Landing (26 page)

"No,
you
asshole," said Rizla, "you practically crushed my friend, why don't you look where you're going?"

Jude felt a surge of hatred. Why did he have to do this, right here, right now?

"No, why don't you fuck off back to the hole you crawled out of?" The guy climbed out of the jeep and slammed the door.

White, thirty-looking, that was all Jude could tell through the blinding rain as she peered out from under Rizla's jacket. She wanted badly to be at home.

"Yeah, why don't you go fuck yourself, faggot?" Two more men stepped down. The shorter guy told the driver, "They came out of that gay bar down the street, I saw them, they were all over each other."

The driver spat. "This your little boyfriend, faggot?"

Before Jude knew it he'd got her by the shoulder, his fingers gripping painfully. She was about to speak; she was picking the right calming words to let them know that she was a woman, that nobody wanted any trouble, that her friend was really sorry for touching their car. But all that came out was a high-pitched gasp.

Rizla head-butted the guy, who let go of her and staggered backward, holding his face and making a guttural sound. There was something wonderful about the moment, Jude registered, even as terror was sending up its mushroom cloud in her head. Rizla and the shorter guy grunted, landing hard blows. She thought of running for help but the third guy was coming at her, he had her in a chin lock, his arm was like a steel forklift on her windpipe. There was something Jude had learned in that self-defense workshop all those years ago, something about stabbing an attacker's foot with your stiletto heel? She was in running shoes, there was no time, she was on the wet ground, how did that happen? Thrown down like a sack of garbage into a puddle, and gravel hard as diamonds under her cheek. She managed to curl up before something stove in her ribs, and the worst pain in the world came down on her hand.

Afterward Jude could never quite remember how Rizla had got her to his pickup. She was on the floor with her head on the seat and there was a lot of vomit. "Stay face down, or you'll choke," he ordered, swerving round a corner. Pain came and went in waves over her head.

The next thing she fully understood was Rizla arguing with somebody. "Listen, all we bought was a CD, I don't remember to what freaking value! Maybe ten bucks. Look, my friend's bleeding, can we speed this up? Her passport's probably in her jeans—She's my wife. Ex-wife. What do you mean, did I hit her? I told you these assholes jumped us, I think my nose is broken. No I don't want to go to the police station, I just want to get back into Canada. No we don't need an ambulance, man, just let us through!"

When she woke up, Rizla was sitting on the side of her bed and a thin gray light filled the room. "Morning, you. We're in the hospital, just across the border in Windsor," he added after a minute.

"Yeah." Jude's voice came out raw, as if she'd been screaming, though she didn't recall screaming. She seemed to be wearing a big white glove on her left hand, with her fingers coming out the end like pink worms.

"I was afraid if I took you to emergency in the States they'd charge ten thousand bucks to let you in the door."

She nodded, then wished she hadn't; her head felt as if it might come off.

"I ate your breakfast, to pass the time," he said, nodding at a tray. "You've got bruised ribs, and something called a Colles fracture where that bastard stamped on your wrist."

Ah, so that explained the cast.

"No concussion though, that's something," he said, cheery. "You didn't happen to catch their license plate?"

She shook her head, carefully.

"I can't tell all these new jeeps apart," he complained. "Could have been a Ford, but I'm guessing. You think it's worth going back to Detroit to make a statement?"

"No," she growled. She took a big breath, and it hurt.

"You pissed at me?" Rizla waited. "What do you want me to say? I get riled up, I go in guns blazing; it's a guy thing."

Jude spoke thickly. "Other guys have the same amount of testosterone but they don't act like dumb fucks all the time."

"It's not all the time," he said, childish.

"Too often. That Australian you punched, the night of our wedding. Or that time you wrapped your sister's car round a stop sign. What about when you put your fist through the wall of your trailer?"

Rizla rubbed his eyes. "Gimme a break, I'd just heard my wife was a dyke."

Adrenaline was bringing Jude to life; she managed to half sit up, despite the stabs in her ribs. "Ah, so it
was
meant for me, not the wall."

"I would never hit a woman."

It was his tone that got to her. "Well excuse me, O perfect Christian gentleman! But you'd pick a fight in a parking lot and get her beaten up by other guys."

