The Journey Prize Stories 21 (25 page)

The summer's come fast. My wife and I have a new routine these sweltering nights. We lock the screen door and turn out the porch light, and then we sneak into Becky's room to listen to the sounds of her little girl snores. Lora sometimes takes my hand. Or she stands on her toes and brushes her cheek against mine. Or she rests against me like I'm her rock. She does these things so tenderly I can hardly catch my breath. Somehow she's forgotten how we were, back when we had a dying child. We've never once spoken about the marks we left on each other. I want to ask for forgiveness, but I don't have the courage.

I bought a bag of seashells at the airport. This was just before we pushed through the same boarding gate we'd stepped out of twenty-eight hours earlier. It was one of those rare last-minute ideas that turned out right. Lora buries the shells in the backyard sandbox, and she and Becky go beachcombing before the sun gets too hot.

On Saturday mornings I crack a beer, stretch out on the grass, and watch my girls. Mostly I watch Lora. There'll be something about the way she tilts her head back and smiles at the sky that makes me believe the damage can be reversed.
She's long since erased the dirty pictures. I wish I could follow her path, dive into the place where she goes inside, but I don't know how. Where she's able to see the goodness of her God working alongside the terrible things that happen to people, I still see the terrible things. I see Becky tethered to the hospital bed, Becky inside his camera, Becky in the evidence file. I see Lora struggling underneath me, my fingers clamped over her throat or digging into the flesh of her perfect white arms. Sometimes, I wake up from a dead sleep and feel my lungs exploding, like I've been running across a beach of broken glass, trying to get away.

Officer Jarvis says to stop calling. She says the case is closed, and there's nothing more to discuss. I think about what it takes to see what she sees each day and still keep going. To get out of bed, get your shirt buttoned right, act like you're normal.

There's a pea-shaped lump between my toes that throbs from morning to night. I don't pretend to understand what I stepped into on that beach. All I know is I have my girls back, and I'd be hard pressed to run anywhere again. It's a fair trade no matter which way you slice it. If Lora knew the whole story, she'd say her God thinks so too.

I
found out because of a dream. In this dream I was speaking to my son and asked how he was. “I'm skinny,” he said. “Really skinny.”

“How skinny?”

A long sandy silence followed. “Really, really skinny.”

“Why?” I said, and he paused again, long enough that it built a pressure inside me. Something awful waited.

“I've just become too skinny,” he said at last.

That pulled me to a shallow wakefulness and I tossed and turned a while. When the clock said five, I got out of bed, made coffee on the propane stove, and sat in the withering darkness. Although Alvin lives only a few hours south of me, we've whittled our connection thin and I hadn't seen him in almost three years.

I should have made my way into town and phoned him right then, but instead, once daylight held a steady grip on the land, I picked up my rucksack and a small canvas and went out to paint.

There's a cluster of giant firs I love – a cathedral that blots out the sky and encloses the forest floor. I set my stool in a well-worn spot in a bed of needles among the ferns and propped the blank canvas in front of myself. The painting consumed me as it always does, the physicality of the work, the concentration required to transfer life through my eyes and through the brush onto canvas. A day of work beat away the voices that dream had awoken. A week later, though, I dreamed about Alvin again. He said he wished he wasn't so skinny. Pain and suffering lurked among those words. I was up early enough to watch the sun rise, but this time, once that ball of fire was clear of the trees, and its rays cut deep into my cabin, I walked out to the logging road, got in my truck, and headed for town. The nearest phone's at a Petro-Can on the Pacific Rim Highway. I plugged in a quarter. Alvin's phone rang almost a dozen times. I was ready to hang up when Sandy answered.

“Hi,” I said. “It's Skylar.”

“Oh my God. Skylar.” The way she said that set off a depth charge within me. “It's your dad,” she said to Alvin. “Sorry if I woke you. If it's a bad time …” And then my son was on the line. “I was wondering when you'd call.”

I didn't recognize Alvin's voice at first. He was six weeks into an experimental treatment for a stage-four tumour in his sinuses. His nose had started to collapse from the radiation and it gave his voice a high edge.

“Alvin?” I said. “What is it? What's going on?”

“Oh God, Dad. Oh Jesus. Didn't you get my letters?”

I live in a cabin in the bush year round with no electricity and no phone. It's crown land and it was once a commune of sorts. This story truly starts there almost thirty years ago. I was drawn to the west coast by what Emily Carr had done, what Jack Shadbolt and Sybil Andrews were doing, and what I thought I could do. I was pulled into the bush by the dark, rich colours of the earth, the filtered light and ancient trees. Alvin's mother and I built the cabin I live in now. At its peak we were a community of a dozen souls – a draft dodger, his wife and their baby, a former math professor, a communist from the north of England, and a pair of sisters, one of whom had adopted a son. Curious locals joined us off and on. And starting in the summer of 1978, a girl from Quebec named Sylvette Turcotte. I met her on a rainy day outside the Co-op. She had a striking face – deep-set eyes, big and open. She'd travelled west with a boyfriend who now worked in a logging camp.

