In the Land of Birdfishes (3 page)

After that he let us go outside, but we sat there and did not know what to do. We didn’t know yet how to play without eyes to see. It felt strange even to talk to each other in the dark, so we sat close and held each other’s hands and were quiet for a long, long time. Finally Aileen said, “I don’t want to leave here, like he said.”

“Where would we go?”

“I don’t want to leave Mother if she’s staying here.”

“I want to go to school.”

“Me too. We were going to learn to make curly letters, all hooked together, like grown-ups.”

“Well, Da will still teach us some things, won’t he. Like he said. Just not the writing bit.”

“He’s inside now, isn’t he,” said Aileen. “Couldn’t we take it off, while he’s in there? We can put it back on if he comes out.”

“But we mightn’t be able to do it in time.”

“We’d watch for him. We can take it off just when he’s not around. He won’t know.”

“We can’t. Please, Aileen, we can’t. We have to do what he says.”

She was quiet for a while. I lay on my back on the grass. She asked, “What do you see?”

I could feel the sun on my face, but I could hardly even make out the difference in light when I turned my face toward where I knew it to be and when I turned away. “Nothing,” I said. I reached out my hand for hers. “What do you see?”

She said, “Nothing.”

There were two worlds, and my sister and I walked through a door between them. On one side, my mother stood with us and it was full of
things
, it was plump, bulging, fat with rooms and the things in rooms, the chairs and papers and spoons and pillows and dolls and dishes and coats and desks and other things people put in rooms, and beyond the rooms, the sky and clouds and stars and trees and crows and fleas, and colours, yellow red blue black brown gold white grey. On that side, there were people—the neighbours far down the road and the people we saw at church and the children in school. It was so busy and we were always being taken from one thing to do, one place to go, to the next. The telephone
would ring or there would be a knock on the door. We would go for a swim or have our hair cut on the lawn. On the other side, it was just Aileen and me. There were voices—mostly my father’s and sometimes we’d hear a voice from another room when Da would send us to our bedroom while a neighbour came by. But it was my sister I would feel beside me, always. We held hands almost all the time so we could know each other was near. And there were so many sounds in the new world. I could hear everything and know where I was in a room by the sound of a step on the floor on the other side of the house. The new world was loud but it was full of stillness. Time was distributed unevenly in the old world—handfuls of it would be thrown out and wasted all the time, a day by the shore would pass in a matter of minutes, and a day at school would sometimes last till you were old. The new world released time on a spool that was steady, and the time it released was taut and long. We were safe in the new world. My sister was always beside me, her hand in mine, and I was only afraid of my father. We only left the house to play outside and we never, ever went to the beach again. There was no church and no school and no other houses. We never had to talk to other children or shake hands with grown-ups. The new world was beautiful.

“Remember how it was before Mother died,” Aileen said sometimes. “It was so pretty when Mother was alive. And exciting.” Aileen missed school and cried often. I’d hold her hand when she did. Sometimes she’d get angry and push me aside. She was always the first to release my hand. Sometimes when we were outside, she’d go off on her own while I called her name. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back for hours, and I would wander the hill and not find her.

I was always patient with her. She liked to list the things we used to see when Mother was alive. “Remember,” she’d sigh, “the fire in the stove at winter. Remember the trees in autumn, they’d let go of all their leaves and they’d fall to the ground, but they were all different colours.”

I’d tell her she was remembering wrong, that she was making it up. “They were, they were all colours,” she’d say. “Orange and yellow and blue.”

The more I told her she was mistaken, the more strange her memories became.

“Remember the birds,” she’d say, “how pretty they were, their huge wings, the size of houses. They made that sound,
wump wump wump
. And they’d fight so hard with those other animals with wings, the ones with teeth.”

The seasons turned and we felt them on our faces and we heard them. Summer was a long, warm dream that awoke to the clattering of leaves dead in the trees and their wheezing sink to the ground. Winter chilled us and we were cold even in our beds. In snowstorms, we went outside in our snow pants and coats and mittens and boots and lifted our faces up to the icy touch of each flake. I always thought I could hear the snow. At first it would seem everything became quiet, and then you would realize the world was not quiet but overwhelmed by another sound; the sky had opened its mouth and released its call to the winter below it. And the winter answered, and between them, they howled and murmured and roared into the quickening night. And then spring again, with its own sounds, that nasty insistent pressing of things out of the ground, the crack of roots emerging from split seeds, and there would be grass beneath our hands when we lay outside and let the sun burn our skin. This cycle went round and round, three, four
times before it was done. And always my sister would ask me, when we were alone, “What do you see?” And I would say, “Nothing.” And I would say, “What do you see?” And she would say, “Nothing.”

