The Death of Small Creatures (23 page)

“I'm going this morning.”

He looks up at me now. “You're leaving?”

“Yes,” I say. “In an hour, no, half an hour… any minute now.”

“When?”

“Right away.”

“Don't go,” he says.

I get up and swing open the camper door. A cool breeze wafts inside, and morning light and the taste of salt. I stand in the doorway, swing myself out, holding onto the door frame with one hand. I inhale deeply. “Oh my god,” I say. “It's beautiful out here.” My fogginess lifts. My face feels freshened, my mind cleared. In this moment I remember I am not this person, I am not supposed to be here, and believe for a moment there must be some other life waiting for me back in the city.

Dave stands up, closes the laptop and stretches. The camper becomes quieter, less electrified with the buzz of the laptop suddenly muted. He walks up behind me, pulls me in close to him, kisses the back of my neck.

I pack my
stuff in my duffle bag and in another backpack, mount them on the back of the bike that Dave stole a couple of days ago, try to balance the weight. I will be wearing a second backpack. The bike has one of those platforms jutting out above the back tire. I rig my stuff onto the bike using this platform, packing my bags into place but wary of the spokes and pedals. By the time I'm finished, it is a gigantic impossible mound, yet it is the only way. It's two kilometres to the highway and the closest bus stop. I could never haul my stuff on foot that far. It's about ten kilometres to town biking along the back roads.

“I have to make this work,” I say, and Dave laughs. Everything is a joke to him. I can't relate. All of this, this pending bike ride, the past two weeks, the month in the hospital, the past ten years, will be or have been the hardest part of my life. I am pained to the core, carry with me shame and regret, can't imagine how I will ever fight my way back again. And yet there is no other way to go than forward. There is no other way out of here, out of all of this, this day, this moment.

“Here,” he says, tightening it for me. He finds a bungee cord in the camper, comes back wielding it triumphantly, then ties the mound down harder and tighter.

We stand back and gaze upon the bike. I think,
I'll never make it.

Dave is going to ride in with me.

It's a gorgeous June day. We take the back road past old farmhouses, fields and berry orchards. Pedalling up even the slightest incline is difficult. It takes me a while to get my bearings, to find my centre of balance, my core. Everything is askew, my coordination, my gravity. I am perched up higher on the bike than I would like, so on top of everything else I feel like I'm leaning up and over the handlebars. The seat is too high, so my legs stretch all the way out when I pedal. The whole arrangement is absurd.

This is a treacherous and soul-sucking trek, though the scenery is gorgeous, fragrant and lush. We wind along dizzily under trees thick with leaves. Sometimes the trees form a canopy over the path and we slip through cooler shadows and shade. Leaves flicker in sunshine. I smell hay, fresh-cut grass, flowers, lilacs at one point and faintly, from the highway, from that distant murmur of traffic half a kilometre away up on the high road, comes the scent of oil and gas.

We come to a little roadside farm. Lying in the mud, right up close to the path, is an enormous pig. I had no idea pigs could become so big. At first I don't see her. She is so inert, so still, and she blots out so much of the landscape I don't at first distinguish her from the mud. There are sunflowers here in this yard too, and chickens and goats and a couple of cats. The farmhouse is small, run down. It seems to sink into itself like it's melting, like it's going back into its basic elements of wood and stone, returning to the earth from whence it came. Surely, no one is home.

The air is still and warm. No movement in the trees. No car sounds. A sprinkler turns out in the farmer's field, that soft
ch, ch, ch
. I get off the bike and go over to the pig, lean over and lay my cheek upon her warm pink belly. The pig lifts her head lazily, flinches, flaps an ear, then lays her head down again.

Dave says, “I'm not so sure that's a good idea, Trish.”

I pat the pig, stroke it. She doesn't stir. She is spent with something: too much life, perhaps, or not enough. I have such emotion for this animal I almost cry.

“I love you, pig,” I say. “I'm sorry you have to die.”

Grass smells warm and sweet all around me. I am suddenly hungry for fresh strawberries, nectarines, oranges, juicy succulent fruit to be squelched upon, sucked in, marvelled over. I think of my grandmother's plastic red and white checkered tablecloth on the porch outside, under her awning, the warm summer evenings we spent playing rummy, drinking concoctions of grenadine and lime cordial as the sun set behind the mountains, and the dog, Tina, asleep under my bare feet, her warm fur, the gentle rise and fall of her chest.

