Algoma (24 page)

The bartender shook his head. “You just look like someone, is all.”

“Not anyone you know,” Simon said. He laid his money on the bar and stood up to leave.

The bartender’s face lit up in recognition. “You’re Gaetan’s brother.”

Simon shook his head. “Rimouski,” he lied. “Here on a job.”

It was time to go.

______________

12:57 a.m. 19°C. Wind S, breezy.
A feather spinning on its string under the rearview mirror.

Bay flicked on her left turn signal and stepped on the gas. She quickly overtook the car she’d been trailing, but did not slow down once she’d passed it. She sailed along the highway, the other car disappearing behind her, its headlights reduced to a pin-prick in her rear-view mirror, then she was alone again. Leaning forward in the driver’s seat, she looked up through the dusty windshield she’d been meaning to clean. A full moon hung high in the sky, illuminating the curve of every branch and stone in a pale blue light. She switched off the stereo and listened to the sound of the tires against the road. A monotonous roar.

Her exchange with Simon had left her numb. She’d forgotten how good he was at reading people, at knowing what was going on. Maybe he just listened more than everyone else, collecting details until they made a landscape in his mind, every peak and valley clear and precise. What would she do if he said something to Algoma? She would deny it.

Bay pressed the gas pedal down further, the car sailing along. Several times a year, she indulged in a fantasy. The idea of leaving. She visualized her suitcases packed and in the trunk, notice given to her work, and her house key pushed under the door after she’d locked it for the last time; however, that was as far as her mental planning went. She failed to account for her family, her twin. She could only manage to get herself out of Le Pin, even if only in her mind.

Others struggled as well. She’d seen it too often—when leaving meant cracking open another beer or filling every spare minute with mindless distractions. If someone didn’t have the money or will to actually leave, he escaped inside, a slow and catastrophic implosion. And then there were the others, those like her sisters, who chose to remain because it was comfortable and familiar. Because their future children could go to the same school they’d gone to. Because they knew what kind of weather to expect each season. Because there was too much blood history tethering them to the town. Because they’d met someone and were trying to create that history.

Several weeks before, Bay had received a wedding invitation. One of her old boyfriends—the roofer—was getting married to a woman she knew. She’d immediately thrown the invitation away after reading it, but fished it out of the garbage the next day and checked off the attending box. She didn’t know what she was doing going to the wedding, but some part of her wanted to watch the ritual, watch another person commit to staying in this town, as if the reason would be visible from the table at the back of the room reserved for those people who didn’t know why they had been invited in the first place.

Driving along the darkened highway, Bay tried not to be conscious of the fact that she was driving north. North was not an escape from Le Pin; hundreds of kilometres later, the highway would eventually lead to a dead end and a spidering of gravel roads. However, if she went south, she might actually end up somewhere. An hour before, she’d left the last houses and gas station behind her as she’d driven out of town. She only ever felt free once she passed the No gas for 100 kilometres sign. Bay looked at her gas gauge. Full tank.

The highway scenery changed little as Bay drove: trees, road signs, and the occasional nod to civilization—a house or steel building. Moonlight glinted off the windows and parked cars. Evidence of the amateur races local teens indulged in was written across the road. Inky black tread marks and the occasional bent guardrail.

Bay slowed her speed and allowed her thoughts to drift off. She thought about the groceries she needed to pick up, a doctor’s appointment, what the weather would be like tomorrow. She thought about Gaetan. His postcard. How it was too late to tell someone you’d made a mistake once they were married to someone else. Anything you felt didn’t matter anymore. But Gaetan had opened the door, if only a crack. It was a revelation to her that he still felt something for her after she had left him. She remembered the way he’d held her days before she’d ended it. He’d smelled of cedar and sun.

A logging truck, high beams blazing, barrelled southward down the highway, creating a vacuum of air as it passed. Bay’s small car shuddered violently and her mind was clear again. The needle on the gas gauge showed half a tank. It was time to turn around.