For almost three years Sylvette was my model. She was the source of the best work I've done in over forty years of painting. She had an elastic body, graceful and elegant in every posture. She had skin that picked up dimples of sunlight, a figure that cast shadows upon itself. There are models who contribute to figurative work on levels beyond shape and form, and she was one. Even today I believe her body enabled me to see the human figure in a new way.

People in town called us hippies. They talked about free love. There was love, but it was never free. My wife left me a year after Sylvette arrived. Alvin stayed. He was sixteen by then and had begun to sketch Sylvette while she posed for me. Like Picasso, Alvin never drew as a child draws. He was
proficient and precise from the day he began. Standing beside me in that cabin twenty-some years ago, he captured her with simple strong lines, bold gestures with charcoal, pencil, and eventually paint.

In 1981, Sylvette left and Alvin left with her. Sylvette was two months pregnant. She and Alvin lived together on Galiano Island and then on Salt Spring. This was the early eighties. I was lost in a short flash of fame built on those paintings of Sylvette. My only works in the National Gallery are of her.

Eventually Sylvette returned to Quebec. She still lives there, in Montreal. She has a daughter I've never met. The year Alvin found out about his cancer, the year I had those dreams and drove down island to be with him, this girl Lysanne had just turned twenty-three.

Alvin's wife, Sandy, is short with a roly-poly beauty – a plump frame, big cheeks. She met me at the door, opened it wide. “How are you doing?” I said.

Sandy backed off a step and raised the cigarette in her hand. “Started smoking again.”

Alvin was on the sofa at the far end of their loft. The
TV
cast a trembling glow across his blanketed body. I wanted to walk straight over, but something held me a moment – a cocktail of anxieties: the possibility he was asleep, fear of what I was about to see, and the years of muck built between us, a weight like undigested meat in the belly.

Sandy led the way and Alvin turned to face us. His nose was wounded, red and bloody-looking. A gauze patch covered his
right eye. The skin of his face, leathery and thin, looked ready to break apart.

I sent out a hand, but wasn't sure where to lay it. Eventually Alvin raised his own hand, embraced mine. “It's good to see you,” I said.

He coughed, and it moved his whole body. He coughed again – took several attempts to get up the phlegm, and then he rested. He didn't speak, but he looked at me, that one eye red-rimmed, worn and droopy. I could feel my own eyes fill with tears and finally overflow. I've lived a long life. I've stilled my heart more times than I can count, but here was my son, my only son, the child I raised. It took a moment to pull myself into control. “Today was a radiation day,” Sandy said. “We just got back from the hospital. It's been a hard day for him.”

Alvin turned his head, looked up at the ceiling. I glanced around the loft. Three walls were filled with paintings. It was all his work, but I only recognized one – a painting of Sylvette lying supine, face turned away. I knew it because he'd painted it standing beside me in my cabin over twenty years ago. It had a raw, fleshy power, a bold weight in colour and composition – amateurish, but strong and fresh in his interpretation of the body.

The day he began this painting is marked in my mind so clearly I can recall the canvas I was working on. I never finished it. I set it down as though it were somehow tainted by the power of the painting emerging beside it.

Pablo Picasso's father, Jose Ruiz, was also an artist. He taught the young Picasso for years, but they fought bitterly. They had a falling out. The exact cause isn't recorded, but Picasso began signing his paintings using his mother's maiden
name. Ruiz set down his brushes, gave painting up altogether in the shadow of his teenage son's brilliance.

Alvin noticed me looking over his paintings. He raised a hand. “Old work.” It was a croak of a voice. He took a deep breath, spoke again. “Hung for a party ages ago.”

Sandy backed off a step. “I'll make tea. Just sit with him.

He'll like that.”

I took the rocker at the near end of the sofa. A newscast flickered across the
TV
, pictures of soldiers in desert fatigues. The volume was off. “The body's a miraculous thing,” I said. “You'll see. Your body will amaze you.”

Sandy returned with the tea. “He needs distractions,” she said. “Made me get him a
TV
. We keep the volume off sometimes so I can hear him.” She handed me a mug, sat at the far end of the sofa, and lifted his feet onto her lap. “He listens to books on tape from the library. And we get a lot of movies. Plus he sleeps a lot. Especially after the treatments.” She patted his feet. “He's so glad you've come. We've been waiting, hoping you'd get his letters.”

“Don't go into town much these days. Sometimes forget to check my mail.”

Sandy turned her attention to the
TV
, finished her cup of tea, then left to go grocery shopping. Alvin snored faintly. I sat alone with him, took his hand, dry and chapped, skin brittle from years of oil paints and turpentine.