by Michael V. Smith
ISBN 9781770860001 | 5.25" x 8" | TPB w/ French Flaps | $21
Categories:Fiction - Literary
Purchase:Local Bookstores
Progress (Preview)
Saturday
Every time helen stepped out of doors these final months, more of the town had disappeared. Today it was the laundromat, which had nothing left inside except a chair with three legs and a can of pop on the seat. Through most of June, trees within ten feet of the highway had been felled, from the old campsite east of town to the overpass of the new stretch of major highway that led to the city. Last week it was the knife-sharpening shack that Tim Ho built from wooden barrels he’d sawed in half. The deli case at the market had been emptied when Helen went looking in the morning for lunchmeat. She’d never noticed how dirty the case was, with nothing to see inside it except the grime along the outer edges where the glass met the plastic moulding.
She’d bought a can of tuna, took herself home, and made a sandwich with cucumbers and lettuce from the garden. She packed it up in a baggie with a handful of yellow pepper slices and a Thermos of tap water. She combed her hair in the bathroom, put on a fresh top, a blue linen skirt her mother used to wear on weekends, and brushed her teeth, surprising herself that she could look more put-together if she wanted. She hadn’t been dressing in anything nicer than a T-shirt since her mother passed. It had been practical in the final days and then, afterwards, a lazy habit. Looking after her father a year later had done nothing to encourage her.
She felt good to be wearing something decent. It was hotter than usual, but with rain every other night; people were saying how lucky the farmers were to have this be their last season. An excellent crop for them. In the paper that morning, Helen had read a letter to the editor that claimed the logic wasn’t so sharp, because the farmers’ last season on the land hardly gave them reason to feel lucky. She chuckled, thinking of it, as she stepped across the wet grass to her car.
She backed out onto the old highway a bit quickly, without her usual checks and re-checks, for there was less and less traffic every week. Piché was kneeling over her pea plants, east of her house. Helen waved to her from the car window as she passed, feeling badly for not visiting this morning. She didn’t want to have to explain where she was going. It was her second trip this season to the old Keegan farm, where no Keegan had actually lived in a half dozen years.
The drive was twenty minutes out of town, up to the only hill of any note, which held one of the best apple orchards in the area.
Inside the property, about ten yards before the orchard began, Helen pulled the car into a small gravelled turnoff from the highway and parked. She took her bagged lunch with her and — to give her something to do, a kind of excuse to be there — an old khaki pair of binoculars her father had owned, which she had found in the shed. A small dirt path once trickled along the property line through the thick grass, though in recent years Helen was the only person to use it, and then only once or twice a year, so the hard dirt, for the most part, was overgrown.
It was an easy route, despite the missing trail, because Helen had only to walk parallel to the fenced property line. She could smell the apple trees sweet on the air and, beneath that, the damp earth through the grass and the hot fishiness of the river.
She came to a clearing along the water’s edge, with three maples making a canopy over a large grey stone rising four feet from the ground. It was here that the Keegan family had buried their son’s ashes, at the base of the large stone, overlooking the river. His name and inscription were carved in neat block letters, a quarter-inch into the face. GARRETT SAMUEL KEEGAN. The grass had once been manicured, to a point, but over the past years, since the politician and his wife had retired out of town — to not be reminded so often of what they’d lost, or to escape the pitying looks from their neighbours — Helen was the only one to keep the grass trimmed.
Helen came to this clearing each spring on the anniversary. Sometimes she would bring her hedge trimmers when she was lonely or wanted a good place to think, wishing herself back into a time that was easier, easier than now, with the dam forcing her hand. She would sit at Garrett’s grave, take up her place on the right, leaning against the stone, and run her fingers through the grass as though she were still tousling his hair in a park somewhere, wrapped alongside him.
The heat of the sun was so intense, even for the morning, she was sweaty by the time she reached the small clearing. Some of her toes were covered in foam from the sap of a milkweed. She came round to the side of the stone facing the river, sat leaning against it, pulled a paper napkin from the front pouch of her purse and wiped her toes dry. They were sticky against the vinyl of her sandal. She could feel two of them pressed together. She sat there, the grass scratchy on her bare legs, moving her toes back and forth, feeling them gum together and separate as she pulled from her purse her Thermos of tap water and the bagged sandwich and peppers.
Helen could hear the long, low rumble and whine of heavy machinery from a kilometre or so upriver. She had watched from this spot as they’d rerouted the river to the south with a coffer dam, then cleared the newly dry land of the boulders and detritus the river had buried under it. Hundreds had come down over those first weeks to see what their riverbed had looked like — there was an awesome magic in standing on the river bottom, which felt direct sunlight for the first time. Fences went up in the second week after the temporary dam was completed, with generic signs on the chain-link saying the grounds were private property, which wasn’t quite true, for it was crown land. While one article in the paper spoke about the hazards of wandering around the construction site, the next had a photo of the Bhatia twins holding up an old head-stocked anchor and chain they’d found in the rocks.
Two years in, the concrete columns of the power dam were in place, looking like a giant’s knuckles. The symmetrical fingers of a great machine. The tops of the farthest three columns were surrounded with a wooden platform and casing. The closest two were only half-poured, but still a good ten storeys high, rebar rising a storey or two from the completed base. Helen could make out a few men walking on the closest platform, black ants moving back and forth. Then a black spot on the side of the nearest full column slid straight down from the top, like a spider dropping with its line. There was another dark blot as well, hanging lower and to the right of the first. Men strapped into harnesses, she imagined, dangling from the top, doing heaven knows what.