My father taught us as he’d told us he would. In the morning for four hours and in the afternoon for two, he’d sit with us at the kitchen table and teach us sums and Latin and chemistry. But mostly he’d read to us from the Bible. We knew the Old Testament almost by heart at the end, and he’d ask us to recite passages.

But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee—

It would seem, I think, to some, a great sin that my father committed against us.

So that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see—

When they arrived at last, one day, their hard fists on the door, men there to take my father, and women to gather us up in their sad, sorry voices and fat, busy arms; they told us a man would be jailed for doing to us such, a man that was meant to serve God.

Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things—

It was his sermons that had begun to frighten them. Their weak ears refused his warnings, and their eyes saw only madness in the hellfire he conjured from the pulpit. And it was then they came for us. But had they asked, before they forced him to resign his job, where his daughters were? What could he have answered?

And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee—

The women sobbed and held us as they peeled the bandages from our eyes. I reached for Aileen’s hand and couldn’t find it. The sweaty hand of one of the women clasped mine instead.

And toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates—

I heard my sister crying then. I heard her far from me. “Mara,” she said. “Mara, I can see you. I can see you.”

And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone—

I was confused. I felt I would fall over. “Aileen,” I said. “What do you see?”

“I see you. I see these women—oh Mara, it’s Greta from the choir. And Da, they’re taking Da away. Where are they taking him? I see the house—oh it’s different. I forgot, I forgot the colours …”

And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind—

“… You’re so old now, you look like a teenager almost. Your hair is darker—is mine darker too?”

And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life—

“… Everything is soft, it’s not hard and sharp like I remembered. But it’s so beautiful, isn’t it beautiful?”

In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see
.

“… Mara? Mara, what can you see?”

And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again
.

“Nothing.”

It never came back, seeing. Shapes, here and there. Something like what I remembered as colour, but only two. Black. White. Shadows. Glimpses of motion. Nothing more. There were doctors, and then they were gone. My sister was taken to the city. I was taken out West. I went to a special school. I married. The man took me back to his home, up north. I had a son.

I died.

Aileen

early June 1996

I
’D FELT IT COME
into the room when he stopped loving me. Like it was something sitting between us. Like it was eating with us at the table. Touching me in bed at night. His not loving me. It felt like something we’d overlooked when we renovated the house. A ghost we’d just discovered.

First it was something that belonged to the house, that hung around the furniture. I’d open a drawer and find it rolling around with the plastic forks, the twine, the clatter of pills in their bottles, the saved stubs of emergency candles that one night had burned for hours, the keys to the locked doors of homes and cars we no longer owned. And then, after a while, I could no longer shake the feeling that when I put dinner on the table there were two of them there raising a fork. Stephan and this shadow. The ghost, I thought, maybe, of us as we’d been before. Unable to depart from the thing we’d become.

Because there was nothing to be done, I did nothing. But at night, I complained to the thing that was happening to us like it had ears to hear me. The thin skin below my left eye started twitching. I had loved him since even that thin skin around my eyes was smooth and perfect.

He looked at me like I was a threat to him.

When I was a child, there was a couple down the road who’d come across the border when the war began. They were young and wore weird, bright clothes. The husband built boats. I loved sitting beside him when he worked, smelling the wood smell of the shop. Sometimes he’d let me sand the boards with the last, finest piece of sandpaper, when the wood had become, after several stages of him bent over it, pushing and drawing different grains of sandpaper back and forth, like velvet. Soft as skin. When Stephan first took work as a carpenter, it was like love had a floor and it had opened up and I’d fallen down a whole other storey in love. He brought that smell, of built and mended things of wood, into our home. We lived in the North End of Halifax then, and together we tore out walls, replaced windows, hammered together a breakfast nook and built-in shelves. Some mornings, I’d get up before him when the sun was still low and pad around the dim house, turning the lights on in every room, pretending to be a stranger looking at our life, and feeling so lucky it frightened me.

He’d never done roofing before. He was helping out a friend.

He was supposed to build walls. He was meant to build floors. Foundations. Frames.

It was a simple thing to happen with a complicated end. The way it’s easy to lose your footing and difficult to step from a roof out into air. The way falling is easy and landing is considerably more complex.

Sometimes I think of what he must have looked like on the ground. He could have been anybody, just someone else’s husband or friend, broken. I picture myself standing there with him at my feet and I say, “Is that supposed to be surprising, am
I meant to look at this
body
and think, Who’d have thought a person could become garbage so easy and so fast?” If I’d been there, I’d have been able to stop loving him. Ha. I’d have said, “You think I wasn’t expecting this?” And I’d sleep at night because there’d be nothing but dark around me and not him, falling, hitting the ground again and again.

