Grave Concern (10 page)

Not long after that, Mary answered the ad in a medical journal and moved halfway across the country — as it happened, to Pine Rapids — in an effort to get away from the sympathy-wracked faces and sorrow-fringed memories. Pity Point's loss was Pine Rapids' — and Kate's — gain. She couldn't imagine life now without Mary.

“I'm sorry, Mare. I'm a total bore, I know. Thanks for coming today. I really appreciate it.”

“Forget it. Now, about next week's expedition. I'll be away, dear, at a conference. You're going to have to seek out Adonis's grave by yourself.”

“Hey, let's be heels again,” J.P. smiled. A fresh cigarette hung from his lips, unlikely to be lit.

“What? Oh!” Nicholas turned upwind and hauled in on his sheet. The boat immediately heeled up. “You mean like this?”

“Yeah, cool,” J.P. said.

They sailed along nicely for a while. But the wind was becoming unsteady — sharp squalls punctuated by short lulls, during which Nicholas repeatedly had to shift his weight drastically to leeward, to keep the boat from reverse-tipping.

“Not exactly a Caribbean cruise, eh?” said J.P., shifting nervously on the wet deck.

“Fuckin' ay. Havin' fun yet?”

J.P. looked skeptical. “Speaking of fun, you gettin' laid?”

Caught off guard, Nicholas said No before he could think of a cooler response. “You?”

“Fuckin' right.”

Nicholas couldn't help a look of surprise. “Oh, yeah? Who?”

“Guess.”

Guess was the last thing Nicholas wanted to do.

“Speaking of dope,” J.P. continued, “you got some?”

Something in this irritated Nicholas, and he just shook his head. “You were offering
me
some, just a bit ago.”

“Running out,” was all J.P. said.

“Anyway, crew has to balance the boat. That's you. Get down in the middle, there. Otherwise we'll reverse heel,” he said.

“You're kiddin' me, right?”

“No, I'm not kidding. Do it now,” Nicholas said.

Reluctantly, J.P. squatted across the centerboard trunk, pantomiming distress over loss of his private parts. “Is it normal to castrate the crew like this?”

Nicholas laughed. “You want to skip?” he said.

“You mean trade?” J.P. said.

“Yeah.”

J.P. was already making his way toward Nicholas's spot, forcing Nicholas to dive toward the centre to avoid dumping.

Nicholas's idea in switching places had been to scare the shit out of J.P. and smarten him up. Sailing was a team undertaking, and J.P. wasn't exactly being co-operative. But it seemed he'd mainly succeeded in scaring himself.

Nicholas moved forward to man the jib, while handing the tiller and mainsail sheet to J.P. “Here ya go,” he said. “For now just keep the sheet cleated where it is and worry about the steering.”

Having never touched a traditional tiller in his life, J.P. made two classic mistakes: number one, over-adjusting; and number two, performing number one in the same direction he wanted to go, like a steering wheel.

Nick had barely tucked in by the forward deck when the boat lifted on a precipitous tilt. It had veered way downwind, and a squall hitting the close-hauled sails drove the starboard deck underwater, pitching them up like a drunk keeling over. Nicholas let the jib fly loose to spill wind. But he couldn't reach the mainsail cleat. Their only hope of not tipping was for J.P. to push the tiller down hard, away from himself, while keeping his weight up on the windward side. Not an easy manoeuvre.

“Push it down, push it down!” Nicholas cried. J.P. did. Miraculously, they began to heave up again into the wind, restoring an edgy equilibrium.

“Thank Christ,” breathed Nicholas. “Didn't feel like swimming.” He reached back and slackened off the mainsail to avoid a repeat performance.

J.P.'s face was white. But he regained composure quickly. “You never said not to turn,” he deadpanned.

Now that the crisis had passed, Nicholas found the whole thing humorous, and laughed. “I guess I'm not the best teacher. Next time, just ask before you do something stupid.”

Chastened, J.P. stared straight ahead. After a long while spent squinting into the light and distance, he allowed, “It's pretty cool out here, eh?”

Nicholas followed J.P.'s gaze. A low tumble of hills made a peaceful picture on the horizon.

One hand still firm on the tiller, J.P. flipped the cigarette out of his mouth with the other. The cigarette flew back and landed in the water several yards behind the boat.

“What's with that?” said Nicholas.

J.P. grinned, “Old Indian Mom knew. Used to come outa the woods and shoot the shit at our place. Used to give tobacco offerings. I figure we need all the luck we can get.”

Nicholas could just see the bobbing white cigarette, now far behind. “Wow, we've — ”

But he never finished the thought. Suddenly, he was underwater, struggling to keep his eyes open and not give in to the sting of sand particles suspended in the murky depths. Okay, so they'd dumped. First thing was to get to the surface, then check J.P. was all right. They'd worry about the boat later. They could probably right it on their own, depending how far gone it was.

Nicholas wasn't far from the surface; he could easily see light. But it seemed to be taking forever to reach it. His breath was running out. Why couldn't he break free? Something was keeping him down, under the surface. He peered through the watery gloom. The goddamn jib sheet. Somehow, despite being careful about ropes, as his dad had taught him, it had wound around his ankle and caught on his shoe. He was so close, so close to air.

