In the Land of Birdfishes (20 page)

Another taxi took us back to the hotel room, and she called someone, and from the way she talked to him, I understood it was the man. She told him not to come pick us up after all. She told him we would find another way home.

She hung up the phone and left her hand on it for a moment, before she raised her face to me. “They did a test on me,” she said.

I knew not to ask if she had passed. I knew it was another kind of test. Some other, grown-up kind.

“Angel,” she said. “I am going to have a baby.”

I stared at her. She was so old. And Jason almost a man.

“Maybe,” she said, like someone in a dream, “the baby will help me leave him.”

I did not know any words to say. I did not understand all she said after that, or even know who she meant when she said “him,” but I knew enough to be afraid of her. And afraid for her. And Jason. After that, she told me to take everything from the drawers and put it into our suitcases again, and then another taxi took us to the tourist bus stop.

We spoke barely at all on the bus, which was full of tourists who pointed out the window every time a bird or creature passed. “You’ll tell your father we couldn’t find anything you liked,” she said once. “That is why you are returning home with no present.” Another time, she asked me to describe what the man in front of us was taking photographs of, because she could hear the click his camera made each time. I said I didn’t know. All I could see were trees and water, sky.

After it was dark and the other riders were gone quiet, she reached out and took my hand, her eyes still staring straight ahead. I’d thought she was sleeping. “Angel,” she whispered. “I did something. A few months ago, I couldn’t stop myself and I did something, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid because I couldn’t stop myself.”

She held my hand till it hurt, but her voice was calm. “I can feel myself … coming undone,” she said. “It has been happening for a long time. Jason knows. He helps me. But I don’t know if he helps put me together or take me apart. I have to stop whatever is happening to me. It happened to my mother, you know. We watched it happen. That is the last thing I remember seeing. How my mother turned out to be
made of a long knot of string wrapped around and around itself, but I didn’t know until the last little piece had come unravelled and all that was left of her was a bit of string there on the floor.”

I didn’t know if she really meant it, or if it was the kind of story she always told Jason. I didn’t see how a woman could be a mother and a piece of string too. So I just sat very still and let her hold my hand all the rest of the way, as though it didn’t hurt at all. And I thought of what Minnie had told me and knew it was true, and of what Mara had said and thought it might be a lie, that the thing she had done, she had done not once but again and again. And if it was a lie, only Jason could tell me and he wouldn’t. I knew he wouldn’t ever tell me that.

When we were home again, I walked her back to her house, and Jason came running down the steps, looking worried. Only later I found out she hadn’t told him or her husband she was going to Whitehorse. She bent down—I always forgot how tall she was till she needed me to lean on—and whispered in my ear, “You’ll remember what I told you. Wait for him. He’ll need you.”

I thought of her voice then, those words, and the soured-flower smell of her breath, and I sat at my little table, turning my spoon in my cup. And it didn’t surprise me to see Jason push open the door of The Pit and stand there, seeing me, suddenly filling the room with whatever the thing about him was that made me stop breathing. I could tell from there he was in a good mood, because of how he stopped to look at me and didn’t wait to come and pull out the chair across from me and fall into it.

“Hello, Jason.”

“Hello, Angel.” He picked up my empty coffee cup, and then he pushed it back to me. “Slim pickings.”

“I’ll get you a drink,” I said.

“No need.” He turned and made a nod so slight I hardly knew he’d made it, and Eloise, across the room, nodded in answer and began filling a glass. “There’s some chill out there today,” he said.

“It’s almost September,” I answered. “No southerners here tonight except the band.”

“And Eloise.”

“She’s from Whitehorse, that doesn’t count.”

“But she’ll leave just like the rest of them.” Eloise put a pint down in front of Jason, and he grabbed her hand. “Tell me, when you leaving, Eloise?”

“When the season’s done. Start of September. I’ve got to get back to school.”

Jason nodded. “Thanks for the beer, sweetheart.”

He was looking at Aileen’s back. “Go on,” I said. “Tell her to come over.”

He pulled a used-up sugar packet from the pile I’d made on the table because I liked sweet coffee, and rolled it between his hands. Then he flicked it from his open palm and hit her arm where it lay resting on the bar. She got up right away like that was the call she’d been waiting for.

The two of them talked while I tipped my chair back and thought about the thing I knew. And then Gary, an old drunk whose sister had drowned right in front of him years ago, while he watched from shore because he couldn’t swim, hobbled over to me on the crutch he’d been going around on all summer and said, “You ever had a pain that just came out of
nowhere and wouldn’t go away? That the doctors didn’t even know what to do with?”

“No,” I said, “I guess not.”

“That’s my foot,” he said. “I’ll have to go to Whitehorse and see if they can do anything there. It hurts so bad I could almost cut it off. It’d hurt less to cut it off.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But if it weren’t for that, I’d ask you to dance for sure.”

“I know, Gary,” I said.

“Jason there’ll probably want to dance with you. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. You stole that boy’s heart clean out of him, I’d say.”

