Authors: Eliza Robertson
What worried Mom was the swim scrum: one lake, no lanes. Anthem ends and the start horn blares. Twenty-six hundred participants wade into the water, identical in our neoprene and brightly coloured swim caps. It feels baptismal, sacrificial. We drop row on row into a tangle of leg and windmilling arms. Stay out of trouble, Liv, Mom said. Stay out of trouble. People assume she got held down. Five feet four inches, 105 pounds: easy to front-crawl over. But that wasn’t it. She stayed nearby. The first leg, sixteen hundred metres lakeshore to Last House, I kept her in sight. In the scrum, you move as a group: collective consciousness, hive mind. Sometimes you let yourself be carried. You slip over bodies like spawning salmon, which Liv and I tried once. Salmon run 2005, Vedder River. We in our swim skins and matching caps. We let the current steer us. Watched their shadows through our goggles, how darkness darted over algaed stones. Their hook jaws and front flared teeth, port-stain scales, how they tumbled over each other and over our ankles. The flick of their fins.
Last year, the swim started me off woozy. Three point eight kilometres, one breath per stroke cycle. Rhythm is key. Beats per minute, strokes per metre. Your heart, your lungs, your metronome. The left is my poor side. I breathed on my left for the first half of the course and on my right for the second. You learn how to swim slippery—when Liv and I practised at the pool, we took turns watching each other splash. Well, that was sloppy, she’d say. It’s your legs. Your legs aren’t straight. I would swim another length, and if it was better, she’d shoot a thumbs-up from the end of the lane.
Sometimes they wired separate music into the underwater speakers. You’d hear Top Forty on deck, but in the competition lanes, they played Beethoven. The lake is a different music—the calm white hum of underwater ear pressure. In the race, you follow that hum to the shore, then find your land legs, where your feet start and the wet sand ends. I remember juddering through the time chute—hands on my back, guiding me to the change tents. They unzip the wetsuit for you, spray you with sunscreen while you call for your glasses. I searched for Liv when I ran to the bike racks, but the ladies’ tent was crowded and she always took longer to change. Some athletes would pause at the nutrient station. They peeled their bananas and PowerBar wrappers. I kept my bike calories in a single bottle. Accelerade + Carbo-Pro. Energy gels to top up.
Tonight Aunt Bea and I will eat spaghetti. I used to make fun of Liv when she measured, but this weekend I packed her food scales. Four hundred grams whole wheat spaghetti, crushed tomatoes, extra-lean turkey. After dinner, we’ll drive the bike course. Follow the lakes: Skaha to Vaseux, Vaseux to Osoyoos. Penticton—Oliver—Keremeos, 180 kilometres. Every twenty-five klicks, I’ll get out and cycle. That’s how you notice the camber, the incline of road when the street appears flat. Never mind the mountain passes. The highest altitude comes near the end: twenty-five hundred feet. Aunt Bea will drive slow beside me. She will play Creedence Clearwater on tape. When she brakes for me to haul in the bike, she’ll tell me she likes the way I walk, the way I talk. Tomorrow we’ll drive the run route. We did this last year, but I don’t like surprises. We all have our rituals. On race day, Liv used to eat sun. We have this skylight in our kitchen, and from May to September the light floods in. She’d stand below the glass with a bowl of white yogurt until the sun reeled off her spoon. I watched from the hall sometimes. You could pinpoint each moment the glare made her blink. But on Ironman Sunday you eat breakfast before sun-up. Check-in’s at five; we set the radio for four. She aimed for toast and peanut butter, but couldn’t keep it down. Race day nerves—I heard her retch in the shower. But ask any competitor: on race day you go liquid. Mothers said it in the fifties: don’t eat and swim. A girl eats careful and it’s a disorder; her brother eats careful and he’s an athlete. We shared the same BMI.
This is the first time I’ve taken the Greyhound. Last year, our parents drove. Liv asked for lunch in Princeton because it was the only town with a Booster Juice. Booster Juice stamps the nutrition label on every drink, so you know you’re getting thirty grams of protein with your five hundred calories of Bananas-A-Whey. I wanted Dairy Queen. A Butterfinger Blizzard layered twice with hot fudge.