Breath nearly gone, Nicholas dove down toward his right foot. But his foot only jerked up, pulling the rope tight. God
damn
! With that last effort, his lungs were giving out. Was this it? He was friggin' going to croak in this deep, dark hell, taking J.P. with him? Not exactly model sailors. Nothing to inspire confidence in parents. Parents. Never see them again. And Kate.

Lungs bursting, Nicholas let out tiny nibs of air in short blips. He'd read somewhere this would help. It did, for about three seconds. His chest filled with death, the worst thing he'd ever felt. No choice, now.
Let go, Nick
. A strange lightness filled his head even as his body sank down.
Crossing over
, he thought, and passed out.

After the lightness, a heavy heaviness. A terrible angel was screaming.

“Open your eyes openyourgoddamn eyes, Link!”

Nicholas struggled to obey. Something, a vise, gripped his ribs. If only it would ease up.

“I've got ya!” J.P. screamed. “Just open your goddamned motherfucking eyes!”

Nicholas could breathe. He could breathe! He was not underwater, encased. He was mashed up against something hard, and J.P.'s forearm was squeezing his belly so tight it hurt. Underwater, he was propped on something, J.P.'s knee.

“Just a sec. I'll get rid of this.” Nicholas heard a clunk up above in the boat.
The boat
.

“There. You still okay?” J.P. said.

Nicholas couldn't speak for coughing. But he could breathe a bit.
He could breathe.

“Okay, Link, my man, yer gonna fuckin'
hold on
, you hear?” Hoisting Nicholas from behind, J.P. folded Nicholas's arms over the transom and mashed his hands into the floorboards, pushing his fingers down through the narrow strips of wood. Continued screaming. “Don't move those fuckin' hands one fuckin' inch!”

No, Nicholas definitely would not move them one fucking inch. The dark angel had spoken.
Nicholas was little, lying in the snow, limbs carving out four giant angel wings. Angel of indentation. Angel of absence and cold. And when summer came? What became of a frozen angel? Melted into a pool, of course, concave to convex. It made such perfect sense. How did everyone not know? He would tell them. Tell the world what he knew.
A smile of satisfaction came over
Nicholas's wet lips.
The hollow in the snow became the solid thing you wrestled with.

The boat. The boat rolling over them like a whale. Whooosh! Nicholas sank down, down for what seemed like forever. Back to the lung-breaking blackness. But he felt the hand on his, and realized it had been there all along. J.P.'s hand. Mashing his hand flat on wood. And now there was air. And the boat was somehow upright. J.P. was up above him, miraculously in the boat, grabbing his wrists. Nicholas's nose and chin and ribs scraped the hull. His arms nearly yanked from their sockets. And then he was piked over the deck, face mashed against the floorboards, feet hanging in air.

The familiar wooden bars imprinting his forehead brought him back to the world. Nicholas raised his head, which hit the main cleat. He looked at the cleat a long time. No sheet. Good. Someone had had the sense to uncleat it. He let his head drop again. Something about angels. A dream of light and dark angels and a vortex of snowy whorls turning inside out.

Far above him, the dark angel spoke. “Now, how the fuck do you run this thing?”

Kate finished up work on a couple of graves and stood up straight, wondering how many more years of this her back could take. On the bright side, spring was in the air, the snow was gone — except for a few patches in the shade — and having remembered to wear rubber boots, she had dry feet. It took Kate a couple of trips to tote the grave care paraphernalia back to her car: a vase in need of proper washing, the few weeds that had grown separately bagged from the grass clippings according to their destiny as garbage or compost, large clippers, camera, ragbag and spray cleaner for the smooth-polished stones. At the car, it came to Kate she had no desire to leave. A stunning day, nothing pressing — plenty of time for a stroll.

Kate knew just about every name in this cemetery. Most of those buried were her parents' or grandparents' contemporaries, but there was the odd baby (usually from old, less medically enlightened times). Worse than the babies, for Kate, were the two or three she'd known in school, who never made it past their teens. She stopped now at a plot she usually hurried past:

Kate cringed, as always, at the misplaced humour, which the family could hardly have intended. She could only suppose that, blind with grief, they didn't see the effect until too late. And again, Kate marvelled at how a middle name, laid out like that, made her feel like a voyeur, how it took someone and stripped them naked for all to see.
Arnold
. After a grandfather, most likely. A farmer or a trainman from the heady days of logging and mining, when goods would arrive from the north by river, from the south by rail, to be redistributed from Pine Rapids' little station, once an important hub.

Kevin Farningham fell so hard for Ariel Frank that the minute he turned sixteen, he quit school and proposed. And Ariel, a year older and with every intention of leaving town for post-secondary, thought he was crazy. But she'd seen it coming. She'd known for some time. Since they were in junior high, Kevin and Ariel had gone together and broken up so many times it was a running joke. But lately, things were more intense. Ariel felt trapped, like there was no way out. She was getting rattled. But whenever she came close to calling it off, she couldn't say the words she knew would destroy Kevin.