It was astounding really, the construction. Thousands of tonnes of earth moved, concrete poured, rerouting a river so the land could be cleared and then erecting something so mammoth, right here. The exposed earth was brown and dingy from the summer sun. The backhoes were toys at the base of the dam. From her perspective — better than the costly spots some locals had set up for the tourists on the other side, downriver — the landscape looked dwarfed, a kid’s toy box, except Helen knew — and couldn’t get over, found it hard to believe — the little black dots moving around on the construction were the big hulking men she saw at the lodge. She picked up the binoculars, the plastic casing warm to the touch from the front seat of the car, and turned the dials to adjust the view. Each little black dot became a stick-figure man with a large, colourful, helmeted head.
Their concrete hand was even more impressive, its scale increased by the appearance of the slivered arms and legs of the workers. She could make out the thin line of the rope now for the two men scaling the side of the closest structure. What a job, she thought, and, with her toes wiggling, she imagined what it was like to be there, suspended along the wall, so many feet up, air all around, nothing but air beneath her. Her heart raced, and by some strange, unaccountable coincidence, at that moment the inky spot of the man on the outside dropped.
The straight line of rope supporting him flew up and squiggled itself as he fell like a sack, straight down, with one arm waving in circles. He fell past the other workman strapped in his harness, who must have been surprised to see him pass. Mocking the air. It seemed he fell without a sound. A pebble dropped from the sky, a dark twig. He fell, with no one to catch him. His body flashed between the metal rebar, a sparrow between iron weeds, and then disappeared behind the concrete.
He fell quickly, in less time than a breath. Two heartbeats. Helen blinked, her lashes rubbing against the binocular glass. She had a kind of vertigo, a spin, as she sat there. She pressed the lenses to her eyes, straining to see more closely. For a moment three men on the ledge and the other on the wall were looking over the side of the wooden banister at the place where his body must have stopped and, as though a timer went off, two of the men took off their hardhats, another broke into a run and the hanging man looked upwards at his buddies but pointed downward. He gestured repeatedly, and was clearly shouting something, although Helen realized she could hear nothing over the sounds of the site’s machines. The harnessed man obviously wanted to be lowered; his arm pointed to the ground — to the injured man — but neither of his co-workers moved. Helen leaned forward, eager for them to pull him up to safety. Why did they just leave him hanging there?
The fellow who ran off — it seemed to Helen it was the same man, though there was no telling from this distance — returned with another four men, one of them in a white hard hat and carrying what Helen thought must be a small safety kit. They engaged the winch, for the guy in the swing began to be lowered into the pit, out of sight as well. The fellow in the white hard hat — foreman, Helen thought — lifted his hand to the side of his head, then shouted into the pit, and pressed his hand against his face once more. He had called someone. Helen imagined the conversation, the clipped messages, the important details. Briefly, she wished she had the perspective of the six men on the ledge — they could see what was happening — then she reconsidered.
Bending on one knee, the foreman cupped his hands beside his mouth and leaned into the pit, shouting. Somebody handed him a megaphone. In a few seconds, Helen thought she heard the faintest electric buzz of his voice. As the minutes passed, her heart slowed; her shoulders collapsed forward when she recognized how tight they were. Her bones felt hollowed out. The binoculars hurt in two round pressure points around her eyes. She felt shaken and exhausted, nauseous from the taste of her own mouth. She opened the water and drank, and was relieved that the coolness of the liquid soothed her. The first swallow made her body relax and the second gulp nearly did her in.
She choked on the water, picked up the binoculars, and couldn’t stop herself from watching. They lowered something down the pit on a rope. A small box or square bucket of some kind. Within seconds, it came back up. Then minutes later the man in the harness appeared, rising up out of the concrete. He looked straight ahead to the concrete wall of the dam. When he reached the top, he immediately removed himself from the harness and walked down the platform without a glance backwards.
A large chute — its mouth as wide as a pickup truck — swung into view from behind the next column. Seconds later, a delay caused by the distance, came the squeal of dry metal on metal. Helen wondered what they could be using the machine for, since she didn’t see a winch, nor a rescue basket, nor anything that seemed useful to their purpose. Of the six men gathered on the ledge, four of them took their hard hats off, until the foreman gestured to them and each of the men put his hat back on.
Minutes later, grey sludge came running out of the mouth of the chute. Helen tried to figure out what the purpose could be, how that would help them retrieve the body. She pictured him floating atop the sludge until the level had risen to the upper lip and they could pluck him off the grey sea; then, stricken, the length of her spine shaking, she realized her mistake. They were pouring concrete.
Helen’s head jerked backwards, throwing her from the scene. A small something flew with a peeping sound onto the tall grass just to the right of where she sat. She looked over at it, to see its dappled head snap to and fro like a mechanical toy. A starling, puzzling her and the bread in her lap. Helen felt her face unbearably hot. She was sweaty around her eyes where the binoculars had been. Within moments, without warning, the bird flew off. By the time Helen turned her attention again to the dam, the concrete had stopped running from the metal mouth. Three men were walking away and two others held their hands to their ears.
Helen burped, tasting the acid of her belly. She might be ill. Her limbs felt loose and rubbery and full of energy. Home, she thought.
She packed her Thermos into her bag, roughly tore the sandwich into bits that she tossed into the grass and slipped her feet into her sandals.
The tall grass irritated her knees as she walked to the road. Her fingers felt as though they had disappeared; they were numb, and when she held them, they were cold against her palms. The warm air, sweet with pollen, went milky, thickened, and the field around her turned dreamy, as though she were separated from everything, her senses locked out and peering from beyond a window, but still she stepped cautiously, feeling the ground might rise up beneath her. She walked in waves, the world rising and falling around her, her head unhinged from her body, her body from her legs.
At the highway she walked along its edge with the sound of the gravel under her feet so much louder than the machines behind her. There were no cars on the road until she reached the Chevy. A small green truck pulled onto the highway, heading towards her. She stood at the rear of her car, relieved to see someone else. She rested a hand on the trunk, but realized in a delay that the metal was burning hot. Her hand snapped back. The driver of the truck was a woman in a tidy hat, her arms looking thin and small, her hands holding the steering wheel as she drove by. If she’d have glanced her way, Helen might have flagged her down. Her hand buzzed from the shock of the heated metal.
