Away From Everywhere Read online

  And now I’ll never know what that voice would have sounded like. Now I’ll never get to hold you, feed you, comfort you. I never even got to take you home. All I ever did for you was sign your death certificate. The one with no name on it, just Baby Collins.

  As they took you away from me, your arms swung from your body like a hypnotist’s pendulum. I couldn’t bear to look at your face. I wanted instead to keep my own image of you, to at least not have that shattered too. But I saw those little hands of yours, perfectly formed and ready to touch life. And now.Now those little hands will never hold anything.

  I first felt you kicking in my belly while standing in line at Toys R Us. I was buying a car seat. Alex was at work of course, but I called him, thriving with excitement. He was in the middle of a surgery. The memory and sensation of that firm little kick is all I have of you now. Alex called me back a few hours later. He wanted to name you Ross, after some uncle of his he admires, but I wouldn’t have it. You wouldn’t have been a Ross. I could tell from the way you kicked me. Like you were trying to communicate, asking for companionship, ready to come out because you couldn’t wait two more months to meet me.

  They stuck a black ribbon on the door to my room so everyone would know I was a grieving mother, not a happy one, not a new one. They sent a grief counsellor who encouraged me to cry and name you, even though I was already crying and couldn’t name you because I never got to look in your eyes and see who you were. The counsellor was a nice man, but who can really help someone in a situation like that, and in one briefmeeting?We were given the option to let the hospital deal with your “disposal,” and I am sorry to say we did. I regret that now. I wish you had a headstone. I wish I could go visit you like Owen does his mother, if only to be alone in the world and clear my head sometimes. But there is no headstone, just tears falling from my aged face onto the bright white sheets of this childish diary. And don’t worry, none of these tears help shed the memory of you.

  Happy Birthday, and goodbye for another year. I love you.And even if it makes me crazy, I miss you. I hope you are happier than your mother is right now, wherever you are, and I hope you are smiling and laughing and not even thinking of me.

  NO STEADIER FOOTING

  SUNLIGHT WAS FUNNELING IN THROUGH the ferry’s circular windows like spotlights, illuminating its dated, vomit-orange carpet. Carpet that had been trampled by thousands of feet, by thousands of people heading in thousands of different directions through life. Not many of them, Owen imagined, had sat alone in the bar, waiting for someone to serve them at 11 a.m. He thought of helping himself to the whiskey, only an arm’s length out of his reach, because the world at least owed him that much. One free glass of Glenfiddich to wash down a life thrown away. The glasses were there, right beside the whiskey no one had an eye on.

  He limped away from the bar. He hated knowing that the bartender wasn’t simply in a washroom or out for a quick smoke. There just wasn’t a bartender in the bar at 11 a.m. He hated what that said about him, sitting there expecting one. A little surprised there wasn’t one.

  He hadn’t rented a room, and decided to spend the rest of the ride on the deck, leaning into the railings, watching the black water, waiting to see land in the distance. Leaning over the rail and watching the water was calming, pacifying. It lulled him into a meditative state.

  It wasn’t the idea of dying that enticed him, of suicide, but about halfway back home, he wanted to be surrounded by one thing and one thing only: cold, black, salty water. To feel himself sinking deeper and deeper into cold black nothingness. He wanted to be consumed by it, disappear into it, forget about everything but it. It was a brief and fleeting moment, but in it, he simply felt that drowning would feel like escape, relief, and redemption all at once. There would be no fear or guilt or pressure to survive, just his lungs filling with water. There would only be those final thoughts, and he wanted to know what they’d be. He was thinking of Virginia Woolf, his father’s favourite writer, who filled her pockets with stones and walked stoically into a river. It seemed romantic, fitting, everything at once. The right balance between right and wrong. He didn’t have the courage or conviction to jump and he knew it. He could only hope the railing he was leaning against, with all his weight and strength, would snap and drop him overboard. That nobody would see him fall, that the sound of the boat would drown out the sound of his splash, and that it would be as tranquil a death as he imagined.

  He took a step back from the rail, shook his head, and looked around to see if someone was watching him.

  He’d originally walked outside onto the platform of the ferry to watch it approach Port aux Basques. He wanted to spend the last hour outside so he could watch a tiny, insignificant dot in the distance become Newfoundland, his home, the place where he belonged.

  His hands were buried in his pockets but still numb from the cold, and his face and tongue were drying out from the salty air off the Atlantic. Normally he would notice the salt on his skin, and as a compulsive writer he would normally take out his notepad and write out some metaphor about how the salt was exfoliating his old skin, his old self. The metaphor could’ve been good – the rejuvenating return to home. He could’ve lent it to one of his characters, but Owen had spaced out too much to notice any of this, including the fact that the ferry was docking and he’d missed the hour-long approach. He’d been staring into the ocean for exactly one hour, as if it was a wishing well and he was rich.

  He’d been spacing out like this often enough lately to be concerned about it. It was like he was awake and dreaming, and only certain elements of reality, someone’s voice or a sudden unfamiliar sound, could wake him from his daydream fantasies.

