Algoma (11 page)

Gaetan reappeared behind her, holding an unopened beer bottle like a flashlight, pointing it at the packed bags.

“What, are we going to toast marshmallows in the basement or something?”

Algoma held three peeled sticks in one hand as she walked down the basement stairs, Gaetan and Ferd single file behind her.

“We’re here!”

She threw down her pack and set about untying the tent from the bottom of it. “Ferd, you start putting your tent up. Get your dad to help you if you need to,” she said.

Gaetan was already digging through the cooler, between the cans of tuna and frozen bag of peas, for something good to eat and finding nothing. “I have to work tomorrow. How does that fit into your camping schedule?”

Algoma struggled with a clasp. “You’ll just come back to the site after work.”

“It’s cold down here.”

“I turned the furnace off.”

“What? The pipes will freeze.”

“Build a fire if you’re going to complain,” she said, pointing at the wood stove.

Gaetan sighed and gave in. It was easier. He dug through the kindling bin for some good starter sticks.

“Why don’t you show Ferd how to build a fire?” Algoma asked. She was working on the second clasp now.

Ferd already knew how, but Gaetan, again, agreed. It felt like Algoma was sleepwalking and that waking her could be dangerous. He nodded. “Sure. Get over here, kid.”

Gaetan opened the heavy cast iron door of the wood stove and raked out the mountains of ash he’d meant to remove last week, or the week before, he couldn’t remember. Inside, he made a small tepee out of the kindling. “Get me some newspaper,” he said, his hand stretched out, waiting.

Ferd grabbed the business section from the kindling pile, pulled off the first sheet, and crumpled it in his hands.

“No. Not like that. Remember? We shred the paper, we don’t crumple it.” Gaetan grabbed the crumpled ball out of Ferd’s hands and flattened it out on the floor. He folded the newspaper in half and tore off pieces in long thin strips that curled up at the ends and then threaded the paper curls through his kindling tepee.

“And you keep one for yourself to get the fire going.” Gaetan held a limp strip of newspaper and lit the bottom with his lighter. He quickly tossed the lit paper onto the tepee, where the other paper and tinder caught flame. “Now blow on it.”

Ferd crouched down in front of the small flame and blew on it until he was dizzy and ready to pass out. The smallest pieces of kindling caught fire first, then the larger ones. Once the fire was burning steadily, Gaetan added a quartered birch log to the mix. The white bark sizzled and crackled like chicken skin.

By the time the fire was roaring, Algoma had finished setting up the main tent, an old canvas military affair that took up half of the basement. The other tent, which had not been used since Leo’s accident, was a newer piece of camp architecture. It was bright blue, complete with screened windows, proper venting, and a vestibule, so the boys would not have to bring their dirty shoes inside. A feature that had cinched the purchase for Algoma.

While Gaetan and Ferd admired their fire and tried to warm up in the steadily cooling basement, Algoma unpacked the camp cutlery and plastic plates, arranging them carefully on a beach towel she’d set out on the carpet.

“I need a nice low fire, boys,” she said. “We’re making chili.”

She pulled out two ancient cans of Manwich that Ferd recognized from the cupboard. He was sure the cans had been in the there since before he was born, maybe even before his parents had been born. When his father had tried to throw the cans out last year, Algoma had resisted. “It’s emergency food,” she’d said, holding the cans to her chest, refusing to acknowledge the well-passed expiry dates. “It’s still good. I know it. Those dates are just to get you to buy more. It’s marketing. A scam.”

Ferd looked at the tins. Maybe this was the emergency she’d been talking about.

Just as they sat down to their dinner, there was a knock at the side door.

Gaetan stood up to answer it; however, Algoma stared him into submission. He sat back down and spooned another mouthful of metallic-tasting food into his mouth. They sat in silence for a few moments. The doorbell rang next.

“Are we going to get it?” Ferd asked, looking back and forth between his parents. Algoma shook her head and Gaetan shook his, but not in response to Ferd’s question, rather at the entire situation. He felt defeated, things were out of control. He’d been sure that Algoma wouldn’t be able to maintain the game through dinner, but she had.

The visitor knocked on the door one more time and then there was silence.

“There,” said Algoma. “That’s better.”

She smiled and gathered the dishes to wash them in the laundry tub.

The basement was gloomy, darkness falling fast. Ferd looked up and saw the light bulbs had been removed from the light fixtures. When had she done that? He shrugged his shoulders and picked up a flashlight and went into the wood room. Algoma whistled in the background as she washed the dinner dishes. Ferd could already taste gritty detergent on his tongue.