She regretted throwing her sandwich into the long grass, for she now needed something to settle her churning stomach. She had no idea where the peppers were. She’d dropped them. They’d been in her lap. Now her head was very hot. She wasn’t wearing a sun hat. She noticed her feet were pinched; the irritating stickiness of her toes prevented them from resting quite right beside each other.
She looked across the road to see two crows flying into the woods, over the blur of cornflowers and buttercups nestled in the wild grass. The sky was a pale blue. The colours on the ground seemed much richer by comparison. Her car was vibrant red, the trees much more green than she remembered. Her stomach let out a growl. She put a hand to her belly, took in a breath of air, smelling the river behind her, the slightly rotten smell of fish coming from the riverbank. She could smell, too, the chalkiness of the gravel, and the pollen like a woman’s powder on the air. Taking her keys from her purse, she walked to the door of the car and stood there, again, staring at the highway ahead of her.
Only when her hands gripped the wheel of the car did she realize how much they were shaking. She didn’t remember unlocking the car door and getting inside.
She felt unsafe, because she still wasn’t entirely present. The world was behind glass. She could see the route home laid out in her head and a dozen different turns of events presented themselves to her. She was trapped in a loop of imaginings where the world offered up accidents, a repertoire of tragic coincidences, and despite rationalizing each away, or forcing herself to correct each mistake with a matching turn of luck, another error presented itself. The car stalling on the train tracks through town, the brakes not working, over-correcting from the shoulder of the road, a drunk in the other lane coming towards her. For a few minutes, Helen could see nothing before her but a random menace until she noticed again her hands on the wheel of the car, and the road before her lined with trees. She’d been looking inward, with the familiar fear, and out there, she tried to comfort herself with the old mantra, things weren’t tragically laid out.
She saw a man fall from the dam. It was a freak occurrence. He was dead, wasn’t he? He must be dead. Yes, of course, pouring the cement meant he was dead. But there was no ceremony. Had anyone said a prayer? Christ, Helen thought, she’d not even said a prayer for the man. She spoke a brief prayer in her head and tears came. Tears brought panic with them, black waves of fear.
Behind everything there was darkness, behind every colour, void. The car was a trap. The road. Her clothes, tight against her chest. Everything she could see, in full colour, felt black. On the other side of everything, black, as though the world had a skin, and beneath it lay a void pregnant with nothingness. Tangible nothingness. Weighted nothingness. She was beside herself with terror, as though she’d been on the edge of that cement pit, as though she were dropping out of the world, to a hard death, without a witness. The world again turned itself against her, everything was a sharp edge, and she couldn’t move for fear of cutting herself open.
The feeling was familiar, from when she was a child and her father had been at his worst. Helen would wake in the night, screaming to make the walls shake. The first time, the family was terrified. The noise was medieval, animal. She was crazed with fear. For weeks she woke screaming, every other night or so, as though she could warn them their lives would be ruined. Blackness, sewn from the material of her dreams, hung in the room before her.
She couldn’t say what the dreams were, though the absolute emptiness of them was something of the same fear she felt now. In the brightness of the afternoon, despite the summer light on the trees and the blue of the sky, the richness of the grass and the random dots of yellow and blue in the fields, she could feel the dark everywhere, she could feel it surround her, laying its arm across her shoulders. A black-gloved hand over her heart. The fear was a profound, massive abandonment, where every sight and smell, every sense led her to one true feeling. She had always been alone, cleaved from the world. Left apart.
She sat for an interminable time, two minutes or twenty, until she could see again. Things in the landscape — pavement, road sign, fields of grass, trees, river — were just that: objects, things, unconnected blobs of things. The steering wheel seemed to become itself, a steering wheel in her grip. Her hands were hands. She was gripping the wheel; she could feel. She felt like a person again.
She had somehow started the car and had already passed the entrance to the construction site and was rounding the first bend in the highway before she was fully aware she was driving. She tried to pay very close attention to the road, but minutes later she was passing the Johnson intersection and again coming out of some daze. Concerned she wasn’t alert yet, she turned into the driveway, which was right there, for the cemetery, and nearly laughed aloud for where she’d ended up. Some cruel design, a stab at humour.
A number of vehicles, mostly pickups, were parked along the fence — there must be a funeral going on, Helen thought — but once she’d driven through the gates, she noticed in the far corner two more trucks: city vehicles. Backhoes were at work on some of the graves, with a handful of workers in matching coveralls standing nearby.
Helen knew what was being done. Her mother was buried here. She had tried to arrange for her father’s ashes to be placed in the plot next to her mother, but he’d died after the construction became too involved, so they’d agreed only to place his gravestone; his ashes waited in a box in the garage. When they’d buried her mother, Helen had presumed her safe. Her mother was left to the earth and its secrets to do what needed doing. Nobody had been told yet the cemetery would be moved. Now, the rules no longer applied. The dead here were being exhumed, their corpses jostled inside their coYns, air leaking in through the panels and their clothes undone. The grisly business of what the men were doing was vivid, immediate.
Helen felt her stomach turn again, with consequence. She opened the car door just in time to vomit into the grass. A small breeze drifted around the door and washed across her face, into her burning nostrils. She was relieved; her back relaxed. Her head cleared considerably. Her hand on the door was slick with sweat. She heaved again, a coarse sugary taste in her throat. As she sat up, she noticed her clothes were sticking to her body. She was thinking she might pull further in, step out of the car, and use the excuse of checking on her parents to get more air, when she noticed the workers standing around the machinery. Each one of them was looking over at the car. Some stared longer than others before returning to their work. Two men in orange hard hats and navy suits discussed something, until the taller of them walked towards her, crossing over the graves as he came. The gentleman in the suit was thirty yards away and Helen could see the deep crinkle in his brow.
