Monkey Beach (16 page)

“What grade are you in now?”

“Five.”

“Five! Oh.” She laughed again and hit her own head. “Same as my Tab. Don’t have a brain till I’ve had my coffee.”

“Aunt Trudy?” I gave up. I wanted to know too badly to be clever.

“Hmm?”

“Did Mick and my mother have an affair?”

She almost dropped her cup, then spent a long time pretending to mop up coffee that hadn’t spilled. “What? What?”

“Did they?”

“Who on earth have you been talking to?”

Until that moment, I hadn’t really believed that she couldn’t remember the night before. “People.”

“People?” She adjusted her bathrobe, ran a hand through her hair. “People, hey?” Her eyes narrowed. “Erica people?”

I didn’t answer. For a moment, I was going to tell her that she’d told me herself, but knowing Aunt Trudy’s dislike of anything involving her sister Kate, Erica’s mother, I just watched her.

“Thought so,” Aunt Trudy said. “You don’t listen to anything that little witch says. Your mom and Mick went on a few dates, but he left before they … um, before they … did anything. She was brokenhearted, your dad was there to comfort her, and they fell in love. What did Erica say to you?”

“She just hinted.” Which was, more or less, the truth.

“Jealous, I bet.” She raised her eyebrows significantly. “Just like her mother.”

What Erica could possibly be jealous of escaped me. She had everything.

“Here,” Aunt Trudy said. She pushed herself out of the chair and patted my shoulder. “I think there might be a cookie or two left in my cupboards.”

When Tab came back, she found us sitting at the kitchen table. She paused, startled. Aunt Trudy called Tab a dear and made us a Kraft pizza. Tab watched me. Aunt Trudy said her tummy was upset, probably because of a darn flu bug. When her mother wasn’t looking, Tab rolled her eyes upward.

A sea otter dives. Long streams of sunlight wash through kelp trees, undulating like lazy belly dancers. A purple sea urchin creeps towards a kelp trunk. The otter dips, snatches up the urchin, carries it to the surface, where the sound of the waves breaking on the nearby shore is a bitter grumble. Devouring the urchin’s soft underbelly in neat nibbles, the otter twirls in the surf, then dives again. The urchin’s shell parachutes to the ocean bottom, landing in the dark, drifting hair of a corpse.

The little man woke me near dawn, his eyes glittering and black. The Winnie the Pooh stories end with Christopher Robin saying he’s too old to play with
Pooh Bear. Little Jackie Piper leaves Puff the Magic Dragon. Childhood ends and you grow up and all your imaginary friends disappear. I’d convinced myself that the little man was a dream brought on by eating dinner too late—Mom had told me she always dreamed of earthquakes if she ate too much lasagna. Sometimes he came dressed like a leprechaun, but that night he had on his strange cedar tunic with little amulets dangling around his neck and waist. His hair was standing up like a troll doll’s, a wild, electric red. He did a tap dance on my dresser. Then he slipped, fell into my laundry basket and pulled my sweaters and T-shirts over his head. The basket tipped over and rolled beneath my window. I watched it warily, my chest aching so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.

“You little bastard,” I whispered.

He popped into the air behind me. I didn’t know he was there until he touched my shoulder with a cold, wet hand. When I spun around to smack him, he stared at me with wide, sad eyes. Even after he disappeared, I could feel where his hand had touched me, and I knew he’d been trying to comfort me.

I put my head in my hands, nursing a headache on the front steps. Mick came and plopped himself down beside me. “Hey, how’s my favourite monster?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Yeah? You’ve been pretty quiet lately.”

I shrugged. “I’m thinking.”

“Your mom says some things are simple, and thinking just make them complicated.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, life. Apparently we’re here to have babies and everything else is just icing on the cake.”

“Are you going to have babies?”

“If I can find someone who’ll put up with me.”

“Are you leaving?”

“Someday. Tomorrow. Three years from now. Who knows?”

It wasn’t the answer I wanted. I sat up, pulling myself right beside him. “Can I come with you?”

He ruffled my hair. “You know you can’t.”

“It’s not fair.”

“You can come check the net with me.”

I pressed my temples together. “I got a headache.” He laughed. “I do. I had awful dreams last night.”

He kissed the top of my head and stood, stretching. “I don’t feel like checking the net either. Been skunked for the last few days anyway.” He saluted me. “But duty calls, I’m off.”

