The Year of Broken Glass (17 page)

•

It's been over
three weeks since Ferris left and we haven't heard a word. He should have landed in Hawaii days ago, though this morning we awoke to news reports of a massive earthquake there now, too, so what to hope for? That he didn't make it in a safe and timely manner? That has its own potentially frightening implications.

The CBC reports that the lid has been blown right off the tallest mountain there, one of the volcanoes scientists had deemed dormant because it hasn't erupted in over 4,500 years. All I can hope for is that Ferris arrived safely, tended to his insane business, and was already on his way home by the time the eruption began last night. Poor Willow. I'll never forgive Ferris for not calling.

They've been talking all day on the radio about James Lovelock and Gaia's revenge and ridiculous stuff like that. It's just like people to cope with harsh realities with confabulations and self-delusion. By three in the afternoon I've had enough, I can't listen to another inane minute, so I decide to head down to the beach to find Willow. He spends most of his summer days there. It's heaven for him, out of school, out of doors, away from his parents' watchful eyes. He's a good kid, Willow, and I trust him to himself. One thing I can say for Ferris is that he's capable. Street smart and sea smart. It comes down to him from his grandfather, or so Ferris has told me, and it has come down to our son, too. I'm glad for it. He'll need it in the coming days. When things really do collapse. When things constrict. Which is to say, when it gets so incredibly difficult to be anything other than poor that the only dignified life for people of our class will be the one wholly outside of and completely non-dependent upon the urban system. This will occur in my son's lifetime, and so I leave him to roam as much as I can, to teach him independence, emotional self-reliance.

I find him down in the estuary of Halfmoon Creek building a dam in the intertidal zone out of old driftwood and rocks. There's a family of ducks drifting out in the bay, and there's a young mother, an Asian woman, and her baby, nursing on a drift log set into the sand above high water mark. “Hey Bub,” I say to get his attention. He works so diligently and intently at his projects, a bomb could go off and he wouldn't notice. (Hopefully a bomb never does go off…)

“Hi Anna,” he answers back. He gets this from Ferris, calling me by my first name. Ferris rarely refers to his parents as anything other than Cosmo—or Carl, if he's expressing anger or resentment at who his father was, something he did often before he quit drinking, and seldom does since—and Alexi-Lynne. Willow has followed suit. “What are you building?” I ask him, trying to pry his mind from his imagination. Selfishly, because the truth is without Ferris around I'm lonely. Arguing or not, his companionship in the evenings takes me away from myself, and without him here I've spent too much time alone.

“A dam, like the ones you're always talking about with Ferris. When I'm done I'm going to smash it.”

“Why would you do that?” I ask, already certain what his answer will be.

“Because that's what you always say we should do to them. That's the only hope.”

The only hope. Jesus. Ferris always says I'm going to turn Willow into some sort of eco-terrorist extremist talking the way I do, and I suppose here before me is his supporting evidence. Of course, eco-terrorism may be the only truly appropriate and courageous response to his world by the time Willow's an adult, but that's not a direction I want to lead him in. Truth is, I suspect it may be the only appropriate one now, though I'll confess also to being full of piss and vinegar when talking of such things, but a chickenshit when it comes down to brass tacks. I'm far too timid to actually act on any of it. I fight my fight with words and civil actions, without physical violence, because I ultimately agree with Ferris on this one point: you can't fight fire with fire, not when what you're fighting for is to put the fire out.

“I don't really mean that when I say it Bub, I'm just venting,” I respond to my son, but I can tell he's unconvinced. I suppose my rally-cries are a tad more persuasive than my recanting. Anger is a powerful passion. “Do you want to come up to the bakery with me for a cookie and a cool drink?” I propose, wanting to change the subject. Sometimes once a hole's been dug with children the best thing is to let time's detritus fill it in. At least that's what I tell myself when I'm stumped with Willow.