He walked slowly. He was reluctant to have this conversation. Helen drew in a long stuttering breath and — she didn’t want to hear anything this man had to say — closed the door to the car. He stopped and looked her in the eye, to see what she would do. Helen waved him off, then turned to fiddle in the glove box, pretending she was looking for something, to stall, and realized in that gesture that she hadn’t packed the binoculars. They must be on the grass still, by the rock.
She couldn’t return, not with the falling man stilled below fresh concrete two minutes up the road. She wouldn’t trust herself to pass by there again.
Sitting upright, she could see the man in the suit ambling towards her, eight metres away and wiping a handkerchief across his forehead. Helen started the engine. The man put the handkerchief in his pocket and lumbered to a stop, tiredly, anticipating her, for maybe this time she really was leaving. She put the car in reverse, which made a squeak as it lurched at the ready. She reversed down the drive, cautiously, and steered the Chevy onto the road, with the man watching her until she drove down the highway toward home.
*
Robert resented much of this; he couldn’t walk up the driveway without breaking into a terrific sweat; his body wasn’t his own, his hands were freezing cold despite the heat of the sun and the slick of perspiration covering his back and arms. He’d eaten breakfast and two dry sandwiches at noon on the bus from the capital, but his stomach felt empty from nerves. He’d burned it up from the capital to the city, and then, in the cab, he’d felt the gas build up inside him and had burped quietly to himself the whole way out. The cabbie had agreed to charge him a flat rate, and hadn’t asked a single question the twenty minutes out of the city, for which Robert was grateful, so he’d given him an extra five bucks as thanks.
The house itself was more or less the same, a split-level bungalow, brick and siding, though fifteen years later, it seemed to be smaller. Reduced, which felt odd, and comforting. The window frames were old and weather-worn. But there was a trellis in bloom on the left side of the front landing and the flowerbeds along the front, on either side of the door, had never been so well tended. Robert remembered marigolds, about eight plants on either side, which were never enough to fill the beds his father had dug for them. He had turned the ground, but he wouldn’t allow Robert’s mother to spend enough to fill them. So she bought seeds for lily-of-the-valley and made do. The front garden was now landscaped, running out in a gentle curve, swelling at the outer edge of the house on the left and, to a slightly lesser extent, on the right. There were bushes, and rocks well-placed, and a small bird feeder tucked beside one shrub with pale green leaves. The front yard was handsome. Things had changed. Of course they had. And for the better. He was encouraged, a strange mix of pleased to see so much life, and concern for what that life might or might not offer him.
He walked up the front steps and noted the wood was grey where the paint had worn through in the centre of each step. The windows were shut. Quickly, he rapped on the door, before he’d even come to a stop. He was ahead of himself. Had he knocked hard enough? He wiped his hand on his pant leg, then imagined his father opening the door. Instinctively, he took a step back.
He waited, and waited longer, willing for a sound beyond the door, for the sound of the lock clicking open. It seemed a great task to decide to knock again. He raised his hand to the door, but set his knuckles against the wood. Knock, he told himself. Just knock. Knock again. Someone will hear you and answer.
He gave another three raps, hard, so that his knuckles smarted, and still there wasn’t a sound. He had to tell himself that they hadn’t seen him arrive. There was nobody around the corner, waiting for his footfall to retreat. The house was empty: there was no car in the driveway and the windows were shut in this heat.
He hadn’t been on the property since he’d crawled out his bedroom window at sixteen, but he still knew the feel of the place. The black metal mailbox on the side of the house had replaced the large wooden one, the siding was older, the windows more ragged, but he thought he could tell if anyone was home, and they weren’t. The quality of stillness told him the house was empty.
It occurred to him that maybe they’d moved already, maybe someone else occupied the house — he’d not bothered to check the directory before coming — but the lace curtains in the window, yes, were the same as when he’d left. They were here. They were just out.
And now what? He’d wait. He couldn’t call a cab; he hadn’t thought to get a number. He should have asked for a receipt. He didn’t want to walk the highway into town, to see if the Inn was open, and risk it not be, and have to pass by the neighbours’ yards twice. If he were to leave now, he might not come back. He wanted to stay, and prove to himself that his parents weren’t home, or they’d have answered the door. He’d wait then, but not on the front stairs because he couldn’t bear the thought of someone seeing him with a suitcase at his feet. Sweat rolled down his back. Robert picked up his suitcase, trying not to think, but to simply move. Take a deep breath. Descend the stairs. Wipe his free hand dry again.
He walked around the left side of the house, to the gate, and let himself in.
*
The sight of her yard made Helen better in her skin.
The car window down and the radio on had restored her breathing to nearly normal, though her stomach was still tight. Some song that she didn’t know but liked for the doot-doot of its beat was playing as she turned off the ignition. The order of the front yard, her flowerbeds thriving despite the heat, and her clematis abloom up the front steps, calmed her, made her limbs vibrate at a lower register.
As soon as Helen was out of the car, Piché, on one knee in the front garden, called out and waved her over. As Piché clambered to her feet as best she could on two legs that had tried to quit working years ago, Helen had to coach herself to not mention the accident. Her old neighbour was struggling enough with having to prepare for the move; she didn’t need extra stress. Piché didn’t need to worry after Helen too.
Helen was beside her by the time Piché managed to right herself.
A man come to see you, she said, her accent heavier for speaking quickly.
Another surveyor? Helen asked. Or agents?
Maybe. I see him from the front room come up your steps, but I don’t open my sheers. I don’t talk at any more men. Piché threw her trowel onto the grass. Her pale stockings were wrinkled below her knees, looking as though the skin had slid down her legs. This was new for her. Even last fall at the end of her gardening season, Piché had been robust. She’d been tidy.