That’s obscene, said Liv.
I have a craving.
That’s over a hundred grams of sugar. For a medium.
Well.
Look at you. You’ll make yourself sick. That’s like six bananas.
How many bananas before you grow tits?
She didn’t speak after that. She inserted her earbuds and frowned out the window. You knew Liv was upset if you saw a glimmer of sweat above her eyebrows, or on her cheekbones. And sometimes she left her mouth open after she spoke, like she couldn’t quite catch her breath. But then I might poke her shoulder with my eyelids flipped inside out, and she would smack the back of my head.
Long QT syndrome, the medical examiner had said. Arrhythmia. Mutated sodium channels, reduced flow of potassium: the medspeak never sounded severe enough. This year, Mom forbade me to compete. She said that. She said, I forbid you. We fought when I registered in October, a few days before Halloween. We were carving pumpkins. She shoved hers off the counter with the heel of her palm.
Dad won’t come this year either. He says it’s because of work, but he’s not contracted for Sundays. Last year, they ate at Thomasina’s, a bakery with oven-hot scones and rounds of sourdough that steam from the centre when you pry them in half. We all shared a booth. Liv and I plugged into our iPods and frosty wax cups. Mom and Dad staring out the window, buttering their scones.
I think the tallest building in Princeton is the Visitor Information Centre. My bus waits there thirty minutes, and I might treat myself to a Strawberry Slam. Sometimes I wonder about the diets of other animals. How millennia of worms and wood bugs might contribute to the bone density of birds. The musculature of flight, lean protein for air-friendly pectorals. Versus penguins, which swim and eat squid. We’ve lost weight since we were apes; we’ve become more aerodynamic. I wish we had wings. Though the run rules say
no form of locomotion other than running, walking, or crawling
. Liv cut that line from the athlete guide and pasted it into her journal. It was funnier before the bike-to-run transition. The weight of your muscles, the downward propulsion, your blood and your breath pumping into the pavement.
Last year I made it to dusk. To the chicken broth and Coca-Cola. The Coke fizz went down like static electricity, like the charge from a balloon you rub in your hair and stick to the wall. The volunteers distributed the broth in warm paper cups. You would ease into a jog and graze fingers with the kid in a mint volunteer shirt as he handed you the cup. The broth tasted like the most nourishing thing you’d had all day, and you held the liquid in your cheeks and nodded at the kid, who had Down’s syndrome, and he grabbed another cup from the table and fired you an A-okay sign.
At one point near Skaha Estates, I stopped running at the top of a hill and waited forty-five seconds to spot Liv. I thought she must be ahead of me. She was a stronger runner. I thought maybe she slipped in front when I used the toilet at the bike-to-run. But then I saw Dad’s Ford Escape at the turnaround on Christie Beach and his cheeks slanted white through the windshield. Athletes crowded the special needs table, ghosted the nutrient station with their neon bottles of Gatorade. I stalked off the road and walked straight to the car. He shifted his eyes to me through the window, and for a moment neither of us moved. He flicked a switch at the wheel and the passenger door unlocked. I opened the door and climbed into the front seat and his palm clapped my shoulder. His eyes squinted into mine, and then he turned the ignition. I noticed there were two small Tim Hortons coffees in the cupholders. He drove off the course, on the other side of Skaha Lake, and it wasn’t until we were halfway to Kaleden that he pointed to the cup nearest me and said, That one’s yours.
A premature ventricular contraction is medspeak for
your heart skips a beat
. The contraction is initiated by your heart ventricles rather than the sinoatrial node. You can listen to a high-pitched recording on Wikipedia. It sounds like bagpipes.