I waved, then turned away and went inside to have breakfast. My eyes were gritty. It felt like I hadn’t slept for weeks. Dad’s car pulled into the driveway and he emerged carrying a waist-high shrub. I watched through the kitchen window as Mom stomped across the lawn and put her hands on her head and pulled at her hair as Dad placed his new greenery in front of the rose trellis.

My cereal had no taste. I couldn’t eat. The dream still crowded around me. Jimmy watched TV in the
living room and the cheerful pops and endless, bubbly music of his cartoon show faded for a moment. Sunlight broke through the clouds, brightening up the kitchen so much that I felt dizzy, like I was falling. I jerked upright, disoriented, staring into my Rice Krispies.

Uncle Geordie phoned later that morning to say that the seals were getting at the nets, and that if we wanted any of our coho, we should go out and check them.

“Mick’s truck is here,” Dad said as we drove into the bay.

“Maybe he’s having coffee somewhere,” I said.

Dad frowned, parking the car at a distracted angle to Uncle Mick’s truck. “Flirting away with someone, I bet, when he said he’d check the net.” Dad honked the car horn impatiently, but Uncle Mick didn’t appear. “Dammit, the seals will get everything.”

I hadn’t slept since the little man left me. I kept thinking, Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong. Mick’s just goofing off. He’s fine.

The rest blurs like a shaky homemade movie. My feet, heavy as we walked down the dock. The speedboat’s outboard motor, cranky and refusing to start for five endless minutes of Dad yanking on the cord. The choppy ocean. The net, all the corks along the middle sunk under the water. Mick’s speedboat pushing itself against the shore, nudging it and scraping slowly along the rocks. Seals bobbing their dark heads between the whitecaps as Dad picked up his shotgun and fired and fired at them, then reloaded, saying, “Don’t look.”

Morning light slanted over the mountains. The sky was faded denim blue. Grumbling, a raven hopped between the branches of the tightly packed trees. Water sparkled as a seal bobbed its dark head in the shallows. A deer paused at the shoreline, alert. It flicked its tail up, showing white, then bounded up the beach and into the forest. In the distance, the sound of a speedboat.

Spotty wakes me from a dream about Monkey Beach. She is in the greengage tree when I wake up. She screeches, hops, and I hear her hit our roof, then trundle back and forth, her claws clicking against the shingles.
La’sda
, she says. Go into the water.
La’sda, la’sda
.

The house has grown a thick scum of quiet. An unhealthy hush reserved for terminal wards. The living-room light is on. I make myself a hot chocolate. I vividly remember the first time I got a hollow chocolate Easter bunny. Marvelling at how big it was and how much chocolate I had, and then biting into the ear too hard, expecting resistance and meeting nothing.

The phone rings and I close my eyes. Anyone calling this early has either very good or very bad news. I pick up on the third ring.

“Lisa?” Dad says. His voice is shaking. I can hear Mom crying in the background.

“Yes,” I say.

“We—” He takes a breath. And another. “They found a life raft.”

“A life raft. Are they sure it’s from the
Queen?”

“No,” Dad say. “But no one else is missing.”

“Was anyone in it?”

“No.”

“Dad, I’m coming down as fast as I can. Is Mom okay?”

He doesn’t answer. I ask where he is, where the life raft was found, then say goodbye and hang up. I should have gone with them. I should have gone. I call the twenty-four-hour line for Air Canada, but the travel agent says it is a busy week and now the people from a soccer tournament, a Health Canada conference and nine wedding parties are returning to Vancouver. She says I could try standby, but there are already fourteen people at the airport trying to get on the same flights. The next available seat is in four days. Canadian and Coastal Mountain are the same. The charters out of Prince Rupert are booked solid because it’s the height of the sports fishing season. I phone the airlines again, thinking that if I explain about Jimmy, I might get on a flight if someone is willing to get bumped, but all the lines are busy.

It takes twenty hours to drive to Vancouver—sixteen if you ignore the speed limit. You have to go inland all the way to Prince George and then down and back to the coast. Add the hours to get to the island, and maybe you’ll get a spot on the ferry up to Bella Bella and you’ve wasted almost two days. The bus is a twenty-four-hour ride. The ferry out of Rupert won’t leave for two days. The train takes three days. Most of the boats are out fishing right now—