How Happy to Be (26 page)

“How specific can you be, using this? Can you tell to the day it –” I stumble over the word
it
because I’ve never been able to call children he or she until the ability to shuffle a deck of cards emerges. “Was conceived?”

“Conception took place five weeks ago.” I do some math.

“Not, say, seven weeks?”

“Five.”

“But how do you know?”

He points at the screen where a black-and-white fingerpainted sea lulls and rushes.

“Science,” he says this with wonder in his voice.

So now I know. Now I know which late-night huddle made this life. My nerves tingle with anxiety while the smudge floats calmly in its sea. I should call its father, now
that I know the number to call. I feel my heart jump, but I’m relieved too, just to have an answer, even if it’s a terrifying one, even if it resolves nothing.

“How much time do I have left to make a decision?” I ask.

The doctor is as moved by my plight as he is injustice in the north, delivering a sombre line reading, “You have until fourteen weeks for a clinic abortion, twenty for a hospital.”

He’s holding a paper printout of the sea.

“Would you like this?” he asks. I take it anyway, fold it in half, a seam above an imaginary belly, and stick it in my wallet.

Elaine is in the waiting room, staring out the window. It would never occur to her to pick up a magazine in a place like this. She’d say something like, Why look at newsprint when there’s a window right there? It’s sad somehow, to catch Elaine quiet, by herself, vulnerable, aging. She turns and gives me a steady smile.

As I’m buttoning up my coat, the receptionist chirps, “Happy birthday. That’ll be ten dollars for the printout.”

I tell Elaine I need a little time and she says she’ll meet me back on the island. I walk to the movie theatre. Before the movie starts, a preview for a terrible Adam Sandler movie I wrote about comes up: “
The Daily
calls it Delicious!” Did I say that, really? To what was I referring? Perhaps a meal someone ate on screen.

And then the film rolls and it’s one of those lifestyle movies where everyone has good clothes and furniture and big, solvable problems. These kinds of movies used to
comfort me. For as long as I can remember, the unreal has always made me feel more real, dramatic exaggerations showing up my own life as reasonable. But today, the film does nothing except bolster the sense of dread I’ve had since leaving the medical building. It offers me no solution. I hear the doctor’s pitying voice in my head and there is no character like that in this movie, this stupid movie that knows nothing about my bad skin and my jelly belly and my photographs in my purse.

My father looks up from his hammering. “How was the doctor’s appointment?” he says.

I ignore the question. “Can I borrow your hiking boots?”

He pauses. “These boots?”

I nod. He looks like he wants to ask me something more, but reads my hardened face –
This is not the time to ask questions –
and thinks better than to pry. As he unlaces the boots, I think that I could have found a pair in the house, but part of me likes making demands on him. Having him meet them is new.

I leave him in his stocking feet in the yard and make my way to the water.

The bones of the boathouse, covered in moss, have split in the salt air. Easily, I flip the canoe onto my shoulders, my head in the dark, eyes on the boots as I walk the dock. I always liked the portage, the hiding before the water.

And then I see, ahead of me, two small red running shoes sprinting back and forth in my path.

“Canooooing!” sings Franny Baumgarten.

I drop the canoe off the edge of the dock, where it smacks and bobs. I loop the rope through the mooring rings, surprised at how familiar this is, how much I haven’t forgotten.

“Does Elaine know you’re out here?”

Franny nods vigorously, still running back and forth, precariously close to the edge.

“Watch out!” I yell, trying to finish the knot.

“Can I come?” she asks.

“It’s not a good time, Franny,” I tell her, heading to the boathouse for the paddle.

“Later?” asks Franny. She shadows me back to the dock. I untie the canoe and climb into the stern, holding on to the dock with my paddle.

“Tomorrow?” she asks.

The boat slips in my hands, and I jolt backwards, tipping slightly, enough to feel uncertain again.

“The next day?” says Franny, and I want the silence I’m anticipating on the water. I want all of this to stop, and I shout at her: “No. Now get out of here!” Fierce, almost animal. She looks away, tears forming in her eyes.