He waited on the steps. I was going to tell him, ‘Go away,’ but I went outside and ... gone. She opened her fingers into the air, miming a puff of smoke.
Just as well.
Helen gave a warm smile of thanks to Piché, who looked at her with determination. Her brow was set in its firmness, a signature look she’d give when repeating an argument she’d had with her Éric, when he was alive to argue. There was no changing the mind of a woman, she often said. You’d have to change the world instead.
Are you tying up the peas already? Helen asked, to get her to speak of nicer things.
Yes, Piché said, giving Helen a fast pinch on the elbow. Growing so fast.
If you need more, let me know. I’ve got a bunch I’m not using.
Piché took her hand. You remember me, she said.
She gave Piché’s hand a squeeze. You’re not easy to forget, Helen answered.
Head thrown back, Piché laughed, a trio of sounds gurgling through her throat. Yes. I like more twist ties. String is not good on my fingers.
I’ll be over soon.
Helen returned to the front step, thirsty, and eager to brush her teeth. Putting her key in the lock, she imagined a man standing on the porch waiting for her. There was no note left behind that she could see. No envelope in the mailbox. Whoever it was would return.
She put her bag down in the hall and stretched her arm out to loosen the muscles. It was stifling hot inside with the windows locked tight. The air was dry with the smell of breakfast from the kitchen. Immediately, she brushed her teeth quickly and felt better. She washed her face, and dried it, noticing the smell of the towel, which she tossed into the hamper. She put on a fresh shirt in her room and felt the urge to crawl into bed, but wanted first to get some air circulating through the house.
In the front room, Helen opened the windows as wide as they’d go. If she was lucky a breeze could cool things off by the evening. She might be sleeping on the couch tonight. The heat in the front of the house would be enough to keep her awake as it is, she wasn’t looking forward to the conditions at the back.
She walked into the kitchen to get a cross breeze and remembered Piché. From the cupboard drawer she pulled out a small bag of twist ties, then leaned over the sink to open the window.
With her hand on the lock, she noticed through the glass someone lounging on a patio chair just beneath the back step. A set of legs jutted out. Men’s black shoes.
Some man had come to see her about the house and had taken the liberty of making himself at home in her backyard. Her blood ran cold down her back with an uncertain fear of what he’d say — she hadn’t signed any of the appropriate papers yet; they still sat in their envelope on top of the fridge — and, at the same time, her hands and face were hot and pulsing. Her heart raced again, compounded by the morning, and boiling with rage.
Mine, she would scream at him. Get off my land. This was still her property.
She unbolted the latch, threw open the rear door and, feeling her body full of adrenalin, flew onto the small porch at the back.
She made it no further. The man had heard the latch and stood up. He was in front of the patio chair with his arms at his sides like he’d been there a long time, waiting. At first she saw only his suit, a smart black jacket and a rich blue tie. As she drew in air, ready to blast him for his trespass, she stared him in the eye.
At the sight of him, her skin prickled and her joints felt turned to rubber. Helen felt the small hairs on her limbs stand up. Chills zigzagged across her back and arms. She could think of nothing to say.
The sight of him, the simplicity of his body in the yard, not a few feet from her, close enough she could see the colour of his eyes, hurt.
She said his name on the property for the first time in a decade and a half: Robbie, a set of consonants and vowels so familiar, and yet distant to her ear, it was like the ground had been turned to reveal an old toy in a box. Robbie, she said again, just to hear the word.
You changed the locks, he said, smiling. It was his voice.
Yes, she answered, quieter than she meant.
No no, I’m kidding. I don’t have a key — Robbie’s tone was apologetic, thinking her short answer a reproof — but I’m afraid the heat got the better of me. He gestured to the chair, giving a wry, dismissive laugh.
Helen felt the heat of the sun pressing straight into her eyes yet she couldn’t bring herself to blink. Robbie was in the yard.
I saw an accident, she wanted to say, but didn’t think that a decent hello. She was full of relief. And then she wanted to scream his name, to hear it said over and again, but she was silenced by how awkward this was — she wanted to vomit again — how changed he was, so adult, so foreign.
He was a grown man who shaved, neatly. He wore a suit and very handsome tie with blue stitching. His hands were manicured, Helen assumed, for his nails were perfect. He had the hands of a movie star. She couldn’t believe he was here, so transformed, so aged and superior. He’d become a man, which felt in her heart to be at once a glamorous re-creation and the worst betrayal.
He was to return as himself. He was to come back, if ever he did, as the boy who disappeared, for them to resume where they had left off. For them to buy the convertible they’d always dreamed of and drive to the coast to see the ocean. He was to sweep her up in his arms, and to lift her in the air for her to shout his name so loud and so often that the whole neighbourhood would gather round and celebrate that Robbie had returned.
He gave a nervous cough then, and Helen’s heart slunk back into her chest. She descended the three stairs to the grass. We changed the locks when our first caretaker quit. She touched a hand to her skirt to dry it. Dad didn’t want her coming back for the furniture, he said, now that she was out of a job.
Helen could taste toothpaste and vomit on her teeth. She wanted to sit down.
So nothing’s changed, he said, glancing to the window of the house, though Helen barely noticed for looking at him, soaking in the sight of him, every detail of the body he’d become. Robbie, in the yard in front of her, was terrifying. Her mind raced with an odd, irrational fear. He was a ghost. How many times had she imagined where he was and come to the same conclusion as her father, that he had followed Garrett’s example and gone overseas, but had been buried in a dry foreign ground or dumped in some nameless grave? Or had been found in an alley, or a hotel, in a distant city. That he was a living, breathing man in front of her made Helen feel as though her parents, too, were closer. He had his father’s features, the same tone and clarity in his voice; his mother’s eyes and lashes. Her parents had returned in the body of one man.