At the end of the third day, Sunday, Algoma stood over the wood stove as she prepared a dinner of pancake and Vienna sausage sandwiches.

“You will eat it,” she said to Ferd when he whined about what was for dinner. “Pancakes are bread and Viennas are meat. It’s just like a regular sandwich. Don’t act spoiled.”

Ferd sat cross-legged in the vestibule of his tent with the screen zipped up. He stared at his mother, bored holes into the back of her skull. He was tired of this game—the bizarre meals, endless games of cards, and exercise sessions. He wanted to go upstairs, open the fridge, and have a real meal. He wanted French fries and hunks of marble cheese. He didn’t even need to slice the cheese, he’d just eat it out of the package. The whole thing. All of it in one shot. Anything but this.

“I think there’s meat in the fridge upstairs,” Ferd suggested. “It’s just—”

“It’s just what, Ferdinand?” she said without looking at him. “It’s just that you want to eat old lunch meat that needs to be thrown out? You’ll get botulism.”

Ferd looked at the clock, but it read, as it had since they had arrived in the basement, three o’clock. Either it had died, or his mother had taken out the batteries, so she could control time as well. I wish I could take the batteries out of you, Ferd thought.

Algoma turned and proudly handed Ferd a plastic plate with three blackened Vienna sausages sandwiched between two enormous undercooked pancakes.

“Do you want mustard with that?”

Ferd could barely watch his mother eat her “sandwich.” She used a plastic knife and fork to cut it into small squares. Her face was soft and relaxed. She seemed happy, at least. That was something.

When she wasn’t looking, Ferd slid his plate into his tent. He was looking forward to going to sleep soon, which was a first. By the time he went to sleep and woke up again, his dad would be home. If Ferd was lucky, Gaetan would have brought treats—jerky, peanuts, and pop—back with him, in secret, as he’d promised the night before. Real food, not the patchwork quilt of canned food and dry goods his mother kept pairing together with unbearable enthusiasm.

With every meal they ate in the basement, the recipes got worse. More inventive. Ferd opened up the lid of the cooler to see what was left: one can of flaked tuna, a milk chocolate bar, a single package of Saltine crackers, mustard, marshmallows, and a can of sardines. He shuddered thinking about tomorrow’s breakfast. Maybe he would make a break for it during the night.

The next morning, Ferd woke with his face pressed into his cold leftover pancake and Vienna sausage sandwich. He fisted the dried mustard off his cheek, scraped bits of sausage off his neck, and tossed his plate, complete with destroyed leftovers, onto the carpet outside the tent. He knew what the day held already. It would start with jogging on the spot for half an hour and then move on to playing cards, which lasted until lunch.

He lay back down and wondered when this would be over. His father had told him that it would only be a few days and that, on the other side, his mother would be better, more capable. Whatever that meant. Gaetan had made Ferd promise that he would not go upstairs for anything—the illusion had to be maintained—however, with all his writing supplies up in the living room, it was difficult. It had been days since he’d written to Leo. How would he explain that he was being held hostage by their own mother and her terrible cooking? Every hour that passed put more distance between him and his brother. Without the letters to keep them tethered to one another, there was only cold, empty space.

Ferd looked forward to school. The water fountain beside the gymnasium. The janitor’s sink in the utility closet. The stream in the woods behind the school, even though it would be buried under the snow. That it was all there comforted him.

Ferd sat still and listened. Everything was quiet except for the buzz saw of his father’s snoring. His parents were still asleep. He quietly unzipped his tent and crawled outside. Beside his door, he found the dinner he’d tossed out and a plastic bag his father had dropped off when he’d returned home in the early hours.

“Awesome,” he whispered. Ferd tore the bag open and chewed on a piece of jerky that was inside. He would wait until later to open the can of pop, in case the sound woke his parents. It was still dark outside, still early. He reached for the tin of peanuts, ripped off the lid, and ate them a handful at a time.

When the family had gone camping for real—packing up the car and driving for hours on end—Ferd and Leo had always been the first ones up. They liked to make breakfast, thinking their parents couldn’t hear their stage-whispered instructions to each other. The memory gave Ferd an idea. He pulled the Saltines, chocolate, and marshmallows out of the cooler and unwrapped the previous night’s horrifying leftovers, so that he could use the tinfoil.