He let out a long groan. "I'm sorry, okay? I never meant for anything to happen."

He's been nothing but trouble since the day you met,
her mother commented in her head; Jude could hear every crisp syllable. But it seemed to her that for all his flaws, this man was all she had left. The two of them were damaged goods; they would never get free of each other.

"I've got a broken nose, if that helps. The doctor had to wham it back in line."

The corner of her mouth turned up on its own. "Nothing else?"

"Bruises, probably a black eye tomorrow."

She let out a scornful puff of breath. Her life was a tangled thread looping around on itself; she might wind up back in that trailer yet. Jude choked at the thought.
I'm only twenty-six,
she thought,
how come I feel so used up?

"The last shiner I got was for being an Indian; I guess getting gay-bashed has novelty value," Rizla offered, and she half smiled. "Next time we go out, I'm making you wear a skirt and heels. I can't believe we got taken for a couple of fags!"

"I need to stop talking now," said Jude faintly, and wormed her way down in the bed. Silence: She shut her eyes, fell back into it.

When she opened them again, Rizla was standing against the window, like a paper cutout of a man. "Kinda sleety now."

She struggled to reach the paper cup of water with her right hand. He came over, pressed a button that tilted her pillow upward, and lifted the cup to her lips. "How you doing?" he asked as he set it down, and dabbed the spilled drops from her blue gown with his knuckles.

"Not good," she whispered.

"Your ribs? Or your hand?"

Tears crept out from under her eyelashes. "My life."

"Ah," said Rizla.

Jude knew she'd been punished. She'd thrown away her lover and the stupid thing was, she couldn't quite remember why. She was baffled and battered, ground into pieces. She couldn't quite imagine picking herself up and going on from here.

"Your life is fine," he told her, "it's structurally sound. It just needs, what's the Shawn Colvin album?"

She cleared her throat. "My life needs a Shawn Colvin album?"

"The one you kept playing on our trip to Montreal.
A Few Small Repairs,
that's it."

Jude almost managed a laugh.

A startled Caribbean face came around the curtain. "Check your vitals?"

Rizla went outside so the woman could take Jude's temperature and blood pressure. "You in much pain?" she asked.

Jude tried to shrug.

"One to ten?"

"Five?"

"Nearly everybody says five," the nurse observed. "I get you a pill."

"How long—"

"Doctor will be in later; maybe your friend take you home tomorrow."

Home: Jude thought of the house on Main Street, as hollow as an eggshell. Her friends, her neighbours, the museum: She tried to summon up some interest. How a life could deflate as fast as a balloon!

The light leached out of the window. November dusk thickened in the room. Jude listened to the Silence, as if she were at Meeting.
Here I am. Help me. Here I am.

Behind the curtain the door swung open, letting in a stripe of yellow light. "Jude?" A whisper. A pause. "Are you asleep?"

Jude thought she was probably hallucinating from the drugs.

A head came through the gap in the curtain. All Jude could see was the silhouette. She fumbled for the switch and the light snapped on.

"Hello, stranger," said Síle, leaning over the bed and smiling like it was Christmas.

Jude blinked, blinded. Finally she managed to speak. "How—"

"Rizla got a message to me via the Dublin office this morning. Didn't he say? I picked it up from New York, grabbed a flight to Toronto, and hired a car to get to Windsor."

Her mind was in a blur at the thought of all those cities.

"I would have called to say I was on my way," said Síle, "but I was afraid you might say no."

Jude shook her head vehemently enough to hurt it.

Síle put out her hand, stroked Jude's hair very lightly, as if touching some wild creature. "Rizla's gone home. He apologized for the merchandise getting dented on his shift."

Jude thought she was going to cry again.

"I'll be driving you back tomorrow, if you're in a fit state. I've never seen you look so awful," she remarked.

"I've never seen you look so beautiful."

Síle bent and kissed her, her mouth like a ripe plum. "If you'd died, and I wasn't here, I swear I'd have murdered you."

The stern tone made Jude smile. "I've got no idea what I thought I was doing, trying to end it."

A serious nod.

