The Rest is Silence (9 page)

It was a two-hour drive from home, and it was dark before we got there. As we approached the campground it began to pour. We sat in the car as sheets of rain washed over the windshield like we were in a car wash. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun. We set up the tent and got in our sleeping bags.

The next morning I woke to the sound of poplar and cottonwood leaves rustling in the little breeze there was, sounding like water. Waves broke on the sand dunes not far from where we lay. A bird sang into the space between the leaves, clean and pure as the blueness of the sky.

Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.

Dad said it was the white-throated sparrow welcoming us. I ran up and down the beach, swam in the gentle waves. I lay on my stomach, pressing my hips and knees into the sand, enjoying the warmth of the sun on my back. The cool onshore breeze masked the intensity of the sun. This was before we learned about sunscreen and the ozone layer disappearing, and by suppertime my skin was pink. Dad said I looked like a lobster. By the time I was in my sleeping bag the itching on my back was crazy-making.

We stayed out of the sun after that and hiked in the woods. My father bought me a set of watercolours and paper, and I painted birds we saw. An oriole, seagulls by the lake, and a white-throated sparrow.

Running home from school, Spring 1985

It wasn't as if we tried to exclude Mom from what we did. The inflexibility of a triangle, especially in a family like ours, meant that one of us always felt left out. More often than not it was Mom, since she wasn't interested in the things Dad and I were. She liked being inside, reading, and she painted sometimes. She had worked as an artist's assistant when she was a teenager. When I was an infant she used our den as a painting studio. I liked this because it was something she and I did together when I was young. Over time my toys filled up the space in the den, and when we got a TV for the room, her easel went into the closet and she stopped painting.

They should have had another kid. It might have saved them.

On Saturday afternoons Dad and I built things. The spring I was nine I wanted to enter the science fair at school with an astronomy project. He bought me a telescope, and we sat on the patio at night, all the lights in the house turned off, and looked at the moon's craters and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. He helped me build a planetarium in our living room for the fair. We superimposed a star map over a piece of cardboard and poked holes at the location of all the largest stars. This was mounted on the rotor from our barbecue and a light bulb was connected behind it to project the stars onto the ceiling. He told me that this was an inversion of how Stone Age people viewed the night sky. They imagined it was an opaque dome with holes poked through it and a light shining behind it.

There is one spring morning I remember when I ran home from school for lunch. After the long winter of streets and driveways never being clear it was wonderful to be running on dry ground. It was sunny and warm, and I wore the green sweater Mom had knitted me, with the zipper undone. I wore sneakers instead of clunky boots, and I was so light that I floated as if I could fly, in love with life. I was brushed by the warm breeze, the smell of lilacs on the breeze, and robin's song. I glided over the grass, breathing in the fragrant air on my way home. I ran at the fence, thrust my right foot into the mesh, levered my left onto the top, pulled up, crouched, and jumped to the ground on the other side. I passed lilac bushes on the way and plucked a few purple and white sprays to take to my mother. Our lawn was covered with dandelions. Yellow disks everywhere on a sea of green. I picked some of these too.

“We won't keep these,” she said, separating out the dandelions and throwing them in the garbage. “They'll just wilt.”

She reached into the cupboard for a drinking glass, half-filled it with water from the kitchen tap, and put the lilacs in it. She placed it on the windowsill above the sink.

Gardening, 1985

The days had begun their descent into the heat and humidity of summer. Our vegetable garden was in the backyard beyond the patch of grass we turned into a skating rink in winter. It was bordered on three sides by Scotch pines with their scales of bark, sharp needles, and branches growing in angled paths. The garden was open to the south. The clay soil was heavy to dig, sticking in clumps to the rusted blade of the shovel. The last weekend in May was the official start to the gardening season. There was no peace on the day Dad took our archaic Rototiller from its resting place in the garage for its annual senile perambulation. It was a wheezy old asthmatic, belching blue smoke, hacking and coughing as he clutched the handles and guided it around the garden. I stood in the shade under the pines, certain that it was the sort of diseased vagrant that should not be polluting the soil and air of our garden. My dad's biceps bulged in his short-sleeved buttoned shirt and his whole torso shook from steadying the vibrating machine. Sweat dripped from his brow onto the white headband he wore. As he circled, he stopped to pull his rubber boots out of the muck and wipe his brow with a handkerchief pulled from his back pocket.

Once it was tilled — except for the asparagus patch and the raspberries — I joined him to plant the seeds. Beans, potatoes, carrots, and pumpkins. We transplanted tomatoes that had been started indoors, weeded and harvested the asparagus for dinner, and propped up the raspberry canes after cutting out the previous year's growth.

We weeded around the tulips in the triangular bed at the end of the driveway, as well as among the roses and peonies under the pines that grew along the side of our property. Once the tulips had died back, we dug them up and stored them in boxes in the garage and transplanted petunias and a clematis in the centre, to climb up the light standard.

All that summer we gardened in the mornings before it got too hot and then again after supper. Mom didn't like to weed or harvest, but she did like to cook the produce, serving us summer meals of yellow beans, new potatoes, and tomatoes. She liked to pick raspberries for our dessert but didn't eat any herself then, saying she had her dessert while she was picking.

For Dad's birthday my mother helped me buy an apple tree and we planted it near the edge of our yard, out of the way of where we built the rink. Its leaves were lush, but it had already bloomed in spring and wouldn't bear fruit that year. I like that she did that for me; one of the few memories I have of her that makes me smile.

It was that summer that Dad promised to take me to Nova Scotia.

