Landing (30 page)

"You don't understand."

"I—"

"Look, you've won, all right? I'm giving up my whole family for you; don't slag them off as well."

A Silence, as loud as a slap.

"Sorry," said Síle, only half-sincerely.

"I didn't mean to butt in. I'm really sorry about your mom, if it's true."

"Forget it. Thirty-seven years on, what's the difference?"

"You sound tired," said Jude after a minute. "Get some sleep, my love."

"Mm."

Síle turned out the lights, but halfway up the stairs she had to sit down. Her head was a wasp's nest. She wanted to wail aloud for Sunita Pillay, glamorous Air India stew, who'd swapped everything she'd known for a rain-green Dublin suburb: followed her man, gone into exile, surrendered her country and family and friends in the best tradition of womanhood. Who'd done it all for love, and discovered that love wasn't enough to live on after all.

Síle thought of the
cave with only one opening,
the
island with only one harbour,
and panic rose like a wave over her head. The snow girl was melting on the hearthrug. Síle seemed to feel the knife along her fingers, and hear the shriek of the birds as they dived.

Our nature lies in movement.

—PASCAL
Pensées

The last yellow leaves were clinging to the branches that slapped Jude's bedroom window: Persephone had gone back under the ground. Jude always longed for the first snow of winter, and here it was.

In the back of a kitchen drawer she came across a set of tiny heavy silver frames. She went next door to ask Dr. Peterson if she had any idea what they were.

"They're place markers, you silly, for name cards. Hold on to them for when you host a big dinner. Maybe you should have one to welcome Síle: a landing party!"

"Maybe in the New Year," said Jude, grinning.

The village had the air of a dressed but empty stage set. Jude kept looking around and thinking,
Site will do this, like that, hate that.
Sometimes she could see it, it was just about plausible, and neighbours like Bub seemed to take it as a matter of course that Jude's beautiful friend was moving into 9 Main Street. At other moments she thought paranoid things like
One winter and she'll be off.

Out shoveling, trying to go easy on her weak wrist, she peered into the bright haze at Rizla coming down the street.

"Hey, you. How's Jet-setter Barbie?"

She hadn't minded the teasing, since Detroit. She knew that the battle was over the minute he'd picked up the phone to summon Síle. "Busy packing."

"You must have worked some voodoo shit on that chick," he marveled. "Emigrating's more than I could do."

"You went all around the world," Jude pointed out.

"Yeah, but I came home. The eagle has landed!"

"So you'd never live anywhere else?"

He shook his head. "Just because I don't hunt or farm doesn't mean this isn't my territory. A Jew's a Jew, even in the Bahamas, but a Mohawk abroad would just be a stray."

"Actually, that's a genealogical term," Jude told him, and when he looked blank she said, "A stray's someone who shows up in the historical record far from where he started. We fill in forms on a database—
young male,
" she improvised, "
Michael Buchanan, sty on left eyelid, died in threshing accident, Seaforth, 1893
—and suddenly someone in Ayrshire's tracked down her Great-Great-Uncle Mick."

"Huh. Neat, I guess. By the way," said Rizla, "that settlement came through."

"What settlement?"

He wiggled his right shoe.

"After all these years! When did you hear?"

"A while back. Should be enough to get us unhitched."

"Excellent," said Jude, startled.
A while back? When did he make up his mind to do this?

"Your gal'll be happy."

"Mm. Now I just need to come up with my half," she said, visualising her bank manager's face.

He waved his hand. "Nah, the thing's done; I talked to the lawyer last week. Told him I wanted a divorce on the grounds of you being a big ol' bulldagger," he said with relish, "but apparently all we need to do is declare we've been living apart all these years."

She was touched. "You could have bought something you really wanted, like a giant flat-screen TV."

"Believe me, I wanted this." He sang falsetto, miming a shampoo: "
I'm going to wash that girl right out of my hair...
"

Not that it would, Jude thought. She and Rizla would always be in each other's hair, one way or another. She picked up her shovel again, worked it across the path with a grinding scrape.

"It's next week Síle's landing, eh?"

"Tuesday," she told him, her grin as quick as a fish.

Jude was utterly distracted. She immersed herself in cataloging, but was troubled by tunnel vision: Every document seemed to be about travel or love. Scandalous mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants; the expulsion of Acadians from eighteenth-century Nova Scotia; bombastic advertisements to persuade prospective settlers that Upper Canada was a new Eden. In an 1822 collection of games for young ladies, Jude happened across a description of what was clearly a yo-yo, but it was called an Emigrant. The painstaking instructions for use concluded, "It would in fact return of itself into your hand, only that a part of its impulse is destroyed by the friction and the resistance of the air." Jude rested her head on her folded arms and thought about that.