"I've caused you so much hurt—"

"Make me happy from now on, and I'll write it off," said Síle with a stylish little shrug.

"I guess it was ... a failure of nerve."

"I tried rock-climbing once," Síle remarked. "It was all great gas till I couldn't find a foothold and my whole body froze up. They called out instructions, they bawled at me, but I was ice. In the end they had to winch me down the cliff like a sheep."

Jude was surprised to find herself still capable of laughter.

Either the well was very deep, or she
fell very slowly, for she had plenty of
time as she went down to look about
her, and to wonder what was going
to happen next.

—LEWIS CARROLL
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Three days later, Síle put her bags in the trunk of the rental car. She went back up onto the porch where Jude stood, shivering a little in her hoodie. "Go on inside, you're not well."

"I'm fine." Jude grinned at her and scratched the place where her cast rubbed against her hand. PROPERTY OF SILE SUNITA SIOBHAN O'SHAUGHNESSY, it said in dark capitals across the plaster.

Síle bent to pick up a scarlet maple leaf, and everything seemed to shift, like a minor earthquake. She straightened, dizzy, still staring at the leaf's sharp points.

"What is it?"

She put the leaf in her handbag, inside her copy of
The Time Traveler's Wife.
"It won't be long, this time," she told Jude.

The blue eyes lit up. "You don't mean you're coming for Christmas?"

Síle shook her head. "For the rest of my life."

Jude watched her, arms wrapped round her own ribs. "Don't mess me around, darlin', not when you're about to head off to the airport."

"No, I've just decided: I'm making the move."

"Which move?" she asked suspiciously.

"Eejit! If we want to be together, we have to make it happen. And the fact is that I'm a more moveable feast than you are. So Ireland, Ontario, it is." Síle pronounced the name as breezily as she could.

"No way! We can keep going as we are," Jude protested; "we'll cope."

"What was that Bible line you quoted me, our first night?" Síle stared up at the bedroom window. "Two lying together..."

"If two lie together, then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone?"

"Precisely." After the kiss, she checked her watch and headed toward the car.

"I don't believe you're going to do this," Jude called.

"Watch me," said Síle over her shoulder, her smile curving like the wing of a bird.

Síle's high lasted two days. It took her through the flight home from Toronto, into a damp morning where she stared out the taxi window at Dublin's gray streets and thought,
Okay, if this is what it takes. I've spent four decades here; it's time for a move.
Her exultation lasted right through her next rotation to New York and back. She was wrapped up in the romance of that moment on Jude's porch, when her life shook and she knew exactly what to do; the memory crackled like leaves underfoot. There was to be no more making do, no more muddling along; all the cautious phrases had given way to one certain
yes.
Síle knew there'd be difficulties; her arms were open to embrace them.

The third day she woke early, though she wasn't working. She felt weirdly tired, as if she were coming down with something. In her head she drew up the list of pros and cons. On one side was
old friends, Da, Orla, nephews, job, cinema, urban buzz, cafés...
That list went on for some time. On the other side was just one word:
Jude.
Why was she making a list, she scolded herself, when she'd already made up her mind?

Síle turned practical. She found the Canadian Government's immigration Web site, and was immediately disheartened. The laws were progressive, all right, but they didn't seem to apply. Jude could sponsor Síle's immigration as her "common-law partner"—but no, dammit, they hadn't "cohabited in a conjugal relationship for a period of at least one year." (They'd never cohabited for more than a week at a stretch, in fact.) Síle noted that "conjugal partners" were subtly different from "common-laws"; they didn't need to have actually lived together, if there was some impediment—but blast it, they still had to have spent at least one year "in a committed and mutually interdependent (marriage-like) relationship" where they had "combined their affairs to the extent possible." Hmm. "Affairs" sounded juicy but seemed to mean joint bank accounts, wills, credit cards, property, life insurance ... What had Jude and Síle
combined
over the past eleven months except words and bodies?

The sponsorship form was surreal.
Did anyone (individual or organization) introduce you?

George L. Jackson, deceased.

On first meeting did you and your sponsor exchange any gifts?

A cup of vile coffee, a pastry.

