In the Land of Birdfishes (26 page)

I shut up then, and Aileen got to her feet. She looked so shaken I almost felt sorry for her, her eyes like burnt holes in a white rag. “I didn’t know about that,” she said finally. “Thank you for telling me.”

I shrugged and watched her walk back up the steps, leaning against the railing and pausing on the last step with her back to me. “She worried about him as much as you do,” I said quietly. “It wouldn’t be any different if she hit him and asked, ‘Is he going to be okay?’“

Aileen was closing the door as I walked back toward the steps and called, “Aileen, I had a baby when I was young.” She hesitated and looked back at me, but with the light behind her, I couldn’t see her face. “I wasn’t much older than Angie.
He’s seven years old,” I said. “His name is Amaruk. He’s a good boy. You know, it’s not Angel that Jason cares about. It’s not even that child. It’s that he thinks somehow it’s her.”

“Who?”

“Mara. He thinks somehow that baby’s her.”

“You mean that story, about pregnant women dreaming of dead people?”

“It isn’t just a story to Jason. Some people around here wouldn’t disagree with him either.”

“Why are you telling me that?”

“So you understand what matters to him. You think you care about him, but the only thing he ever cared about was her.”

She nodded and then closed the door behind her. I watched the lights go out downstairs.

“I never heard a name like yours,” I had said after the first time we slept together. I was half dressed, but couldn’t make myself leave the bed, even though I was already almost an hour late for work. Lopita smiled and slipped her hand under the waistband of my cotton underwear. “It means ‘the valley of the wolves,’“ she said. “It’s a saint name. What does yours mean?”

“I don’t think it means anything,” I answered. “It was just the name of a friend of my mother’s at school.”

Lopita lit a cigarette and pushed herself up onto a pillow. I put my hand on her long, plump thigh, but she ignored it. “I want you to go to school,” she said. “It’s stupid of you to just be like this. Cleaning tables forever.”

She was taking night classes at the university and wanted me to do the same. I started saving that night. I put ten dollars in a jar after every shift. But the money added up so
slowly. Weeks went by, and I still didn’t have enough for even one class. That night I had also, for the first time, told Lopita I loved her. But not till after she was gone. I wasn’t stupid. It would be months till I could tell her to her face, and by that time, she would be sleeping with her professor. “I never thought I’d fuck a Marxist,” she’d say, “but my cunt is apolitical.” By the time Lopita moved in with him, the jar would still have less than a semester’s tuition in it, and only a few weeks later, I would lose it to a truck driver after falling asleep hitchhiking home.

The next day, I was by myself at the bar, just drinking pineapple juice and staring at my reflection in the mirror behind the liquor bottles, when Aileen came in.

“Pull up a chair, stranger,” I said.

She shrugged her shoulders lightly, looked at my glass and then away. “I just came by to look for Jason. We’re supposed to leave this afternoon to go up north, but he didn’t come home.”

“Any word from Angel?” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

She had a funny energy about her. She was glowing, like she had a fever or a sunburn. “You’re going back to him,” I realized.

She pulled her purse off the bar stool and slung it over her shoulder. Her grey-blond hair was shining under the yellow bar lights. “I haven’t decided. I already told you I haven’t decided.”

“What you mean is you haven’t told Jason.”

“Minnie …” She squeezed her hands over her eyes, like
she could change what was right in front of her with her fists. “That thing. That thing you told me. About her. I can’t stop thinking about it. It makes me wish I’d never come here. It makes me want to leave.”

“Well, there you go. So you want to leave and hubby wants you home. Sounds like everything’s on track.” I stood up and walked around the bar to grab a beer. I waved it in the air at the bartender, who was over at a table and nodded back at me.

“Minnie,” Aileen said quietly. “I know what you think of me. I think it myself. But I can’t figure it out. He left me and I thought it was a tragedy. Then I got here, and I started thinking we were just two unhappy people clinging to each other and thinking that was a marriage. So which is true? How can I tell?”

