The Sky Is Falling (30 page)

Then, in the middle of it, after I had peeled my nightgown off and tossed it on the floor, a wonderful thing happened. Several wonderful things, but one of them was that minutes went by, many minutes, when I stopped thinking about my son and the perils of being alive in this world, when I thought instead about my husband and what he was doing to me. And afterward, as we lay there breathing hard, Joe singing “Fucked Up Ronnie” under his breath, I realized this just might be
the thing
. Better than Chekhov even. Better than Xanax or Ativan or Tolstoy. Because pleasure is so distracting when you allow yourself to feel it.

Joe stopped singing. “I have an idea.”

“I do too.”

“You go first,” he said.

“I think we should go to a motel. Tell Joe Jr. we're going to a movie, but go to a motel instead.”

He swelled. “Am I as good as that?”

“You are,” I said, lifting his hand off my breast to kiss his palm. “What's your idea?”

Second thoughts crowded onto his face; I had to prod it out of him.

“Go and see her,” he said.

“Who?”

Who indeed. And how? All this time, as far as I knew, Sonia had been in Ontario. Or maybe they'd moved her again. I could have written, but I didn't. I didn't know what to say. She probably wasn't even the same person. How could she be? How long can you stay earnest behind bars? Or idealistic? If it were me, I wouldn't last a day.

“How would I find her?” I asked Joe. “Presuming I wanted to. She'll hardly be in the phone book.”

“It's not hard to track people down. Contact her lawyer.”

“How would I find out who her lawyer was?”

“Jane,” he said. “Jane. Here in the twenty-first century? We have this thing called Google.”

I rolled over. “Yes. I've heard of it.”

He went to sleep. I lay awake, fluttery and anxious. All those feelings forced into dormancy by trauma, stirred up again. I didn't want to see her and, no doubt, she felt the same. Yet I couldn't help wondering what she looked like now. Immediately I pictured her long hair white, which was ridiculous because we're the same age, thirty-nine. But the very
least
thing prison probably did to you was age you prematurely. Maybe it had made Sonia the old woman she thought she'd never get the chance to be.

1984

I couldn't sleep. All night I kept feeling that distorted ridge of bone under my palm. I sweated, tossed. Gulped water and got up to refill my glass. The next morning seemed like it would never come, but it did. It came much too soon with Sonia shaking my arm and asking, “You don't have an exam, do you?”

“No. Do you?”

“I'm not going. Let's take him to the Endowment Lands.” Pascal had not run away from us. He was still asleep on the chesterfield when I came down. During the night, one of the things I had fretted about was that the police would be looking for him. His picture had probably been in the newspaper. We didn't normally get the paper because it was full of lies, but by sheer chance I'd picked it up yesterday for the classified ads. I went out on the deck where the recycling was piled and scanned the headlines. It was a beautiful spring morning and the sun made my headache sing. But there was nothing in the paper so I went back inside.

Sonia was making pancakes. “We'll wake him in a minute,” she said.

And suddenly the solution came. I had confused it with my fear. “Let's call the police.”

She turned to me, shocked. “We can't have the police here, Jane. What about the action?”

“We'll take him to the university and call them there. They'll take him home.”

“You heard what he said last night. He'll just run away again. We've got to make him change his mind.”

“How?”

“We have to convince him. We have to show him how wonderful it is to be alive.” When she said this, I sank down at the table with my head in my hands because there was no one, no one, less suited to this task than me.

Sonia went to rouse Pascal, who joined us, eating cheerfully and heartily. I stared at him. He had cancer. I had felt it myself, his tangible, bony death, not the hypothetical one I always felt for myself. Yet neither cancer nor our sombre mood affected his appetite, though that other symptom of our distress, our barely touched plates, got his attention right away. “All the More for Me” was apparently the motto he would die by.

The bus took us up Kropotkin Street. We transferred and got off where the Endowment Lands began, crossing a city street—two lanes in each direction separated by a meridian. From there we stepped directly into forest. Traffic noise ceased and it seemed we were already miles from human commerce or habitation, deep in a strata of green, leathery leaves underfoot, ferns waist-high, trunks and branches brightly furred with moss, overhead a cathedral span of boughs. “Holy shit,” said Pascal, craning to take in the full height of the trees. He turned a circle on the path. Sonia, she was brilliant. This was how we'd make our case for life, without even saying anything.

For a few minutes that's what we did, walked in silence, then Pascal left the trail and set off bushwhacking in his white boots. We started to follow, but when too many branches whipped back and stung our faces, Sonia and I returned to the trail. Farther ahead, around a bend, Pascal leapt out from behind a tree and scared us. Apparently our screams were hilarious. Sonia glanced at me and, clearly worried that silliness was about to replace reverence, chose this moment to take his hand. He grinned and tried to kiss her. I was outraged, but he had cancer. He had
cancer
. I didn't even know the word in Russian.

Sonia gently pushed him off. He walked over to a mossy trunk and began caressing it instead. “Isn't it beautiful here?” she asked him. “Wouldn't you miss this?”

He said that he would. He said that was why he was determined to stay. The trees in Esterhazy were barely trees compared to these.

“I mean if you were—” She choked on the word.

Pascal: “Dead? We'll all be dead in a few months anyway, right?”

“I hope not!”

“But that's what the generals say.” And he put an arm around the tree that could not refuse him the way Sonia had and swung around it, smiling at his own cleverness. “Since they're the ones with all the bombs, I guess they know what they're talking about.”

Sonia glanced at me again, imploring. I just stood there. Because maybe he was right. It was our own logic flung back in our faces and it stung as much as the tree branches had.