On the notice board outside the museum, she pinned up the latest plastic-coated display:

Some Criminal Assize Indictment Records
for Huron County.
Hockey, Hubert; Uttering Forged Note, 1863
Jardine, John; Attempt to Carnally Know a Girl under 14, 1894
Johnston, Marshall; Nuisance, 1861
McKeegan, Malcolm; Bestiality, 1862
Naebel, Doris; Unlawful Disposition of Dead Body, 1923
Pratt, John; Obstructing Free Use of Railway, 1893
Sturdy, John; Unlawful Voting, 1882

Sturdy, that name rang a faint bell. Wasn't one of the Malones married to a Sturdy, a few generations back? Oh well, it was only voting fraud the guy was accused of, not bestiality.

Canada geese went by in arrowhead formation, honking glumly. Mindless birds, didn't they know it was nearly Christmas? They should have been in South Carolina by now. What were they still doing here, flapping back and forth all day; what were they waiting for?

In the mailbox Jude found a letter from the foundation to which she and Síle had made that application, back in July. She ripped it open right there, on the snow-choked steps. Phrases struck her like darts.

In the current climate, the scarcity of resources is such ... Whether there is indeed a pressing need for another small museum devoted to the history of Perth and Huron Counties, given that...

She stared around her at the glittering white that covered everything like a parody of a Christmas card. Her wrist was hurting. She knew she should make some calls, set up a meeting of the board. She could anticipate exactly how Jim McVaddy would denounce her for her failure, how Glad Soontiens would appeal to everybody to just calm down.

The awful thing was, Jude didn't care. Or rather, of course she was devastated about the foundation's refusal of funding, but the thing was, this was the fourteenth of December, and tomorrow was Landing Day. So there really was only room in her head for one thought, which was Síle. Síle coming through the sliding doors at Toronto Pearson Airport, with her cat and her bags; Síle here to stay, somehow; Síle unlimited, miracle made flesh.

No need to tell anyone about this letter yet,
Jude thought.
I'll call the board in the New Year; we'll come up with something. New approaches to fundraising, appeals to the community
... But already her mind was sliding sideways to Síle in tall fur-lined boots, slinking down Main Street.

Tuesday afternoon, Jude was at Arrivals, hands tightened on the barrier. Her heart ticked like a clock in a room where someone was trying to sleep. She and Síle had left each other phone messages over the past few days, but never managed to speak. Jude had been waiting forty minutes; put another way, she'd been waiting all year. She stood still, as passive as a ghost.

Other passengers from Heathrow emerged and were greeted lovingly. At first, Jude enjoyed watching them. Then she began to resent every face that wasn't Síle's. Gradually the crowd dispersed, and the flow of emerging passengers dried to a trickle. "Excuse me," she asked a man with a briefcase, "have you come from Heathrow?"

A shake of the head. "Bonn."

Jude told herself not to panic.
She must be coming, she had her ticket bought a month ago.
But that proved nothing, now Jude came to think about it. It wasn't even a piece of paper: Síle always got e-tickets. Just a few letters and numbers somewhere on the Internet, a fragile sequence of code.

She stood where she was for another fifteen minutes, till the passengers from Bonn had all emerged. She clung to rational possibilities. Síle was being grilled by Immigration, having rashly answered "How long do you intend to stay in Canada?" with "Forever!" No, customs officers were going through her bags with probes and sniffer dogs; Jael must have planted some coke on her. Actually, Síle was still at the baggage claim, waiting for a missing suitcase that contained all her favourite clothes. Unless she was ill, locked into a washroom cubicle. Or had come through already and somehow sailed right past Jude.

Jude told herself not to be ridiculous. She waited, stiff-kneed, for another ten minutes. Then she went off in search of a pay phone so she could check her voice mail, in case Síle had left a message.

Driving out of the airport in the looming twilight, Jude felt cold chew at the back of her neck, slide its claw inside her cuffs, deaden her fingers inside their gloves. She talked to herself soothingly as if to someone standing on the railing of a bridge. The fact that Síle was not on this particular flight, because something must have come up at the last minute, didn't mean that she wouldn't be on another flight to Toronto, another day.
Cold feet, it could be that. No biggie. She'll call tonight.
But Jude's heart was a pebble.

