In the Land of Birdfishes (28 page)
A
FTER IT HAD HAPPENED
, the thing I was afraid of, I stayed away as far as I could from my son. His father thought things were better between us, because I did not scold Jason or make him sit for Bible study anymore. But Jason knew I hid from him and why.
And it was that summer I had met Lewis Eames. He was new in town and not staying long enough to trouble himself with fitting in. And he had no gift for attracting the notice or interest of strangers, so he was left alone, mostly, even by his congregation, who were mourning the minister they’d lost in a snowstorm that winter. He came to my Bible study class and I felt him watch me as I read. He was so interested in my Bible and made me show him how the ends of my fingers read the dots and made them into words. He reached out to the page and his hand touched mine.
None of it would have happened, but I needed help and feared to ask for it from Jason. And Lewis was lonely, so he came to call for me most days, to see if there was anything I needed, or anywhere I wanted to go. And the sin that we committed, after only a few weeks of knowing each other, was not so great as it might appear to one who did not understand. Even
what I did with Lewis, there in the little room he’d rented across from the church, was to keep Jason safe. Because I knew what I had done to Jason once, I would do again. And so I hid from him, I hid what I had done and might do to my son in the sin I committed in Lewis’s bed.
And then one morning, I went to Jason and I said, “Take me out in your boat,” and he agreed, as he always agreed to whatever I asked of him. I wanted to walk, and so we went together, his hand at my back, all the way to where he’d docked the boat his father gave him. I climbed into his boat, and though the rocking of it in the water made me clutch at the sides with both my hands, it was not that that I was afraid of. And what I did then, I did to save him. And what I thought of was how for three seasons, I’d carried him inside me. Like a secret. Like something deeply precious, and safe.
And I remembered how, when he was a baby, he’d suck on my finger. The nurse said he had jaundice and that I had to stop breastfeeding him. So I’d heat up formula and give it to him in a bottle, but he’d refuse it so often, I thought he might starve, my little skeleton boy. He was so thin and so small. But he’d always want to suck on my finger, and sometimes I’d cry because he wanted my finger and not the bottle and I was not a good mother.
Then, and even later, when he was a teenager, some nights when I knew he was fast asleep, I would creep up the stairs and lie with my back to his door.
All these years later, I still could feel his mouth, open and wanting. I knew how he was like an appetite. How he went into the world unfed.
When I had once sat outside his door, when he was a sleeping child, I whispered to him, “I will never leave you.” I said
to him, “If I fail you it is because I love you.” I told him, “Pay no attention to what I do or say. What I tell you now is what I truly feel. You are loved.”
W
HEN WE GOT THERE
, she looked down at my boat and said, “I’d thought it would be bigger, like those awful ones we see out on the river sometimes.” It was an aluminum shell with a twenty-horsepower outboard motor screwed on the back. I shrugged and said it did the job. Together we untied the boat and waded out into the water.
“Jump in,” I said, and she obeyed. I pushed the boat out till I was knee-deep, and then threw my leg over the side and climbed into the back. I yanked the pull cord, and the engine began to growl. As I turned to face out to the bow, where Aileen sat, clutching the sides, the boat leaned far over onto its side and then, suddenly, we were skimming along the surface of the river and the town was far behind us.
We were a couple of miles out before Aileen leaned over and, grabbing the bench seat in front of her, began to climb toward my seat at the stern. “Get back,” I shouted.
“I just want to talk to you,” she said, sitting down on the middle seat. “I told you boats frighten me. I’m afraid of falling out.”
“It’s dangerous,” I said. “Too much weight in the back. Let me cut the engine.”
The sound of the engine died away, and immediately, the current caught hold of the boat and began pulling it forward, taking it back to sea.
“Come sit beside me,” I said. “It’s okay,” I added, as she hesitated. “It’s safe now that we’re just drifting.”
She sat down beside me and looked over the side, down into the river.
“I don’t see any fish,” she said.
“They’re there.”
“You didn’t bring your fishing rod?” she asked.
“I’m not fishing today,” I replied. Then I said, “Aileen? I don’t want to stay here anymore. Now that Angie’s gone.”
She looked startled. “Did Minnie talk to you?” she asked sharply.
I didn’t understand what she meant. “I should have left years ago. I never could, but I was thinking maybe if, like you said one time, your husband got me a construction job. Maybe if we went together”
Aileen let her hand reach down into the water, so it disappeared from sight and the waves at the surface splashed around her wrist. “This will be hard, Jason,” she said. Then she took her hand out of the water and rested it, wet, on her lap. She looked at me and said, “I’m going back to Stephan.”
My eyes left her face and, without moving my head, my gaze slowly slid back to the boat, and then far, far down the river.
She touched my knee and then pulled her hand away. “You know, I’m not even gone yet, but already this summer feels like a dream to me. This is home for you, Jason, but for me, it was only ever a dream. It’s time to wake up.” She smiled like she was already gone, and I wanted to take that smile off her face with my hand.
