The Rest is Silence (10 page)

Benny worked all morning without distraction. Leach had asked her to begin her graduate work by investigating structural changes in genes of bacteria that had been cultured for long periods in unusual environments. His lab had published papers on the acquired ability of bacteria to digest toxic man-made compounds. He had already discovered strains of
Pseudomonas
capable of eating dioxins, chlorophenols, and the building blocks of the simplest plastics, such as nylon. He wanted to expand that list to include more complex plastics. To this end, Benny grew bacteria in liquid medium in Erlenmeyer flasks in which the only source of carbon and nitrogen were plastic polymers. Only those bacteria that mutated to become capable of metabolizing the plastics would survive. She sped up the process by exposing her bacterial cultures to mitogens to induce mutations, genomic rearrangements, and gene duplications.

In late afternoon she left the lab and bought a falafel from a Lebanese place on 70th. She took it to the corner, where she sat in the sun on a wall above the sidewalk. She peeled back the wax paper and ate while the crowd passed by. A jackhammer blitzed pavement somewhere nearby and horns announced another blocked intersection. A house sparrow hopped on the concrete near her, finding scraps of sandwiches. On her way back to her lab she met Leroy in the foyer going home for the night. They stopped in front of the bust of George Papanicolaou, the school's Nobel laureate, inventor of the Pap test. As had been the habit of hundreds of students wishing for good luck before their exams, Leroy reached down to rub his bald bronze pate. He was going out for dinner at a Spanish restaurant in their neighbourhood and invited her along.

She couldn't; she had an incubation to deal with. She wanted to purify a DNA fragment containing an amide-digesting enzyme gene.

Other than the freezers humming in the hallway, the lab was quiet. Benny was able to read at her desk while she waited on the plasmid DNA to be cleaved by the restriction endonucleases. She loaded a few millilitres of the reaction into an agarose gel and turned on the current. The electrophoresis would separate the DNA fragments according to size, allowing her to purify the one containing the enzyme gene.

When she was done she walked around the block and stopped on the sidewalk as a woman threw her lover's possessions at him from a third-floor window. He called up to her, begging her to be reasonable. Instead, the woman hurled one projectile after another, silent fluttering invective that made its way to the ground. Books, clothes, a toothbrush. A bag of his papers caught in the tree outside the window.

“How am I supposed to get that out of the tree?”

She unspooled a cassette and threw the tape out. It also caught on a branch and tangled in the tree.

“Ain't love a bitch?”

It was Leroy. He was with three friends, medical students. They were going home. She slid her arm into his.

“Come with me.”

He waved to his friends, and Benny walked him back to the entrance of the school. They took an elevator that only went to the twenty-third floor. The last three flights were accessible by stairs and were empty. There were no offices, and the only sounds were mechanical, fans and water in pipes and their footsteps echoing off the walls. The floors were covered in a layer of dust, scraps of wood and paper, discarded coffee cups.

On the twenty-sixth floor they stepped out onto a tennis court and into the night. On the three sides of the court ahead of them, the walls rose five feet, like the turret of a castle. There was a net covering the court to prevent balls from flying over the parapet and down to the streets below. They walked across the empty court to the east side, where the lights of Queens shone beyond East River. A bench rested against the wall and they stepped onto it to look over the edge. Far below, a tug boat plied the river.

“Hey,” Benny said, pointing at it. “It's Little Toot.
Toot, toot
.” Right on cue the tug tooted its bass horn two times as if in response. They looked at each other and laughed. She leaned her back against the wall and gazed up. A few brave stars winked at them.

“I come here every Friday night,” she said.

“By yourself?”

“My roommate came up with me a couple of times when we first discovered it, but it creeps her out.”

“You're not scared?”

“Of what?”

“It's dark. There's no one around.”

“That's why I come up here.” She pointed below them. “All those cars, and we can barely hear them.” At that distance, the lights on FDR Drive moved slowly. “To see so much and barely any noise.” A plastic shopping bag flapped by them on an updraft. “Low-density polyethylene.”

“You're obsessed.”

“It's one of the simplest polymers that exists. Once it's digested, all that's left is carbon dioxide and water. We'll make them literally evaporate.”

“But if you get rid of bags what will replace them?”

“What did we use before plastic?”

They were silent then, leaning on the wall and looking out at the horizon. She seized his hand.