Outside Stratford she felt the sickening glassiness of black ice under her wheels, and before she could slow down the skid had begun. How slowly, how gracefully the Mustang lost its grip on the road! She hunched over the wheel, shut her eyes in the darkness. The car came to a standstill, and she opened them; she was facing back the way she'd come. When she wound down the window and looked out, her back wheel was at the edge of the snow-filled ditch. The road was still empty. Jude knew she might have been killed, but she was unmoved. She turned the car around and headed on home.

When she got in, there was no message. Jude didn't tap in that familiar number. What could she say?
I was at the airport, you weren't
seemed redundant.
Where were you?
was pathetic. Instead, she made herself a pot of espresso and sat on the floor by the wood stove, trying to warm up. The coffee beans had been too long in the freezer, she could taste the burn; she knew the difference now.

Bone tired, she lay down on the sofa and waited. She was hollowed out; she was nothing but longing. There was a line from Jeremiah that kept nagging in her head: "There is no hope: no; for I have loved strangers and after them will I go." But Jude couldn't go anywhere, could only stay where she was, lying like a fossil in the house where she'd been born.

***

For three days Jude hadn't gone out.

Gwen left a message welcoming the new Canadian, and inviting the two of them to come watch her hockey game, as the Stratford Devilettes had reached the quarter-final. Rizla left a ruder one, encouraging Síle and Jude to
stop boinking one of these days
and join him at the Dive. There were other messages, to do with various Christmas bazaars and fairs that Jude was supposed to attend; she erased them all.

She didn't see the need to tell anyone what had happened. What was there to announce? A nonevent; a failure; a blank. It wasn't divorce till you'd been married. It wasn't moving out if you'd never moved in. Only some kind of breaking off, like the abrupt Silencing of a tune. Only her life cracking in on itself like a rotten tooth.

The predictable feelings filled her—grief, and rage, and fear—but flickered away. Jude found she couldn't even really blame Síle for not turning up on the plane; the whole project had been a fantasy. Síle wasn't calling, but wasn't that exactly what Jude had done to her, back in October? It was all a matter of timing, she supposed. They'd missed their moment; the baton had dropped between their fingers and hit the ground.

To pass the hours, she looked out the window a lot. Ireland had a strange, fictive look to her: an old cracked photo, a creepy ghost town.
What am I doing here, still here at twenty-six?
Jude felt a sudden nausea. Those pragmatic settlers would have despised her for clinging to home. They carried their nostalgia like their framed photos and heirlooms, but they never let it get in their way.

A place was nothing on its own; it hit her now; it was only people who carved it into meaning. She'd misunderstood the old myths. It was when Sedna tried to come home that she'd lost her fingers; it was when he touched his native soil again that Oisín felt his flesh withering away. You couldn't stay in the womb; you had to go voyaging.

Not that Jude had the energy, right now, to get to the general store for milk.

She had no desire to go to work, either. What difference would it make if the Ireland Museum opened today, or tomorrow, or ever again? It wouldn't break anyone's heart. Perhaps with a great effort by all the board members and volunteers, it could crawl on for another year or two. But the fact was, there were bigger museums that covered the same themes, only better. If it hadn't been for Jim McVaddy's stubbornness about the terms of donation, the museum would never have come into existence; his collection might well be better off in Goderich or Stratford.

Jude had a bath, to kill half an hour, then lay down on the sofa again and shut her eyes. Síle walked through the crazy architecture of her dreams, her hands indicating doorways or corridors or chutes, her plum-coloured lips moving Silently.

When the phone sent up its shrill clamour, Jude woke with a start in darkness. She had no idea what evening it was. Saturday? The ringing had stopped, but she felt her way to the hall table and listened to the message.

What she heard first was Silence, but she could tell who wasn't speaking; she recognized the sound of this woman's breath in any mood. "Jude? It's me. I—Listen, I'll try you again in a minute, will you please, please pick up the phone?"

Jude put the receiver back in its black cradle and stood very still, holding her breath. She was dizzy, and her mouth tasted foul. When the phone rang again she snatched it up so hard she thumped her cheekbone.

"You must think I'm a monster," said Síle, so near, so clear.

It seemed a year since Jude had heard this voice. She was speechless.

"I hadn't been sleeping," said Síle. "I kept telling myself it would be all right once I was with you. I was all ready to go, on Tuesday morning, I'd booked a taxi. And then I just ... couldn't."