In the Land of Birdfishes (17 page)

It wasn’t true. I’d heard all I wanted to hear of Stephan, but I always shut up when she got to talking of him again. “That’s a lie.”

“It isn’t. You let me talk, I know that and I appreciate that. But it isn’t the same as listening. And I know you’re always so eager to start telling me your own things. I don’t feel I can get help from you.”

Faintly, I could hear someone moving upstairs. Aileen didn’t seem to notice, but I listened to the steps, which circled toward us till they were standing just over our heads and then retreated. “You think maybe if we talked, like you said, you wouldn’t want to call that guy anymore, you’d stop wanting to do that?”

She shrugged and snapped up the blind behind her and light flew into the room. “Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But it’s nice to talk.”

“So talk to me then. You want to talk about Stephan? Tell me about him. Why don’t you open the letter. What do you think it says?” I was listening harder for the steps upstairs than I was to her. But they didn’t move. The footsteps themselves were listening.

From across the table, she reached her hand out and took mine. Then she tipped back her head and rested it against the window. Light was coming in all around her, blazing around her face. She was hardly there, in the middle of all that light. I tried to take my hand from her, but she held it tight. “See this,” she said. “I don’t know that I ever took another person’s hand. It might be your mother’s hand was the last one I held. What a thing to think.”

She held it tight. “That’s a lie. You talk like you think I’m stupid. You telling me Stephan never held your hand?” She held it so tight.

“We weren’t like that,” she said shortly. “Stephan wasn’t … affectionate, not in an obvious way like that.”

“What kind of way was he?”

Light nipping away at the edge of her face and her hair. Her at the centre of all that light. Till she looked like someone else. “Well, one time I remember, while we were still in college, he turned the palm of his hand out toward me while we were walking, and made mine face his, so they were touching, but we didn’t reach for each other or move our fingers. So while we walked, our palms brushed against each other, just slightly, and with the rise and fall of every step I could feel that movement of him beside me, as if everything of him was there, in my hand, but only ever so lightly and just for a moment. He only did that once, but I never forgot it. Because it was how we always were. Separate—not dependent on each other like some couples, hanging on every word, calling every time we were apart, kissing every time we saw each other … but always that kind of closeness that was private and strange and our own, like a secret.”

I nodded, slowly. “I get that.”

“Well, I’m glad you do, because it boggles my mind, personally.”

“How?”

“Because a thing can look a lot like love, smell like love, talk like love. But maybe, in the end, if it hurts you or leaves you, you’re going to have to tell yourself, ‘Well, that wasn’t love.’”

“Why?”

“Because.” The sun was sliding past the window, and I could see half her face again, the line of it with the sky behind it, everything as it was, sharp and true as something carved there. Till she looked like
her
. “Because, Jason, he’s not going to come back. That was all I got.”

“You know, I think you should open that letter—”

“I told you, I’m not ready yet.”

“Well, when you are, you shouldn’t worry about me. Doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Thanks,” she said and stood up, pulling my empty plate away. “Was that any good?”

“Pretty awful,” I said, grinning. “But not you. You’re pretty great.”

She had her back to me at the sink, but even from there, I could feel her smiling. And the thing upstairs was silent, or maybe gone. “You remind me of him a little, you know.”

“I do? Of your husband?”

“Yeah, you do. I don’t know why. You’ve both—and I don’t mean any offence by this—you’ve both got something a little broken about you. A girl could go crazy trying to fix it.”

I didn’t mind that. “What do you mean.”

“Well, take Angel. You want to tell me she hasn’t lost half her mind already?”

I got up to grab another beer. “You sound like Minnie now.”

“Well, it’s cruel, Jason. To you, it maybe feels like something you can stop and start. But there’s nothing about the way she looks at you that knows any kind of stopping.”

“That’s not true.” I needed her to understand this, so I stood so close she had to turn the water off and look at me. I tried to tell her why she was wrong with my eyes. “You just
don’t understand how it is. Besides, she’s going around with John now.”

Aileen laughed, but her mouth wasn’t smiling. “I wonder if you’d take it so well if you didn’t know you could stop that any time you wanted. I’ve got this feeling she means more to you than you think.”

“Shut up,” I said, but tried to make it a joke. “You’ve got some mouth on you. Some big, dumb mouth.”