Using the top of the cooler as a counter, Ferd assembled a half dozen improvised S’mores. He carefully placed the squares on the tinfoil, which now smelled like Vienna sausages, and wrapped it up carefully. Within minutes, he was able to coax the embers in the wood stove into a roaring fire. He touched the top of the stove to test the heat and burnt his finger.

He yelped and sucked on his finger, sure he’d woken up his parents, but they remained asleep.

Ferd sucked on his burnt finger and tossed the tinfoil package on top of the stove. He’d never made S’mores before, only seen them on television. He estimated that it would take about ten minutes for the chocolate to melt. By the time he took the packet off the stove, everything inside had melted into a chocolate soup. Undeterred, he carefully opened the tinfoil packet and scraped the melted chocolate, marshmallow, and burnt and broken crackers into a plastic bowl. He added two spoons and stood at the front of his parent’s tent and yelled: “Breakfast!”

A smudge of chocolate still at the corner of her mouth, Algoma waved to Ferd as he ran to school. He didn’t look back once. She went back downstairs to where Gaetan was still sleeping in the tent, his sleeping bag pulled up to his chin.

“Gae, go sleep in your bed,” she said. “Go upstairs. Everything is good. It’s all good. Everything will be all right.”

FEBRUARY

4:47 p.m. -12°C. Dead calm.
Mannequin dressed in tuque and wedding dress.

Sometimes when Ferd skipped school, he went to his mother’s work. She never faulted him for wanting her company, even if it was a school day. He could learn in the classroom, or he could learn on the floor. It didn’t matter to her. When the school secretary called about his absences, Algoma always covered for him.

“He had an appointment. You must have lost the note. Look again.”

She performed for the secretary so often that she began to believe her own stories. And soon, the secretary stopped calling.

While Algoma folded a pile of newly donated sweaters and Sandra was at the cash register, Ferd hid inside the warm centre of a circular clothing rack, a small woollen world all to himself. Some days, like today, he imagined the clothing racks were portals. He sat in the middle, imagined new galaxies, far-flung constellations. He could hear shoppers rifling through the clothes, circling like great fleshy spaceships flying around him, looking for the right size or a particular colour. When a woman’s hand pierced the cotton barrier of his world, he imagined it was Leo’s reaching out to him, so he grabbed it. The woman screamed and wrenched her hand free and he was alone again.

Ferd hadn’t even made it out the door that morning before his mother had read his face.

“If you work on your homework, you can come to The Shop,” she’d said. “I’ll call in for you. A doctor’s appointment.”

“You told them I had one last week.”

“Dentist, then.”

The women who worked at The Shop, four in total, one or two at any given time, patted Ferd’s head whenever they passed by him. At The Shop, he had a handful of mothers, someone to turn to at every corner. Warm waists and strong hands. The store was the only place he let people hug him.

Ferd exited the clothing rack. The woman whose hand he’d grabbed was now trying something on in the change room. The thin curtain billowed every time she moved, exposing flashes of pale skin. He tried not to look at her bare feet on the stiff carpet. The sight, for some reason, always made him sad. The vulnerability, the clothing strewn on the floor.

He made a beeline for the housewares section at the back of the store. The shelves were full of pots and pans and jam jars filled with cutlery. There were baskets of linens, a cluster of stand-up fans, and a couch with a $50 tag pinned to one of the cushions. He walked through the layers of drapes that hung from the ceiling, hands dragging along the smooth fabric. They were like flags in a medieval castle, retired jersey numbers hung from the roof of a hockey area, a poorly built maze.

The drapes still swaying behind him, Ferd picked up an old space heater from one of the shelves. He set it on the ground and plugged it into an outlet in the wall. He sat down and positioned the heater in front of him, turning both the heat and fan on high, and enjoyed the blast of a false summer breeze. The sound of the curtains rustling behind him was reminiscent of trees at the height of summer, or the sound of running water. He thought he could hear Leo speaking to him from across the river. He closed his eyes and tried to listen harder to make out the words, but nothing came.

The blinds drawn and the doors shut and locked, The Shop was bathed in complete darkness, a hermetic seal that would not be cracked until early morning by the key holder. The store was silent except for the creaks and rattles of an old building that was perpetually shifting, expanding, and contracting with the seasons. Its wear was beginning to show—cracked windows, loose floorboards, crumbling brick.

Outside, the temperature had plummeted. Ghostly roads coated in salt dust. Hoar frost crept along the windows, a slow takeover that only stopped when the sun rose, and even then, only a bit. What happened next would later seem like the building was trying to take back the night, bring a touch of August to the middle of winter.

