The Find (25 page)

—
♦ —

THEY HAD CELEBRATED HIS EXAMS
and Greta's victory in the tribunal. He had been living with Anna for ten months when she came and sat next to him in the kitchen and quite simply told him it was over.

‘I don't want to continue... So what I'm thinking,' she said, very slowly and carefully, ‘is that you could use Mama's room while you decide what your plans are.'

What she was saying did not match her voice.

‘I do believe what you say, absolutely,' she told him, ‘but I want you to have another life.'

When he reached for her she shoved him away and his hip glanced on the corner of the counter: it was a shock to feel her fight him and then he wanted to fight her back. He had her by the arm, would not let go. A chair clattered to the floor. His heart punched at the walls of his chest, he was ready to overcome her, wanted to hurt.

‘No— I can't stand this! I just can't!' she shouted. The shock of what he was doing loosened his grip and she twisted free.

After that, he would not stay there, not one night. He took a bag of stuff and the letter she'd written him and drove back to Big Crow even though he knew Mac and Orianna were staying with her daughter, even though he knew being there was likely the worst thing he could do. He drove when he should have slept, put miles behind him — between him and her — as fast as he could.

The window had been fixed. The lights worked. The refrigerator and the stove had been unplugged; Scott hooked them up again, unloaded his beer and vodka into the fridge. There was no plan, except to knock himself out, to obliterate his memory of Anna any way possible. And perhaps as well as that, to show her: Did she think of
this
possibility? Was this what she had meant by
another life
?

He had a good example to follow, and he did a thorough job of it, stretched on the sofa with the drink within reach, watching TV and forgetting it as he watched, falling asleep, drinking some more, emerging only for liquid supplies, a bottle and a case, from the liquor store. Some time passed.

It seemed very early, but was actually around noon, when knocking on the door dragged him back into the room: he was on the couch. Light shimmered painfully through the lace curtain. Scott yelled to go away. He lay there, still, his skull throbbing, and whoever it was outside began knocking again. He pushed himself up and negotiated a path through furniture that seemed to lurch at him; he reached the door, struggled with the matter of opening it. Who the hell?

‘Thompson.'

‘Long time. Alan said to look you up. You look rough. Can I come in?' Thompson looked the opposite of rough: he moved easily and talked freely. His hair was longer, washed and shiny, caught in a ponytail at the back. He glanced around the trailer, and then kept his eyes on Scott.

Scott reached the sofa again. He closed his eyes.

‘Got coffee?' The sounds of Thompson washing cups and scraping coffee out of the tin seemed to Scott like some kind of personal assault, though the smell was surprisingly good; he opened his eyes, warmed his hands on the cup; he thought that he heard for a moment or two the sound of the ravens' wingbeats, felt the air on his face as they soared up above the edge of the cliff. Things had been very different then. Now, all that felt like an imaginary world, a fantasy.

Thompson watched him drink.

‘You could get stuck in this shit,' he said. ‘They say alcoholism is partly genetic. It's a physical thing. You especially don't want to be doing this.'

No? Exactly what did Thompson think he should be doing, then? It was a mistake, Scott realised, to have asked because just like everyone else on the planet, Thompson had a plan for him, one he had heard before: Scott should study.

‘Open up, man. The point is, get wise and get a degree at the same time,' Thompson said. ‘Anthropology, Law, Education, whatever. Look at your cultural background, the history and politics of it, past, present and future. Develop skills and reconnect to your mother's side of the family, and at the end of it you're qualified to do something worthwhile.'

‘So where are you sending me?' Scott asked, his head back in the cushions, every inch of him committed to gravity: ‘You got that picked? I can't,' he said. The
c
word had lost its terrors; it was a friend after all. ‘I can't do it. Leave me be, okay?'

Feeling Thompson's eyes on him he was aware, suddenly, of how he must look: stubble, red eyes, slept-in clothes. A tsunami of self-pity engulfed him as he watched the other man put down his cup and make to leave. But at the door Thompson turned back:

‘Look Scott,' he said, ‘forget the detail. Why not just come back to the city with me and take a look at things. There's a spare bed in our house right now.'

—
♦ —

HE WORKED AT A RESTAURANT CALLED FLUX
, hung out with Thompson and his student friends. It was months before he could bear to slip the CD Anna had left for him into the drive, to allow her words to appear in clinical Verdana on the screen of his laptop and hear the voice they conjured up, telling him about what was now the past.

