Your Place In The World

It’s the morning of your birthday, the first birthday you’ve ever spent without your mother—not because she’s dead, she’s too proud for that—but because the week of your birthday happened to be the only week your partner’s family, dispersed now across Canada, could meet up at the family home on Vancouver Island. You have made it down the wide, creaking staircase without waking any child, you have crossed the hallway, littered with shoes and sleeping dogs, without stumbling or stepping on anything that barks, you have entered the kitchen and closed the door and are walking towards the kettle and the French press when a pain in your foot collapses your leg and you curse, which wakes Brandy, your brother-in-law David’s deeply compassionate golden retriever-German shepherd mix, who scrambles up, her nails scraping the hallway floor, which wakes Harold, your sister-in-law Stephanie’s boneheaded boxer who barks and whips his head around desperately to try and figure out why, why, why he is barking. “Oh, shut up,” you say, your voice an eerie emulation of your father, though you make this observation so quickly that it slips through the net of your memory of the event and swims back into the sea of your subconscious.

A toy unicorn. Someone’s fucking toy unicorn.

And now someone is crying. Harold has stopped barking but he and Brandy seem desperate to go upstairs to help.

In the moment it takes you to figure out if it is your youngest daughter or your youngest niece crying, you toss the unicorn towards the living room then see your brother-in-law Stan asleep under a nylon sleeping bag and glistening with sweat. The unicorn hits him near his feet. It slips sibilantly off the sleeping bag, bounces from the couch and thumps against the floor. Stan rolls over mumbling something about stupid dogs and covers his head with a throw pillow that you can’t tell for sure in the dark but you think may have a Popsicle stick stuck to its coarse fabric.

It is your daughter. The crying is your daughter.

So you tell the dogs to “stay” and charge upstairs as fast as your tiptoes can carry you up the creaking stairs. When you see your youngest daughter, Erica, standing against the netting of the Pack ’n Play, you know that all hope of a quiet, private morning has vanished. Still, you are whispering that you are there, that it is okay, that she should, shhh, just go back to sleep. Erica is quiet when your partner comes in bleary eyed and sees you standing there. “Oh, okay,” your partner says and Erica gets excited and reaches for her mother. “Hi,” your partner says.

Your oldest daughter whimpers then and you wave your partner away in a way that you know she finds rude.

She scowls.

You pick Erica up and shake your head at a pace that says, I can’t fucking believe it, it’s five-thirty and I got up to avoid all this shit.

Your partner says, “I can get up,” and you flick your head quickly, No. “Why don’t you go back to bed?” she suggests.

You press your finger to your lip, telling her to shhh.

“Stop it,” she says, like you’re one of the dogs.

You hold your hand out, palm down, your way of silently saying, Relax.

You are driving your partner crazy. “Okay, I got it. You don’t want to be here.”

Good morning.

“Happy birthday,” she says as she turns and heads back to bed.

You manage to get out of the bedroom and down the stairs again. Erica says, “Dogs,” as you cross through the hall. Brandy raises her head. “Don’t even think about it,” you say and feel badly.

You start the kettle and hand Erica a piece of banana which she seems more interested in mashing against things or seeing how much dirt she can cause to adhere to than eating. Then, as you are measuring out the coffee, she throws the banana and starts shouting for yogurt.

Stan over on the couch mutters something. Erica gets scared and she starts crying. You take her out onto the porch, and the sound of that, probably specifically the sound of the suction on the outer door, the sticky snapping open and the woosh of air that makes any closed door rattle against its latch—or maybe whatever enticing smells flood the house—gets the dogs shuffling around, agitated, and vocalizing. You can’t be bothered.

It is cool outside and your hands go immediately cold. Your ears, too. Erica isn’t satisfied playing with the Rubbermaid bin of toys on the porch and wants to walk on the lawn with its human-scale dog feces, which is so much harder to see in the dim early morning light. You do that for a few minutes, startling the sleepy, slow flies from their shit-beds, or their shit-meals or whatever shit thing they are doing and sending them buzzing lazily in the air before you spot your stroller hanging from a large coat hook on the outside of the house where you hung it so whichever of the neighbourhood cats wouldn’t piss on it again. You grab Erica from under her arms and she laughs like she thinks you are playing. “Let’s go for a walk,” you say.

You go inside to grab a sweater for you and a sweater for her and you pause by the kitchen counter to consider making that coffee, but as soon as you do, Erica starts to strain towards the door, her arm reaching and saying, “Walk, want walk.”

