Twenty-Six (39 page)

Meta is frozen in place, paralyzed as much by her fear of being suddenly discovered as by what she’s seeing.

The man has his face buried in Yuka’s neck. At first Meta thinks he might have his teeth clamped on Yuka’s flesh, but he turns his
head sideways to reveal his profile: pale white skin covered to just below the eyes with a thick black beard.

Yuka bends her neck up and looks at Meta. For less than a second, her face registers surprise. Then she lowers her head back to the floor, and her facial expression changes. As though to make clear to Meta exactly what is going on, she begins to speak in English: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” she cries.

Meta’s heart is racing ahead of her, she gulps air to keep up. She goes inside her own apartment and is suddenly clobbered by exhaustion. She’s been through too much today, and it is only mid-morning. She takes a bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator and sits at the table to drink it. Twice muffled, by her own door and then Meta’s, Yuka’s screaming is still audible. She switches on the radio to try to blot it out. The earthquake has thrown a few things out of place in her apartment. Some toiletries in the bathroom have been knocked off a shelf. Dishes that had been on the counter in the kitchen have fallen into the basin. She goes into the bedroom and slides the shoji closed. She takes off her clothes and crawls onto the futon, pulls the quilts over her head, but Yuka’s voice still reaches her. She lies for what seems like hours with “Gai! Gai! Gai!” echoing in her head. It is such a low sound now that it could almost be her imagination, her memory of having stood in the living room over the naked couple. It seems she’ll never be able to sleep, and then, suddenly, she wakes up.

Her doorbell is ringing.

She looks at the clock. It is two o’clock in the afternoon. She throws on some clothes and goes to the door, peers through the peephole, and sees Yuka, her body distorted, her head seemingly hundreds of metres above her feet.

Yuka comes in and sits at the table. Meta fills a pot with water and sparks the burner without saying anything.

“He’s gone,” Yuka says. Meta is sick of talking about this guy. Now that she’s finally laid eyes on him, and in such ridiculous and yet somehow terrifying circumstances, she wants to talk about him even less.

They sit in silence for a while, the pot beginning to rumble on the stove. Yuka is obviously there to talk about something, and Meta does not want the conversation to begin. She’s said enough about Yuka and her relationship to the man who beats her. She doesn’t want to say any more. Yuka’s very appearance now, in a flawlessly pressed pleated skirt and white blouse, seems a lie. It hides the fact that she’d spent the morning on her kitchen floor, howling like an animal.

“He went to Kyoto,” Yuka says.

“Kyoto,” Meta is surprised. She’s known people to go to Kyoto on holiday, but it is usually at Obon or Golden Week, two popular holiday times.

“He gave me letter.”

Meta takes a page of delicately patterned bone-coloured paper from Yuka’s hand. It is of a quality meant for traditional calligraphy work.

Dear Yuka
, it begins.

“He gave you this today?” Meta says.

Yuka nods.

“When does he leave?”

“He’s gone now. Maybe he’s on bullet train now.”

“Did you know he was thinking about going to Kyoto?”

Yuka shakes her head.

“Are you surprised by this?”

Yuka leans forward for emphasis. “
Very
surprised,” she says. “And about this letter.” She takes back the paper and scans it quickly, finds the sentence she wants, near the top. She turns the paper so Meta can read and points at the place where she wants her to look. It is the sentence that says,
I don’t know why I strike out at you
.

“What is this sentence mean?”

Meta glances back through the letter. She is so tired of the violence in Meta’s life that she does not even want to explain what “strike out at” means, but she feels relieved at least that this bully is leaving for a while.

“I’m glad he’s going away,” she says. “You deserve a holiday from him.”

T
he apartment is in a four-storey walk-up behind a supermarket on Quinpool Road in Halifax. It is directly across the hall from Colleen’s place, and looks out into the courtyard of the building, so that Jackie can let the girls outside to play and still keep an eye on them from the window.

It has been over a year since they’ve moved from Albion Mines, and almost a year that they’ve been in their own place. Kate is now settled in well to her new school, although the end of the last school year had been difficult. They’d moved in the middle of the year and the girls were still confused and angry over their father’s death. The publicity surrounding the explosion had put Kate on display among her classmates. Melanie has made friends with a little boy from down the hall, and attends daycare when Jackie and Colleen’s work schedules do not allow one or the other of them to take care of her. Colleen’s predictions of great sales figures for Jackie at Gregor’s have turned out to be optimistic, but Jackie likes the store’s management, and
she is able to make more money than she did in Pictou County.

It’s eleven o’clock on a Friday. The girls have been asleep in their room for hours. Christmas is on the way. Jackie has the tree set up in a corner of the living room, where she’s been watering it for days. But despite the girls’ begging, she refuses to decorate so early.

Colleen sits across from her at the kitchen table. There is a box in front of them, its lid on the floor at their feet. She and Colleen are both tipsy, a word that just moments before had them giggling when Colleen had used it. They’ve had a couple of eggnogs each, the kind the dairies sell in milk boxes around this time of year. They’ve spiked it with Captain Morgan rum.