And then, over a five-line blank box:

Describe how your relationship developed after first contact. Provide photos and documentary evidence of activities in which you both participated. For expediency and security reasons, do not include documents with electronic components such as musical greeting cards.

Oh dear, here was another problem, Síle saw, on skipping down to the list of "Excluded Relationships": You couldn't sponsor a partner if you were "the spouse of another person" at the time. Meaning, in this case, one Richard Vandeloo, blast him. Jude and Síle's situation was sounding more disreputable every minute.

"How're your dented ribs?" she asked on the phone.

"Much better," said Jude.

"And your wrist?"

"Mending nicely, the doctor tells me; I just have to resist the temptation to pick up a snow shovel."

"Snow, already," marveled Síle.

"This is what you're letting yourself in for, if you're really moving here," Jude warned.

She grinned. "Hey, just checking something: You don't want to marry me, do you?"

A beat. "I thought in Leitrim you said weddings—"

"I wasn't proposing!"

"Oh."

"I hope that's not disappointment I hear?" asked Síle, regretting having brought it up so flippantly. Wishing they could be having this conversation on a pillow somewhere, anywhere at all, even the nastiest Super 8 motel.

"No, just momentary confusion," Jude told her. "Once was enough for me, honest."

Her lover's firmness on this point reassured Síle. "It's just that I've just been looking into ways of getting me into Canada, and you divorcing and re-hitching is the most obvious, though even going that route would take quite a while. But there's loads of options," she said more confidently than she felt.

"So who've you told about this mad notion of yours?"

"Nobody, yet," said Síle. Sometimes she could actually hear Jude's thoughts, like faint radio. "I just need to arm myself with a plausible plan first," Síle assured her.

"Listen," Jude said, "if you get qualms—find you can't go through with this—"

"Shut up with that nonsense."

"I wouldn't hold it against you. So if you change your mind—"

"I'm putting down the phone," Síle sang.

She could apply for a visa as a skilled worker, she discovered from further research, but what kind? A news report on the troubled air industry in Canada confirmed that there were no flight attendant jobs a-going, and even if there were, the airlines wouldn't hire an Irishwoman over one of their own. To Síle's surprise, this fact didn't depress her, far from it: It was a new life she wanted, not a copy of the old one. For years now, hadn't she been feeling weary of pushing past belligerent tourists and serving up foul-smelling omelettes? A fresh career at forty would be just the thing.

The list of desired occupations issued by Immigration Canada made her laugh out loud. What could a positive artist be, or a hair examiner, a switcher, an all-round furrier, or a camp cook?

Síle ordered herself copies of
Pursue Your Passion: Making Career Choices From the Heart, Dream Up Your Dream Job,
and
What Are YOU Doing For the Rest of Your Life?
Then she thought that perhaps instead of spending $62.59 on dodgy self-help books she should start saving for the many costs of emigration, so she canceled the order. She ended up buying just one book, called
Downshift: Learning to Live the Life You Love On Less.
It turned up two days later (Síle always ordered books express delivery), and it enraged her so much with its preachy, make-do-and-mend suggestions—shred old phone directories for a no-cost garden mulch, stay out of shops, bake your own birthday gifts—that she was tempted to mulch it.

She chose Marcus as the first friend to tell, so she waited till he was up for the weekend, and—thrift be damned—took him to the Shelburne Hotel for tea on silver service in the plump armchairs.

His clotted-cream scone froze in midair. "I knew this was coming."

"Really? That's more than I did."

"Why can't Jude move here?" Marcus demanded.

"Because she's not the kind of shrub that bears transplanting," said Síle.

"Shit, shit, shit."

"Come on, now," she said, "if anybody understands I thought it would be you, Mr. Love-Will-Find-a-Way!"

"I do understand," said Marcus, putting his scone down, "but I don't feel like being an advocate for romance today. More like a five-year-old whose best friend's about to move to the moon."

Síle tried to laugh; she sipped her tea. "It's not like you and I were living near each other anymore, anyway." That sounded like a reproach, so she hurried on. "I'll ring you from Canada just like I ring you from Dublin, and persecute you and Pedro with long visits."

Silence, as Marcus weighed the credibility of that.