You go into the room you and your partner are staying in and set Erica down in the nook created by your partner’s fetal positioning. Your partner say, “Hunh?” and you whisper, “Watch her for a sec., I’m just gonna grab us sweaters.” Your partner says, “Sweaters?” like you are crazy, possibly dangerously, and you say, “Yes. Sweaters.” She asks you what your problem is. You don’t answer.

You are ninja-quiet going into the room where Erica’s older sister, Virginia, is mercifully, probably delicately, still asleep. Out the open window a motorcycle screams by—it sounds like it's racing along the sill—but Virginia doesn’t even sigh. Then, suddenly, you are worried that she’s dead and you watch her chest for a minute to make sure that it is still rising and falling rhythmically. It is. You leave.

You walk into town. Erica is singing. The birds, too. The coffee shop that you love, a bastion of familiar coffee options and near-familiar feeling, is closed at this hour, which shouldn’t surprise you, you know. Shouldn’t upset you. Tim Hortons is open and you go there and order the dark roast coffee you scoffed at the ads for. You buy Erica a donut. The feeling in Tim’s is familiar too, from your youth, and if the tables and colour schemes have changed in the last thirty-years they have been changed with a delicacy and care that intends to escape your notice.

What is different is the clientele here on the Island, in Duncan, at six on a Saturday morning. The erasure and assimilation project so central to Canadian colonialism isn’t as far along here, will hopefully never get so far here as it has in the Greater Toronto Area. There are, you take pains to acknowledge, a woman your age with a stethoscope around her neck, its black rubber wrapped in beautiful, colourful beadwork and an older Native couple at a table by the front window having a quiet breakfast and conversation, the man’s hair carefully combed—slicked—and the woman smiling warmly at Erica when they spot each other. But there is also a woman who seems to be at the tail end of a substance-hammered night clutching at her extra-large coffee like it’s the only buoyant thing in her sea of suffering. There is a man with large, vicious looking scabs coming out of the bathroom who makes eye contact with you and offers a grin with gaps, maybe fresh. You nod, possibly imperceptibly, and say, “Hi,” with too little breath.

A maybe twelve-year old boy with black hair and a No Fear shirt opens the door to enter, spots you trying to leave and tells his siblings to, “Wait, guys,” and you thank him as you navigate Erica’s stroller out the door trying desperately not to spill your coffee. For whatever reasons, you apologize to the people you presume are the boy’s parents as you scuttle past them on the sidewalk.

 You cross the highway and walk towards the river. Any time you slow down or start pushing the stroller with one hand and it arcs as a result, Erica says, “Go, go, go,” and jerks her body forward and back, her head slamming the back rest. This means that you drink much less of your coffee than you would like.

Before the bridge, you push the stroller off the sidewalk and down a path of flattened grass that allows you to avoid the stairs leading to the gravel walkway running parallel to the Cowichan River. The gravel is much harder on the stroller’s wheels and you are actually stopped a few times before you curse and give up.

Erica is saying, “Out, out, out,” and you are telling her to just hold on. It is hard to find a spot on the ground where you feel confident that you can set your coffee down and it won’t tip over. You decide to put it on the edge of the path a few feet away. Erica is rocking forward and back again as you approach to unbuckle her. As soon as you set her feet on the ground, she races down the slight incline to the tall plants that create a barrier between the path and the river. You tell her to hold on as you grab your coffee and with one hand swing the stroller onto the grass. You have to tell yourself to relax, and you do tell yourself. The river’s long monologue is audible in between the sound of trucks passing over the bridge on the highway. Erica is happily running with her hand out, sweeping the long grasses. The coffee is starting to work. The wind is playing ventriloquist with the leaves on the trees and the sun is drawing elongated images of houses and trees east of the path. You can feel the day cooling off your heart.

But Erica has disappeared.

You look back along the path towards the highway. You squint. You call, “Erica?”

She squeals from somewhere beyond the wall of plants.

Your coffee rocking and splashing out from the hole you tore in the lid and landing burning on your hand, barely registers against the hot humming panic animating your body, yet some corner of your mind manages to tell your left hand to grab the cup so your right hand can grasp it from the top, your fingers free of the splashing, burning beverage.

“Erica?” you call again.