I turned my head from side to side as I put together what I had missed before. What Minnie had been warning me about her all along. She was so caught up in herself, she couldn’t see straight, so wrapped up in whatever it was she wanted, she’d got herself tied up in knots. She was a fucking fool. If she’d had sense in her head, if she’d ever had sense in her head. But then maybe she’d have left town as soon as she arrived. Maybe it was only because she was this stupid that she’d stayed as long as she had. “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll go with you. We’ll go together. And you can go back to that guy. And I’ll find my own place. We’ll go together.”
“Jason …” Her eyes were wet. “I can’t take you with me.”
“Did you and Angel talk about this?”
She shook her head. “Jason, you’re mixing things up. This has nothing to do with Angel. I know myself. I can wish I were someone different, but that won’t help either of us. Maybe this sounds cruel, but I’m trying to be as straight as I can with you: I just don’t have room for you. These are two different worlds, the one that Stephan’s in and yours. I can’t live in both.”
“I have money,” I said. “Is that what this is about? I can pay my own way. I have money.” I began breathing deeply, quickly, and then I grabbed the side of the boat. “It’s all right,” I said, slowing my breath. “It’s all right. I won’t go with you. I won’t go with you, like you said. I should let you go first. You need to make things right with your husband. I should finish the season with Peter. Maybe I should wait here till the money from the government comes, in case—just in case.”
She just shook her head again. “Maybe I should never have come here. Maybe she was better off without me, and you will be too.”
A cold feeling was creeping over me, like little icy spiders
crawling up my arms and legs. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I could have pinched my own skin and felt nothing. But I wasn’t worried, because I saw clearly now how things would go. “I’ll come visit you in the city. In a little while. When everything’s ready. By then, Angel will have come back, and we’ll have our little baby.”
“Jason.” She was as white as the sun. “Angel is gone.”
“It’s okay,” I said and I smiled at her. “You’ll see, we’ll be like a family. I just need a little time. Then I’ll come visit you. I’ll drive down. I’ll come every weekend.”
“You can’t come every weekend,” she said. “It will take you days to drive there. You’re not thinking. You’re confused, Jason.”
I was staring over my shoulder to the trees along the riverbank as we floated past them. “I heard a story once about a man that came here looking for gold,” I said. “He was crazy to find gold. But it was after the rush was over, and everyone laughed at him, showing up years later, when there was nothing left in the town but the gold teeth of the whores. He was furious at being made a fool of, and he picked up a handful of dirt on the useless claim that he’d been sold. And he squeezed it and put all his anger in his fist. And he squeezed that dirt so hard that he released the water in it, he released a river. The river flowed out of his hand through the dry, worthless dirt of this town, and he got in a boat and he sailed that river to its end, and there, where the river washed onto the shore of a distant land, he found more gold than he’d ever dreamt of. That’s how angry he was. And that’s just what I will do. I’ll squeeze that hard, I’ll make a way to you and my baby …”
“Stop,” said Aileen, pressing her fists against her head and looking wound up like a toy, “stop. I’m so tired of your
stories.” She twisted her mouth to one side. Her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying anymore. “Every word, Jason. Every word is a lie.” She said, “You can’t make water from dirt. And that story of yours about our father and the blindfolds … You take what’s true and you make it into something else. It’s more than a lie, it’s an insult to the truth. My mother drowned herself and my father never was right again. He was a lousy father. And my sister and I inherited the cataracts that ran in my mother’s family, and they never got treated because he was so wrapped up in his grief, he hardly knew we were there. Your mother’s were so bad that they cost her her sight. That’s all that happened.”
My mouth opened but said nothing, like the mouth of a fish. I had just begun to understand. I had been so stupid for so long, and only now, at last, I understood.
“Tell me one true thing, Jason. I’ve been here all this time, trying to make things up to you, to her. But you can’t tell me one thing that isn’t a lie. You can’t even tell me what happened to her.”
“Ma,” I whispered and it was all I could say.
She stared at me, pretending she didn’t understand.
“Did you plan this? Were you planning this my whole life?” I gasped as I realized how big the lie was, how it had surrounded me all my life. It was a net I’d always been caught in. “You made up that story about your sister and told it to me since the day I was born, so I’d have no choice but to believe you. So you could fool me for so long without me guessing. So you could come back and pretend to be her and leave me all over again … you must have already known, from the day that I was born.”
She grabbed the side of the boat and leaned away from me. “Jason, what are you saying?”
“I didn’t think you would come back. I told you if you left not to ever come back. And I knew you never would. I thought you never would.”
“Jason. You think I’m …”
“In the boat, when you said you were going to Calgary with that minister, I was so angry. I was ashamed. I couldn’t tell anyone what you’d done. How could I tell them why you had left? That you wanted him and that baby more than us. But you came back. You came back for me.”
Her eyes were wide, like they were trying to see right through me to the other side. “Jason, do you mean that she left Dawson? Jason, you have to tell me right now. Are you saying my sister is still alive?”