She flexed her hands, feeling the dry skin of her palms. She put a hand to her damp forehead and closed her eyes. She needed to slow the moment down, to catch up with how the world had suddenly remade itself.
Are you okay? Robbie asked.
No! she yelled and he winced.
You’re alive! she said. She held a hand to her mouth and shook with tears, repeating the words, You’re alive, Robbie. You’re alive. You’re in my yard.
Yes, he said, almost giggling, and the word, the trueness of him standing there to speak it, righted her. She sobered, straightened herself and sniffed. A bit of a shocker.
She didn’t laugh with him, and so he said, rather formally, I’d like to see our parents.
Helen realized by his tone of voice that she was doing a very poor job of welcoming him home. She was no help in putting him at ease. I can take you to them, she said warmly, in a quieter voice.
Where are they?
Just past the Johnson’s dairy. Well, it hasn’t been a dairy in a decade.
Did you ... did they sell you the house?
Helen’s head tipped to the side, slightly, puzzling his question.
I’m not prying, I don’t mean to, but I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought you’d be ... somewhere else.
Helen realized that Robbie had made a terrible assumption. She knew no way to decorate it nicely. She said gently, They’re dead, Robbie.
A moment passed, and he extended his neck, slightly, in a sort of silent, Oh. He hadn’t looked her in the eyes since the initial moment of recognition, or perhaps it was that she hadn’t looked at him directly. She was busy studying his hands and clothes, his shoulders and trim waist, for something of the young Robbie who left, but he looked her in the eye now with an innocent, disappointed candour that pulled her heart apart in halves. There he was, in the blue of his eyes, clear and brilliant Robbie. Everything they’d left behind was in that look between them. Finally, she felt, someone who will understand what’s been lost.
I would have liked to see Mom again, he said, his voice clear and delicate.
He turned then, dropping his jacket onto the deck chair behind him. As he came back round, he lifted his hands wide apart so that Helen didn’t know what the gesture was, some sort of clearing of the air, a stretch, until she realized it was the beginning of an embrace.
She stepped forward immediately and pressed herself unbelievably into him.
As he drew his arms around her, Helen’s heart sank so hard in her chest she felt as though someone was trying to pull it out of her body. Keenly alert, aware that she was in the adult arms of her brother, after waiting so long, disproving any fears that he too had died, she felt the slight breeze tickling a hair against her cheek, the spring of the grass beneath her feet, the sound of bees in the garden and the river rubbing against the weeds. She smelled the slight musk of his cologne, a damp sweat, and the sweet thick pollen from the gardenias along the eastside fence. Even the sun on her skin felt more intense, as though she could soak up the light.
She clasped her hands behind his back and held him. She had remembered him for so long he’d become a ghost of her imagination. What had he really looked like? How exactly did he hold himself? What was the expression of the grin on his face as he was telling his jokes at the dinner table? With her face pressed against his tie and her arms pulling him even closer, Helen let out a sob of joy that he was solid. Solid never felt so solid. He was real. His body so thoroughly here, in her arms. She saw again the speck of man falling through the air and felt it, his fall, inside her, like a Washing line tied to her heart, pulling downwards, and she grabbed Robbie’s shoulders more tightly.
When they let each other go, she wanted to invite him in but couldn’t think how to do so without sounding proprietary. Would you like to come inside? felt so coloured with ownership.
When he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow, Helen felt relief. Oh, we’re baking out here, Robbie, let’s go inside for a drink.
He smiled and said, Good idea, though Helen caught the strain in his right eye as he glanced at the back door.
Taking a step towards the house, Helen’s adrenaline began to run cold through her limbs, her heart banging in a chest too small to contain it. Robbie would be in the house. She was winded climbing the three steps of the porch. Holding the screen door open, she stepped back to allow him passage. At the top step, he smiled at her, a nervous, uncertain, friendly smile. Conspiratorial. They both knew the significance of these simple gestures, and they were both nervous with it.
Then he was in the kitchen, ahead of her, taking steps on the tile in his black shoes, so much broader in the back and shoulders than when he’d left, and the incongruence, the change, helped Helen relax. However much the house carried the spectre of her parents’ former life, they were dead. Helen was the one who remained and she was thrilled to have him here. It could be that simple. Her brother was home, she’d cook him a meal, they would talk, and the world would continue to turn on its axis.
Draping his jacket over the back of a chair, he sat at the table in the seat where Helen used to see him every morning wolfing down his breakfast before school. She felt her body holding its breath in an attempt to slow the moment, trying to keep it.
I’ll get us some iced tea, she said. You still like iced tea?
If you made it, I sure do.
When he smiled, his eyes were sharp and, again, a little pained. He seemed too alert, not the least bit relaxed. She wanted to slap his back and tousle his hair, to put him at ease, though they felt like old tricks, the tricks used on a boy. How did he get to be here, so old; both of them grown and changed? With her brother sitting at the table, it was as if Helen was the one who had been away. She felt like she had stepped into this world out of another, maybe, and she couldn’t explain where she’d been. She felt she knew nothing of how she got to be here. So much had passed without him and she could only see the result of it, the product, perhaps because Robbie being so transformed threw everything else into relief. Time had progressed for Robbie, whereas Helen had stepped back into the world to find it changed.
As she closed the door to the freezer, she noticed the twist ties by the back entrance that she’d dropped in a rage. She’d forgotten Piché. Well, she’d have to wait. Helen poured two glasses of cold tea, sliced a couple of lemon wedges and glided them around the rim of the glass before dropping them in the drinks. Robbie was smiling again, infectiously, as she turned to him. Helen giggled, handing him his glass.
She pulled out a chair across the table from him — her mother’s place — and sat, feeling light as she landed on the cushion.