  Owen was still forgetting about his limp. When he’d sit for too long it would slip his mind and he would try to stand on his leg as if his tibia and patella weren’t full of screws and still healing. The flash of pain and ground teeth never helped to prevent a subsequent lapse of memory. When he woke up in the mornings, he’d roll out of bed and absentmindedly put all his weight on the bad leg and fall back into bed, clenching his jaws. The occasional pain he felt reminded him of Hannah, and the newfound inconvenience of stairs reminded him of his brother.

  As he descended the wobbly metal staircase that bridged the boat to Newfoundland, he took in one long exaggerated breath of that famous, fresh, Newfoundland air. He flung his father’s duffle bag onto a weathered bench and searched through its contents until he found the tattered, blue-and-yellow bus information guide. He read the bus schedules with a false sense of optimism. The bus he was looking for was the one heading to Port Blandford, where his father’s cabin was, but he let himself consider it the bus that would take him from his old life to his new one, from the past to the future. The idea of rejuvenation felt better than the alternative, and it gave some vague sense of purpose to his return home.

  He had an hour to waste before the bus would arrive, so he sat on the bench to put another dent in his novel, but was distracted by a woman’s concerned shouting. “Jacob, too close to the water! Jacob, don’t chase your sister, one of you’ll trip and fall!”

  The kids, like any kids, were absolutely fearless because their mother was there, so nothing bad could happen. They peered out over the wharf, throwing snowballs into the ocean, and running away from the water each time, as if a shark might leap up to exact some biting revenge. He liked the devilish kid in the baby-blue jacket, laughed at him. He peeled open a granola bar and found himself watching the red-haired mother of two. She had freckles, the type the sun would draw out, and the sunlight was doing something beautiful to her face, the right balance of light and shadows highlighting all her features. She had a magazine crumpled up in her mittened hand, the pages buckled and blowing in the wind. She looked a little too cerebral for the magazine, but with two kids, maybe she was just looking for fluff to turn her mind off, something to glance at in between watching out for her kids. Not her , not necessarily this woman in particular, but someone like her, and he
could let go of his past. Move on. There was hope in that much.

  She glanced briefly at Owen, saw the deep red cuts embedded in yellow bruises, the ones his brother had left there. She looked equally wary and sympathetic, and stepped closer to her children.

  He found himself hoping the redhead and Jacob and his sister were waiting for the same bus. Maybe he’d sit behind them and pretend. Maybe it only felt like an uncanny notion, the innocent vicarious experience.

  A man in a lime shirt and black peacoat walked into his field of vision, hoisting ice creams over his head. Jacob and his sister came running, all smiles, towards him. They grabbed air trying to get them, laughing at their father’s teasing them by keeping the ice creams just out of reach. “C’mon, kids, take your ice creams, c’mon.” The redhead laughed. It was in her smile how much she loved him. The way she smiled at him when he wasn’t even looking. He gave the kids their treats, and then slid an arm around his wife, knew right where to lay it.

  The father yelled jovially, “Jacob, stay away from that wharf! If you fall in you’ll lose your ice cream!”And she hit him with the rolled up magazine, laughing, okay with their good cop, bad cop parenting routine.

  The bus stopped at an orange-and-white North Atlantic Petroleum gas station directly off the highway and at the entrance of the amiable town of Port Blandford. It stopped so abruptly that everyone was jolted forward. An old lady gasped, a kid laughed, and Owen snapped out of another daydream.

  As he descended the four steps, limping, the bus driver recommended the French fries in the restaurant attached to the gas bar. He spoke with a smile in his words.“You’ll wanna make it an extra large,Chief!”He winked, to promise Owen he’d love those fries, and Owen wanted to be able to care that much about something as simple as French fries. He smiled and let himself wink back. Laughed at himself for winking. But Owen couldn’t even be social enough to utter a word to the bus driver and try the fries. He headed straight for his father’s old cabin with his head down, squinting from the sun glaring off banks of snow.

  All the houses he passed were comfortably modest, with their shrubs wrapped in brown burlap for the winter. Clusters of tall and slender aspens functioned as fences to separate the houses. With the exception of two short roads leading from the highway down into the town, Port Blandford was essentially one long street running parallel to a calming body of water, with nothing but hardy spruce trees beyond the blue bay. The water was a stone’s throw from the backyards, and it was calm and spotted with gulls and the white crests of gentle waves.

  He didn’t want to rush to the cabin, and he didn’t know why. Halfway there, he stopped to watch a red squirrel hop along a woman’s yard and raid a bird feeder, almost laughing at its quick paranoid movements: it moved its head, not its eyes to watch all angles. He walked on for another few minutes, watching a man in a green-and-black flannel coat chop wood, and loved the crack of it echoing in the cold winter wind.

  Long before he was anywhere near his father’s place,Owen fished through the change in his pocket and dug out the loose key scattered among pennies and dimes. It was Lillian’s copy, and the lettering on a grimy taped label, in faded black ink, read, Roger’s Cabin? Ever since his father had been admitted to the Waterford Hospital, Lillian had had the only spare key. She’d spend time there whenever she could. Maybe a week a year.