Up ahead, Bay saw a highway construction site, large orange-and-black pylons narrowing the road down to one lane. An assortment of heavy equipment was littered about the area. She eased off the gas pedal and guided her car in behind a bulldozer. Stalling the ride home, she parked and sat quietly in the car for a moment, listening to the ticking of the engine, before taking the keys out of the ignition.

Outside, Bay circled the bulldozer, which looked like a giant sleeping beast. She looked at her watch: 1:38 a.m. It was at least four hours until the first workers would arrive. She hiked up her skirt and scaled the side of the bulldozer, and finding the door unlocked, climbed into the cab and sat down. The driver’s seat was more comfortable than she had imagined. She ran her fingers over the glass faces of the gauges, touched the top of each lever. Everything was cool and silent and there was the faint smell of diesel in the air. She flirted with the idea of leaving the hotel for a construction job. A sign holder. Two speeds: stop and slow. Everyone would obey her.

With the moon still bright and from her high perch, Bay could see across the road, the first rows of trees behind the fence that was meant to keep animals from crossing into what little traffic there was. Yet every year the local newspaper was filled with accident reports. Bent fenders, shattered windshields, amputated side-view mirrors. It felt like it was almost impossible to leave town without being marked by the effort. If you made it at all.

Bay froze when she saw another set of high beams coming down the road, this time too low to the ground to be another truck. She held her breath as she watched the car slow down to navigate the narrowed road. When it passed without stopping, she released her breath. When she could not longer see the car’s brake lights anymore, she climbed out of the bulldozer and got back into her car. She switched on the radio and pointed the nose of her car south and started the drive home, grateful that she’d left the porch and hall lights on for herself. It was like someone was waiting for her.

Two empty bottles of wine bound for the garbage sat beside the door, and the sky began to lighten from black to deep blue. Morning. Bay swirled around the remaining wine in her glass before she downed it. She sat hunched over her laptop, as she did so many nights. She’d been scouring the internet for photos of the Algobay, her namesake ship, and was surprised by what she’d learned. She read that the ship was no longer docked in the Toronto Portlands, where it had been for years, but there was nothing on where it had gone. Through her web of searches she’d landed on someone’s blog, a birder who briefly mentioned the “eyesore” was gone. She chewed one of her nails furiously.

The Algobay had been laid up in Toronto for a number of years. And now it was gone. Bay felt cheated, as if someone should have told her it had been moved. Or scrapped. She should have felt it.

Like her own reflection, Bay could picture every detail of the ship—which way it had faced, the degree of rust on its hull, how large it was in comparison to everything around it. Her name painted on the side in bright white block letters, beneath which read “Sault Ste. Marie.”

The bird blogger had taken a picture of some cormorants bobbing in the place where the Algobay had been—ugly, oily-looking birds—however, even in the photograph, the space the ship had left behind seemed charged as if struck by lightning or haunted. Full of latent energy. Things had been left unfinished, but there was nothing Bay could do, no direction she could take from the missing ship, its absence a gap in her present.

She’d hoped that seeing a current photo of the Algobay would be therapeutic, that it would be her totem and tell her where she needed to go next, what she should do. So easy to find meaning in the tilt of its hull, the position of the small yellow crane on the deck, which way the flags reached, what luck would come to her if she correctly guessed the number of windows. It all mattered.

______________

4:00 p.m. 23°C. No wind.
Neighbour’s dachshund shitting on the grass again.

“No, I’m sure it’s not my Oscar,” Marie-Helene said, standing on the top step of her ladder. Her shoes—strappy leather sandals—made it nearly impossible for her to properly maintain her balance. She had made the same footwear mistake last year. Her husband had been out with a bad back, so she had taken it upon herself to trim the tops of the hedges. While trying to use pruning sheers to cut a thick branch, she’d lost her balance and tumbled off the ladder onto the flagstones below, the back of her head split wide open.

“My head is smiling,” she’d said when her husband hobbled outside to see what had happened. It had taken eight staples to snap together the grin-like gash.

“It’s just that I keep finding… surprises on my lawn,” Algoma said. She hated confrontations.