“There was a reason I thought you'd like it up here, and it wasn't to bore you about plastic.”

She pulled him across the court to the south side of the building. There was another bench and they climbed onto it together. Spread out before them were the beautiful buildings she was in awe of. The Citicorp building on stilts with its beam of light cast heavenward. The Empire State Building, shining pinstripe blue and white in honour of the Yankees winning the ALCS that afternoon. And the one she liked best, the Chrysler Building, a corporate cathedral with its spire piercing the sky and gargoyles made of car parts. She let go of his hand and pulled herself halfway over the wall, pivoting on her hips, so that she could see the roof of a lower portion of the hospital and, through a gap between buildings, a slice of the traffic on York Avenue. She pointed down. He shook his head. She jabbed at the air again. Three floors below and built of twigs and grass on a small ledge.

“Peregrine falcons,” she said. “They breed them upstate in Ithaca. This one was released on Mount Desert Island and damned if the silly bugger didn't fly here.”

“They're beautiful,” he said. “I remember a hawk, swooping down on the chickadees on our feeder. But I've never seen a falcon.”

They descended to the street and walked home. Once in their building, Leroy headed for the elevator. She touched his arm and steered him toward the stairs. She attacked the stairs, two at a time, and was a flight ahead of him by the time he figured out what was happening. He took her charge as a challenge and caught up to her by the fourth floor. They were both winded by the time they got to their floor. They walked to the door of the apartment she shared with her roommate, Annika. He leaned in to kiss her and she turned her head so his lips landed on her cheek. He said goodnight and turned to go to his room.

11

Margaretsville

I have spent the day at Art's talking, eating lunch, bringing in firewood. He offers to let me spend the night on his couch. He pulls a sleeping bag from the cupboard, finds an extra pillow. The moon is huge and the trees drop their shadows onto the blue snow as if each of them has stepped out of a skirt that now lies around their feet. Talking aloud about Benny has tired me, and I long for the cold air to invigorate my lungs. But it's the thought of my tent, buried in white, that has kept me at Art's all day. He stands leaning against the door jamb as I unroll the sleeping bag on his couch.

“Louise loves to ski.”

“They'll get the roads plowed soon.”

He isn't listening.

“She's so graceful on skis. The nurses look at her and see the sparkle in her eyes. They tell me they know she's still there.”

I have learned from the short time I've spent with him that it's best not to say anything. If you start asking questions or give him your opinion on the matter he either gets lost or shuts up. I know he needs to get where he wants to go with this.

“When she started to lose her memory it wasn't obvious. She'd leave one of the burners on after pulling the pot off. Or she'd go into the garden on a rainy day and leave the front door open. ‘Put wood in the hole,' I'd shout after her. She had always been the one reminding me to close that door. Then she'd look at me all confused and say she was sorry, and I'd regret barking at her. Life's a bugger sometimes.”

I nod.

He wipes his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, pretending he is weary. “I've gotta get some sleep.”

He turns and leaves the room. The heat makes me drowsy, but I can't yet sleep. There are so many things I still can't understand.

*

My first trip to Nova Scotia, August 1985

As much as I liked gardening with my father, it took forever for the middle of August to arrive so we could go to Nova Scotia. When it did, my sleeping bag and bathing suit had been packed for three weeks by the end of my bed.

It was the peak of summer, and as we drove across Maine, the smell of freshly spread manure was everywhere. We had all four windows rolled down, the hot summer air pouring in, and the smell from the fields filling the car. Dad inhaled the rich pong of soil fertility through his nostrils. We crossed the bridge onto Mount Desert Island, under which the water was rushing out to sea, and drove to Bar Harbor. There we sailed on the
Bluenose
to Yarmouth. The first night in Nova Scotia we stayed at a campsite on the edge of a lake. I asked him why he always took the site the wardens assigned to us. We never looked around to see which site we wanted. He said that if he were a pioneer he would take the first piece of land he came to. He wouldn't keep walking over the next hill to see if it was any better.

The next day everyone started leaving the campground. Dad asked another camper why they were leaving, and she told us that a hurricane was sweeping up the coast. My father was the kind of father who looked at that as an adventure. Good thing Mom wasn't there.

The winds picked up long before the storm arrived, whipping the lake's surface into whitecaps. He put me in our small inflatable raft, tethered it to a tree onshore, and watched me ride the waves. I was laughing as the raft went up and down and spun around in the wind. We went to sleep that night anxious and excited, the tent tied to the spruce trees in the campsite. The wind pushed the trees around all night until I thought they would split, but there was little rain.

