In the Land of Birdfishes (15 page)

Inch by inch the scaffolding beneath her sank. Each time she leapt and planted herself to the ground again, it wobbled farther. She seemed not to know or care, perhaps disoriented by her own music.

And then, suddenly, all at once she and everyone in the room seemed to see what was happening to her. Only the band was oblivious, thundering on through their song, while the
crowd stilled and waited for what now seemed inevitable. At first she held her fiddle in position though no longer playing, watching, wide-eyed, at us below. Then she lowered her fiddle and took a step backwards, but it was as if with that gesture, she gave a signal, and everything released.

In an instant, the scaffolding reached its tipping point and plunged to the floor in front of the stage. Someone, or everyone, screamed. And the fiddler disappeared.

At first they told us she was dead. Huddled outside the church, where we’d been ordered by the paramedics, we shared cigarettes and rumours. Then someone said that she had lived, but was in a coma and the six people she landed on were dead.

It was a deep blue night and the sun would soon give up and go back the other way again. I wandered the street, smoking a cigarette someone had given me and looking for Jason.

I thought that maybe he’d forgotten about me and felt sorry for myself. And then I thought of the fiddler and was ashamed. She’d looked so young. Maybe only twenty years old.

Suddenly I felt sick, and I threw my cigarette to the ground just as a hand clapped down on my shoulder, and I turned and Jason was there.

“Hello,” he said, and I burst into tears.

He stared at me. “What the hell.”

We stood with an arm’s length between us for a moment, him looking at me like I came from the moon, and me crying, my chin lowered almost to my chest, my arms loose at my sides. Crying like it was draining out of me.

And I didn’t know how to tell him that when that fiddler fell, it was like watching my own past come crashing to the
floor. How this girl had fallen right in front of me and I was standing on the street grieving my childhood. How she might be injured or dead and might be only twenty years old, and what was wrong with me that, even knowing that, I could think only of myself, of Mara and me in the basement of that stupid church with no clue that everything about to happen would hurl us here.

“This fucking town,” I said at last.

And with that, the worried, mildly annoyed expression rose up and left his face. “Yeah,” he said cheerfully. “Fuck this town.”

I wiped my eyes and looked around at everyone in the street, waiting for word from inside and trying, in their own ways, to comfort one another. And I thought for the second time that night that I understood why somebody would stay in a place like this.

“I was inside talking to a buddy of mine who’s a ranger,” Jason told me. “Girl’s got a broken wrist and maybe a sprained ankle. She’ll be fine. Violin’s toast.”

“She fell so far,” I said in wonder.

“She had a soft landing. Right into the mosh pit. Some of them won’t like waking up tomorrow, but nobody’s hurt too bad.”

“I want to go home,” I said, realizing it.

“I’ll walk you there.”

I looked up at him. “Jason?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t stay there forever. At that hotel.”

He frowned. “You want to go back to—”

“I want …” I cleared my throat. “I was wondering if I could stay with you. Just for a while.”

“You want to stay at my house.”

“Just until I get a job. I’m going to start looking this week. I’ll find something, and then I can get an apartment. But till then I’d be a good roommate. I’m a good cook,” I said. I was not a good cook.

“You want to stay with me.”

I shrugged. It had been a bad idea. I wondered if he would avoid me now, punish me for trying to draw him too close. I looked back at the church, so as not to look at him. In the window I could see people clearing up. I could see a woman standing by the window, like she was searching for something outside. I stared at her and she stared back. The features of her face were made obscure by the light of the sun, already rising again, hitting the window. It made her look like a ghost, an outline of someone not entirely there. “I wonder who’ll be blamed,” I said, to say something. “Who built the set on the stage. Whose fault it was.”

“My buddy said they never should have had a show like that at the church. Usually bands like that play the tent. But in the end nobody was hurt much. By next week, nobody’ll care.”

I wasn’t listening. The woman was still watching me from inside the church. I thought for a moment I recognized her. Something in her pale gold hair, her white, stricken face. I moved toward her and saw her features take shape, becoming more surely the person she could not possibly be.