She laughs again and bursts out of the grasses running on stiff legs and waving a pair of jean shorts in the air. You laugh relief, then surprise because where’d she get a pair of jean shorts. Now the pain of the coffee on your hand forces a, “Fuck!” and you again grab the cup with your left hand, this time more consciously, and flick your right hand as if that’s a way to get rid of the pain. Erica drops the jean shorts and runs back towards what you see is a concave dirt rut cut by use through the tall plants. “Where are you going?” you say and her hands and eyebrows leap up and she screams like you are playing a game with her now. “Erica!” you shout. She shudders with surprise, falls onto her diaper-padded bum and begins to cry. Certain now that she won’t go any where, you walk over to inspect the jean shorts.

They are cut to the edge of the back pocket, short enough that the thin, light blue front pockets would hang below their frayed hem. Through one leg hole you can see a pink, frilly fringe and a pattern of tiny black and yellow bees.

You put your burnt, throbbing right hand into your pocket, pull out your phone and take a picture.

Squatting, you pick Erica up with one arm and she rests her snotty, tear-streaked face against your shoulder. You walk her down the path. A few steps towards the Cowichan and the riverside plants already reach past your head. You see a depression that looks like a deer bed. “Is this where you found those shorts,” you ask Erica. She lifts her head and looks, but says nothing. “Is this where you grabbed those jeans?”

“Jeans,” Erica says. She buries her wet, warm face in your neck and laughs.

Curiosity walks you to the riverbank, raised and clear here. There is a path down to a rocky, shallow pool. Though called a river, the Cowichan is closer in size to the creeks you know from southern Ontario and there is something about it that makes you feel like you are home, reminds you of bike rides with your mother, Sunday drives with your grandparents, exploring with your father.

Near the water’s edge you notice a twelve pack of Labatt Ice—the box anyway—a clutter of brown empties visible through the torn top. Beside the box is a bottle on its side half in the water, rocking slightly.

As you walk back to the stroller sipping coffee, your brain writes stories. It is the need to account for the women’s underwear still in the jean shorts that seems to push each ending to an unhappy place—drunk, bottomless swim leads to drowning; sex in the grass followed with a hasty bottomless departure. You buckle Erica in and wonder if you missed a body bobbing around some bend in the river, or a used condom hanging off some tall riverside plant like the limp pupa of a monstrous butterfly.

The sound of a car door slamming means nothing to you until you see a beautiful girl, obviously tired, obviously upset, walk to the edge of the wall of plants then along it, head turned towards the hidden, monologuing Cowichan. She is wearing a long, white shirt with some sparkling design. She stops and takes a few steps down a path like the one you so recently emerged from, but before she disappears you notice that the back of her shirt has some sort of plant matter clinging to it. When she returns from down the path, you notice her breasts rocking rhythmlessly as she trots along the edge of the plant wall. You turn your head forward, conscious of staring, and you see an older woman—possibly her mother—watching the girl. There is a cluster of keys and tchotchke key chains bouncing from the middle finger of the older woman’s impatient left hand. “Found them,” you hear the girl shout, her voice tired, but relieved.

“Okay,” the older woman shouts, too loud for how close you and Erica are. She smiles nearly apologetically.

You nod.

“Let’s go,” the older woman shouts.

The girl shouts back, “I’m coming.”

A hundred meters down the street, they speed past you in an old Ford Focus.

Back at your in-laws’ place, your partner and Virginia are up and they both wish you a happy birthday. David is sitting in a low lawn-chair, Brandy lying at his feet. David wishes you a happy birthday, too, then sips his coffee.

Your partner asks how you are.

You smile too wide and hold up your right hand, your thumb and index finger forming a circle. “Perfect,” you say.

Your partner suggests that maybe you go off on your own today, like go for a walk or go sit in a coffee shop and read or something. You want to tell her about the girl and the beer and the jean shorts and the underwear, but don’t know what you would say.

Virginia runs up to you and smash-hugs your thighs. “Daddy?”

“Yes.”

She holds up the unicorn that you stepped on and tossed accidentally at her Uncle Stan. “It moved,” she says. “It’s magic.”

That makes you laugh.

“What?” she asks.

Your partner explains that Virginia remembers leaving it “set up” in the kitchen and that when they woke, it was on the coffee table by where Uncle Stan was sleeping.

Uncle Stan comes outside, trailing two of David’s kids. Virginia gets quickly distracted. Stan wishes you a happy birthday, then sits down and starts telling David about a dirt bike engine he’s trying to re-build.

Erica is chasing some cousins around and squealing.

You ask your partner if she’s good, if you can go have a shower. She says yes.