“No, not Oscar.” Marie-Helene continued snipping away at her hedges, some of the branches falling into Algoma’s garden. “His are smaller.”

Algoma shook her head. “Okay, fine.”

To avoid further questioning, Marie-Helene quickly descended her ladder, so she was out of view. Algoma could hear her quietly ushering Oscar into the house, the patio door sliding shut behind them.

Algoma sighed and turned her attention back to her garden, which was in equal parts overgrown and barren. The garden had been neglected for months and it showed. She silently praised the cedar hedges that hid the rot, weed, and tangle from onlookers, her neighbours who would relish the year that their gardens would outperform hers. She wondered if Marie-Helene had noticed. She’d seemed particularly happy today.

Every summer, neighbours dropped by unexpectedly to give Algoma plastic bags of vegetables from their gardens. Armloads of green tomatoes and hard little radishes. Under the guise of being “neighbourly” they used the opportunity to compare their gardens against hers and were instantly humbled by her brick-size beefsteak tomatoes, her perfectly symmetrical peppers. Algoma didn’t let her neighbours offerings go to waste by tossing them into the garbage or to the birds; instead, she let the tomatoes ripen on her window sill until they blushed red and then sliced them for the tomato and bacon sandwiches she sometimes liked to eat for breakfast. Even if they were not good enough for her family, they were good enough for her.

She tugged at a vine that looked like a weed. It was difficult to tell the difference anymore. The vegetables, those that had survived, were hidden below half-rotted foliage. Even though she had ignored what she affectionately called her “dirt fridge” for months, it continued to produce, but what bravely grew had either eventually rotted into the ground or had been picked apart by animals, insects, or birds. The evidence was everywhere. Clumps of soft tomatoes that looked like melted Christmas ornaments. Green pepper plants honeycombed with holes. At first, she thought she had forgotten to plant another round of lettuce, but then found the nibbled-down remains wilted in the dirt. Hares. Snares crossed her mind, but she worried about catching a neighbour’s cat or dog. The dachshund. She thought about snares again.

In some ways, Algoma was comforted that her garden had survived at all without her. The sun and rain had succeeded in raising her vegetables where she had failed. The world needed less of her than she thought. She raked her hands through the leaves and vines, pulling at the knots like a woman running her hands through hopelessly tangled hair.

With her knees protected by second-hand volleyball knee pads, Algoma knelt down on the dirt. Using a permanent marker, Leo had drawn a crude hoe and rake on each foam square, the tools crossed like swords. The drawings were now mostly obscured by several years worth of dirt and grass stains, but Algoma would not part with them. Happy to be busy and out of the house, she tossed rotten tomatoes over her shoulder onto a pile of compost behind her. She used her kitchen scissors to prune the vines back to expose clumps of small green tomatoes that looked like miniature apples and were just as hard. She wiped one off with her garden glove and popped it into her mouth. Crisp and sour.

With some work, parts of the garden could be salvaged. There would be less than in past years, but her family had shrunk as well. The child growing inside her wouldn’t taste a crisp bean or pepper for several years. At least she would have all the radishes to herself now. A salt shaker in one hand, bowl in his lap, Gaetan used to eat radishes like popcorn whenever he watched television. Even when Algoma had tried to hide some for salads, he found them, salted them, and devoured them.

Overhead, birds sat on the power lines and chirped as Algoma worked. She sat back on the overgrown lawn and looked at the work that lay ahead of her. Her leather gardening gloves, sweat-stiffened, sat beside her like clenched fists holding nothing but salt and air. It was easier to be a good gardener in the fall—less maintenance—and it was easy to see which pumpkins and squash would thrive, which would cave into themselves under the pressure. Most of the work she did in the post-summer months was harvesting. The cold room in the basement would overflow with produce, most of it to eat and some of it to decorate the house with.

The first winter after Algoma had started her garden, Gaetan had asked her to take down the gourds from the window sills, the dried corn from the doors.

“It looks like I live in a goddamned witch doctor’s house.”

The decorations had remained until they softened. Their formerly hard bellies sagging and staining the sills.