I wake in the night. The coyotes are howling deep in the woods to the north. Perhaps I should get a rifle. Art could teach me to hunt and I might sleep better with it in the tent on nights like this. The image of the two of us, each sleeping with a rifle beside us as our only company, makes me laugh.

9

Lily Lake Road

The autumn here was gorgeous. Little rain until mid-November, lots of time to walk in the woods, put the garden to bed, and read in my tent. But the snow came before Christmas and was followed by rain. Then more snow. It's been a hard winter and it's only January 26. Jenifer was insisting that I move in with them for the winter, but I have to prove to myself that I can do this.

I haven't seen Art since that night in October and have spent most of my days alone here. Another storm has landed on us. This time there is no wind. I wake up from a good night's sleep to a hush and darkness everywhere except at the top of my tent, where wan light illuminates the canvas. I unzip the door to a wall of snow. I pull on pants over my long johns, then snow pants and the rest of my gear, and push my way out. I have gotten by this winter without a shovel but was wrong to assume my luck would continue. I trudge through thigh-deep drifts to Martin and Jen's to borrow one from them.

“Go in,” Martin calls from beside the shed, where he's splitting firewood. “Jen's in the kitchen.”

Their power is out again and she's cooking soup on top of the wood stove. Martin comes in, stamping snow from his boots before dumping an armload of maple and birch in the woodbox. It sounds like a house of children's blocks tumbling down. I face my palms toward the heat radiating off the cast iron.

“Caught with your pants down again, eh?”

Jen rolls her eyes at her husband.

“Can I borrow a shovel?”

“It's January! Were you going to wait until the snow in March?”

“There's an extra one hanging in the shed,” Jen tells me.

“Don't take the red one,” Martin yells after me once I am through the door.

I wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the shed. The door opens again, then slams shut. It's Jen, wearing her green down vest and a red-and-white striped wool hat.

“You can use these too.” She pulls a pair of snowshoes from a nail on the wall. “They're mine.”

It takes most of the morning to dig out my tent and a path to the road. The road itself won't be plowed for days. There is nothing more to do here, and the thought of spending the day in my sleeping bag in that dark tent discourages me. I decide to visit Art and exchange some shovelling for a few hours in front of his wood stove. I strap on the snowshoes. They take some getting used to, and slogging through three feet of snow isn't the best way to learn. I am sweaty and tired by the time I arrive at Art's door two hours later.

Smoke rises straight from his chimney into the bright sky. He has shovelled a path from his door to the shed and to the chicken coop. He meets me at his side door.

“Go see if there's any eggs, will ya? It may be too early, but all this snow's thrown the old girls off their schedule.”

I am glad to take the snowshoes off and be walking on the shovelled path. The henhouse is dark because of the piles of snow that cover the windows. I was in here once before, with Art, in the fall, to clip the hens' wings at night. They had been roosting and didn't fuss when we picked them up. I held the left wing out and Art clipped the ends of the primary feathers near the tip with scissors. He insisted it didn't hurt them, but the way they squawked and fluttered, I had to wonder. Just one wing each. They could fly short distances but at a wonky angle that made me laugh.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I make out a few of the hens standing on rails. The darkness obscures the laying boxes, and I can't tell if they're occupied. I blindly slide my hand into each one and hope not to get pecked. The hens are docile, the feathers of their warm breasts light and soft as my fingers find each egg. I collect five and leave the coop into the glare of sun on snow. A flash of red passes by in the air in front of me and lands in a white birch. It's a male cardinal, rare here even in summer, and this is the first one I've seen in winter. His stark feathers against the bark and snow make him look like a target, as if he is already wounded and bleeding.

“What do the roads look like?” Art says.

“It'll be a couple of days at least.”

He shakes his head in disgust. Inside the house, I sit beside the wood stove in the kitchen while Art scrambles the eggs for us.

“Damn snow. There's no way to reach Louise's house. My phone's dead.”

Louise's house
. Conjures up an old woman in a cottage with a blanket across her knees, knitting. It's a half-hour drive in good weather to the nursing home in Bridgetown. Art has made that trip every day since she moved there until this storm hit.

“She always likes to go to chapel on Sundays to sing. She'll be wondering where I am.”

From what he's told me she will be wondering no such thing. “They'll tell her why you aren't coming.”

After ten minutes of chewing eggs and toast and slurping coffee, he raises an eyebrow and says, “Well, Mother Nature, that bitch, has given you a captive audience. If you wanna talk, go ahead.”

It's true, we aren't going anywhere. There is enough firewood cut and stacked to last at least two winters, the days are as short for work as they will ever be, and the two of us are hanging on, alone at the edge of the world.

10

New York City

Now, a year and a half after receiving her acceptance to graduate school, Benny was in Leach's lab. She threw her cotton sweater over the back of the chair and grabbed her lab coat off a hook on the wall beside her desk. She put it on and rolled up each sleeve, halfway up her forearm so they wouldn't drag on the bench. On the shelf above her desk were binders of experimental notes, textbooks from her classes, the
Merck Manual
she had taken from her parents' bedroom, and the book that had got her to the lab in the first place,
Plastics: Their Chemistry and Uses
.

Her lab was joined to Nawthorn's by a swinging door she could see from her bench. It allowed the sharing of expensive equipment and reagents but did nothing to allay the tension between the two principal investigators. Nawthorn, a full professor, had come to research out of a love for experimentation and a curiosity for discovery. Deep in Leach's past there may have been a similar motivation, but it had been buried under years of striving for success. He was an associate professor trying to make his fame. It was Nawthorn who harboured the bulk of the animosity; Leach respected Nawthorn's abilities, if not his lack of business ambition. Leach, in his awkward way, was willing to be on good terms with everybody, though it turned out that not many liked him.