You say good morning to your mother-in-law who’s making another French press of coffee in the kitchen. She asks you if you want a cup. You tell her yes, when you are out of the shower you would love a cup. She makes a face before saying, “I’ll just make a fresh batch then,” because both of you know that there will be no coffee left five minutes from now.

It takes David’s wife, Lisa, wishing you a happy birthday to remind your mother-in-law of the day’s significance. She apologizes, wishes you a happy birthday then apologizes again.

In the shower, you think about the girl and now that you know she is safe you feel permission to make the story positive. Sexy. You can imagine the riverside plants all around you, under your bare knees. The sound of the water going down the drain is the murmur of the Cowichan, the warm water the warmth of another body pressed willingly, thrillingly against your own.

It is only after the shower, hearing your daughters’ voices through the open window that you imagine yourself the jean short girl’s mother. Despite the guilt that the thought brings, you still resolve that tonight you will suggest to your partner a walk down by the river.

As you are getting dressed, your partner and children come upstairs to the room you are staying in. Virginia and your partner give you cards. Your partner hands Erica a package and the girl nearly gets it to you before she drops it on the ground and starts tearing at the tissue paper. Your partner tries to stop her, but you say it is okay and you get down on the floor and unwrap the gift with Erica’s help. It is a short-sleeved chambray shirt. You put it on. You thank your partner and she hugs you and kisses you.

All morning, your partner’s family compliments you on your new shirt.

After lunch, you call your mother. She wishes you a happy birthday and tells you that since she woke up this morning she has wanted to call you, but she wasn’t sure when she should call because of the time difference and because she knows it can be busy at your in-laws’ place. She asks you how you are doing and you tell her about waking up to be alone and about the dogs and Erica and the unicorn toy that you threw and that now Virginia thinks is actually magic. Your mother tells you she misses you, but that she understands. She tells you how proud she is of you. She tells you how important you are to her and how when you were born she finally understood her place in the world. You know what she means. You have heard it before. You tell her thank you, because you appreciate it. You tell her about Erica disappearing in the grass by the river and the horrible flood of fear. Your mother tells you that once she lost sight of you at the CNE and that it was only a few seconds before she found you and picked you up so quickly and with such loving force that you cried, but for those few seconds she felt— She can’t find a word. You picture the midway at the Ex: all the metal amusements, all their moving parts, all the people. “I can’t imagine,” you say, which is obviously not true, but you don’t bother to correct yourself.

You spend the afternoon with your partner’s family at a provincial park along the river. People are going down some small rapids on one of two yellow, inflatable mattresses. Virginia and you go too and the first time Virginia screams and cries, but when you reach the end of your run she says she wants to go again, so you do, many times. You collect stones at a gentle bend fifty meters up river. Erica naps under a small nylon structure that David and Lisa brought, then, when she wakes up she sits in a shallow pool with her grandmother and your partner. Your partner looks good in her bathing suit and you notice, but you have to think about other things. Three times you get up to go pee in the woods, each time walking further down a small path and scanning the bushes for deer beds and discarded clothes. As you are leaving the park, Virginia has a tantrum about a hardboiled egg that she has thrown in the sand and still wants to eat. There are no more hardboiled eggs. She says she hates you and you hug her and she tells you to let her go, that you are hurting her. In the car on the way back to your in-laws’ house, your partner tells Virginia that when she shouts like that you and your partner worry that the Child Services or Children’s Aid will come and take her away. You watch the sunlight flickering between the cedar trees.

After your girls have gone to bed, after dinner, your partner’s family surprises you with a cake. You thank them. Some people give you cards, the card from your mother- and father-in-law has a cheque for one hundred dollars. You thank them. Your father-in-law makes coffee and offers a cup to anyone who is interested. You consider it, briefly. Everyone eats their cake and you eat your cake, but you are waiting for an opportunity to ask your partner to go on a walk with you, but your partner, who misses her family for the eleven and a half months that you spend halfway across this massive country from them, is engaged in a conversation with her sister and you just don’t have the patience to wait. You stand up and announce that you are going for a walk.

“Do you want me to come with you?” your partner asks.

“It’s up to you,” you say.

“Maybe you’d like some time to yourself,” she says.

“Sure,” you say.

“I’ll come,” she says. The kitchen is quiet and her whole family is listening, because they can’t help it.

“No,” you say. “It’s okay.”