A corner of one of the curtains in housewares touched the exposed element of the space heater and burst into flames. Fire, slick like water, travelled up the curtains and walls. Soon, a stratus cloud of fire spread across the ceiling. Just as quickly, the flames moved back downward, inward. They licked the hems of old skirts with outdated hemlines, blouses with faint perspiration stains in the armpits, ancient receipts in ownerless pockets.

The smoke alarm remained mute, its batteries having been removed months ago after the toaster oven kept setting it off.

“Need some good-goddamned quiet around here once in a while,” Josie had said as she tossed the batteries into the junk drawer.

From a distance, the fire in The Shop’s windows looked comforting and familiar. A cottage with fresh logs thrown in the fireplace. It was only when part of the roof caved in that someone noticed. A drunk reluctantly used his second to last quarter to call it in. The next morning, during a retelling of the story, he’d learn he could have made the call for free. The waste ate at his heart for days, everything seeming a single quarter out of reach.

When the firefighters arrived, they stood still for a moment, mesmerized by the sheer height of the flames. There was nothing to save. The brigade trained its hoses on the pulsating heart of the blaze for hours until it was only embers beneath a ruckus of awkward stacking and black smoke rising into pale morning.

Gaetan sniffed the air. The cigarette smoke in the bar was tinged with something heavier. Wood smoke mixed with the smell of burnt wires, plastic. The bar was quiet, almost empty. He put down what he was reading and stepped outside into the bitter February cold. Toward the north, he saw it—a subtle orange glow in the distance. He hoped it was an empty building and not a house. He crossed himself and went back inside.

Sitting on a stool behind the bar, he picked up the note he’d been reading. It was one of Ferd’s. After reading it several more times, he put it back in the cigar box with the others. There were dozens, all stiff with water damage, brittle. He wished he could get his hands on the rest, the ones his wife was working so hard to keep from him, but there was never an opportunity, or he forgot when there was.

Before discovering that Algoma had been keeping something from him, Gaetan thought her incapable of secrets, mistaking her for having no inner life. Yet, once he knew, he never let on that he did, wanting to see how far she would take her secret and what would finally make her show him the notes she’d collected. He approached her like the animals he hunted—watching from a safe distance, learning what he needed to know for future use when the time was right.

But the time, it seemed, was never right. He realized he’d missed the moment his wife had changed, when she’d doubled back. He’d followed one person and found himself face-to-face with someone he no longer recognized.

In the distance, sirens wailed. The smell of fire was thick in the air, giving rise in Gaetan the most basic instinct: flight.

______________

7:15 a.m. -13°C. Wind N, light.
A spire of black smoke rising from the horizon.

The morning after The Shop burned down, no one called Algoma to tell her that her sorting services were not needed that day. As she drove toward work, the morning still winter dark, the acrid scent of smoke bit at her nostrils even before she could see what had happened. Gut seized with worry, she drove faster, blowing through stop signs until she could go no further. The roads surrounding The Shop were blocked off by yellow metal barricades the police had erected. Algoma abandoned her car in the middle of the road and walked toward The Shop. She approached the scene almost reluctantly, as if her actions could change what had happened.

The turn-of-the-century building—three storeys of stately red brick and concrete mouldings—was now unrecognizable. It was almost impossible to believe that only yesterday the building had held warmth and a loose degree of order. The far right third of the building, the section where The Shop had been, had collapsed entirely. The rest of the building, including Café Drummond, was still standing, but the windows were charred mouths of soot flanked by long, jagged teeth of ice. Algoma swore she could smell burnt coffee beans. The roof was missing, presumably incinerated, so that the morning sky was visible through the windows on the third floor.

“Almost pretty,” she said, in a daze.

The building and most of the debris and surrounding sidewalk were covered in a layer of ice topped by the fresh water the firefighters poured onto the remaining hot spots. The water slid cleanly over the already formed ice, hardening at the edges. A crystalline lava.

Algoma watched a firefighter—indistinguishable from the others dressed in orange-and-yellow gear—spray a steady stream of water into a heap of blackened lumber that was still smoking. Tired, he knelt down on the hose to keep it in place, the thick brass nozzle propped up on a brick, the spray arcing over the mess.

Her lunch, the leftovers she had planned to eat again today, was now irreversibly overcooked and buried under rubble. She couldn’t believe that at a time like this, she was thinking about her Tupperware. Algoma wiped off the cold mist of water that coated her face. A second fire hose was spraying water down from a crane high above the scene.