They thought he’d die—they told me, “Be ready for him to die,” and I said, “Be ready for my lawyer.” But he didn’t die. He didn’t die, and if something like that happens, you start to think maybe you were wrong about everything. You think something awfully damn good has reached down and put its big ole finger on your head and said, “Go on, get out of here, I spare you.”

He got better.

And then he got headaches.

And then he got moods like he wasn’t even in that broken head of his anymore. He was defensive. He was distant. He went somewhere far, far away. And he just never came back.

I went to the doctor and I said, “When I touch him he flinches.” The doctor said sometimes alterations like that happen with brain injuries. That was his word,
alteration
, so I started to see Stephan in my head like a pair of slacks some tailor had opened up a seam in. The doctor said it might change. And he said, “Then again it might not.”

So I ate a year of dinners with that thing between us at the table. The day Stephan said he was tired of Halifax, that he’d taken a job in Toronto without a word to me, I said, “Okay.” I came with him to a city where I knew no one. At the end of the phone calls I had with my father before he died 2,500 kilometres away, I’d go in the pantry of our new apartment to cry so Stephan wouldn’t hear.

When he finally left, it was as sudden as if it had already happened. There was no conversation. Just the things he said. And the door behind him.

I’d been on the bus almost two days when the flat, dry plains gave way to bright yellow fields. “What is it?” I asked the old man across the aisle. “What’s that growing there?”

“Canola,” he said.

“What’s it made of?” I asked.

“Well, it’s itself,” he said. “It’s canola. Like the oil.”

“Is it a GMO?”

“A who now?”

“It doesn’t look natural. It looks like people made it. Look at the colour of it. It looks like it’s all wrong because people made it.” The words came out of my mouth too fast and too many at a time, as if they’d been shoved in there, too many to fit, waiting to escape.

The man frowned and got the sort of hard look on his face that I’d seen back home in Nova Scotia on other faces. He said slowly, “I don’t know, I guess.”

“Like mules,” I said. “Or burros? Which one is it that’s a cross between a horse and a donkey? Or a donkey and a mule?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at there—”

“They can’t reproduce.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’d think people might take some kind of lesson from that. You’d think we might wonder why we can’t even put a mule together without sterilizing it. Maybe every single thing we do is screwed up like that in some way we didn’t intend.” I
hadn’t spoken to anyone since I’d got on the bus. Now I realized it had been a mistake to start. I willed my hands to relax and set them in my lap in a loose, casual way, like they had just landed there on their own.

The old man leaned forward so I could see the way the lower lids of his eyes didn’t quite make it all the way up anymore. They gaped at the bottom, revealing the wet pinkness beneath them. He said, “You want a Ringolo?”

“No, thank you.”

He sat back. “Okay,” he said, “but I’ll leave the bag here.” He set it on the seat beside the aisle and moved over to the window.

As fast as I’d made up my mind, I’d begun to regret it. Dumb, dumb, dumb, to cross a country for scarcely more than a rumour from a dying man. The words had started circling around in my brain the second I stepped on the bus, an unending chorus to my stupidity. What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing, I had heard when it rained the first afternoon and the wipers slapped back and forth across the windshield. But I had no answer, and then at last, just as the second night fell and we crossed the border into Alberta, I knew why I didn’t: it wasn’t the right question.

Just before dawn on the third day, we stopped in Calgary and the empty seats in the bus all got filled. A dark-haired girl with dreadlocks sat down beside me. “You mind if I turn the light on?” she asked. She had wide brown eyes with silver sparkles painted on the lids that made her eyes look enormous and startled.

“That’s fine.”

“I’ve got to read all this book before we get to Vancouver. You read this?”

I looked at the cover. The type was big but written in tilted, script letters. As I moved the book a little closer to my face, I was able to read the title.
The First Time Around
. I shook my head.

“It’s all about how you’re supposed to live your life like you have another one later. It’s supposed to help you not get all stressed out about making mistakes. Like this is a practice run.”

“Oh.”

“It’s pretty dumb. My dad is always sending me stuff like this to read. Really it’s his way of telling me he thinks I’m making mistakes. He sent me this one months ago, and I lied and said I read it when he asked. So I’ve got to finish it before he picks me up in Vancouver. He’s that kind of guy, he’ll test me. Like, before we leave the parking lot.”