I looked at her tired, worn-out face, so much like Mara’s. Skin as white and thin as paper. People that stupid could make you feel sorry for them. If it weren’t for what they did to other people. And I remembered when I first realized what Jason had done. It had taken me days to figure out, me who had thought I understood him better than he understood himself. He’d told me he was taking his mother out in his boat. Even at the time, I thought it was strange because she’d never gone out in his boat before that I knew of. And then Jason came back and his mother didn’t. When I went to see him the next day, it was only Jason and his father there. Jason’s father said that Mara had gone missing. His eyes were wild and frightened. He said he’d started spreading the word. He pleaded with me to search for her. He didn’t want to leave the house in case she came home or called. He kept telling me she was blind, that she couldn’t be out by herself because she was blind, as if it were something I didn’t know. And Jason watched his father shake me and plead, and he didn’t say a word.

The whole town looked for her. For days and weeks. And then, even months after, every hunter had an eye out for her yellow hair when he went into the woods, though no one thought they’d find her alive. And I noticed that Jason didn’t leave his house all the time we searched for his mother. And he never said to anyone that he’d taken her out in his boat that day. And then I understood the look he’d had on his face since his father said Mara hadn’t come home.

I went by his house and found him lying on her bed, just staring like he was looking at something, but there wasn’t anything there. “I know what you did,” I told him. He didn’t answer. And I said that if anybody asked, he’d have to say he brought her home from the boat, no matter how much he thought he could trust the person asking. He lifted his head then and told me he hadn’t touched her. And the lie, the way he looked me in the eyes to tell it, made me sure of what I’d only guessed before. I could have been insulted he didn’t trust me with the truth, but I’d known him all his life and knew he’d never learned how not to lie. I waited till he was quiet again, and then I told him I would keep his secret. I told him I’d tell Angel not to ever say anything about it to anyone. It was too late to hide it from her, when I’d already told her what I’d seen Mara do, and she knew Jason as well as I did and might come to suspect on her own whatever I might try to keep from her. But I knew I could trust her. I told Jason only we two could understand what had went on between him and his mother and why he’d had to do what he’d done out there on the river in his boat. And when, later, I told Angie, she didn’t hesitate. I remembered how she’d nodded like I’d confirmed something she already knew. I knew from how she loved him and from how she looked at me then that she wouldn’t betray him any
sooner than I would, and that she understood what Jason did had not been a matter of murder but of survival. As I knew, the second I lay eyes on Aileen, that sooner or later she was going to ask a question that he would want to answer with the truth.

“You know,” I told her then, “I think you should go back to him.”

“Do you mean that? Or are you just being spiteful?”

“No,” I said honestly. “I think it would be best for everyone.” And then I told her the lie I’d known I’d have to tell since the moment she’d first told me who she was. “You know, Aileen,” I said, “Jason won’t ever get around to telling you what happened to that sister of yours. And I can tell you why he won’t.”

She stared at me, speechless and unsure of herself.

“Because it isn’t a good story. He likes what he makes up better, so he’ll keep making it up for you. I wouldn’t believe anything he tells you. The truth is always less interesting. But worth knowing. Don’t you think?”

She shook her head a little. “I don’t—I don’t know. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying all that happened is your sister went out for a walk in the woods one day. Looks like she tried to climb down the hill toward the river, but she slipped. Hit her head. Landed at the river’s edge and drowned in three inches of water.”

“She … drowned?”

“What do you think. You like Jason’s stories better? Well, go on and listen to them then. You suit yourself.”

She had her hand over her mouth, and behind her hand she was mumbling something.

“What?” I demanded.

She dropped her hand to her lap and sighed. “She was so afraid of water.”

I shrugged. I could have liked Aileen. If she had all the way committed to being decent or to being a stubborn, selfish piece of work, I could have liked her. But what she did instead was worse, maybe, even than what Mara had done to Jason. She got halfway to caring and then she lost her nerve. I leaned forward again. “I want to wish you luck with that man of yours,” I said. “And you know, Aileen, maybe you’re right.” I made my eyes as wide and empty as I could. “Maybe things’ll work out better this time.”

