Cover
The following chapters were previously published:
“Hélène” and “Lucy” appeared in Taddle Creek magazine as stories (“Circle of Stones” and “Extreme Ironing”). Both chapters appear here in altered form.
Epigraph
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”
He reaches up to turn on the lamp. Hand on his arm, pulling him back down onto the futon mattress. The hand is soft, cool, and he will do anything to feel it on his skin. He leaves the light off.
“I see you,” she says. “It’s like a vision.”
“What am I doing?”
“Walking.”
“Walking?”
Her face is obscured in shadow, and he doesn’t know if she’s joking. He traces the curve of her right ear, mapping it with the tip of his index finger. “You’re a vision.”
“I’m a performer. It’s just a dance I do.” She turns, sits up in the near dark. “It’s all an ill-ooohhh-sion,” she singsongs, her voice low and raspy. He watches the shadows cast by her hands as she sorts through their clothes scattered across the floor. The shape of her arms as she reaches up, slipping his black T-shirt over her head — like victory. He considers the triumph of this moment, the slick of sweat on his chest. A small clatter, then the sound of a striking match. Her face glows. He reaches for her. She blows the match out, darts across the room, lights another one, glows, blows it out.
“Hey,” he lunges toward her shadow, misses. Looks up at another glow. “Come here. I can’t keep up.” She whirls then stops. Two matches in a row fail to spark. She tries a third. Glows and spins.
“Your performance better not burn the apartment down.” He grabs her ankle. Narrow. Solid. “Hah — caught you.”
He pulls at her ankle, grabs at her waist, picks her up, and deposits her back on the muddle of blankets on the futon. She thwacks him with a pillow, giggling, as he yanks the pillow from her arms.
“Wait — I’ll show you everything.” She jumps up again. Another match strikes. This time she lights the red taper jammed in the mouth of an empty wine bottle. She leans down, rummages through her bag then holds up a small velveteen pouch. She crawls back onto the futon, pushes him onto his back, and straddles him.
“Hold still.” She shuffles the cards and begins to lay them out on his chest. The cards smell like the inside of her dance bag. Feet, sweaty tights, rosin, and lavender.
“No.” He takes her tiny wrists in his hands. A gentle stop. “No tarot.”
She swats his arms away, turns over the top card in the deck, the one he’d inadvertently touched. Dread in her eyes. He looks down at the card now affixed to his chest with beads of sweat. A knight lying face down in the mud, stabbed in the back, a darkened horizon.
“Ten of swords.” She shifts off him. “It’s not as bad as it looks. See, there’s bits of light here, and here.” She points to the misty sky in the illustration. “It’s about change.”
“You don’t sound convinced.” He rolls over, knocks the cards off his chest, collects them into a stack, and hands them back to her.
“That’s not your reading, it’s just one card. It’s like the first sentence. Or one bar of music.” Nik is silent. She hesitates, concedes, places the cards back into their pouch. She leans into him, letting him envelop her with long arms. He touches her hair. She tucks her legs against his, clutches the tarot pouch, pulls the duvet and a blanket over them.
“Come home with me,” he says into her ear. “Let’s go to the island for spring break. I’ll take you to the beach.”
“It’s too cold.”
“It’ll be like a little holiday.”
“I have rehearsals.”
“You can relax for a few days.”
“You know I have auditions coming up. A performance, too.”
“Jen.” He sighs and strokes her hair some more, examining the whorls and waves. He likes the dark coarseness of it and imagines the long strands as a series of strong ropes to climb, the way in to see what she’s thinking. “My grandma will cook us dinner.”
“Nikky.” She loosens his arms, leans off the bed, blows out the candle. Drops the pouch on the floor. He pulls her close, feels her hand on his arm again. She falls asleep first and her hand slips off. He falls to the steady rhythm of her breathing and does not let go.
Brisk, cool sea air blows through the open window. The scent of salt mingled with seaweed and cedar. But the wind shifts. My condominium doesn’t need to smell like the nearby salmon smokehouse. I get up, shut the window, and sit back down in my comfortable easy chair. My teacup rattles in its saucer. Sometimes my hands shake enough to spill it. They’re becoming as independent as teenagers. Nothing seems to work, but I keep trying. Doctor’s scripts and pills, self-prescribed shots of brandy. Some days all I can do is apply the force of what I thought was considerable will. Today I lean back in my chair, close my eyes, and daydream. I think of my grandson, Nikky. I would like to knit him a sweater, but I’m not sure I still can. The steady twisting of yarn over needles and counting of rows and stitches could ease my worries. It would be like having a conversation. I still have so much I’d like to teach him.
My thoughts drift and I remember the day I saw the first circle of stones. It was one of those sharp, cool mid-winter days, when even in the rain, you can tell the light is changing. I rock in my chair and watch my memories like cinema. That was the day Geoff had forgotten to bring my groceries. Again. I was furious, but instead of stewing alone at home, I ventured out for a stroll through the coastal mist. I walked slowly, methodically. Carefully. As I rounded the corner of the sea walk where the path widens into Rotary Beach Park, I looked up to see the view: rolling green-blue water, the dancing-arm boughs of the tall trees. My eye caught something white. I stepped through wet grass to look. There were a dozen freshly painted white stones at the foot of a sturdy evergreen. A toy truck decorated with glitter glue nestled on a tidy patch of bark mulch inside the circle, along with three gaudy orange plastic flowers and a Mason jar stuffed with cards and handwritten letters. “Mike the Trucker” was scrawled on the toy rig.
I shook my head and made a tsk-tsk sound in dismay. I’d read about the unfortunate fellow in the newspaper. The story stuck with me: Mike was on the side of the road trying to fix a blown tire when a young man speeding to make the Vancouver ferry hit him, dragging him under his sports car for hundreds of metres. The young man kept driving. Mike’s crumpled body rolled into a ditch, and still he kept driving. It made me wonder how many kids grow up without learning the right kinds of things in life. It made me think of Geoff. Because somehow, even though I guided hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of children during my decades-long tenure as an elementary school vice-principal, I failed my own son.
It began to get dark, and I walked home in winter twilight, taking one slow step at a time. The bright lights of my ocean-view condominium shone like a beacon. Coming home, I took a deep breath of fresh laundry smell in the crisp and immaculate lobby. I picked up the weekly flyers from the stack on the oak newspaper table, then frowned at my mist-melted silver curls in the antique mirror. On the way to the elevator I glanced up the curve of the grand, milk-coloured stairway and saw a pair of brown Florsheims. That’s when I began to shake.
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