You stand for a second at the curb out front of your in-laws’ house. You are lonely and angry. Plus, your mind is constructing violent, fearful, racist narratives now. Some tricked out Honda Civic with a muffler modification rips past and your exhausted body shudders.

You go back up the walk to the house, stop at the threshold and, looking down at your shoes like you need to look down at them as you take them off, you say, “You know what? Fuck the walk. I’m beat.”

“You’re going to bed?” your partner asks.

“Yeah,” you say.

Everyone wishes you a good night, then Lisa remembers to wish you a final happy birthday and everyone follows suit.

“See you in the morning,” you say.

You ascend the creaking stairs and prepare yourself to sleep. 

Toronto, June 2016

Emoji sequence: Kat Armstrong

Story: Lee Sheppard

Just Part of Something Bigger

J had written, “My father was a man.” The sentence was supposed to have an adjective, but he’d been searching for the right one for a while now. None fit between what J needed to say and felt he should say. He shut down and unplugged his laptop, carefully coiling the cord.

Outside the train window, the trees—rooted and consigned to a pace of movement and growth imperceptible to people’s fast moving brains—became streaks, smears, a cartoonist’s green rendering of speed. J knew that they would bend and whip in the train’s wake, then become still again until touched by wind. Picturesque at this distance and velocity, a town huddled around a bay; a cluster of boats floated in a harbour and presumably rocked to the sea’s rhythm, masts clanking. The train burst onto and off of a small bridge, the guh-guh-gung guh-guh-gung sound of each transition stopping and starting too fast to register in J’s ears, except as an echo.

J remembered long school bus rides down country roads, the power lines drooping between worn wooden poles, warm morning sun like a strobe light flashing on J’s eyelids as the bus sped past trees.  For a year and a half, the driver had molested the girl whose home was at the beginning of the morning route and end of the afternoon route. J thought of her now, in his class because she’d been held back, but a year older than him at a time when that year seemed an impossible gulf. She seemed nearly grownup, except she carried with her a teddy bear, its fur matted by her persistent embraces, its eyes missing.

J’s father was the duty counsel assigned to the bus driver. The long hours he spent on the case were nothing new, nor were the long walks he would take as soon as J was tucked in, regardless of whether J was asleep or not. But it was during that case that J’s father started falling asleep in the chair near J’s bed. Maria, the nanny, seemed to think that it was important that J not see his father that way, slumped and drooling in the chair, so in the mornings she would rush J’s father out the door and J would pretend to sleep until Maria came back in to wake him.

Normally, while Maria was setting dinner on the table, J’s father would announce the results of his cases with a practiced neutrality that he thought made him more trustworthy, which probably had made him a more trustworthy lawyer. J knew that his father had not announced the results of the bus driver’s case, but somehow J found out. Who would have told him? The other children were oblivious. The school’s staff were troubled and tightlipped about it. Likely, J had overheard his father discussing the case with Maria at some point when they thought he wasn’t or couldn’t be listening.