“Franny –” I stop. She is already gone, disappearing into the woods, her small body slumped. I have never seen her walk slowly. I should run and gather her in my arms, tell her I’m ashamed of myself. But I don’t. I am cowardly, and desperate for space. I watch her vanishing, and when she is gone, I push off into water as sidewalk grey as the sky.

At first, the paddle feels foreign, a thing that will give me calluses, break my pink skin. But quickly, my body
remembers that the sensation of being in a canoe is one that makes you aware of scale. You ride the water like a fly on a buffalo.

I realize, my God, I know my north from south out here. I know that this nothing weather can turn to violent rain, or light up with sun, but it will not stay neutral for long. I know to keep to the shoreline because of the sky’s uncertainty. I know rain.

The water yields as I move along the shore, out of the bay toward open water, my eyes marking my path by the tallest trees, like someone taught me once – who was it? My father.

The tide is so high that some rocks, landmarks, are covered by waves. But I keep going, the sky and the water darkening each other. And then, suddenly, the wind gets rowdy, rears itself against the boat. A few drops fall.

For several minutes, I let myself believe that this medium weather is going to hold. I listen to rain beading off my jacket. But then something is snuffed. The sky’s crust goes dark.

“Fuck,” I say, triggering the downpour. It’s that fast. I am soaked to the skin. I didn’t think to wear a life jacket. Wait, it’s worse: I didn’t think to wear a life jacket, and I am pregnant. This seems appalling now; what kind of mother wouldn’t consider all that could go wrong?

I lean forward in the boat, paddle in and paddle out, my wrists pulled backwards from the force of the water. I’m aiming for the shore, to see if there’s a break, some shelter where I can wait it out, but rocks keep bucking up from beneath, pushing me farther into the open ocean. The only way out is to go back. So I’ll go back.

And now I have to turn around. I have to force my way through, stroking backwards, careening in the direction I’ve come. Each stroke moves the boat a few centimetres, and then the wind rights me back to where I started. I see only the immediate moment in front of me, the angry black water, bunching, unbunching, and I think, Get through that. Get through that one section of the world. And then there’s another, and I get through that one too. I am almost righted. My wrists and shoulders feel aflame, and then it is done. Somehow I’ve turned around, and in doing so, the wind is behind me, propelling the boat forward. The space in front is like television static. I can’t see through it, just shapes and colours, and the colour is brown, and the shape is a yellow blur flapping in the wind. As I get closer and closer, the yellow takes the shape of a person; my father in a raincoat, arms flapping, trying to signal the dock. Too late; I hit at top speed, a cracking noise. My father’s hands, giant paws, clawing me from the boat, and the boat from the water.

I slip on the dock, one foot knocks the other. I fall forward onto my father to break my fall, to protect my maybe baby.

My father pulls the canoe onto the dock, turning it onto its side, revealing a huge mouthy gouge.

“I’m so sorry,” I shout into the wind, and I start walking fast, away from the dock. Already I’m imagining Elaine’s disappointment, my father’s embarrassment at his flabby, urban daughter defeated by a little rain.

My father catches up to my side, grabs my shoulder roughly.

“You did well,” he says.

“Are you high? I nearly drowned,” I say, tears rising up in my throat, the hot, wet interior of the raincoat hood scratching my face.

“But you didn’t,” he says, blinking against the rain. “You’re still great in a canoe.” He squeezes my hand.

Still
. Something for my memoir: She was great in a canoe once.

The rain thins out, lines instead of sheets, then breaks between the lines, ellipsis. My father gestures for me to walk ahead of him. He stays close behind right into the house where I open the door and collapse on a birch bench in Elaine’s hallway. The bathtub runs off in the distance, the sounds of Elaine and Franny talking. I am exhausted, my body shivering, unable to open my mouth. My father sits next to me, silent. Eventually the bathtub shuts off and Franny can be heard splashing in the water.

I get hot in my jacket, feet entombed in wet wool inside my father’s boots, but I can’t bring myself to move. It’s as if I don’t want to end this raw, red feeling. Changing anything – unzipping or speaking – will take me out of the shock, and I need it right now.