"I'm sorry," said Síle in a flatter tone. "It seems it's one of those moments when friends come second."

He nodded. "I do wish you and Jude luck; you're lovely together."

She leaned over to kiss his stubbled cheek. She took a cream-cake, but it stuck to her tongue like glue; she swilled it down with lukewarm tea.

"Leaving aside my own personal loss," he said, "how are you going to cope with the move?"

She shrugged. "People do these things all the time. Pedro managed beautifully, didn't he?"

"The difference is, you've no interest in the joys of the countryside. If it were a city you were going to, at least..."

"I'll be within arm's reach of Toronto," she said unconvincingly, thinking of those two and a half hours on the road. Three and a half, in a blizzard.

"And besides, you're Irish through and through."

"Whatever that means!"

"It's your setting, your frame. You're a Dub," Marcus told her, warming to his theme. "This dirty old town is your, what's the German word, your
heimat.
" She didn't answer. "What the hell are you going to do with yourself at some little Canadian crossroads?"

"Be with Jude," she said furiously. "I want to live with her fulltime, sink into it, feather our nest. Be stationary, for once."

"And there's another thing, when you leave the airline—"

"—which you've been at me to do for years now, by the way!"

"But not without a new job. How will you pay the rent?"

"Jude inherited the house from her mother."

"You know what I mean," said Marcus. "What are you going to
be?
"

"Well, that's something I need your help with, since switching horses is something you've done already." Síle's tone strained to maintain the fiction that this was a chat instead of a spat.

He sighed. Then, after a second, he said, "Something online."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, but the point is, the Internet's your playground, so you might as well make a job out of it. A job that isn't tied to any one location," he added darkly, "just in case this turns out to have been a disastrous mistake."

Later, thinking about it, Síle was rather taken with this idea. She tried to picture herself as an online something-or-other; a travel advisor, maybe? But the problem was, these days everybody seemed eager to offer information and expertise for free, just for the pleasure of seeing their own words onscreen. Maybe Síle could milk her cousins for contacts and run a business selling cheap mirrored hangings from Rajasthan to customers in Red Deer, Alberta, or Nacogdoches, Texas. Hmm, that sounded both exploitative and unlikely. But the Internet was clogged with people who apparently made a good living from selling weirdly specialist items: doll's furniture, soy candles, baseball cards...

One evening, when she and Jude had both had bad days—Síle's involving a cracked front window (she blamed those little yobs who'd kidnapped Petrushka back in June), Jude's hinging on an eight-year-old who'd gone into hysterics when Jude had smacked her desk with a willow switch during a workshop—they decided to get drunk together. Jude hadn't had a drink since Detroit, but her various bones were feeling so much better that she was ready to open a bottle of Glenfiddich. At Síle's end she'd prepared a cocktail shaker of martinis. She went through the list of careers she'd considered so far.

"Supermodel," suggested Jude.

"Flatterer! Something more consultational, I think, if it's to be the beauty world. Makeup Tips for Mixed-Race Lovelies?"

Jude howled. "Snow shoveler? Rizla says I should be paying him a hundred bucks a week."

"Cat masseuse," she countered, scratching the back of Petrushka's head.

"Premier of Ontario?"

"Ha! I'd give your Medicare a kick up the arse."

"So how long's it going to take to get this visa?" Jude wondered.

Síle groaned. "I was hoping you wouldn't ask. Have some more whiskey."

"That bad, eh?"

"You have to put together this elaborate application with photos and birth certs and CVs and your addresses for the last ten years, you get police clearances and notarized copies of records of employment and and and, you courier it all in to the nearest Canadian High Commission—oh, and I forgot the medical. The form's alarming, listen to this," said Síle, fingering through her pile of printouts.

Have you received treatment, attention or advice from any physician or practitioner for disease of the heart, tumour or polyp, disorder of the intestines, dizziness, abdominal bruits, nephritis, pus or blood in urine, paralysis, deformity of bone, lung masses, thalassaemia, disorder of testes, impairment of throat, murmurs, thrills, or convulsions?

"Wait up," said Jude, "I believe I may have seen you experience murmurs, thrills, and convulsions."