Because of J’s father’s efforts to describe the precise, unusual and non-penetrative nature of the sex acts, the bus driver’s sentence was light. He was forced into psychiatric treatment in a correctional facility for a few years. The girl was sent to a counselor.

~~~

When the train arrived and opened its doors, J raced past the other people on the platform, hopped in the first cab and gave directions past the encroaching developments to his father’s place. The fare was high, and the driver asked too many questions.

There was a creek near J’s house where his maternal grandparents took him for picnics and to play. He would throw smooth rocks from one bank to the other, aiming for this or that stump or tree trunk or bird or butterfly. Eventually, he started walking there himself. If he walked upstream, around two bends, the creek became a whole different, private place.

One day, J was sitting on the banks of that creek, spinning a rock between his thumb and middle finger, when someone crashed out of the bush across the river. Gone was the hair set so that the lines of the comb’s strokes were visible throughout the day. Gone too was the polyester uniform with his first name embroidered above his heart and the bus company’s logo across the zipper from his name. The man’s angry eyebrows and muttering mouth still did violence to the other features on his face, a face J had primarily seen reflected in the large rectangular mirror through which the driver had watched the children on his bus.

J got up, put the rock into his pocket and, breaking ground through the dense undergrowth, followed the driver along the creek’s bank to the road leading up from a single lane bridge. Being careful to stay out of sight, J crossed the creek, soaking his canvas sneakers and the hem of his shorts.

The road cut through the creek’s deep valley, a wound that had never healed, a wound that left two bald and crumbling cliffs. To climb the slope without setting off a riot of falling stones and dry dirt, J had to go back along the bank and climb where there were trees By the time J reached the top, the driver was about to round a bend, so J, already out of breath, ran to catch up. At the end of the cliff—the road only about ten feet below the steep bluff, the driver already far off down the road—J jumped and slid down to the road’s gravel shoulder. The rest of his voyage, maybe half a kilometer, J walked in a crouch in a deep, muddy ditch.

The driver went up a winding dirt path at the end of which was a tiny, outdated, but neatly kept house. J stayed in that ditch, twisting and turning the rock from the riverbank over in his hands like if he could just find the right angle or grip on it, he would know what to do. The dark, moonless night fell and J’s feet started to suffer. When he had arrived home, Maria held him desperately tight. His father asked where he’d been.

“The driver is out. The bus driver.”

“I know.”

“How is he allowed to live here?”

J’s father smiled sadly.

“I thought, I thought things happened to people like that. In prison, I mean.”

“He had the very best treatment.”

“Thanks to you.”

“Thanks to me.”

“How do you live with yourself?”

“I am very good at what I do. I believe in what I do.”

J stood now in the hallway where that argument took place. “My father was a dutiful man,” he thought. He turned the rock in his pocket. “My father was a good man,” had been one of J’s earliest discards.

He looked in on his father’s bedroom. J hoped that the grand, severe furniture pleased his father, because as far as J knew, since J’s mother had died, only he and Maria, long since let go, had ever laid eyes on it. The old chair from J’s bedroom was the one piece out of keeping with the rest of the furniture.

J slept in the guest bedroom.

The next morning he completed his eulogy, writing, “My father was a dedicated man.” He felt that dedicated sounded more compassionate and human than dutiful. Less of a slight.

J went for a walk.

The river was as he’d left it. Smaller, maybe, but just as peaceful. The bridge was still a single lane, the cliffs beside the road still barren and steep. The bus driver’s house was still standing, still looking better maintained than it deserved. A sunflower bloomed, big and shameless, beside the front door. It was forty years since the trial and J figured the driver had died, but who else would have bothered to keep that sad little house in such fine shape? He stood on the road by the mailbox and tossed his rock up in the air. He’d had it for over thirty years. It remained mute.

~~~

It was almost a week after the funeral when J found the letters and Christmas cards. They were addressed to a PO Box. At first they were from the parents of the girl that the bus driver assaulted. “Thank you for your generous offer, but we cannot accept. Please find your money enclosed.”

“Thank you again, but we do not want your charity.”

“Please stop sending us money.”

Then a series of thank yous before the parents stopped sending them and instead it was the girl. Her first letters were simple thank yous. Then she told stories about various jobs she had worked and stories about how she used the money—to buy a used car or a winter wardrobe for her kids. There was a break up—she never used the word divorce—and then one partner after another. Eventually there were requests to meet him, to do something to thank him. They were never inappropriate or obviously suggestive, but there was the faintest whisper of innuendo.

J wrote her. He said who he was, who his father was and that his father had died. He gave the return address and his email. And as he prepared the house to sell, he waited for her reply.

They had an auction to get rid of his father’s things. J was sitting, watching it all disappear for more money than he ever thought it was worth, when he saw a woman touching his father’s headboard.

She looked over and approached him, smiling.

“Hi?” he said, maybe recognizing her now.

“J?” she asked.

“Yeah, hi.” It was her, the poor girl from the bus.

“This probably isn’t a good time.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “When’s a good time?”

“I’m sorry. About your father.”

“Ah,” J said. “People die.”

“I suppose.” She started to cry. “I’m sorry.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. Then, remembering what had happened to her when she was a girl, he withdrew his hand. She hugged him. Put her head on his chest.

“Want to go for a walk?”

“But,” she said, pinching her nose. “Sorry, sorry,” she waved her hand. “I don’t know why I’m—” she cried harder then. People stared.

“Let’s go for a walk,” J said. “Hold on.” J confirmed with the coordinator from the auction house that he was, indeed, not needed.

They walked to the river. J talked about his work with an engineering firm, work that had taken him all around the world and away from here. He talked about his divorce and his children. His youngest had just finished her first year at university. Both daughters were unable, for their own reasons, to make it to their grandfather’s funeral.

People called her Mandy, she told him. She talked about her children, one of them managing a stationary store, one of them back in a treatment facility. She lit a cigarette. She told him what some of their former classmates were doing.

They stood beside the river. J played with the stone in his pocket.

