In the Land of Birdfishes (13 page)
I
GOT USED TO DAWSON
. I got so it seemed normal to sleep with the curtains pulled shut to keep the sun out. The long days stretched out and became long weeks, and every day I woke up and found I was still in Dawson.
Taking Stephan from my thoughts was a steady labour. I opened drawer after drawer in my heart, unfolded him, removed him. And what I found, as each night grew a little darker than the one before and he was all but gone from me, was that each drawer I emptied was now full with my sister. The not-being-there of her, the not-knowing of her. Her town, exhausted of her and yet gasping with her.
At first, I called our old home every night, though before I left my hotel room for the bar, I’d vow I wouldn’t. At the bar, I’d turn down the drinks I was offered, because I knew they’d only cloud my head and fill it with Stephan again. But later, on my way home, I’d pass the pay phone box and for a moment, I’d see him, somewhere far from where I stood, older than I’d ever imagined being and alone. I’d see him unlocking the door to come home to me. I’d see his suitcase in the closet again where it always had been.
A minute later I would find myself standing with the phone
in my hand and that unanswered ringing in my ears that came to haunt me, that crawled into my dreams at night to find me. After a couple weeks of this, I called a lawyer in Whitehorse. “I think I want a divorce,” I said. “Can you find him for me?” And then I gave the lawyer Stephan’s sister’s address and waited.
During the day, I had nothing much to do with my time, so I would sleep late like a teenager and then wander around town, looking for something I hadn’t seen yet. I tried to stay out of the way of the locals. Maybe people knew I was Jason’s aunt, or maybe it was because the town was so full of tourists that you didn’t have to hang around long to stand out, but I’d begun getting nods when I went places and I didn’t want them. I remembered a boy at the school for the blind I went to as a child. The boy was older than the other kids on his floor, but a bit slow or something. He’d get picked on even though he was bigger than the rest of them. They’d move the furniture in his room so he’d be disoriented. Once another girl and I were invited to sneak into the boys’ dorm and listen as the older boy dropped things and tripped, trying to find his way around his bedroom. I had the best vision of anyone at the school, and I could see the shape of him clearly, moving around in a room that had suddenly become a dark, formless antagonist. He became blind, again, in that room. I watched him trip against the edge of his bed, hesitate and turn, backing up and colliding with the wall in his confusion. After some time, the boy began to shuffle around with a kind of savage mistrust of the physical world. He would get pushed on the stairs. The boys would pour water on his full dinner plate. He lost the surprised look he’d had in the dorm that time. He came to look expectant—injured and defiant at the same time. And I
heard that he had begun to sleep with a staple gun in his hand. The girl who told me snickered as she said it, and I knew I was meant to find it absurd, such an inadequate weapon against a persecution that was only confirmed inevitable by his weapon choice. But instead it frightened me. I knew what it meant to him. The kind of hurt he dreamed of. Remembering it years later, as I sometimes did, it made me depressed as hell to think about. Some people had zero chance, right from the start. And here, walking around in Dawson, passing locals who began to nod grudgingly when I went by, something in their expressions reminded me of that boy, and I had the feeling I was living among people who slept holding staple guns. I looked away from their whipped-dog faces.
Still, there was something about this strange place. Those mountains, endless, and the clouds that hung over them, the green and the dirt and the endless plains, the endlessness of the world here, the wildflowers of all colours, the aloneness of everything. And I thought maybe I was getting it. Slowly, I got how you could come to love a place like this. It wasn’t a thing I could make sense of, but more like something I felt in me, somewhere so deep it was like climbing the stairs in the dark and you think there is one more step than there is and raise your foot, let it land where there’s nothing upon which to land, and in the searing flash of a moment before your foot finds the ground again, everything in you falls; you feel what it is to have your whole body know something, to have your head and your kidneys in conversation about the importance of what is happening to you. That was what it would feel like, I thought, to love a place like this.
At the end of each day, when I couldn’t bear the heat any longer, I’d go back to the hotel and nap until the sun had
dropped from the centre of the sky. And then, after dinner downstairs at the hotel, I’d show up at The Pit, as if it was a surprise every time to find Jason there. As if either of us had somewhere else to go.