I get up but don't bother to dust myself off. There's dirt on my T-shirt and blades of grass, tiny fine pig hairs even, but I don't care. I want these traces of the garden upon me, feel christened by them. What I need now is earth, mud, grass and sky—I need sky. And a warm yellow sun. I need to bite down into a succulent orange then drink sweet grenadine. My body is so corrupted from the past two weeks, and from years of self-abuse before that.

I want God to take me in his arms and love me, and the pig, to love us both, to love us both into salvation and grace.

Dear God, please love me
, I think.
Dear God, please let this pig live
.

We enter Victoria
through View Royal, back into civilization, past beautiful houses and tree-lined streets. I am desperately thirsty but we have no water left.

It's downhill for a while. This part of the trek I like. I feel like I'm just out for a cruise on my bike, pretend this is my neighbourhood, that I live in one of the great estates set back from the road.

“How much farther?” I say.

Dave is biking circles around me, can't seem to pedal fast enough. He's still high on meth. I probably am too. I've let him ride way ahead of me while I stayed back, leisurely meandering along under the sun and heart-stopping blue sky, consumed by a new sense of my body, my muscles, my most rigorous self. Sweat pours down my face. I am sweating the poison out of me.

This feels like penance.

“Not far now,” Dave hollers, though I only have a faint idea of where we're going, through the city, downtown, over to Megan's, something like that. It doesn't seem to matter anymore. Something has overcome me, something like grace. I feel compelled into a path of least resistance. There's nothing left to do now but let go.

Megan has gotten
wind of the fact that I've been doing crack and crystal meth, so she tells me I can't stay at her place anymore. So just like that, at 2 pm in the middle of a non-descript day in the middle of June, I have nowhere to stay. The last thing I want to do is to impose upon my sister, again, but I don't know what else to do. So I call her, and she comes and rescues me, again.

I stay with her until we both move into her new house in early July.

I begin to walk again, baby steps up the driveway then to the street and beyond. I go for long walks, let the poison flood from my body, let the cool ocean air cleanse my pores. I drink lots of water and tea, spend hours at the coffee shop reading or writing, coming back into myself.

Miraculously, I start running again.

I think about my rabbits. I'm going to get well for them. I take Caravaggio to the vet to get his teeth trimmed. The details of my existence begin to materialize again: first, the clothes on my back; the shoes on my feet; the wind against my face; the sun in my eyes; my face in a mirror. I stare at myself and see myself.
There you are
, I think, noting the pale skin and blue eyes, the dry blonde hair, the high cheekbones and full lips. My visage comes back to me. Like a deer looking into a still pond, I am vaguely aware of my existence. Peacefulness presides over me.

I go for long runs along the ocean, up Dallas Road, around Clover Point, all the way along Ross Bay and back again. My muscles grow strong. I become leaner and firmer, feel the endorphins instead of drugs coursing through my veins.

I am seeing Dr. P weekly, for an hour each visit. He offers me so much of his time and attention. I'm grateful.

“I just spent two weeks doing crack and crystal meth,” I say.

“Well for god's sake,” Dr. P says. “No wonder you're feeling agitated.” Then adds, “It takes days for the drugs to completely leave your system. Cocaine, seventy-two hours. Amphetamine, forty-eight hours. Cannabis, thirty days. Crystal meth, seventy-two hours. Crystal meth, micro-aneurysms of the brain. Crack, cravings. Cannabis, mimics the effects of schizophrenia on the brain.” He appears irritated, disappointed. I feel like a loser.

I gaze upon him as he sits across from me in his office chair.

I am so in love with this man.

His two top shirt buttons are undone, revealing a little bit of chest hair. I want to kiss him there, press my mouth upon his chest.

There is a big rectangular window on the back wall with ugly blinds pushed off to each side. The window looks out onto a side street where the loading bays are. A few trees in the foreground. July light sparkles upon the rustling leaves.

I look out this window frequently during appointments, averting my gaze from Dr. P's, can't hold eye contact for long, am still so shy and embarrassed to be in therapy. I look out the window and at the filing cabinets to the left of the window, at the children's drawings and paintings covering the filing cabinets, taped on. I find this so endearing, that he took the time to display the drawings that children have made for him, just another reason to love him.

“I'll never do drugs again,” I say half-heartedly.

“What compelled you to do something so dangerous?” he asks.

“I wasn't myself,” I say. I walked out of the hospital loaded with plastic bags and luggage, with remnants of myself, of my old life. My home was gone. Husband, gone. Job, gone. Money, gone. Debt, huge. “I was lost,” I say.