“It’s a funny thing,” she said, turning the tap back on, and I got out of her way. “Broken folks—and I guess I’m probably one too—don’t always look it. I’m an easy one, because you probably don’t have to look at me too hard to figure it out, and maybe that’s why people never take to me.”

“I take to you.”

She ignored me. “At first, I thought I loved Stephan because he was wholer than me, wholer than anyone else I knew. He looked clean as soap. Things
affected
him so much, but in a way that seemed good. Like he felt everything. But he didn’t get bungled up in it like I did. Because he could feel something so much, and then a moment later, he could think of something else. I thought that must be the right way to live. And then, when I figured out I was wrong and he wasn’t whole at all, I loved him because he was brokener than anyone else. Maybe I loved him even more then.”

“I’ll bet he was looking for you,” I said. “Maybe that’s what the letter is about. You don’t have to go back to him, but I’ll bet he misses you.”

“Shit,” she said as a glass slipped from her hands and cracked against the sink. She put her wet hands over her eyes, until I turned off the running water for her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll clean it up.”

“Jason,” she said, uncovering her eyes. “I’ve got to know what happened to her.”

I picked up the two halves of the glass and laid them gently in my other hand. It was a clean break.

“I feel her everywhere, Jason. I feel surrounded.”

But it was a lie, because upstairs, her bedroom was the way she left it, but now it was full of Aileen’s things, her clothes in her closet, and the bed never made. And I couldn’t hear her there. Though I listened as hard as I could, I couldn’t hear her there.

From behind, Angel looked like less than she was. But stronger too. You wouldn’t be sure, looking at her walking away from you, if she was stronger than you were or not. From behind, you noticed how short she was, not much taller than when she was a kid. But with these hard muscles in her calves now. Everything about her soft, but then those hard, round muscles. And then, when you looked at her right on, the corners of her eyes. Her lips.

I watched her up ahead of me for a while before I caught her. I liked the slow way she walked, liked watching it. In everything she did, she was slower than everyone else. I was late to meet Aileen for lunch at the Midnight Sun, but I followed her anyway. And then when all of a sudden I found myself
missing
her, like there was something sad about her walking away from me, even going as slow as she was, I caught up with her. Without even hurrying, from a block away.

“Going someplace, Angie?” I asked her, and she turned around, and those eyes of hers looked happy to see me. They were like two dark, wet fish, her eyes. Shining and liquid and pointed up at the ends like two finned tails.

“It’s the Moosehide Gathering, Jason,” she said, like I should know that or did but was pretending not to. “I’m late. I guess you are too.”

I shut my face as fast as I could so she couldn’t tell I’d forgotten and wouldn’t have caught her if I’d remembered.

Before he died, my father and some Elders decided everybody should be dragged up to Moosehide every summer to have a big party, like it was some kind of homecoming. But it was a lie. It was a lie that said we were fine. It was a lie that said everything was okey-dokey, because all we really needed was a goddamn beaded vest and some company. The lie said don’t be angry anymore. The lie said we were proud, when I knew we were ashamed.

Moosehide was nobody’s home now, if it ever was. My father himself had told me that our people had always travelled with the seasons and the animals. He said it used to be that only white people got stuck in the ground like trees, and we were like the wind. Moosehide was just the place we got shoved off to after white folks struck gold across the river from the closest thing to a home we’d ever had, the fish camp at Tr’ochëk. After that, I guess they started thinking those little houses across the water didn’t look so shabby after all, and maybe they could buy them for a song from some Indians too dumb to know that when you sold your house you sold the land out from under it too. Tr’ochëk was the home we’d chosen for ourselves. Everywhere else was a place that we’d been sent to by a bunch of honkies who likely thought if they just shuffled us around enough, sooner or later we’d disappear.

I’d gone to the first gathering. It meant so goddamn much to my father. And then, after he died, I said to Minnie, “But it’s pretty stupid, isn’t it, everyone in those stupid costumes,
banging around on those damn drums?” and she didn’t answer, only looked at me and shrugged, like she wasn’t on my side either. Her parents, like my father, were the last to live up there. When the school closed and the government said all the kids had to go to Dawson now, a few families waited a long time before they followed after, and hers and his were two of the last to leave. And he was only a boy then, but all his life, whenever he used the word
home
, it was Moosehide he meant, the way for Ma it always meant that sea-soaked nowhere she came from.