“It’s growing on me,” I told him one night, shaking my head at Eloise as Jason signalled to her to bring us another round. I hadn’t finished my first drink and didn’t intend to have more than two. In this place, I’d learned, not getting drunk was a persistent, exacting task.
“What is?” he asked.
“Here,” I said. “This place.”
He shrugged and I thought he was going to turn sullen, but then a grin broke out across his face. “Dawson City?” he said.
“Sure.”
He tilted his head back and laughed, so sharp and loud the whole room took note. But the look on his face wasn’t bitter but gleeful. “Dawson City. Shit.” He took the beer Eloise slid toward him without a word. “What’s it, the scenery?”
I wondered if it was the kind of thing I could talk to him about, what it was like to look at those mountains, or that river. The way they made me feel was like the way I’d felt at home, so many years ago it would make me tired to count them, and never again till now. “Up here, it feels like you’re at the edge of something.”
He watched me. “Edge of what?”
“Maybe the world.” I swung my beer back into my mouth, reckless. “Like you might fall right off.”
He looked like he couldn’t decide if that made him mad or not. “People like you always say things like that. I’ll tell
you what it feels like. Feels like the goddamn middle of everything.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“The middle is where you end up if you don’t go anywhere.
You have to do something to get away from the middle.”
“You don’t like it here?”
“What would it be to not like it here, when this is the only damn place I’ve ever been.”
“Minnie said—”
“It was like she said. I tried to go other places, but I always end up back here. In the middle.”
I thought about that. “I was in Toronto, and people there thought they were in the middle of everything.”
“Those people.” He grinned. “Those people are so far over the edge, they went right over to the other side. I think about that place, or New York, wherever, these places you hear about that think we’re just a bunch of half-naked Indians running around in the woods and don’t know what century it is till one of them shows up to tell us, and I picture them and all those big, tall buildings hanging upside down from the other side of the world. If one of them were to show me where in a book it says the world is round, I’d say, ‘Bullshit, I’d believe you if you weren’t walking around on your head.’ You don’t believe me? They show up here in their buses or their big cars like buses, RVs with fucking bowling alleys in them, and they get out of their cars like this.” He turned around and mimed like he was walking around on his hands.
I started laughing and tried to pull him back in his chair, but he went right over, launched his feet into the air and was walking on his hands for a few steps before he crashed to the ground.
“Fuck, Jason,” said Eloise, squeezing past him with her tray held high to show how hard her job was. He just lay on the floor with his eyes closed, laughing wild as an animal.
“Come on,” I said, smiling, reaching my hand down to him, “come on up, Jason.”
He let me pull him up. “I swear to God. They get out of their cars like that. Fuck knows how they drive.”
I waited till he was quiet again and then I said, “I’m glad I came up here, Jason.”
He glanced up at me and then reached for his cigarettes. I didn’t know how to say it to him or even if I should. I’d been thinking about the stories he was telling me, and I was sure now of what I’d only worried at first. I didn’t know how to tell him that I knew how she had died. And because of my own mother, I knew how hard it would be for him to put words to it, to how he hadn’t been enough to keep her in the world. What it felt like to know you weren’t enough to live for. I started again. “If I’d known she wasn’t here, that it was only you, I’d have come anyway.”
He shrugged and turned his face away, making his mouth into an O and sending smoke rings in halos over our heads. And then I started thinking about Stephan. What was it about Jason that reminded me of him? I knew it was wrong, probably, to feel there was anything alike in my love for my husband and my sister’s son, but there was something there that I couldn’t put a name to. Something wrong with him that I was dying to forgive. “I don’t have any other family,” I said. “I guess you don’t either. Stephan thought I was crazy … when we were angry at each other, he’d always tell me I was crazy … or make me feel I was, or be afraid that I might be. I never was like other people. I don’t know what it is or was. My
eyes, or what happened to our mother”—I looked at him then, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes—”or our father, or the school I went to, or just something wrong with me. But I never fit with other people. I see other people laughing, talking so easily, and if I’m laughing or talking to them, I’m thinking, Can they tell that I’m not like them? What if they stop laughing first. Things like that, I’m thinking all the time. And that’s just kid stuff, right? Like everybody thinks that in high school or at some time. But I just never got so I felt like I could talk to another person without being afraid.”