She changed tack. “Don't you want to see your squeeze one last time?”

Right away, he softened. “I said goodbye. They didn't know it, but I did. I hugged them and said I loved them and then I snuck out in the night.”

“What do they do?” Sonia asked.

“My parents? My dad works at the plant. My mom's just a mom.”

“She must be heartsick,” Sonia said.

“I called them from a payphone. I told them I was okay.” He walked on.

“You seem so nice,” Sonia said, following. “Would you really hurt her like that?”

Pascal turned. “You're always asking me questions. Can I ask you one?”

“All right.”

“Why don't you have a boyfriend?”

I waited for her answer too. “I couldn't,” she said.

“Why not?”

“What if something happened to him?” she said, and the way Pascal shook his head, it was clear that he already subscribed to the wonders of being alive, that it was Sonia and I who, in our fear of dying, had turned our backs on life.

Sonia gave up on the subject after that. She dropped behind and walked with me, letting Pascal lead the way. Though he had no idea where he was going and chose each fork in the trail at random, eventually we emerged onto a paved road across from a row of duplex housing for students with families. We trudged across the campus. I hadn't eaten anything, had barely slept the night before. The watery pressure of unshed tears was building up inside me.

Somehow he found the path behind the Museum of Anthropology. He must have come that way with Pete. We clambered down, using stones and roots as handholds, and arrived on a pebbled beach where driftwood logs were scattered around like sticks. Nearby stood a large concrete structure straight out of campus lore—a gun tower prettied up with graffiti, erected during World War II to repel a Japanese invasion. Pascal climbed to the top of it and made machine gun sounds while we waited, embarrassed, for this fit of childishness to pass.

“I want to go home,” I told Sonia.

She grabbed my hand. “Jane. I need you.”

“What can I do?”

“I don't know yet. Please stay. We'll figure something out. We always do.”

When Pascal came back down from the tower, we continued walking around the end of the promontory. He spent some time here skipping stones. By then I was dizzy with hunger. Each grating step had a similar effect on my nerves. “Look,” he said with mock surprise when, ahead, a number of people came into view, some lying on the beach, others reclining on logs, a few even swimming in the frigid water. He walked faster. A prudish distance away, Sonia and I halted. Wreck Beach. None of them was wearing clothes.

“Come on,” he said.

She was as horrified as I was. “No!”

“I'm going in.”

Pascal stripped his shirt off. We turned to face the trees, waiting until it seemed safe to look again. When we turned back, his clothes were piled on shore, but he was still working up his nerve, standing thigh-deep in the water, backside to us, pretty as a flower.

“I'm going,” I said.

“Jane.” She took my hand and led me to a log, never once taking her eyes off Pascal. He plunged and, a second later, bobbed up, sputtering, in a different place. I didn't notice anyone approaching. I was watching Pascal swim and thinking how it was Dieter who had taught him back in Saskatchewan.

“What about telling Pete and Dieter?” she asked.

“Pete will side with Pascal. He'll say he has a right to do what he wants.”

“Even die?”

“Who knows how far Pete will go?”

“That's true. But Dieter might take him home. He doesn't want to do the action anyway.”

“You really think he would?”

“He might,” Sonia said. “If
I
ask him.” She blushed before adding, “Or I could go.”

“What about the action?”

“That's the thing,” she moaned. “The action is my chance to finally do something that will count.”

“There you are! You didn't come for your paper.”

We both looked up. I'd never had the occasion to see a penis in the flesh. This one hung above us, rosy and helpless between shaggy thighs, a naked bird in a nest of hair. Hair covered the rest of his body too, whorling in a weather pattern round his belly. I lifted my eyes to the beard. Kopanyev? As soon as Sonia realized he was talking to me, she sprang up and ran to Pascal.

Kopanyev said, “You should come and pick it up. You didn't do as bad as that. Come this afternoon.”

I was speechless. He seemed not to realize it was because he was nude.

“If you're going to have convictions, no matter how misguided, you must take little criticism, yes? You did very well on your examination. I peeked. You knew that, of course. You're very bright.” He waited for me to respond and when I didn't, he sighed. “I hope our little spat won't change your mind about Russian. Or Russians. This one.” He pointed to the mat on his chest. “In particular.”

I dropped my gaze to his feet. He was wearing dress shoes and socks.

“You are coming back next year, ya?”

“That depends,” I said. I meant the end of the world might change all our plans, but when I looked up at his face again, skipping the parts in between, I saw that he was hurt. With a brusque nod, Kopanyev walked away, bestowing on me a long, receding view of the hair concentrating in his crack.

I was wretched after that. I felt expelled from Kopanyev's favour and, by extension, Russian literature. Sonia didn't ask me what the matter was. She didn't ask about that hairy apparition, my former favourite professor, because she was too upset herself. The entire bus ride home her pale forehead pleated with worry; she tenderized her bottom lip. Pascal put his arm around her and she didn't even pull away like she usually did. When we got off at the stop, she asked me, “What's that word again? For ice cream?”

Morozhenoye
.

We stopped at the corner store so she could buy some. Pascal bought a bag of chips, two chocolate bars, a pocketful of penny candy.
Konfyeta
. He was like a kid. He
was
a kid. A kid blowing his allowance and dancing around Sonia, trying to get her to eat a chip. “No,” she kept saying. “No, please.” Then she gave in and closed her eyes as though it was his last request, allowing Pascal, with a delicate, priestlike gesture, to place the rippled wafer on her tongue and laugh.