I woke first, as usual, and was looking down on him when he opened his eyes. Sunshine and the shadows of leafy branches fell on the canvas. I whispered, dramatically, “We're alive!” He loved that joke. He said it cured him of any doubt that I'd take to camping.

We drove along the coast by Digby. When Dad stopped at the side of the highway to pee a little beyond Annapolis Royal, he collected seeds from the pods of desiccated lupines to sow in our garden at home. Our destination that day was Middleton, the town Dad was born in. After his father died at Dieppe, my grandmother took him to live with her sister on a farm. He tried to find the house, but he had little information to go on. We found a museum that had genealogical archives and found a record for his father, Stuart, living on School Street. The house was one block from the museum. Dad held my hand as he looked at where he'd once lived.

We spent the night in a private campground on the banks of the Annapolis River. There was a caged raccoon by the campground office. It was pacing back and forth and it had a mangy, greasy coat. Dad told me he thought it was some sort of attraction. I cried when we left the office.

All that afternoon I could think of nothing but how to get back to that cage without getting caught. It was my birthday. At the river we swam, and I played on its muddy bank. We went to The Big Scoop for supper and I got to have a milkshake and a piece of cake. On the drive back to the campsite my arms and legs were gimpy and Dad joked that I was in a sugar coma.

That night I told Dad I had to pee and climbed out of the tent. The arc lamp by the office shone yellow light onto the grass in the field. Thousands of moths and other insects circled the light. The only sounds were the hum of the lamp and the continual ding when one of them bounced off the metal dome. I jogged across the field to the office. The building was dark. A dog growled in the yard as I unwound the wire holding the raccoon's cage door shut. The raccoon hissed at me with what strength it had left. I backed up, cajoling it in a whisper, and gradually it moved toward the opening. It scurried out and made for the nearest tree. The dog barked and came running to the end of its rattling chain. The raccoon went up the tree and clung to a branch to look down at me with its bandit eyes. I skulked into the shadow that the building threw and waited. The dog lost interest, sniffed its way back to the office porch, circled once around, and flopped down. The raccoon climbed backwards down the trunk and waddled off into the woods.

I peed on the grass and then returned to the tent.

“What took you so long?” Dad murmured.

I told him I was looking at the stars. I hated to lie to him, but I knew that nobody should find out I had let the raccoon go. I had learned that keeping a secret meant telling not even those you trust.

Dad looked puzzled when he saw the open cage the next morning as we checked out. I avoided his eyes while he paid the owner of the campground, who was annoyed that someone had let his raccoon go.

In the car Dad said, “It's true what he said. It's no different than stealing or breaking a window on purpose.”

“I'm glad it was set free. What's wrong with that?”

“It's not wrong, Bean. But it's against the law. If everybody did what they thought was right, we'd be living in chaos.”

“Then I'd like to be living in chaos.”

He laughed and reached across to squeeze my knee until I squealed.

We drove up to Cape Breton. There were dirty-faced kids on the side of the road, begging for candy when they saw our licence plates. We camped in the Highlands and hiked in stunted spruce forests. When it came time to head south again, I didn't want to leave. This happened to me whenever we packed up our tent and headed home. I would not be able to sleep on the ground, go to bed as soon as it got dark and sleep under the stars, or listen to the creeping noises on the other side of the thin canvas walls for a whole year. That year the longing was more profound. Part of me thinks we would have done well to stay instead of driving back onto the ferry in Yarmouth.

In September I helped weed the flower bed on the south side of the house. We pulled out dandelions and grass from around the peonies and cleared an area for the lupine seeds we had brought back from Nova Scotia. Dad hoped they would sprout and grow enough before the fall to have a head start the next spring. I pushed a stake into the ground to mark the spot. In the vegetable garden there were still weeks of tomatoes and beans. We harvested the onions and potatoes late that month and stored them in a cool part of our basement. We also severed the pumpkins from their vines and put them in our garage, not only to beat the first hard frost, but to protect them from vandals.

On October 31 I hauled one of those pumpkins out of the darkness of the garage when I came home from school. Dad spread newspaper on the kitchen counter and I carved it for Halloween.

“Come here,” he said.

