Damselfish. Susan Ouriou

Mom caught the sarcasm. I certainly did. “Other than the fact that I’m pregnant, that is.”

      Mom and the blender stopped together. A neighbour’s rooster crowed outside. And I was the one who was broad-sided.

      Mom’s exclamations, her questions, were only so much background to my whirling thoughts. I went back for the bottle of Tequila I’d noticed on the top shelf and added a shot to my orange juice. I could see the coming months so clearly. Marc, who had always been there for my sister, would of course drop everything and rush to her side. She would have the family I had not, the family I had hoped to rediscover by embarking on the search to find Papi. And I would have José or another man and our tentative attempts at closeness until sex was not enough and he dumped me or I dumped him. Did I want to do it all over again?

      Growing up, every single friend I ever had liked Faith best. Quite the testament to friendship if you asked me. The power of those two extra years she had on us spurred my friends to look for inclusion into her world. As if Faith needed them. Did she ever suck her thumb for company or drag an old blanket around until nothing was left but a pocket-sized shred? No. Because she had no need for things or people.

      First at everything, me last. Not that I wanted a baby, not now. But still. It made me sick. I added another shot. Not that anyone was going to give a damn if I threw up.

      “I’m going to do this myself,” Faith was saying. What had I missed?

      Mom didn’t like that. “Oh, Faith. I think it’s a big mistake to set out to do it all yourself. The kind of mistake I made with your father.”

      “What do you mean?”

      Mom ignored the question, clammed up.

      Which was a relief.

       VI

      The search for Papi, the visit with Mom, everything seemed to have been cut short by Faith’s announcement. Even the trip Mom had so been looking forward to.

      All three of us did leave together on the bus to Xihuatanejo — the land of women, Faith informed us, her Nahuatl lessons already starting to bear fruit — as planned, although Mom didn’t hesitate to voice her qualms given Faith’s impending motherhood. The beach house that belonged to friends of hers was liveable, however, even if only just, but it soon became obvious Faith would not be able to stay there long. On the one short day our visit lasted she spent most of her time inside, close to the washroom or, the one time she did come with us to the beach, lying on a towel covered from head to toe with a second towel to block the sun out. A stranger walking by could have taken her for a beached whale — a baby whale — covered with a tarp.

      On the other hand, the fact that she didn’t feel well meant that she never fully realized the extent of her loss. She’d always loved the water: baths, swimming pools, freezing lakes, and seas. Here in the warm waters of this ocean, she would have discovered one more version of the element to love. A version even I loved. I thought of her as I submerged, the waves against my eardrums, and how her musician’s ear would appreciate the thrumming of multiple lifeforms underwater like a percussive line from her favourite rock band.

      My glimpses of the ocean had been brief before: the Pacific seen from Vancouver, frigid water up to my knees, the ride on the ferry, the cliff past Mile 0 in Victoria on one of the yearly cross-country trips or the Atlantic from our perch on a huge weathered rock close to Peggy’s Cove, a country’s breadth away. As for Florida — the Quebeckers’ promised land — and its shoreline, we’d never been. Papi felt no need to introduce us to the land of the gringos. But in Xihuatanejo, during the short time I had before it was decided for Faith’s sake that the two of us should head back, I saw the ocean like never before.

      I had only ever seen its surface, from the shore or the shallows or the deck of a ferry, and thought the fascination it exercised came from the waves, the tides, the seagulls, and washed-up shells. But this time, thanks to the snorkel gear - the tubes, masks, and life vests our mother’s friends kept in a rattan chest — I was able to see the soul of the ocean and, for me, the never-before-dreamed-of life hidden there: coral reef and brilliant fish instead of surface sameness. Such a shame that a glimpse was all I had.

      Mom swam ahead of me, pointing, taking my arm. Every once in a while, she’d hold her thumb up, a sign for me to lift my head out of the water, she had something to say. The resurfacings that I instigated were much more spontaneous, triggered by a mouthful of water I’d let into my tube, or stinging pupils from leaking goggles — a little spit served to solve that.

      Each time we broke the surface, I was reminded of the mother killer whale and calf we saw with Papi off the West Coast, the way they crested the waves of the Georgia Strait in unison. So unlike Mom and me — the two of us had none of the killer whales’ grace.