Where were her coworkers? Where was Josie? The street was surprisingly empty of onlookers. The only non-emergency services people on site were a handful of children who should have been in school. Algoma looked at them and shivered. She’d never liked children’s attraction to devastation. They looked almost excited by the wreckage. Their wide, curious faces made her think of her son. Ferd. She had to see him.

“He has an appointment. I need to take him now,” Algoma said, tapping her nails impatiently on the school secretary’s desk.

The secretary, a woman of indeterminate age with orange-peel skin and darkly drawn eyebrows, shuffled nervously through the papers in her desk. “It’s got to be—” she said.

“Forget it, I’ll look myself.” Algoma took off down the hallway in search of Ferd’s classroom.

The secretary clipped along awkwardly after her in her too-tight skirt. “Mrs. Beaudoin, you need to sign in. I need a record for my files.”

Algoma quickly found Ferd’s classroom and opened the door with more force than needed, the doorknob denting the wall.

Ferd’s teacher stopped in the middle of writing a math equation on the chalkboard. “Can I help you?”

The students in the classroom stared at Algoma who gripped the door frame with hard, bloodless fingers. Her hair was a fury around her small, tight face, and her denim skirt and wool jacket were still wet from the mist from the fire hoses. It was as if she had risen from the river to claim her sole remaining son. Or at least that would be the story that was passed from child to child until it had reached every parent in town by dinnertime.

“Ferd?” Algoma looked blindly around the classroom for her son. “Come here. Ferd, where are you? Stand up.”

Her eyes settled on the empty desk in the back row.

Ms. Prevost looked at the desk. “He’s not here,” she said, slowly putting the piece of chalk down onto the ledge. “He left this morning.”

“Yes, yes, he left this morning for school,” Algoma said. “Where is he? In the washroom? Where is it? Show me. I’ll go get him myself.”

“Ferdinand came in this morning with a note that said he had a doctor’s appointment. It was signed by you.” Ms. Prevost pulled a piece of paper from her desk and handed it to Algoma who did not make an attempt to take it.

“He left an hour ago.”

Algoma’s face softened like a dam compromised, its mortar rotting, giving way. Her shoulders slumped and she left the teacher and secretary to calm the disrupted class, which was already spreading rumours about what had happened to Ferd.

At home, Algoma nervously thumbed the buttons on her stove, trying to reset the clock. For the past year, every clock in the house had displayed different times. The digital numbers of the alarm clock in the bedroom read 4:23 p.m. The black and white twelve-hour clock in the living room said noon or midnight, she couldn’t be sure which. Her watch, dead for weeks on her wrist, had stopped at 3:01, yet she still wore it for the familiar weight on her wrist. The only clock she trusted was the ornamental sundial in the back yard, however approximate its timing was, but it was buried under snow.

She felt her life being taken from her, flash frozen and slowly melting away as the months dragged on. She could no longer remember the small differences between her twins. Which one wouldn’t eat cheddar cheese, only marble. Who only liked to sleep with flannel sheets. Who had had chicken pox first, only days before the other. Which one had a mole behind his right ear. She only saw blank skin and Leo’s birthmark. Her mind had amalgamated their identical bodies into one boy; blurry vision that had spontaneously cleared one cold winter evening last year.

Algoma wondered who or what she would lose next. Maybe she had already lost more things, small things that she hadn’t noticed yet. How long would she be able to keep what she had left. She patted down her clothing for missing coins, pins, anything. Inventory, she thought. I should take inventory. But she didn’t know where to begin or where the starting line was. Her breath was short and shallow.

She hadn’t looked in on her husband that morning. It was late afternoon now. The bedroom door closed. Where was he now? The bar. It was the one thing she was sure of.

But where was Ferd?

Algoma considered calling Gaetan, but stopped short. What did it matter if he learned now, or a few hours from now, that their second income had literally gone up in smoke and that their son—their sole remaining child—was missing.

She promised herself that Ferd would turn up soon. The odds were in her favour. Who loses two sons? But then she thought of the muddied and bloodied faces of the mothers she saw on the evening news, women from war-torn countries who had lost everything. Their livelihoods, husbands, homes, children: gone. They had probably expected to keep something, but their eyes held nothing, and their arms, no one.

In the days after Leo’s drowning, Algoma had not been able to turn on the television even though she would have welcomed the distraction. Images of her own tear-streaked face on the fourteen-inch screen were too much for her to bear. The sound of her own sobbing broadcast through thousands of television sets, an aural house of mirrors.