I remembered being her age. I remembered how easily sneers settled on soft, pretty faces. I thought of something to say. “I used to want to write a book,” I said. And it was true, though I hadn’t thought of it in years. At the university where I’d taught composition before we left Halifax, they’d given me a grant to hire readers. I had large-print versions of most of the books I taught from, but I needed the readers to help me mark my students’ papers. It was a laborious process as I dictated punctuation changes and grammatical corrections, but one or two of the readers got good at the work as the years went on. And the university had been kind to me, giving me smaller classes than the other instructors, though it meant those instructors made snide comments about their workloads
when we crossed paths in the hall. And the department head, who’d known me as a student there, once said to me, “You know, you could dictate your own work to those readers. If you ever wanted to write something of your own. I still remember your essays.” But I would have felt ashamed to ask another person to witness me fail at something so preposterous, and in any case, as I told him, I had a special typewriter and managed just fine on my own.

“No kidding,” the dark-haired girl said. “Anyway, I’ll turn the light off once the sun’s a little higher, but it’s bad for you to read when it’s dim. You should be careful not to do that.”

“I don’t see so great,” I said. I lifted my hands up off my lap but then, unsure where to put them, I let them rest back down. She was still looking at me. “I can’t read that small print,” I said. “Too late for me, I guess.” I laughed and then fell silent.

“That’s shitty. What’s your name?”

“Aileen.”

“I’m Rochelle. Nice to meet you.” She smiled again and then started reading. I watched her, and how easy it was for her. Her eyes moved back and forth so quick, like little fish in two tiny bowls.

“I’m going to be forty in two weeks.” It wasn’t the right thing to say. I knew it. I waited for the sneer of her mean, young face.

Rochelle closed the book, leaving her index finger between the leaves. “Happy birthday,” she said.

“Thank you. What I meant was, I don’t see how many mistakes your father could think you’ve made at your age. You’re … you’re just starting.” When he’d left, the door made a certain sound against the wood floor. A scraping sound that I had not been able to stop hearing. It was getting louder.

“I’ll be twenty-three in February. I’m a Pisces. So you’re a Gemini?”

“Rochelle.” I whispered it, because I was worried the words might get away from me. “He fell off a roof.”

“Who?”

“My husband.”

“Is he okay?”

“He left me.”

“I don’t get it.” Girls that age, they were so heartless. Understood nothing. Felt nothing.

“It damaged his brain. He just stopped. He just stopped loving me.”

“No kidding. I never heard of that happening to somebody.” She blinked so slowly, there was a moment you could pause and see her eyes closed, and then open again so wide the full circle of brown was revealed against the white, and it was strange how we got made like that, perfect, our eyes precise circles the way you could never draw them, not if you tried to copy what an eye looked like a hundred times on the page—it would never be symmetrical and perfect like her eyes were, staring at me and blinking so slowly that half the time I was just looking at the silver of her lids and trying to understand how to talk to someone who put sparkles on her face before getting on a long-distance bus.

I shook my head. “I just can’t get my head around it. Can it be something that stupid that ruins your life? Can your husband fall from a roof and knock his love for you out of his head? Are other people living lives like this?”

“Well, if he doesn’t love you anymore, you’re better off—”

“He was the kindest man I knew. When we were at people’s houses for dinner, he would ask if he could use their washroom,
like a little kid asking the teacher for permission. He was raised to be nice to women. He loved his mother. Like I said, my vision isn’t so great, but I could see him smiling from across a crowd. I was grateful every time he came into a room.”

“You’re going to just have to grieve, you know. This is something you have to do. It’s going to hurt.”

“I gave up my job for him. I moved to a city where I knew no one, just so he could leave me there. I never once said,
‘Could we wait to move until my father finishes fucking dying?
’”

The woman in the seat in front of me whipped around and unnested her glasses from her perm, lowering them to the end of her nose so she could see me properly as she hissed, “
I have a child with me
.” Whispering was safer.

“You’ve got a lot of anger. You’ll have to talk to this guy, work these feelings out. Are you going to see him now?”

“I’m going to my sister.”

“I hope you guys get along better than me and my sister.” Rochelle patted me on the knee. She said, “Sounds like you’re going through a lot right now. Thanks for sharing it with me. I’m going to have to get back to this book, but if there’s anything in here I think might be of use to you, I’ll let you know.”

Rochelle snapped open her book and began reading. I looked down at the smear of text on the page and then across the aisle at the mountains that were getting closer. Getting bigger. The Ringolos man waved his finger at me.

The right question was the one that never left me. The right question was important because it was the question she would ask me. I didn’t need to wonder what I was doing. I needed
to answer why I hadn’t done it sooner. We were only children when I lost her, when she went, alone, out of the world we knew. Why did it take me three quarters of my life to go after her?

Rochelle was asleep when we hit it. Outside the window the sky had a thin yellow stripe of field beneath it, that was all. I was watching what looked like a storm go rolling across the sky, maybe an hour or a day away, who knew out here. And then the bus braked.