“This is lovely,” Mandy said.

“Thanks,” J said. “I mean, I’m glad you like it. This place was special to me. Is special to me.” He squinted up the hill then smiled at Mandy.

“For a long time I hated your father. There I was, though, taking his money.”

J thought it would be impolite to ask about amounts.

“He was just part of something bigger than him, that’s all.”

J nodded.

“We all are, though, aren’t we?”

“We are,” J agreed.

He had thought they would go on to the bus driver’s house, but he saw now that they wouldn’t, that they shouldn’t. When they got back, men from the auction house were labeling the larger items, things that had been sold and were too large for the vehicles the buyers had driven. Mandy held J’s hand. “It was very nice to see you. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You know, we never guessed it was him.”

“No?”

“We even guessed that it might be Mr. Garrett.” Mr. Garrett was the bus driver.

“Really?” It made J angry that they had thought that. “Hm.”

“Will you keep in touch?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure. Let’s. Let’s keep in touch.”

That night, J slept on a mattress he’d dragged up from the pile of unsold things in the basement. He didn’t dream.

In the morning, he got dressed and put the rock in his pocket. As he walked to the bus driver’s house, J wondered if he had missed some provision his father had made for Mandy in his Will. J thought back on all the financial information he’d sorted through. There certainly was enough money to keep sending Mandy something.

A Civic was parked outside the bus driver’s house. J crouched in that same ditch that he’d crouched in years before, stood in what felt like the same mud. Each time a car drove by, J crouched. A child spotted him out of the rear window of one passing vehicle. J wished he was privy to the conversation that happened afterwards, about the man standing in the ditch.

Eventually, a man and girl walked from the bus driver’s door to the Civic. The girl was young, maybe ten or eleven, and lovely in the way of a child. The man looked like a younger version of the bus driver, who stood, stooped and twisted at the threshold of his home. They waved to him before they got in the car. The girl said something that from the ditch sounded like, “Thank you Grandpa.” The bus driver blew a kiss.

The Civic pulled out of the driveway. J crouched with his face pressed against the plants clinging to the edge of the ditch until well after he heard the Civic’s engine disappear behind the bird cries, grasshopper trills and cicada buzz. J rubbed the rock in his pocket, asking it one last time for guidance.

Its answer was elegant and silent, the same answer it had been giving all along. It referred to the river whose banks J took it from, the river’s persistence and the river’s change over time, the river’s reworking of the materials that made up its bed and bank, the smoothing of rough edges, and the influence of those materials on the river. It referred also to the hours, the years, that J had spent in conversation with this small piece of earth and the way they had shaped, had changed, each other.

J left the old bus driver to himself, whoever that self had become.

Duncan, British Columbia, July 2015

Emoji sequence: Nye Marks, major contributor to The West Enders Vol. 1, Issues 1 and 2. 

Story: Lee Sheppard

Dogeza

It wasn’t supposed to happen in the cab, but it was supposed to happen, she did mean for it to happen. Over the past few weeks, Marlene had been compiling a comprehensive list of reasons why she had to end it with Nick. Your inconsistent hygiene was on there, but Marlene skipped over it in favour of some of the bigger items: feels like you always ignore me, sometimes you even walk away while I’m talking—

Nick said, “But—”

But Marlene just continued: Whenever you are actually paying attention, you interrupt me; your pornography thing—at least you could have the decency to erase your history, or to have sex with me sometimes; you rarely have sex with me.

The cab driver turned the volume up on the radio.

Marlene continued, louder now so Nick could still hear: you’d rather spend time with your friends, watching hockey or whatever, than hang out with me, even if we are doing the same things. That one made the list because a week earlier Marlene and Nick had actual plans to watch the Leafs and order pizza when Nick’s childhood friend invited Nick over to watch the same game. Nick asked Marlene permission and she said yes even though she didn’t want him to go. It was some important game, Nick argued. He said he was sorry, but he just really wanted to watch with someone who actually understood. So what was she supposed to say? No? At least he could have invited her, right? He didn’t. And none of her friends were available so she just waited around at Nick’s apartment and the game went into overtime and she fell asleep on the couch and woke up way after Nick had come home and gone to sleep—he hadn’t even had the decency to wake her up and invite her to bed. Anyway.

The final item on the list was about Nick’s dad, who Marlene had only met once even though she and Nick had been together for a year and a half: I have only ever seen you cry about your dad, and I’m not saying you should be crying about me, but it’s like your feelings are locked up and your dad’s the only key.