I take his hand as we start up the beach, but he quickly shakes it loose, running ahead toward the marram grass and flowering blackberry brambles above the rocks and sand. When we first moved here, when Willow was still an infant, I used to come down to the beach to sketch the old houses and the shoreline and sometimes Merry Island in the distance. That's when I still believed art had some transformative power, a position I've grown suspicious of over the past decade. There's no shortage of artists addressing the woes of the world now, nor has there ever been, but if that's contributed to its betterment it has obviously been in so small a way as to be negligible.

I come back to Joni Mitchell painting her post-apocalyptic paintings and singing her requiems for the earth, and for what? So some fans can convince themselves of the self-delusion that they're different because they choose her over Celine Dion or Madonna? Because her CDs come in cardboard packaging, because she cares. Obviously, I'm bitter. This world isn't the world I wanted or want, this world of cellphones and all-inclusives and rich artists building mansions on the beach. I suppose I hold the artists more accountable than most because art
should
be transformative, and if it's not it's because the artists haven't pushed themselves to the point of necessary transformation themselves. Ferris accuses me of self-exemption. He points to my computer and my internet connection and my car as evidence that, to scale, I'm no different. But that's naive. This
is
a war. The Poles on horseback stood no chance against the blitzkrieg. There is necessary weaponry, and there is luxury. There is a clear and easy distinction there, and Ferris's refusal of it comes from his own desire to legitimize his acquiescence, his cowardice, which in his heart of hearts I know he can't, and I know it's turning him slowly into one of those broken men, hiding from the world inside himself behind a patchwork of flimsy ideas that hold no water. Ferris's are like the clepsydra that hangs on the wall above his dresser, the one passed down from his father, given to Ferris by his mother on the tenth anniversary of Cosmo's death. One of those ancient clocks the Saxons used to keep time, a wooden bowl with lines carved into it and a tiny hole in the centre. They would set it floating in a basin, and as water entered the bowl the time was indicated by whatever line it had risen to. Eventually, of course, the bowl would sink, just as Ferris will, I mean figuratively, of course, and knock on the closest piece of wood I can find as I think it, a washed-up, sea-worn timber, as any fisherman's wife would.

•

One thing that's been good as a result of the quake has been the lack of tourists in town. Usually they're swarming this time of year. City-slickers in convertible beemers and on fancy motorbikes cruising around checking out the scenery and the real estate prospects. Usually the bay is busy with speedboats and water skiers. But it's been quiet these past few weeks, eerily like it was when we first moved here, as if the quake set the clock back a decade. Aside from some blown-out windows and a few fallen power poles there was little damage done to the area, so by physical appearance alone you'd almost think the quake hadn't occured. But the city's become a bottleneck that virtually nothing can pass through, so things have been altered insofar as supplies, primarily food, have been scarce. The bakery just reopened a few days back, and the general store's shelves are still relatively empty.

Willow and I each get a muffin—it's either that or strudel or a croissant—and the only drink available, a glass of water. The Asian woman and her baby are seated out at one of the two tables in front of the store, so we sit at the other. I say hello, and she responds with only a timid smile. Her baby's another matter, practically leaping at me from her lap, bursting at the seams, a wide grin across her face. She's got the dark Asian eyes and fair skin of her mother, aside from where it's been blemished dark red over the entire left side of her face. “What's wrong with her face?” Willow blurts out, indiscreetly. It's not like him to speak so insensitively, though he's picked up more and more of those types of behaviours over the past five years at public school.

It's another one of the repercussions we suffer as a result of Ferris buying his stupid crab boat. Who of our class spends $450,000 in their twenties on any business, let alone one as precarious as fishing? If things were different I'd home-school Willow, or send him to Waldorf down in Roberts Creek, but as things are I can't afford not to work and we can't afford the Waldorf tuition, so he's at Halfmoon Bay Elementary, and he has morphed into one of those kids who say inappropriate, even cruel things without thinking as a result. Like now, asking a perfect stranger what's wrong with her child. Some of the contractors' wives around here would lay right into Willow for it, but this woman very politely answers his very rude question.