Jason didn’t even look up. I smiled at Gary. “Not sure Jason’s much of a dancer. But I’ll be coming looking for you for a dance, just as soon as that foot is better.”

He beamed at me and waved the crutch in the air, before he limped back over to the bar.

Aileen was laughing so hard, I didn’t want to stop her. She had her head back with laughter, and in the light that came down spilling over the bar, it wasn’t possible to see any grey in her gold hair. Jason wasn’t laughing, but he had a smile that slid up the side of his face every time he looked over at Aileen.

In this dim room, smoke made a cloud over our heads the shape of a ghost or a dream. For a moment, I looked, really looked, at everything around me. At the bright-coloured Christmas lights strung in loops along the walls. At the things on the shelf that ran around the room—a broken clock; a plastic doll with a papoose on her back; empty liquor bottles, one shaped like the body of a woman; money from the States and Japan and Germany; photos of customers and people who worked here, their arms around each other and grins on their
faces. I looked at the singer on the stage and his band, at Eloise, at the people at the bar and at tables, and just coming in the door. I knew them all, except the band. I knew every face in the room. Then I looked back at the coffee cup in my hand.

“So I’ve got another story for you, Aileen,” Jason said. He glanced at me. “You mind if I tell it, Angel?”

“No,” I said, letting my eyes slide over him again. “No, I’d like to hear it.”

He leaned over the table, peering again and again at Aileen, his eyes wide and eager. Only lately he’d begun to look that way. All summer I’d watched him hold himself back from her so he was always out of reach and unknowable. Now I saw him giving himself to her in armfuls, as if she’d just reached out a hand and he would fill it with everything he had.

Old Man knew Old Woman’s secret. He found out one night when he lay listening to her sleeping beside him. Because he knew there was something she wasn’t telling him. He noticed how her smile looked like a jewel in her mouth, and he knew there was something she was keeping that was hers and not his. And he knew that he could only learn what she wouldn’t tell him when she was sleeping and her lips were loose with dreams and their honest ways, so he let the lamp go out while she lay beside him, and when her breath was long and deep, he lit it again. He looked at her and found her beautiful but in a way that made him draw back from her. He saw her eyelids flickering and knew she dreamt. Then he leaned close and listened to what she would say, but even in her dreams, she kept her secret. She whispered dream thoughts and dream stories, but they were hollow, gutted of meaning or information. She
dreamt only of light, water, insects moving very slowly. He was frustrated and almost left her, when he heard something she could not silence or hide. He pressed his ear closer to her to be sure. Only by the man who made the world could it be heard, but beneath her own heavy woman’s heartbeat, there was its reflection, a soft, steady sound of life just starting, being just beginning
.

And so while she slept, he put his seed in her. He put another child there, inside her. A twin. And as he made the child, he thought only of dark and hard, cold earth, of silence. He put winter’s twin there in her. She did not know the child was there until she woke and remembered her dreams and how they’d changed in the night. She felt the third heartbeat in her, and knew a different season grew there to haunt the first. At breakfast her husband wouldn’t look at her, and she put her hand on her belly and carried his child and hers
.

When he finished telling his story, I pulled at my hair, wrapping and unwrapping it around my fingers.

“I don’t know if I understand these stories,” Aileen said.

Jason shrugged but looked pleased with himself.

“You know, I had a dream about your mother,” I said. They both turned to me as if I’d surprised them. “She was just walking by the river, holding something in her hands, trying to find a place to hide it. I kept calling her name, and she wouldn’t answer. Finally I got close to her, and she held up both her hands and all that was in them was a little bit of string. She said, ‘He already took the beads.’”

Aileen stood up. “I think I’m going to head home. You coming?”

Jason glanced at me. “You want me to stick around?”

I didn’t answer. I was remembering what Minnie had told me, six years ago. I remembered what she had figured out about Mara and Jason, which was why I never said anything to Minnie or to him or anyone else about what Mara told me in Whitehorse. And then later, as we watched Jason lay flowers against Mara’s stone in Brookside Cemetery, Minnie whispered what had happened to Mara and ordered me never to speak about it to Jason or anyone else. And I thought it was best I had never told anyone why Mara had taken me to Whitehorse. And I knew not saying anything was how I could do what she had told me to. It was how I would watch after him. And it was how I would love him.

After a moment, he shrugged at Aileen and said, “I’m going to stay here with Angie for another round.”

He reached his hand out and set it on mine, still in a good mood, still looking to make me smile. “Can I buy you a drink, Angie?”

I looked at his dark, dark eyes that were still, even then, beautiful. “No,” I said.

I knew already then, had known for days, before even checking the calendar or counting the month on my hands. I hadn’t known till I felt it what it would be like to be so certain, to feel a fact in your body, to have knowledge about yourself that came out of the pounding of your blood, the weight of your breasts, the roundness and hardness of your body. I knew before I went to the nurse’s station and asked for the test, and I knew even then, waiting for the test, that I wasn’t really waiting, that there was no question to be answered. There was only this thing I knew.