Nick stared out the window, a tear sliding down his cheek.

“Do you want me to let you off here?” the driver asked.

Marlene saw past Nick, saw all the people lined up waiting to be let into the venue. They had arrived. Nick got out of the car and put his hands in his pockets. The cab driver said, “Twenty-six seventy-five.”

“Right.” Marlene reached into her purse. She gave him forty and didn’t think to ask for change.

Even though the people waiting in line were there to see his favourite band, Nick was staring at them like he couldn’t imagine why anyone would bother. Marlene touched his elbow. “You think I don’t love you,” Nick said.

“Well . . .”

“That’s what that letter says. Not in those words, of course.”

Marlene was tired, suddenly. Like she’d spent all that time writing down what she wanted to say and Nick still wasn’t listening. “I don’t think I can be with you anymore.”

“I got that part, too.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. What she wanted to say was, You don’t need to be an asshole about it.

Nick walked off.

“Can I get my ticket?” Marlene called.

He stomped back to her and handed her both tickets, told her to “Enjoy the show,” then left again.

By the time the line started moving, Marlene still hadn’t decided what to do with Nick’s ticket. She was holding her cell phone, wondering if she should text someone, when Nick appeared beside her. “Hey,” he said. “Who you talking to?”

“No one.” She showed him the blank screen, the blue cursor lazily appearing and disappearing beside a faint To:

“I’ve been thinking,” Nick said. He got down on his knees, then put his forehead on the ground. He was speaking, but Marlene couldn’t hear what he was saying. People were staring. Someone walking past nearly tripped on him.

The line started moving again.

“Nick,” Marlene said. “Nick, get up.” She heard some people laugh and her heart hurt like it was tearing. “Nick.”

He looked up, his forehead mottled by sidewalk, a bit of road grit stuck to the tip of his nose. “Will you forgive me?”

She just waved him over. When he got there, she handed him his ticket and wiped the tip of his nose.

“I know that I can change,” Nick said.

Over the course of the concert, people would walk by where Nick stood with his arm thrown possessively over Marlene’s shoulders and they would look at him and at her like they were some curiosity, not just a couple of people in love. Marlene assumed everyone had witnessed that whole thing in the line-up and she wished she could not see them seeing her and Nick, wished Nick didn’t have to see them, but knew that he did because whenever they looked he would squeeze her shoulders more tightly or brush her breast with his fingertips, the later making her cheeks burn, though she didn’t tell him to stop, so . . .

That night, Nick was more passionate and compassionate than he’d been probably ever, with her at least. At breakfast she reminded him about the list and how if they weren’t broken up, then the things on that list, well, Nick couldn’t forget them. He held out his hand and asked for what Marlene had read him in the cab. She hesitated to go fetch it from her purse because of the hygiene thing that she had skipped over, but when Nick said, “C’mon, I can take it,” Marlene got up and grabbed the six pastel purple sheets of stock she had found at a thrift store with the hilarious girl and, presumably, boy unicorn smiling and faint in the lower left; they laughed about the note paper, and when Nick read the thing about hygiene he laughed and Marlene laughed, and after sex in the shower they went out for a nice brunch.

Marlene couldn’t help but wonder if anyone at the restaurant had been at the concert last night and had seen Nick with his forehead on the ground, making a scene of being sorry, and were seeing him now making a performance of being kind and attentive and listening to all the things Marlene was struggling to come up with because she was mostly just thinking about last night and the awkwardness and wondering if this was right.

The feelings were like a fire warming her, yes, but not necessarily in a nice way.

Over the next few months, as Nick tried, at first, to be better and then just seemed to be better without trying, Marlene could feel that fire—kindled by shame, embarrassment and self-consciousness, fueled by hope and suspicion that the hope was unfounded—and she would wonder if what was happening was good and was what she actually wanted, wondered if she even liked Nick enough for him to be putting all this energy into getting better for her. Eventually, she stopped feeling the fire’s burn and it just didn’t occur to her ask herself whether the fire had gone out.

Toronto, ON/Duncan, BC, June-July 2015

Emoji sequence: My just-former student, Spencer Litzinger, a writer, improv actor and comedian who will be attending Humber's "Comedy: Writing and Performance" program in the fall and who, last I heard, had a summer job with Second City.  Her work appears in Vol. 2, Issues 1 and 2 of The West Enders.

Story: Me, Lee Sheppard.