He stood at the sink, looking out the window at the bird feeder. We kept millet and sunflower seeds in a green metal bucket in the garage, and each winter day one of us took a yogourt container out to the birds. I got up from the stool and stood behind him. A pair of cardinals was perched on the feeder. The red of him, his proud crest. She was paler, as if the red had been washed out. The male passed a sunflower seed to the female, from beak to rosy beak. When she flew off, he followed.

The next summer he and I drove to the sandy shore of Lake Ontario in Upstate New York. There were willows lining the dunes and a flat expanse of grey water all the way to the horizon. A little farther back from shore poplar leaves fluttered in the heat. I was barefoot for two weeks, pressing sand between my toes, grinding my arches and heels into it, pouring handfuls of warm sand on top of my feet as we lay in the sun. By late afternoon each day the beaches were covered for miles with silver fish rotting under the blue sky. The next morning, by the time we arrived to swim and play Frisbee, all that was left were parallel lines in the sand, as if a giant with a hundred fingers had grated the beach in the night. Dad wanted to know what happened to the fish, so we rose early one morning and went to the beach. A man was in the gentle waves soaping his torso, calling to his wife that the bar of soap floated as she had told him it would.

The alewives, six inches long, lay motionless against the sand, their eyes looking up at the sky while flies landed on them. Farm tractors descended on the beach pulling rakes behind them, dragging the fish into piles that were shovelled into garbage trucks and hauled away. It might have been one of nature's cycles that killed them; at the time I didn't know.

The banging of the poker in the wood stove wakes me. Art is piling the coals in the centre and adding some kindling to get the day's fire going. He offers me breakfast, which we eat in a hurry as he sees that the road has been plowed. He gives me a lift up the road on his way to see Louise.

Lily Lake Road has not been plowed, so I strap on the snowshoes and climb the hill. When I pass between the two ash trees into my clearing I feel as alone as I have since I arrived here.

12

Lily Lake Road

In March I get a letter from Lina, who is staying with her grandmother in Quebec. The envelope is addressed to me at “Forest Garden.” She's christened the land, and I like the name. She admires me for what I'm doing and asks if she can live here for the summer. I want to contact her immediately, but that is not as simple as it used to be. It's still possible to email, phone, even take a plane on a whim, but at a cost inversely proportional to their availability. Because there are so few computers left, nobody emails anymore except under urgent circumstances. The one government e-pod in town is expensive and books a week in advance. I write her a long note, saying yes among much else, and bike through a cold rain into Middleton later that morning to mail it. At least Canada Post hasn't changed.

My winter work is done, but there is April to get through before I can plant outdoors. I'm waiting for the thaw and the blackflies. I read homesteading books and write in my journal.

*

The end of my childhood, 1989-1990

I still felt like a kid the day Dad and I left for our camping trip the summer I turned fourteen. I settled into the passenger seat, as comfortable and eager as I had been previous summers, then swivelled to wave at Mom through the rear window. She stood on the driveway by the garage, wiping her eyes. We pulled onto the street and she turned back into the house. In that moment something sleeping awoke within me. I thought, for the first time,
She doesn't really want me
. She had never seemed that interested, and I wondered if she thought something was wrong with me. I turned back to face the front. Dad's profile was expressionless, his lips set, his eyes looking forward. I put on my seatbelt.

We took two days to get to Maine. By the time we arrived at the state campground on Moosehead Lake I had more or less put aside my worries about my mother. On the night of my birthday I opened the gifts he had for me as well as the one Mom had sent with us. Hers was wrapped beautifully in orange tissue paper, with a blue ribbon tied in a bow around it.
Middlemarch
. It was a thick, softcover book, and its heft made me happy. Heavy going for a teenager, but I liked that she thought I could read it. Her inscription was a mystery though.

It is Dorothea Brooke that I identify with. Do not squander your intelligence and invention on a too domestic life as she did.

After supper, we put on our bathing suits and drove to the beach on the lake. On the way, we tried to phone her from the pay phone at the check-in, but she didn't answer. At the beach, the air was cool and the sky black. The car's headlights shone on the shallow water near shore, the light disappearing into the murk in the middle of the lake. We waded in, and once we were immersed, the cool night air, by a trick of physics, my father explained, made the lake water feel warmer than it had earlier in the day. Everything was relative, he explained, and depended on its opposite for definition, as the languid sunny day we had spent fishing in the lake from a canoe contrasted with that cool night.