I have woken each day and felt my spirits lift because you were there beside me or somewhere in the house. But increasingly, as the reality of this diagnosis sinks in, I need to set you free of me. That day at Vik's when the Chinook blew and you stood there with your shirt flapping and your head craned back to look at the clouds, I thought my heart would burst, but also I knew that if need be — if things did not come to a natural end — then I must do this.

I believe you when you say you could cope with what is ahead of me, but because I believe you, I want your life to be otherwise. I want to know that you are out in the world, and that countless other possibilities are ahead of you. But it is only with great effort that I do what does sometimes seem perverse.

You've altered me. Everything is the same yet different. There is a shine to things that there was not before. Even now. I'm no longer afraid, or never for very long.

I will miss you, and I hate to make you sad. I want you to know how glad I am that we have been together for these past months. If I am honest, I do not want you to forget me, but rather to understand, and to see this parting as a kind of love. And I want you to know, too, that I will be all right.

Scott hated the letter, but did not destroy it. Sometimes he thought he hated Anna too, but when he read that genetic manipulation looked likely to halt the progress of HD in mice he still wanted to be able to dance around the room together, crying out
You see? You see?
Teams of people were working on it all over the world, but this piece of research was happening right here in the university Thompson attended. Could he do something like that? Wear a white coat and chop life up under a microscope or whatever it was that they actually did? Save her, so that she would have him back? Though it was people he liked, not the bits they were made of, not the pieces of code: he liked the girl with the white cane whose mother came every day to meet her at the bus stop right outside their house; he liked Simon B, a Haida performance poet who was going to move into their house, and Helena Michaels, mother of three, studying law part-time for the next god knows how long, and his co-worker Aidan who was building a straw bale house over by the Centre for Horticultural Studies. Thompson himself.

‘Why so heroic? Hundreds of communities don't have a physician,' Thompson pointed out. Why so expensive? Scott countered. To be one of those took about ten years and countless thousands of dollars, not to speak of dedication and ambition; highly educated, amply supported middle-class kids murdered each other for places, for the right to dissect corpses and fill their well-disciplined minds with Greek and Latin words. Though it was true, also, that he had stood on the hot shale and laughed with Anna about the bones of the arm and hand; he did know that words were just squiggles on the page, wave patterns in air which vibrated the eardrum, stimulated the nerve and somehow, in the depths of the brain, became sounds, the names of things you didn't ordinarily see — that they were no more and no less than that. He could learn them when he wanted to, could like it, even, so long as it took him to a place that made sense.

Don't push me
, he told Thompson.

A BSc, perhaps, at most
, he privately thought, and if he got that far, think again. Months before he even considered signing up for his first class, he ordered a life-sized skeleton with moveable joints and display stand, which arrived in pieces in a box the size of a dryer; he spent the next two days in the living room of the shared house on East Fifth, assembling it with the aid of the diagram. It was a 3D jigsaw; it was simple mechanics, a list of words; but also, it implied a person, someone whose problem you could fix, improve at very least. Once he had the bones and the joints filed in his brain, he could begin to visualise the large muscles and their attachments, could find the things themselves on Thompson or any other willing body; could feel them, glowing, illuminated inside himself as he pushed up the hill on his bike or wove between the tables at Flux.

—
♦ —

ANNA WAS BACK FROM A WALK
, hot and exhausted, and if she had known who was calling, she would not have taken the call. But the ringing continued, and she pressed
Talk
.

‘Is that you, Anna?'

He had to ask, she knew, because her voice was different. It was slower, and it seemed to belong to someone slightly drunk who was trying very hard to appear sober. And also Roger stood watching her, panting and needing water. She was sweating hard, her heart battering in her chest. But Scott's voice was absolutely the same, and she did not hang up.

Yes, she agreed. It was a very long time since they had spoken. Were things going well for him? Yes, he said, they were.

‘I'm wondering if it's possible to visit,' he said. Even then, she was going to say that no, she still thought it best, from a purely selfish point of view, to just leave things in the past. ‘I have a friend, Lenni,' he told her, ‘who would like to meet you. I think you'll like her.'

He travelled with Lenni by bus from Calgary, back into the landscape of his former life. They shared his MP3, listened to the same music — but they were not together: she had the window seat and stared calmly out at the shimmering blue sky and the golden or glaring yellow fields to either side; he was sweating silently beside her, his eyes mostly closed as they proceeded down the road that he and Anna had driven many times, as they passed the exact junction where the truck had blindsided them.