“Jason,” I said softly. “Look at her.”

“Who?”

I pushed my way through the crowd till I stood before the window, looking for her that I’d always been looking for. It was her face. There at the window, looking back at me.
There, as the sun lifted into the sky, I saw the shadowy forms of people working in the church disappear, till all I could see was my reflection in the glass. And I saw her face.

I turned back to look at her son, who had not followed me. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, watching me, and I could see thoughts tumbling in his head, the push and pull of what he wanted or thought he did.

“Never mind,” I said, walking back to him. “I thought I saw someone. I was wrong.”

He didn’t answer for a moment. And then he said, “You’ll stay in her room.”

After we left, we stopped at the hotel and I paid while Jason carried out my suitcase. We walked the rest of the way in silence.

The house was a small clapboard two-storey, with peeling yellow paint and green wooden windows. The steps up onto the narrow veranda creaked under my weight, and I looked back at Jason, bent over beneath the weight of my suitcase, which he’d hoisted on his back. “So this is your home,” I said.

But as I opened the door and walked into a bright, open living room that connected to the kitchen, it hit me all at once that it wasn’t his home I’d asked to stay in but hers. In only the clutter, the indiscriminate collapse of one thing here or another there—a plastic mesh hat on a pot hook over the stove, a calendar from the Yukon National Bank tacked over the wooden chair by the door where he sat to pull off his boots when he came in—was there any sign of him or of a man like him. The rest was all white-painted wooden furniture, the tiny brown roses on the wallpaper, bits of cotton crochet like shed
exoskeletons prostrated over every surface. All of it was hers, her things, in her home.

No. That was wrong. I could not look for her in any of those things. I remembered that Mara would not have chosen the print on her wallpaper or the colour of her table and chairs. Some other person would have made those decisions. She wouldn’t have known the things she lived among except by their sounds and surfaces.

I looked again at the small efforts that had been made to make the room cozy or comfortable. Over the sagging frame of a door at the far end of the living room, there was a narrow shelf of coloured bottles. Wine bottles, beer bottles, liquor bottles. All different sizes and colours. Maybe in the afternoon, there was a brief hour when the sun could be seen directly through the window, and it would hit those bottles and maybe someone once had thought it lovely, the way those different pieces of glass glowed. Someone who had picked out the wallpaper and the furniture. Who had tried to make a home for his blind wife.

“Jason,” I said, “what about your father?”

He was pulling a couple of beers out of the fridge. “What?”

“Your father, were you close with him?”

He took two green plastic cups out of the cupboard and snapped the caps of the bottles off on the edge of the counter and then poured them into the cups. The beer made a longing, gulping sound that rose in pitch, almost gleeful, as it sucked and pulled air from the bottle.

“I think you know I wasn’t,” Jason said. He handed me a cup.

“I
don’t
know. Not really,” I said. “All I know is what you told me about how he died and … how he hurt her. But then why did she stay—did she love him that much?”

He drained about half the cup of beer. “She hated him,” he said.

“Because he hit her?”

“You wouldn’t have known it was possible for one person to hate another so much, but if you had, you wouldn’t have thought it would be a wife for a husband that could feel that way. I don’t know if I came to hating him on my own, or if it was just a habit I got into from watching her.”

“But why,” I asked. “Why did she stay with him?”

Jason stood up. “You see this chip off the edge of the table?”

I looked and there was a chunk missing from the end of one of the boards of the table, like someone had taken a bite out of it. A sheet of paint had torn off with it, and where it was left exposed, I could see the warm sheen of wood worn down by the oils on the hands of the people who had lived around it.

He said, “That’s where one time he tried to bring the blunt end of a splitting maul down on her. He missed that time. But most of the time he didn’t miss.”

I felt the place—where was it supposed to be? my brain? beneath the left pocket of my blouse?—where I should have known something to say or wonder, and it was mute and dumb as muscle and bone. When I spoke again, I had to look somewhere else, like it was out of my liver or my lungs that I found the question. “Because she was afraid? That’s why she didn’t leave him?”