But after a long time, my father crouches down in front of me. I have a strange, fleeting idea that he might rub my foot in prayer, like a pieta, but instead he unlaces his boots from my feet, one at a time. As it is happening, I know I am remembering it already. My father kneeling before me, busy and kind, his head bowed.

M
Y MOTHER HAD THE WHIRRING TONGUE; SHE LIVED
close to the surface, moved waterbug fast, but my father dove down deep into himself. When he came back from the mountains, he couldn’t answer questions for hours, just smiled and held up the fish he’d caught, and then set about cutting their heads into a bucket by the shed. My mother would wink at me, roll her eyes, and let him be.

What was it like for him, suddenly to be the sole parent of an eight-year-old girl? What must he have made of me, all over him, endless chatter about nothing, the running and
jumping, pulling tree branches from seedlings, lighting fires in the schoolyard, calmly watching the flames flap around the edges of the garbage can? If he was unable to carry his own grief, where would he keep mine?

One day he looked at me and said, “We’re leaving.” Maybe he thought he could take me down deep with him, and we’d be quiet together; maybe, because he never noticed what I was like before, he assumed it was missing her that made me manic. He took me to the compound to calm me, but it felt like confinement, and only made me more frantic. The only place I sat still was at the movies.

I’m so tired of these stories and these questions that I tell myself and ask myself and answer myself on the loop I’ve been caught in for all these years. There’s no comfort in it any more.

It’s dark in the house except for the light in this room. I lie on the mattress staring at Elaine’s weavings, warm in her long johns, a borrowed sweater. I rub my hands over my stomach, which is getting harder, toughening into something solid. I can’t e-mail, or check my cellphone messages – can’t push buttons, can’t write – because my wrists are too battered from the storm, ropes of strained muscle protruding up my arm.

I hear a noise down the hall, like a pulp-movie spaceship landing. When I stand, my bruised bones shift and fall into one another.

A line of white light at the bottom of Franny’s door. I knock. The spaceship sounds cease.

“It’s me, Franny,” I tell her.

“Okay, come in,” she says. I’m afraid she’ll be mad at me, but she’s sitting in the centre of the guest bed with a flashlight and a comic book. Her blue pyjamas are covered in clouds. She is grinning.

“Did you hear the spaceship?”

“I did. Was that you making that sound?” She giggles and shakes her head.

“It’s the comic book! It’s realistic!” This cracks her up.

I sit down on the edge of the bed and look at the comic book. It’s entirely in Japanese, but the pictures tell the story of four girls with stars on their foreheads flying through space and shopping malls, leaving explosions and fires in their wake. It is unclear what they are fighting for.

“Do they live on this spaceship?” I ask Franny. The spaceship looks like a compact.

“Mmhm.” She turns the pages for me.

“Where would you go if you had a spaceship, Franny?” She thinks about this.

“I’d go canoeing in the ocean.”

“But you have a spaceship. You could go anywhere.”

She thinks again. “Boston.”

I laugh. “What’s in Boston?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been there. Boston,” she says it again. “Boston, Boston, Boston. I wish that was my name.”

Franny flips the pages, looking for something.

“Franny, I’m sorry about today,” I say. She keeps looking at her book. I’m not clear enough. I add, “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. You didn’t deserve it.”

Franny shrugs and says, “Okay. Where would you go in a spaceship?” It is that fast for her, forgiveness. What is in Franny that lets her drift through the world like this, so weightless? I don’t think it’s just youth. Theo is the same way. And Elaine. And all of these people have known tragedy, known loss, and all of them have put it somewhere for safe keeping, and moved forward. What is this grace I lack, and for this baby, could I learn it?

“I think I would go canoeing too,” I say, and Franny nods.

“Ah-hah,” she has found what she was looking for in the comic book and she shows me proudly. The last panel: a full page of blue black sky sprinkled with stars, stars of all sizes, all depths, and way up in the corner, the tiny ship hurtling through space with all the girls inside it.

E
LAINE, FRANNY, AND I SIT AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
with our strange habits before us in bowls: Franny’s Cheerios, no milk; Elaine with her muesli and figs; me with yogurt and bananas and the newspaper.
The Other Daily
doesn’t have any news of Baby Baron today. Interest has faded that quickly, the scandal now an accepted fact.