“She has a birthmark,” she says. “She was born with it.”

Willow takes a bite of his muffin and then responds, his mouth half-full still. “Oh, I thought she was burned or something.”

“I'm sorry,” I interrupt, embarrassed by my son's lack of manners. “I'm Anna,” I continue, trying to change the subject. “And this little ruffian is Willow.” I tousle Willow's hair, hoping to illustrate that he is, after all, just a rascally kid.

“I'm Jin Su and this is Emily,” she replies, smiling a reassuring smile my way.

“She's very beautiful,” I say, and mean it. Her birthmark isn't ugly as you might expect, it's just different, and I for one find it stunning. It looks like the underside of a bird's wing outstretched in the wind. It's the type of diversity in humans and in the world I've grown to love. Not the kind built of artifice, of intention, but the organic kind. That which is as it is, beyond any conscious meddling or manipulation. This baby's birthmark is such a thing, and it's captivating. It seems to lift more of her to the surface, and she's obviously a boisterous and beautiful spirit. “I've only just noticed you around these past few weeks, since the quake. Are you staying with relatives or something?”

“With Svend,” she says, and I'm surprised.

“Svend is a good friend of ours. He's like an uncle to Willow.” Willow has taken his muffin and wandered across the road where he is climbing the retaining rocks of the steep embankment. “How do you know him?” I ask.

She takes a moment to answer my question, fussing around with her baby girl, repositioning her on her lap. “He
is
my uncle,” she says, again to my surprise.

“I didn't know Svend had any family in this part of the world?” I say, the question caught in my inflection.

“He doesn't,” she answers, and pauses as though to think again before speaking. “He didn't, until I found him. His eldest brother is my real father, but I didn't even know until a few months ago. I grew up in a Chinese family in Vancouver, but I was adopted. When I got pregnant with Emily I started looking into my real family, and I found my father. He lives in Norway. When he came to meet me last summer, he told me about Svend. We've been e-mailing ever since.”

“I met Svend's brother last summer. But he didn't say anything about you. We thought he was just here to visit Svend.” Emily starts clawing around at her mother's chest, so she puts her back on the milk. I flash a look across the street, but Willow is gone. Probably run up the trail across the road to the little waterfall he likes to climb in and under this time of year.

This Jin Su is quite stunning too, and I'm realizing talking to her that she's not as young as I'd assumed from a distance. She has fine, unlined skin, and eyes that don't show their age, but I can tell by the way she conducts herself, by her composure, that she's a woman of my age or older.

 
“Do you live in Vancouver now then?” I ask, though the answer is obvious. She explains to me in her soft voice how her apartment was ruined in the quake, and how she'd been trying to cross the city to get to her adopted parents' home, but by way of circumstances ended up coming on a boat here instead, landing at Svend's door. The baby drifts off to sleep on her mother's breast, to the lilt of her voice as she tells me her story.

“The boat you came up on,” I ask. “Who was driving it?” Again she takes her time answering, and this time it seems almost as if she doesn't know how to respond, so I ask her flat out. “Was it a guy with dark, curly hair named Ferris?”

“Yes,” she says. “I was trying to remember his name, and that was it, Ferris. I met him in the street below my building.” Ferris had said when he got home the night of the quake that he'd slept in his truck in a parking lot up by Queen Elizabeth Park. He'd said it was probably the only thing that saved him because there were no buildings around. He told me he stole a boat from one of the docks near Science World, but he had said nothing of any passengers, let alone a niece of Svend's. “I was crying in the street, holding Emily, and he came up to me and asked if I had anywhere to go. So I told him about my parents on the North Shore, and about Svend, and he told me he knew Svend and could take me to his house.”

I explain to her that Ferris is my husband, and Willow's father. “How is he?” she asks. “Have you heard from him?”

I respond to her only with a questioning look, not immediately understanding why or how she knows Ferris is gone.