before breached the surface of his mind.
“Morning,” Billy-Peter said. He got up from his chair. “I’ll put on some coffee.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Wish said.
“Stayed over,” Billy-Peter said. “Thought I should keep an eye on you last night.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. How did you know to find me here?” he asked Mercedes.
“Kathleen told me you were living in Calvert.”
“Jesus fuck,” he said. “The mouth on that one.”
Isabella said, “He’s a real charmer, Mom.”
The third woman was Mercedes’ sister, he could tell just from looking at her. She was holding a wallet-sized picture in her hand and he said, “Where did you get that?”
“I stepped in to see if you were awake earlier,” Billy-Peter said. “Thought they might like to see it.”
It was the photo taken in Hiram’s shop during the war, Mercedes as a young woman, the ancient black-and-white creased and faded. Wish hadn’t looked at it himself in years, had dug out the envelope the night before, alone in his bedroom. Just to remind himself of the physical fact of Mercedes’ face. To set it against the face of the woman who’d ambushed him at the nursing home. He’d left the picture lying on the bureau and a hangover fog of emotion flooded him now, seeing it on display. A rootless, insidious sense of betrayal. He pointed at Billy-Peter. “You blood of a bitch,” he said.
“Settle down, Wish.”
“Get the fuck out of here. And give me back the key to the front door.”
“There’s no lock on the front door, you foolish prick.”
He looked at Billy-Peter a moment. “Fuck,” he said. He marched to the porch and pulled his shoes on his sockless feet.
“Where you going?”
“Over to Mercer’s for a drink.”
“Mercer’s don’t open before noon.”
“I’ll wait.” He straightened up and reached for the door.
“Wish.”
“What
, goddamn it?”
Billy-Peter pointing with a smug little grin on his face. “Your fly is down.”
“Fuck,” he whispered. Isabella and the other one, what the hell was her name? Both of them laughing as he hauled at the zipper. He took a ball hat off a coat hook and went out the door with it, crunching down the gravel driveway. Realized at the car that he’d left his keys inside.
“She’s almost brewed,” Billy-Peter said, nodding to the coffee maker when he came back into the house.
Wish shouted something then, a wordless guttural syllable. He whipped the ball hat across the kitchen and it tailed sideways before it fell to the linoleum, halfway to the counter. Something in his chest tailing sideways and dropping in much the same fashion.
Mercedes turned her teacup slowly on the table, watching as the two men contemplated the cap on the floor.
Wish said, “What’s the sense of me going up to the Cove with you, Mercedes?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know a goddamn thing about who you’re talking to. You really don’t.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m asking.”
“You might as well sit down, my son,” Billy-Peter said. He set a cup of coffee on the table. “She got the nerve of a mule.”
Wish looked up at the ceiling with his hands on his hips. “Sweet flying fuck,” he said.
Mercedes’ sister got up to drag a folding chair over to the table for him. He felt completely defeated. Run to ground. He walked over and sat beside her.
Agnes
, her name was. “Thank you, Agnes,” he said. “Thanks.”
4.
T
HEY DROVE IN THROUGH
the country in Agnes’s car, four hours to Gander, where they turned north to follow the coastline through Notre Dame Bay. It was cold and wet the whole way, socked in with fog along the shoreline. “Capelin weather,” Wish said.
Mercedes and Agnes kept up a ping-pong conversation over the seats, pointing out the changes on the northeast coast since they were girls together on Little Fogo Island. Pavement and power lines. Schools and rinks and baseball diamonds. Split-level bungalows. Manicured lawns. Convenience stores.
The Cove itself had been abandoned around the time the Americans left the Pleasantville base in the 1960s. The provincial government had forced dozens of small, isolated communities to relocate to towns with schools and medical services. People loaded their boats with what could be carried away and left behind what couldn’t. Homes and storehouses and wharves. The web of cart tracks and walking paths to the stages and fishing rooms, the slide paths through the backwoods where winter fuel was cut and hauled. The berry fields, the Washing Pond, the Spell Rock. The generations buried one next the other in the graveyard.
Most of the larger islands in the bay had been strung together with causeways in the years since the war, so you could drive onto New World Island from the mainland and straight across from there to Twillingate. But the ferry was still the only way out to Fogo. They sat with the engine running to keep warm while they waited in line above the dock in Farewell.
“Bella’s never been on a boat before,” Mercedes said. “Have you, Bella?”
“Can’t wait,” she said.
The two-dozen cars in line pulled onto the lower deck of the ferry. Wish set the handbrake and they all climbed up into the fog, walking across to the guardrail as the vessel inched away from the dock. A fresh wind was blowing outside the harbour and the ferry began to kick sharply port and starboard as they moved into the open water of Notre Dame Bay.
Bella put both hands on the rail and stared out over the whitecaps. “How long is this trip?”
“Forty-five minutes, give or take.”
“Are you all right, Bella?” Agnes asked her.
The colour was already seeping out of her face. “I think I’ll go back to the car and lay down awhile.”
Agnes followed after her and they both disappeared down the stairs.
Mercedes said, “Her father was useless on the water too.”
“She seems out of sorts altogether.”
“She’s been out of sorts her whole life.” Mercedes looked down at the rail. “Not a bit like Marion.”
“How old is Marion now?”
“Marion’s dead, Wish.”
“Oh,” he said. He leaned out over the rail. Mercedes told him about the rodeo, about the runaway horse and the scar on her face, and all the while she talked he nodded down at the waves, as if he’d heard the story before and was just indulging her need to tell it.
“I was wondering,” he said, “where that scar came from.”
“Lost five teeth on this side and the cheekbone was shattered. I didn’t know Marion was gone till I woke up in hospital. They put in a plate,” she said. “It sets off the metal detectors at the airport.” She touched her cheek with her fingertips. “Most of the nerves are dead.”
“You got plenty of that to spare.”
She put her arm into his. “I blamed you for a long time,” she said.
He leaned away to get a good look at her.
“That birthmark of yours, you know. And losing her the way we did. It felt made up. Like there was some kind of design in it.” She laughed a little at her own foolishness.
Wish could see it would be hard to dismiss the conclusion out of hand. The world threw enough bullshit into a life that some of it was unreasonably persuasive.
They were quiet a long time then, watching the wake furl away from boat until the shudder of the engines reversing came up through the decks. Mercedes said, “What happened to you over there, Wish?”
“How much do you want to know, Mercedes?”
“Everything.”
“Now my love,” he said, “don’t be greedy.”
“Everything,” she said again.
They spent the night at a bed and breakfast run by a couple from Ontario. The Hendersons served scallops wrapped in bacon, a salad with tomatoes and olives and goat cheese for their supper.