He thanked her and took a sip of his iced tea, swallowing with some diYculty.
I ... wasn’t sure if I should expect a warm return.
Robbie, she scolded, of course. Then she said more lightly, It was worse the longer you were away.
I suppose there’s some truth to that, he replied, with a flatness that made Helen fear she’d been misunderstood.
Mom left your window open for nearly a month, with the door still locked. The morning you left, Dad wanted to take the door off its hinges but she wouldn’t let him. It was your room. She was so bent on privacy. He had to slide your bedroom window closed from the outside.
Robbie let out a very small grunt, barely audible, but said nothing.
Mom put a small ladder alongside the house until someone took it. They thought it was Humphries, so we stopped getting our wood from him.
Why would she think I’d come in through the window?
Helen chuckled, and shrugged, raising her palms. Because you left that way?
Robbie said lightly, shaking his head, Glad I wasn’t here for that.
Helen set her iced tea on the table, turning the glass, the condensation pooling against the polished wood. I expected you back within the week, she said slowly.
She wanted to communicate how interminable the days felt at that time. Every meal was a reminder that they were no longer together, the routine broken, until over weeks or months, the waiting became the routine, a new pattern in his absence.
Her mother set a place for him each meal in the first months. Only once did Helen’s father tell her mother not to bother with the extra setting, which prompted her mother to throw supper in the trash and break every dinner plate on the table.
I did, he said. I mean I nearly did. I came back ... I came partway and, well ... changed my mind.
Abruptly, he stood up, stepped towards the hall, which made Helen jump, then he stopped. I’d like to use the washroom, if
I may. I see he finally managed to build a new one.
I had it done. Walter McLellan came in with his boys and finished it in an afternoon. He was too sick in the end, and I wasn’t going through the winter.
That must have hurt his pride.
I don’t know if he realized. He never saw it.
Helen stood as well. Towels are in the cupboard there if you need them. I’ve got to bring some twist ties to Mrs. Piché.
She’s still here?
Oh yes, there’s no stopping Piché. Helen touched his sleeve. Make yourself comfortable. Look around. See your old room, which hasn’t changed much since you left it. Where are you staying?
I have a bag outside.
Bring it in.
Nice, he said, chipper. I thought I might be staying at the lodge.
Helen felt a flash of anger grip her, that he’d expect so little of them, and then, knowing he would likely have been right had her father still been around, her heart sank for the pity of it. No wonder he’d stayed away so long. I’m surprised my room is still here, he said, perhaps noting her anger. Not much has changed, has it, other than the bathroom?
Well, they plan to come for the house in a few months, she said warmly. Things need to be packed. They’re tearing it down. The structure isn’t sound enough to move.
Robbie’s head tipped to the side, studying her, and again she noticed the downward pull in his right eye, a tick of stress maybe. In those short seconds she could see him puzzling her meaning, then his face blanched with understanding and his eyes lit with tears.
She put a hand to his head, just over his ear, as their mother used to do. Robbie’s face fell in on itself, stifling a sob that burst from him.
Robbie. Oh Robbie, I’m happy you’re home, Helen soothed him.
He nodded, squared his shoulders and sniffed hard. It’s all a bit much, I’m afraid. He opened his mouth to say more, and nothing came; he was struggling to contain himself. Helen waited, moving her hand from his hair so that she could take his hand in hers.
I’m so sorry Mom is gone, he managed.
She missed you. We all did. The three of us.
His face closed a door then; he withdrew. He gave a short nod. Will you not tell Piché I’m here? he asked.
She’d love to see you, Robbie. She’s been a great help to us, Dad and I, especially when Mom was at the end —
I think I’ve had enough for now, he interjected. We’ll see. Tonight. Or tomorrow, when I have the energy, he said. Then he mouthed washroom, and turned for the hall.
As soon as he set the lock, Robert leaned his head against the door. The painted wood was cool on his forehead, and solid. He swivelled his head, to press his cheek closer and absorb some of the coolness. He was broiling, overwhelmed. His parents were dead. His father dead. Such a relief to not have to face him ... but he’d also been cheated out of that.
So many thousands of times he’d imagined the confrontation; months thinking about returning, three weeks planning it. But his father was dead. When he bought his ticket home, when he checked the schedule seven times to make sure he hadn’t misremembered the time, when he lied to the restaurant that he wasn’t coming in for a week because he was going on holiday to lake country, when he told Colin, and convinced him not to come, and when his legs buckled three times on the way to the bus depot, his father was already dead.
His mother too. He had imagined she would forgive him, instantly, the moment she saw him, for having stayed away so long. Forgiven. And truer than that, he hoped for the reverse, that he’d forgive her.
Now that they were both gone, he felt unnerved. There was a terror, dormant, in how everything was familiar. Everything he’d imagined, the house, right here before him, the walls and floor and ceiling surrounding him, an embodiment of so much he feared, and longed for. The kitchen just as he’d remembered it, from the dishes on the counter to the wallpaper on the walls, the curtains, the table and chairs, the beige tiled flooring, the placement of spices on the rack above the stove. The cheap paintings and ornamented mirrors.
The front door clicked shut. Helen had left for Piché’s, next door. Robert was immobile on the bathroom floor leaning into the door, breathing heavily, trying to slow his breath, to stop perspiring, to turn off his guts, which were boiling. He was inside his body and outside at once. Feeling and not feeling. The bathroom, remodelled, felt like the safest place in the house. The counter was new. The toilet. A striped towel hanging next to him on the back of the door carried the slight smell of river water: seaweed and algae. His sister’s swim towel. Behind him, the smell of plastic from the shower curtain. A fruity soap or shampoo. There was a wisp of hair coiled in the corner in front of him.