“Maybe I knew. Maybe I didn’t know it but I knew. Maybe that’s why I told you those stories, like the ones you used to tell me. Maybe it was so I could know if it were you. Because you would know what they meant.”
Her hand was covering her mouth so that it was hard to hear what she was saying. “Jesuschrist, jesuschrist,” she said over and over. She squeezed her eyes shut and I could hear her breathe, it was that loud and deep. I could hear my mother breathing.
“And you do know, don’t you. You know what the stories mean, don’t you, Ma?”
“The stories …” Her eyes had stopped flicking toward the river like maybe she could escape there. Now she was staring right through the boat that held us, shaking her head slowly. She sighed and all the air went out of her. “Yes. Yes, I think I do understand them, Jason.”
I looked at her and saw her for the first time. I had missed her so much. I had searched for her everywhere. I had heard
her in my house long after she was gone. “Ma?” I said again, even more gently.
She pressed her lips together but wouldn’t look at me. I wondered how it was that she could see again. It was a miracle. She said, “All those stories are about hurting the people you love. It’s not an accident or cruelty. It’s something else. Do you understand that?” She took another breath deep into her. “The point is nobody knows why. Nobody means to. But nobody knows how to stop. It’s a warning, Jason. You were warning me.”
I was still confused. I covered my eyes. “But why did you go?”
She smiled sadly. “If she left you, I don’t think it was you she was leaving. My father used to say that a fish could love a bird but then where would they live? Our mother was like a bird. She never really made a home with us. But there is no real place for a fish and a bird to live together. Only in a story.”
And then I knew she wasn’t going to leave me again. “But there is one place,” I said, softly.
“Jason, you have to take us back to shore now.” She looked worried again. I reached out my hand to calm her, but she pulled hers away. She’d said she hadn’t held another hand but mine since her sister’s.
Here on the river, which was as bright as a mirror, I could remember everything from that day. I felt as if all the world was spinning, and the only thing that didn’t move was my boat and her in it. It was then and it was now at the same time, and both times she was going away, twice, and all at once, she was leaving. The first time she told me, I’d wanted to hurt her, to leave my prints on her, to stop her with my hands. I wished then that I’d hurt her, and all the years in between I’d known that I should
have. It was so hard to be free of her but so hard, too, to keep her. All you could do to make someone yours or still was to murder what was in them that wanted to go away from you or ever could. I said to her then, “I should have hurt you.”
She was twisted around in her seat, staring at the shore, and she hardly looked at me over her shoulder. “You should have … What did you say, Jason?”
“You didn’t believe me about the man who squeezed a river out of dirt. But it’s because you don’t understand how hard he squeezed,” I told her. “He wanted it enough, he was that afraid of losing it, that he squeezed a river from a fist of dirt. He squeezed that hard.”
“It’s not true,” she said. Her voice was clear as a bell as she said to me, “You can’t make water from dirt.” She said, “Say it, Jason. Say no man could make a river out of dirt. Say your mother hurt you and then she left—”
“Ma,” I whispered. “Let me show you how hard he squeezed.” And I showed her. I showed her. I showed her.
Her throat in my hands was soft and my hands were hard and the thrust of her pulse in her throat in my hands was hard but my hands are harder, my hands are
this hard
, and even when she cried my name, Jason, I don’t answer and I don’t let go until the pulse has stopped and her breath, its eloquence, is stopped and everything stops.
And then you are there before me, let loose, let go, like your long yellow hair, you are all over streaming in front of me, you are in my arms and you are gone. You are leaving me, I grasp you by your long faded yellow hair, but that, too, is leaving me. I say your name to you, and you don’t answer because you are leaving me. I cry for you. And you are so cold that you don’t shed any tears, Ma.
I can’t believe you are here in my boat. That you are like this in front of me, all your secrets open to me. You will finally tell me your secrets, where you went and why you left, here, today, in this boat, on this river. What a special day it is. I laugh at how you are opened like a page in front of me.
And then you do the strangest thing. It’s night now, and we’re still floating, I guess we are going slowly away, to the ocean maybe. I guess we’re going to leave, like you wanted. But we’ll go slowly. We’ll take the long way. I tell you this joke, and you don’t laugh, because you are doing the strangest thing. You are changing. Your yellow hair is gone, and your legs and your eyes and all the shape of you and all the look of you, it’s all gone. Instead, what is left is your shining scales, the fan of your tail, your fins, your eyes that see nothing but water.
You become a fish, Ma.
You leave my boat for the river, I watch as you snap your tail and release yourself into the air and then fall down, deep into the water. I watch you, the colours of you, moving against the waves. You don’t tell me where you’re going. You don’t say goodbye. But I smile as I watch you, because I can see how happy you are.
“Ma,” I whisper to you. “I haven’t told you your last story.” I know you can hear me, under the water you have perfect ears. So I tell you your story.