But I thought a home was a pretty poor thing if that was all it was, a place where something used to happen or an idea that had got caught like a kite in a tree. And after he died, I didn’t go again.

So I had nothing to say to Angie, but she stood there looking at me like she knew everything I wasn’t saying. “I’ll walk you there,” I said finally. “I’ll walk you to the boat.” We were already almost there.

“Jason,” she said after a minute, “you know I’m with John now?”

“Sure,” I said. “Old John, good old John.”

“I just wanted to tell you. I guess I don’t know why.”

Minnie always told me to be careful with Angel. When my father was alive, he used to ask me if I’d noticed how pretty she was. “If I were you, I’d treat her like she was worth something,” he’d say. “Some women have a gift for seeing good where there isn’t much. It would be nice to wake up every day and be looked at by a woman like that.”

“Maybe he’ll take you to Vancouver,” I said. “Fly you around in his plane. Take you to the city.” There was a goat I kept behind the house a little while, when Ma was still alive.

It didn’t last long. I kept it tied up the whole time. It would look at me like Angel did. I liked that goat being there. Sometimes I could hear it going on at night, and so I didn’t have to look at it to know it was there. After I found it dead, I had to untie the rope. I could have cut it, but I laid that dead thing on my lap and pulled at the knot until there was nothing around its neck.

“Maybe,” Angel said.

There was some true thing about her that I felt close to knowing, right then.

“Remember that time you went with Ma down to Whitehorse,” I said.

“Sure,” she answered.

“It was funny she asked you to go with her, not me.”

She was staring down at the river like she was looking for something there. “Sometimes it was hard to figure out the things she did.”

“Yeah.” I looked at the river too and thought I wouldn’t mind going for a swim in it like a tourist. It was hot enough I wouldn’t mind that at all. “But it was funny though. Must have been weird, just the two of you in the car.”

“It was.”

“And whoever she got to drive. Three of you then.”

She looked at me steady, with those eyes like dark and shining fish, and I understood nothing about her.

We were quiet till we got to the river, where all the boats were waiting. Then Angel stopped like she’d remembered something. “Jason,” she said. “Does Aileen still talk to that husband of hers?”

“Nah,” I said. “She got a letter from him a week ago, but she couldn’t even open it.”

I felt like I had to cover my ears not to hear what she was saying with her eyes.

“You’re sure about that.”

“What do you got to tell me, Angie?”

She looked away. “Saw her on the phone the other night. After The Pit, when she said she wasn’t feeling good and left. I stayed another hour, and on the way home, I saw her on the pay phone.”

“Must have been talking to her lawyer,” I said. “Or somebody here in town even. Or she must have people back in Toronto or Halifax. She’s allowed to call them, I’d say. None of our business if she wants to call them.”

“Okay,” Angel said. She looked down at the boats. “You sure you don’t want to come.”

It wasn’t a question, not really. “I’ll see you around, Angie.”

“Okay,” she said again. “Okay, Jason.”

I watched everyone turn to welcome her and help her into a boat. Her aunts and a man I didn’t recognize, all dressed up like they didn’t know how stupid they looked in their feathers and beads. I watched how they looked glad to see her, and how she looked happy too, and I hadn’t seen her look like that, not look at me like that, not for a while. They all had big, bright smiles on their faces. They looked like there was going to be something really special waiting for them when they got up to Moosehide. But none of them fooled me. There was no way they could fix up there all the things that were broken down here.

When I walked into the Midnight Sun, I saw Melvin before I saw her. He was sitting on one of the bar stools with his back to me, but I knew him from the spread of him over that tiny
stool. He was the fattest man in town. You could forgive a guy for a lot for looking like a balloon stuck on the end of a pin. It was as if he’d sat there to be funny. What other guy would spear himself into a seat like that? But then I looked at the arms on the chairs around the tables, and it hit me that he couldn’t squeeze himself between them. And then I remembered that what pissed me off about Melvin was that he didn’t act like he knew he was fat. He always wore these big suit jackets that he must have got made specially, as if he thought he was somebody important.