Colleen found the box in a closet in the bathroom and brought it out as a joke. “Look at this!” she shouted at the first thing she found inside. It was a school photo of Jackie from Grade 8 or 9. It showed her hair feathered away from her face in the style that was popular at the time.

They both laughed at the picture, but Jackie is uneasy about digging through the box. A lot of what is inside is Arvel’s, and she is in no mood for tears at the moment. She has been focused on the present and the future since she’s moved to Halifax. The past is a place she is in no hurry to revisit. She has made a plan to bring the girls to their grandparents’ in Albion Mines right after Christmas Day and the commitment to make that trip has got her thinking she’ll have had more than enough of the past by the time New Year’s rolls around.

“Come on, let’s put this away,” she begs Colleen. She picks up the lid and makes a move to replace it over the box. When Colleen intercepts and puts the lid back on the floor, Jackie gives in and takes another sip of rum and eggnog. The mixture is rich
and cloying. She can feel her system getting clogged with it.

Colleen is poking through the contents of the box with an almost scientific mixture of indifference and intrigue.

“Birth certificate, confirmation,” she says. Her cheeks are flushed with the rum.

“Hmm … What’s this?” She flattens a newspaper clipping against a bare section of the tabletop.

Jackie recognizes the photo of Arvel and Santa. “Oh, come on, Colleen,” she says with some real frustration. “I don’t feel like going through this stuff.”

“Is this Arvel?”

Jackie sighs, slouches resignedly, nods. “It’s Arvel,” she says. “And take a look at Santa. I’m pretty sure that’s his father.”

Colleen looks intently at the photo.

“I don’t even think Arvel knew that was his father in the photo. I wonder if his family has a copy of this.”

“Unbelievable!” Colleen exclaims. She has already moved on to the next treasure. This one is a colour photo of Jackie on Melmerby Beach.

“Is this you?” Colleen asks. “You look amazing!”

Jackie snatches the photo away from Colleen. “You know damn well this is me! And don’t sound so surprised that I look good!”

This was Arvel’s photo, taken years ago. They must have been eighteen or nineteen at the time. They had gone to Melmerby Beach on Canada Day. She remembers Arvel taking the picture, and she remembers him almost gasping at it when it came back developed.

Like children, they had brought a bucket and shovels. Jackie remembers the two of them digging a big square hole in the sand. Arvel said, “This will be the foundation of our new house.” She
rested her cheek on the warm sand at the side of the hole and put a hand down into the moist coolness their digging had uncovered. “I want to live right here,” she said. And she had meant it. She did want to live there. Right there on that exact spot on Melmerby Beach. There had been crowds of people around all day, on the sand and in the water. But after supper, the beach cleared off. They found themselves alone, back on a remote patch of sand with no one else around. Arvel folded the blanket over them and they snuggled up together, face-to-face, lying on their sides. He pressed his hips into hers and she felt her whole body as a flame. She reached down into his trunks and put her hand on his penis. She pushed the crotch of her swimsuit aside and brought him gently inside her. They lay there for what seemed like hours. Each propped on an elbow, facing the other, moving together so slowly and gently and magically.

The sun went lower in the sky. The sand and sea went the same colour of spilled gold. Arvel got up, and she sank back into the sand and drifted off to sleep. She woke up with his voice calling to her. The waves were dark and foamy and the sky above them had turned a dark and solid unstained blue.

Arvel called her name again, but she could not see him. When she sat up and looked around, over her shoulder, she found him behind her in the sand, near the edge of a swath of coarse grass, the sun behind him. All she could see was his silhouette. He’d gone to the car and got the camera. He was asking her to smile. She put a hand up against the light, to shade her squinting, and he snapped the shutter.

She does look beautiful in the picture. Beautiful in a way she is sure she has not looked since. It is the beauty of innocence that the photo has captured. She had been lying in the sand foundations of
her dream house, and was now smiling not only for the camera, but for someone she loved.

Colleen must be able to tell from the expression on Jackie’s face that she’s in no mood for joking. She picks up the lid of the storage box and points at the word written there:
memories
.

“Let’s go out on the balcony,” Jackie says. She drops the picture back into the box and crosses to the sliding glass doors of the balcony.

They both stand coatless, sweaterless, in the cold air of winter. Below them, the building’s courtyard is lit with a sprinkling of snow. Directly across, a woman has neglected to draw the curtains on her bedroom window. They watch her shamelessly as she slips out of her clothes, pulls a warm-looking nightgown over her head, and turns off her light.

Jackie puts a hand on the iron railing of the balcony and waits for the cold of this night to push away the memory of that warm day so long ago. Memory seems a rotten trick to her. It’s unfair to be confronted now with these sweet thoughts when so much between her and Arvel had gone wrong since. What hurts most is knowing he went to his death unhappy, with their marriage a wreck. Though she knows it’s a stupid notion, she feels as though it was she who condemned him, sending him out of his own house as she did, just before he died.

She scans the windows of the apartments opposite, but all the windows are black.

“It’s freezing out here,” Colleen says. She puts an arm around Jackie’s shoulders and guides her back inside.