Tempo rubato
is Italian for stolen time. Rhythmic freedom. The expressive speeding up and slowing down of a piece of music. Chopin played steady with his left hand, timed to the metronome, while his right hand weaved in and around the beat like a ferret inside a chest of drawers. Your left is your clock. Your timekeeper. Liv played Chopsticks with her toes. Tilted onto her tailbone, the stool pushed back, half a grapefruit between her palms. She sucked the juice through a straw, and I waited for her to flick her chin and fire the pulp at me. I remember her in screenshots. Like she’s in motion, but my mind can only capture single frames. That’s how I imagine her in the lake. Involuntarily, when my mind slips in flashes. Liv with her jaw gaped, gasping in water. Liv with a thin wrist braced to her thorax. Liv with her eyes bulged like a fish. When I imagine my sister, I do not see Ophelia. Her heart’s seized and she’s choking in lake, and I wonder at what point she knew.
I read once that grief is like waiting. Waiting to sleep. Waiting to wake up. Waiting for Act III, the plot twist. Like when you drop a twig into the stream and it never emerges on the other side of the bridge. Tonight in Penticton, I might take out Bea’s kayak. Go for a paddle. Liv and I rowed the swim course last year, with a Thermos of hot chocolate and a box of Ritz crackers, our boom box, the Beach Boys, and six D batteries. We paddled into that warm darkness, the blue hour of bats. How they screeched and swooped over the dry-patched Summerland hills. Liv laid her oar across the cockpit coaming and shut her eyes. I continued to row. Motel neon glowed from the lakeshore, and we slipped past their spears of reflected light.
Versions of these stories appeared in the following publications: “Who Will Water the Wallflowers?” in
The Walrus
; “Ship’s Log” in
The Malahat Review
,
Journey Stories 22
, and
Elbow Room
; “My Sister Sang” in
Grain, Journey Stories 25
, and
Coming Attractions 12
; “L’Étranger” on CBC Canada Writes; “Nightwalk” in
Descant
; “Where have you fallen, have you fallen?” in
The Vancouver Review
and
Journey Stories 24
; “Roadnotes” in
PRISM International
and
Coming Attractions 12
; “Worried Woman’s Guide” in
The Fiddlehead
; “Missing Tiger, Camels Found Alive” in
The Indiana Review
; “Sea Life” in
Little Fiction
; “Thoughts, Hints, and Anecdotes Concerning Points of Taste and the Art of Making One’s Self Agreeable: A Handbook for Ladies” in
Prairie Fire
; “Good for the Bones” in
Room
; “Here Be Dragons” in
The New Quarterly
and
Coming Attractions 12
; “Slimebank Taxonomy” in
Willesden Herald New Short Stories 6
; and “We Walked on Water” on
Granta
’s New Writing. Thank you to all the editors.
Most of this book was written under the guidance and green thumbs of faculty at the University of Victoria. Thank you John Gould, Steven Price, Bill Gaston, and Lorna Jackson, who taught my first fiction class when I still wanted to be a lawyer. Thank you also to Jean McNeil, Henry Sutton, Giles Foden, and Andrew Cowen at the University of East Anglia.
Resounding thanks to my peerless agent, Karolina Sutton, who took me on at the risk of cementing her reputation as a one-woman orphanage for story writers. And thank you to my editor, Nicole Winstanley, whose enthusiasm moved me from the beginning—even before I had completed a manuscript. Thank you also to Stephen Myers, an exemplary publicist with exemplary taste in raincoats and messenger bags. Indeed, thank you to everyone behind the pages at Penguin Canada. I know it took a lot of hands to produce this book.
I would like to thank my workshop pals at UVic and UEA, and someone who was never a workshop pal, but my arch rival, D.W. Wilson. Dave, I have ridden your flannel coattails across the Atlantic. Without your meddling, my life would look very different. You are an important friend.
Most of all, I owe this collection to my father, John, my mother, Kathryn, and my brother, Jesse. If you were any more supportive, you would be writing these stories yourselves. (Once or twice you have tried.) I am grateful for you. Dad, you were my most ardent reader. I can see you in every page.
Eliza Robertson was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1987, and grew up on Vancouver Island. She studied creative writing and political science at the University of Victoria and then pursued her MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, receiving the Man Booker Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize for best writer while studying there. Robertson is now a highly celebrated short story writer; she has won three national fiction contests in Canada, and the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, has twice been longlisted for the Journey Prize and was a finalist for the CBC Short Story contest. She currently lives in Norwich and is working on completing her first novel.