Robert took a deep breath and pressed his face again into the door. Despite what he’d done, she’d been warm to him. She’d welcomed him. Garrett had been killed, so long ago, that she’d made her peace with what had happened. Robert wondered how much their parents might have also made peace. Had he stayed away too long? He’d spent more than a decade away for no reason but his own useless pride, maybe, and all was right here. All was well between him and Helen. Though she’d received her fiancé’s ashes, mailed home in a box, still she had embraced Robert. She had forgiven him. She must have. He was pitying himself. There was nothing in her welcome to make him guilty about what had passed.
Robert shook with relief. He heard the outside door open and click shut again. Helen’s shoes muZed by the living room carpet. He stood, quietly, then flushed the toilet, to hide his little episode, and washed his face in the sink. Stepping out of the bathroom, back into the kitchen, with Helen smiling and glassy-eyed as he came into the room, he thought he should just ask her and have it done with. He should just say he was sorry, and have a good cry with her about it, and move on.
Helen shook her head. You seem impossible, Robbie. How did you get here?
The bus, and then a cab, he answered, and she laughed.
Where did you come from? she asked, performing, holding her palms up and looking around.
Robert chuckled, and stepped to her, then leaned down between her arms and hugged her slim body to him. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders as best she could, so he leaned a little lower to help her get a better grip. I’m sorry, he said quietly, speaking into a mouthful of hair. For why I left.
Helen was silent, but gripped him. When they were done, Robert sat down again in his old seat, and smiled, sheepish. Helen smiled back. Then her brow wrinkled, and she cupped her iced tea, and asked, innocently, Why did you leave? and Robert saw in her face that, so many years later, she knew nothing.
*
Helen lay in bed, her mind too topsy-turvy to sleep. She couldn’t convince herself to let go of the day. Similar to the sensation she had when she was learning to float, the more she struggled to relax, the harder it was to accomplish. Sleep felt dangerous, threatening, as though, in order to not drown in the heavy darkness of the room around her, she might have to break something to survive it. Folding back the covers, she slid out of bed and grabbed her summer housecoat from the wardrobe.
The house was so quiet, even walking lightly she could hear the sound of her feet unsticking from the hardwood floor. It had been some time since she’d had to be this quiet, to not rouse someone else in the house.
The click of the lock to the back door seemed unusually loud in the darkness. Out of doors, the night air filled Helen’s lungs. Everything outside smelled new. She was better for being outside. She noticed the terrific tightness of her upper back and tried to relax.
The yard plants were gilded with silver by moonlight. Everything was laced with a soft white, the water’s surface a constant blinking of clean light. Helen sat at the end of the dock, as they used to when they were kids, with her feet dangling in the dark water. They would hold themselves with their arms on the edge of the dock, facing the river, and lower their bodies to the water. They were so young their legs couldn’t reach the surface. Helen measured her growth from season to season by how far away her feet were from the river’s surface, and then how deep she could slip a foot, or leg, in her later years.
Across the river, there were no lights. The land and trees were a dark outline against a sky only slightly less black, a black more luminous for being made of air. She slid a foot into the water and was surprised how chilly it was. There was a ring of cold around her ankle where the water and air met.
Before bed, Helen had stopped in the hallway, outside Robbie’s door, with her hand on the doorframe. He was seated on the end of the bed, bent over his suitcase on the floor at his feet. When he looked up, she finally said, Thank you, what she had been wanting to say all evening. He gave her a quizzical look and she said, For coming home. She’d hoped for some reaction, to have him soften, but still there was some reluctance.
She entered her room and closed the door. The minute she crawled into bed, though, she didn’t feel right. He was only partially here, partially available to her. Hadn’t he been sly all afternoon? Something about him had been busy, distracted, and whatever conversation he’d been having with himself, he wasn’t letting on. He’d rejected the suggestion to see Piché, then had taken a nap for most of the afternoon, and when he came out around four, he had suggested they cook supper together so that, it seemed, they had something to keep them busy.
She couldn’t deny — as much as she felt a knot of guilt over it — she was worried, and anxious. Fifteen years without Robbie and suddenly he was home. The waiting was over. The questions could be asked, although — here was the sliver in her heel she couldn’t pull out herself — all evening Robbie hadn’t said a thing, not a word, of why he’d stayed away so long. So he and his father had had a row. Big deal. And why had he returned? Why now? Fifteen years. Her mother’s death, then her father’s. How she had longed for him at the graveyard, looking over her shoulder to the gates of the cemetery, hoping he’d pass under the ironwork in time. He had failed them. He had failed her.
And now, news of the Power Authority buying up property is published in the papers across the country, and he happens to come home. He’d left a boy. Helen hadn’t a clue what influences he’d had during the absent years, where he’d been, or what kind of opportunity he’d had to grow into a man. She didn’t know who he was. The boy was there in Robbie’s eyes, the quickness, the sparkling warmth, but Helen couldn’t deny that he had come home just in time to claim his inheritance. Helen considered it was a prize, possibly, that he hadn’t earned. He has every right, she reasoned, and no right whatsoever.
She looked back at the house, the only roof she’d ever lived under, the walls that had seen her conceived, then born, and within which both her parents had died. It looked so solid in the night, so firm, rising out of the ground, and yet Helen imagined she could blow on it and see it disappear like winter steam. Soon there would be nothing left. Robbie was safely inside, asleep in his room; not home, Helen realized, for he’d abandoned home.
Robbie was safe behind those walls, until the demolition crews came in a few months. Helen felt her heart jump at the need to protect him. He’s returned, she thought. She doesn’t have to consider him home, for very soon there won’t be a home for either of them, not the same home, surely, built in a new town, but he’s returned, and she would have to wait to see the consequences of that, to determine his intentions, however much she wanted to be her mother and to love him regardless, and despite her doubts, and her anger, despite her resentment, like her father, only this time it was not that Robbie had left, but that he’d come back.