I sat beside Jason, knowing this and saying nothing. And
it was strange, what I didn’t think of as we sat side by side in quiet, and later on the walk home. I didn’t think of the girls in my high school who’d got pregnant at fifteen. I didn’t remember how I felt a kind of envy in me, a hunger for the way those girls got larger and larger, while I felt that a wind could have taken me away. Their shapes in the hallways grew and left no room for the rest of us. Until they quit school and became part of our mothers’ world and not ours any longer, part of the mystery of sex itself. I didn’t think of how I was my mother’s last child, and how the day I started school, she wept over being left alone at home and wished she’d had eight or ten children more, and she said to me then, “Don’t wait too long.” Or how another time, when I was older and spent too long staring in the bathroom mirror, dreaming about what I might become one day, “Don’t hurry.”

Just before I told him the thing I knew, as we walked home together, I remembered how the first time it had happened, he had stopped suddenly, when we had just begun, and he went fumbling in his pants for one, and I said, “Don’t,” and he said, “You don’t want me to?” and then he looked like he understood and said, “Oh, you’re on the …”

But I wasn’t, and it was Mara I thought of then. And on the way home, as I stopped him, and put my hand against his shoulder, I remembered how that night he’d wanted to use one and it was Mara who had made me think maybe something like a miracle might happen. And the funny thing was, it wasn’t that night I was really thinking of even then. It was Mara herself, and how she had not been able to see anything at all.

Mara

M
ARLA’S SISTER WAS FURIOUS
with me for having left the bar, but Marla told me she wouldn’t even have noticed except that the other girls had got worried. On the way back, Marla’s sister said we weren’t to breathe a word to anyone at school about me leaving the bar with that old Indian. The other girls and I were all astonished to learn that it had been an old Indian I had gone off with, and one of them asked me in a whisper what it was like, and I said I didn’t know what to compare it to.

I didn’t think much after that about the man called Jason. After our short time in the city, it was especially thrilling to return to the old routines at school, and I found myself enjoying everything more, the tasteless food seemed saltier, the nuns kinder, and the words we read each day with our fingertips from the Bible seemed to speak to me directly.

It was Agnes who noticed. One day, I was struggling to fasten the zipper that ran up the back of the heavy wool tunic we all wore, and she heard and came and tried to help me. “It won’t go, Mara,” she said at last. “You’ll have to tell them.”

“Tell them what?” I asked. My breasts had grown larger
lately, and I was ashamed of having eaten so much that my belly pushed open the pleats in my tunic.

Agnes linked her finger around mine. “I’ve heard you in the bathroom. I’ve heard you be ill, I mean.”

I felt my face heat. “That’s private,” I told her. I had only gone when I thought no one was there. Lately the hymns in chapel had made me feel dizzy and faint, and I’d sometimes had to hurry away to the toilet, though we weren’t supposed to leave chapel till after the last prayer. Sometimes the nuns reading to us made me queasy too, as if their voices and the priest’s too had all entered into my head, pushing their words inside me, more and more, deeper into my belly, which was already too full with their words.

“You don’t know?” Agnes asked. “Do you not know?”

I squeezed her finger, knowing I hurt her a little. “Of course I know,” I said.

She didn’t believe me. “Mara, when is the last time it came?”

It took me a moment to understand her. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Do they hurt? Your tits, I mean?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

She leaned closer and said in my ear, as if she were sharing a secret, “My sister said her bosoms always hurt and it didn’t come anymore. And I would always hear her sick in the bathroom, like you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her, becoming frightened. “Is something wrong with me? Am I sick?”

“Mara,” Agnes whispered, her voice delighted with the secret and the thrill of it all, her voice happy for me. “You’re going to have a baby.”

I didn’t understand at first what she was saying to me. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Mara.” She squeezed my finger tighter, and then her hot, moist hand took all of mine in it. “I’ve tried to figure it out. Was it when you went to town? Or was it … one of the priests?”

I put both hands on my belly and wondered if it could be true, what she said. I wondered if I might be able to do something like that, make a person out of nothing, inside me. I didn’t see how I could. I had never done anything but try to be nothing, nothing bad, nothing wrong, nothing loud, nothing in the way of other people. Sometimes in my own prayers I thanked God for making me blind so that I couldn’t see how every day I got a little smaller. I was so tiny now, it was no wonder that the people I once loved had lost me. No one came looking for me because no one looks for nobody. I was a mistake in space, and that was all. A body where the hole of
her
should have been. And that was why God and my mother took my eyes. To make me disappear.

But if it were true. If I could make out of nothing another person, it might not be so very different than having a hand reach out across the dark and take yours, as if you were one soul housed in two bodies. My body might be a house for another, and then, if that were true, it might be like what the whole world looked like if you had two eyes to see it.

“Mara?” Agnes asked. “Mara, why are you crying?”