  There had been a time when his family spent at least one weekend a month at this cabin, but when he and Alex got to junior high, they’d lost interest in spending the weekends with their family. There were girls now, and parties and video games. The cabin was old, boring, and, relative to those parties and their elating cheap thrills, a form of prison.

  He regretted that now, as he approached the old cabin. The swing set was left there to rust in the rain, and grass had grown over their sandbox. It had morphed from a family cabin to one man’s getaway. After they’d lost interest in the place,Owen’s mother never had any desire to spend time there either, and the cabin was considered his father’s retreat, as if it were as silly and childish a retreat as a kid’s treehouse. His father spent the weekend there every three or four weeks. He’d take up some big project of his to work on.

  Considering the delusional nature of his father’s “projects” last going off, Owen was a little scared about what he might find lying around in the cabin, maybe more of those flyers with certain letters underlined to spell out delusional claims. Because Owen was only in his teens when he’d lost his father to schizophrenia, parts of his father’s falling ill were still hazy, but he never forgot the day his father’s psychiatrist gave him a Polaroid camera and told him to take a picture of his supposed employer next time he saw him. Owen never forgot those three blank Polaroid pictures his father had taken when he thought he was seeing and talking to “Mr. James.” There was one of a black, empty office chair, one of a wall, and one of a street full of cars but no people. Mr. James was in none of them. Those photos meant it took his father three futile tries to be shocked enough to give up and realize he was sick. His father could describe that man, right down to his mannerisms and how he talked too loudly. Sadder still was the Polaroid picture he took of Owen and Alex the next day, to make sure his children were real. It wasn’t too long after that picture that his father went catatonic and never spoke again.

  The key felt like a crowbar now, like he was about to break and enter some foreign place. He wanted that feeling to disappear before he stuck the key in the door. The town looked nothing like how he remembered it. It was more of a town town when he was a kid, people lived there all year round. Now, all the new cedar A-frame houses, and B&Bs, and all the closed-down convenience stores made it feel like a cabin town, a seasonal place. He liked that though. The seclusion.

  He had made it to Port Blandford, but couldn’t ignore how many symbols of his past had come along with him. He’d loot from them, make use of them: the lack of distractions here would help with the writing, and he had been sketching out the male protagonist for weeks now. He took out his notepad:

  The main character has a limp, like mine, that is a reminder of something horrible from his past. Maybe every time the pain flares up, he remembers a different aspect of that horrible accident. Have him walking into his new town with a duffle bag flung over his shoulder that used to belong to his father, so that he is symbolically carrying some piece of his past along with him. The same sun that is shining down on him is feeding the grass above his lover’s grave in his old town. A large premise of the book being this: there is no escaping ourselves, our pasts. So how does one really let go and carry on? Or does one?Have him meet a single-mother redhead at the ferry terminal. As battered and broken as him, and she has a great, captivating backstory. Maybe her kid falls in the ocean and he dives in and saves him.

  WAITING FOR DECEMBER, FOR SOMETHING THAT NEVER COMES

  November 26th, 2008,

  In my giant bed, a solemn slut beside my husband.

  Alex sleeps in the same position every night: on his side, in the fetal position, hugging a pillow as if it were a teddy bear. He looks like a man who spent his childhood lonely. He has tried so hard to build himself a perfect life, an obvious attempt at compensation for his sad childhood, and now I’ve become the flaw in those plans that might topple everything he has stacked so neatly in place. He at least deserves an ideal adulthood. He put his faith in me, gave me two children, and look what I’ve done with that trust.

  I feel guilty. I feel guilt in my gums and teeth and core. And since guilt is the result of an act of greed, I was greedy to want Owen, even if Alex was neglecting me. The fact I feel guilty must mean I still love Alex. Whatever “love” means. I swear to God we invent words sometimes. Grand concepts with undefinable definitions. I believe there are many forms of love, and they ought to be named individually so we can get itright. There are men out there who truly love their wives, but burn for another woman. What is that burning called, when it isn’t just hormonal? There are women out there who dearly love their h
usbands, but get swept away by the sweet new man who wanders into her world as a reminder that life is full of other options. What is that temptation called?

  The comfort and routine of my and Alex’s relationship is a wonderful thing: that bond years together creates is a beautiful thing, and knowing someone so well: when he’s going to laugh during a movie, or cry; what he’s going to do, right away, when he wakes up. But that kind of love is different than what I have with Owen: enthrallment, and not knowing everything but wanting to, and noticing everything about the person: the way his mouth rises before a laugh, or how truly kind he is. And desire. Desire is again its own form of love.The fleeting one. The one that gets all the attention in poetry and Hollywood.

  I’ve fucked up. I can’t keep them all straight, and share them all with the same man.

  I spend every autumn falling apart like this, and in November it peaks. I am a mess, from the first miserable memory of my thieved childhood (his hot breath on my face like an upturned ashtray, his hands sculpting me from an innocent child into a lost cause) to my most recent memory of this desolate adulthood (flipping my husband’s pillow to hide the semen stain his brother left there because I was too lazy to do laundry yesterday). You’d think depression/anxiety wouldn’t make you lazy, you’d think you’d feel better distracting yourself with mundane chores like laundry.