She sounds quite something. A hard act to follow
, Lenni had told Scott when they arrived at the History Stage — that sticky moment when a woman he'd been seeing would look into his eyes and then away again, then back, maybe stroke his hand, or fiddle with the fringe on her jacket or bite at a nail, then stop herself, start again. Perhaps she'd cry a bit as she explained how her ex two-timed her, or she him; how it stopped being fun, or how he was so jealous and it was stifling, or she wanted to live together but he didn't or they did live together but fought all the time, or alternatively never fought at all but the spark went right out of it... Then she'd dry her eyes, smile, say: ‘What about you?'

Like, forty? That's kinda weird.

But it doesn't sound, you know, like it could have gone anywhere.

How sad.

‘I'd like to meet Anna,' Lenni had said. ‘Seriously, I would.'

But why? And what the hell was he doing, going along with it? Why, four years —
four whole years
— down the line, when he had finally gotten over her, had he dialled Anna's number? Why was she allowing them to visit? Suppose he had brought Lenni all this way just to discover that he still belonged to Anna, always would? Suppose he lost her, too?

She sat quietly next to him, studying the landscape, reading the names of signs. An important part of Lenni, Scott was beginning to understand, was that if she was afraid of something, she would neither run away nor ignore it. She would quite deliberately turn and face it, get to know it as intimately as she could.

Lenni made me do this, he told himself.

Because physically it was not a good day, Janice had driven Anna downtown to meet them at the Greyhound stop by the convenience store. It was very warm still, the light was just fading. Most of the town was closed and still, but they could hear the highway traffic and some music from a cafÈ down the street. Anna was torn between excitement and dread. What would it be like after all this time, to see him? What would it be like for him to emerge into the gritty light and heat of summer dusk and see Janice standing close to a suntanned woman in loose khaki shorts, much thinner than he remembered? Who had grey in her hair and looked older, now, than her age? Would he notice the difference in her eyes, the stare? That between movements, her face looked somehow stiff?

Of course he would — and now the bus was upon them and its doors hissed open. She concentrated, frowning up at the passengers as they emerged: two large women in bright track pants, an assortment of old men and boys, a young woman carrying a backpack, tall, and alert in the way that creatures are and people often are not. Then Scott.

Should she have been surprised that he too looked different? That at first she couldn't speak, and then all she could do was shout out his name in her new voice?

‘Scott!'

The hug was not a simple thing; she knew it was awful for him to feel the unwelcome dance inside her, whereas, through the damp fabric of his shirt, her hands registered only a strong back, the familiar protrusions of his spine.

‘There,' she told him, sensing tears before she saw them. ‘Don't worry. I'm doing well.' They stepped back from each other and Lenni offered her hand.

‘I'm very pleased to meet you,' Lenni said, and her large grey eyes sought Anna's as she spoke, and did not shy away. She wanted, Anna felt, to know exactly how things were.

In the car, when Anna turned to answer a question about the museum she saw them together: dark and light, Scott's hand on Lenni's thigh, the way they leaned into each other without meaning to, how they didn't need to look at each other in order to communicate, and yet could not stop themselves from doing so, and she cursed herself for allowing the visit. She saw Scott, his strong back and his complex history, fully awake now and connected to his own life, who would commit and mean it, fight for what he wanted, suffer and recover, transformed, if he should lose: a man who'd called her name out in the night, who had wanted to walk alongside her on her own difficult road. Who could have done so, who would have found a way, somehow, eventually, to something good, to whom she had eventually said,
No.

His face was a little older now: the planes of it more defined, the gaze steadier. He wore his hair longer, but there he was. And she saw the other woman in all her glory, passionate, intelligent, and curious. Lucky, young and whole.

This was what she had wanted. But it was so far easier to know about in the abstract than it was to accept in the flesh. It took strength to get through dinner: the serving of the food Janice had prepared, the pouring of wine.

That night she lay in her bed and heard the low murmur of their talk in the room below, a burst of laughter, the running of water in the shower, the opening of a window, and wept. It was as if stones were in her chest and she had to push them out. It felt like a kind of work. Eventually she could breathe normally again, felt her face relax, her body dissolve into a strange, empty lightness.

Scott was sleeping with his girlfriend Lenni in her mother's room below. They would eat breakfast together in the morning, and then she would show them around, and not forget to invite them to the opening party next June.

After the preparation room and the moulding facility, where technicians were already working to make resin replicas of the skull and other finished parts, the three of them wandered through the newly completed Cretaceous garden. The path wove through a crush of ginkgos, huge ferns and horsetail, then past a waterfall, and a pool with spiny, greyish fish. The air, warm, saturated, had a tang of must and rot about it. Water dripped from the ferns and dogwoods on the bank above the benches they sat on and with no warning, warm mist hissed from concealed valves, drenching them, coating all the leaves.