“What about Stephan?”
“Stephan,” I said. I smiled. “Don’t you know what I mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but he was smiling too. “You sound pretty crazy to me.”
“You know what I want?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“I want you to take me to the—what do you call it? Where you work.”
“The claim,” he said. “That’s what we say.”
“I want you to take me to your claim,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I told you we’ll go sometime, and we will. But what are we doing tonight?”
I knew he knew that it was Angel’s concert tonight, the second-last show of the music festival that the locals had all done their best to avoid. I knew he was counting on me knowing it. He would wait for me to say we should go, he would make it something he was talked into. Maybe he would even skip it if I didn’t insist. And for a moment I thought about it, and how we could spend the rest of the night here in this bar if I let it happen. And then I saw Angel’s face, the way on her face hurt
didn’t look like surprise. It looked like a reminder. I thought of her face and how those calm, steady eyes of hers would look out from the stage and not be surprised to see he wasn’t there.
“We should go to Angel’s show,” I said at last. And he gave a long, slow nod, as he raised his full glass, with something like relief.
Somehow we got there early, or the concert started late. We found ourselves waiting in the gallery over the back of the church where Angel was scheduled to sing, and I could feel Jason getting restless and wanting to leave, hating the commitment that waiting for something proved. He’d left a seat between us, put his feet over the back of the chair in front of him and tilted his head back, his cigarette almost falling out of his mouth.
“Well, look who it is.” A tall man with thick grey eyebrows nested over bright blue eyes climbed into the gallery, taking the stairs two at a time and trailing a short, shrewd-looking woman. The man smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back; he had the kind of face that was altered all over by smiling, deep-set laugh lines vaulting from the corners of his eyes across his cheeks, meeting with the curve of his mouth in a crooked grin. “And I know who this is.” He reached out a hand and clapped mine closed in it. “Glad to meet you, Aileen. Peter here. I’m sure Jason has told you all about me.”
I could feel the energy in Jason shifting as he settled more comfortably into his chair. “Not a word.”
“Get your feet off that chair, boy,” Peter said, his tone teasing, but to my surprise Jason listened to him. “Jason works with me at my claim up the road.”
“He’s my boss.”
“I’ve known Jason for years. Knew your sister too.”
I nodded.
“I’m very sorry for your loss. A great loss.”
“Well,” I said and didn’t know what more to say.
“I’m Pat,” said the woman behind Peter. “Married to this one long enough to know I’ll grow old waiting for him to introduce me. I was very sad to hear what happened to your sister. A sad story, that one. Some lives are burdens, aren’t they. Maybe it’s wrong for me to say, but I wondered if it wasn’t a blessing that she passed. I don’t mean because she was blind, don’t misunderstand me. But she seemed picked out for unhappiness. It’s like that for some folks, isn’t it.”
“I don’t know,” I said coldly. I felt swarmed by her unanswerable questions. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with her and was embarrassed not to be. “I don’t know what it’s like for other people.”
“Watch your mouth,” Peter told his wife, but his tone was affectionate. “Not your place to talk about. It was a tragedy, no doubt about it.” Then he told Jason to move down so he could sit next to him, while Pat gave me a sharp look and took a seat beside me.
I turned to listen to the story Peter had begun telling Jason, but immediately felt a tap on my shoulder.
“You know,” Pat whispered, “we had a bear at the camp today.”
“The camp?”
She nodded, her tight, dyed red curls unmoving, as if they were sculpted onto her head. “We have a little cabin by the claim—we’re only here in the summer. Rest of the year, we have a house in Whitehorse. I was on my knees trying to
unclog the kitchen pipe today and then I stood up and what do I see but a grizzly sniffing around, maybe four feet over on the other side of the window.”