Jason ran his hand back and forth along the table, its edge in the gulf between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know why people don’t leave things,” he said.

“Jason,” I said. “Jason, did he hit you?”

He said, “What do you think.” He said, “They had fights like they were fucking. It was the closest I got to seeing what it would look like if they’d loved each other, there was this heat in them, this way he’d look at her, as if he could hardly see anything else in the room. Sometimes if I got hurt it wasn’t even on purpose—sometimes he’d hurt me because he was so haunted with her and wanting to do her harm that he just didn’t notice I wasn’t her. He’d go at her with a fist like he thought he could just flatten her into nothing. Into not being there. Not being anything at all.”

I hated the wallpaper. I hated the bottles. I thought I shouldn’t live here after all, and Jason shouldn’t either. I thought we should just leave this town and take nothing with us. And now I understood why she had done it. It had been the only way she could leave. And she already knew that way of making an exit. “Jason, I know what happened to her,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“How she died.” I looked at him meaningfully but he wouldn’t return my gaze. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But it’s important you know”—I took a deep breath and told him what the psychologist Aunt Una had taken me to had said—”it wasn’t your fault and there isn’t anything, in the end, that can be done for other people except what they do for themselves. We can love them and support them, but that isn’t enough for some people. Some people need something more that’s meant to come from themselves, and for some reason they don’t have it. Do you understand?”

Jason said, “You think she killed herself?”

I didn’t know how to answer him. I was in the middle of realizing something. I’d been pulling Stephan out of drawers since I arrived, out of every thought and fear and desire and
grief I had, and I’d thought what was left was all the missingness of Mara. All her absence, all my guilt. But now I saw that I’d been wrong. It was Jason that was left. He was so full, he was bursting out of containment in my thoughts or care, and he was what I was full of. Not his needs, but my own, what I needed to be for him. What Stephan and perhaps even Mara had not needed from me.

Jason said, “Say something.” My mouth went looking for words and he looked at me then and said, “Say something.”

“Do you,” I asked, “do you have another story?”

He lowered his head. His hair was dirty and somehow much longer than when I’d met him, though it had not even been two months. It fell in pieces from a nucleus at the back of his head, where a coin-sized bit of bare skin showed, like a baby’s hair. “Can it be just a little one?” he asked.

I nodded. I was looking at the table and all the places where paint was scratched or scraped away.

“Okay,” he said. “You think you know what happened to her, but you don’t. I haven’t told you yet.”

My father’s people believe that if a pregnant woman dreams of a dead person, her child will inherit that person’s soul. Old Woman had wanted a child for so long. She no longer thought it was possible for her to have children. She was too old, and her husband had never given her a baby
.

Old Man had been angry with her for so long. He was tired of her face, the way it was always the same face in the morning that it had been in the evening. When she talked, she did not make him think of anything interesting. But it was not just her he was angry with. He had felt for a very long time that
a trick had been played on him. He had thought he invented the world. He had thought he was an important person. The man from the beginning of things. He thought he would be busy forever with the pride of having made the world. But the longer he lived, the less the world pleased him. The animals had less and less to say. Eventually they would not talk to him at all. And he had made men and women to play on the earth, but because they were mortal, they were often bored and they never lost a certain kind of doomed expression that depressed Old Man. And because he was depressed, he decided that winter would not leave the world. He prepared more snow than he had ever made before and he let it fall until the men and women and animals did not know what there was to the world that was not snow. They waited for summer to come, so they could take fish from the rivers again, and so the caribou would run, but summer did not come
.

At this time, Old Woman had a secret. She was with child. And so she did not mind anymore that her husband was melancholy and discourteous with her. And one night, as she slept with her head on the sea, as she often did, because it was such a soft place to rest her head, because even the frozen sea melted when Old Woman touched it, and her body between the sheets of snow, because the snow did not melt, not even when she touched it, she had a dream. She dreamt of long, green blades of grass that could cut your fingers. She dreamt of fireweed pushing up into a lit blue sky that did not darken for months. She dreamt of the quick water in the river full with salmon. She dreamt of the dumb, sad eyes of caribou
.