Her face seemed to hesitate, looking for something in mine, and then she smiled, so brightly that for just a second I felt sorry for her. “Thanks, Minnie,” she said. “I’ll see you when we get back.”

I nodded slowly, and she left the bar, leaving the door swinging open behind her.

Everyone thought I’d married Ed because I was pregnant, but I didn’t. I did it because he asked. I’d never expected anyone to ask me to marry them. And I believed him when he said he would have asked even if I hadn’t been knocked up.

Everyone also thought I was cruel, the way I left him, but I wasn’t. I did it because I needed to do something kind for him. Because I owed him so much and had given him so little. I owed him Amaruk, but I knew I would take him from him. So I let him go, not even a year after we married. And not even two years after that, he was married again, to a nice girl down in Teslin, where they bought a house and had three children of their own.

I finished my beer and walked out of the bar into the dirty street. I thought maybe I’d go home and see if Amaruk was
still awake. If he had waited up for me, I’d let him come sleep in my bed and would let him talk until he fell asleep, mid-sentence, his soft baby hair and the light weight of his head on my shoulder.

It was almost dark out and maybe in another hour or two, it really would be dark. In another week or a few days, I’d be able to walk outside this time of night and see the stars. People went a little crazy in winter sometimes. There were nights I looked up at the stars and thought I saw a face there. I lit up a cigarette, and the flare of the match made it seem darker outside. Thank god for cigarettes, I thought. It filled my mouth and I didn’t need anything, didn’t need anyone’s lips or hands.

Ed was so happy when I told him I had named our son Amaruk. He was an Inuk from Chesterfield Inlet and had been sent to a residential school, where a Québécois priest gave him the name Edouard. Later, he had to change it to the English spelling. “A good Inuktitut name,” he said. “Amaruk.” To the blond-haired nurse, who stood smiling a thin smile and holding her hands out to take my baby back to the nursery, I said, “It means wolf.”

Mara

T
HE SUMMER THAT I
carried my son came and passed like a turned page. Around my son and me, things changed. The sun burned for many days. Its heat sickened us. And then it slid away, and then it did not come again for a long time. And then it was colder than I had ever known possible.

Around us, Jason worried and tried to think what to do to please us, but we were not pleased. The last few months, we were ill and spent most days in bed. His sisters were always at the door, always wanting to cook things or lend things. We wanted them to go away, but he would not send them away. He whispered to them that they must understand it was a difficult pregnancy and I was not myself.

And I was not myself. I was us both.

But all these things, the words and worries of others, the fickle seasons and their moods, happened very far away and did not interest us. So much else was at work. My son grew nails and ears and lungs. My belly stretched to give space to my son, to contain him. He grew eyes.

I began to have terrible dreams. I stopped sleeping. I was afraid he would escape if I were not awake to keep him inside me. In the dreams, I found him in other rooms of the house, or
other houses altogether, half formed, thinking nails might keep him safe, thinking ears and lungs and eyes would be enough to face the world with.

He grew hair. He moved.

I felt something altering in me, something deeper and more important than my body. I felt how I would not ever be safe again once he had left me. I felt how hard it became to hold on to another thought once I’d had that one.

His eyes opened and closed. He saw light.

I saw how I had known very, very little of the world. I realized my piece of it had been very small. I saw that what choices I had made had not been the right ones.

When he left me, he hurt me terribly. He left me slowly and cruelly. And I thought that what was happening was more awful than anything else I had lived. And then I was myself again.

But I was not.

Because they put him in my arms. And I saw that the way he filled what had been empty between them was the way that he would mend all that had been broken. And I understood that nothing else had happened before him. I understood the past was something very light, like a kite or a balloon. It could all be blown away. Or drawn back and unspooled again so that it happened just as I told him. And so I met his father in a jail. I read the Bible to him. I was blind and immaculate and he fell in love with me like a person might fall in love with the sun.

And maybe already then I saw that something in me had come undone. Maybe then was the beginning of knowing what I spent my son’s life learning. That I would hurt him. That I would hurt him as badly as he hurt me when he left. That everything I did to keep him safe would ruin him.