Away From Everywhere Read online

  I know November breaks me down because it was a November when I spent that time with Tommy. Lately, when I think of it all, I blame my parents. Then I feel wrong for that, for the need to place blame. Dad’s brother’s family had to move to our cityand build a new house because Tommy was expelled from the school in the town where they lived. Fine. That wasn’t Dad doing anything wrong. But then, does Tommy sound like the kind of kid you want in your house?With your daughter? And then I feel evil for blaming him, even though I’ve read that it’s normal to misplace blame, intially, as you try and deal with it all, years later. It says so in the book Alex bought me. After he realized he couldn’t “fix me” himself.

  That “short stay” turned into four months. The longest four months of my life. There may be only sixty seconds in a minute, and seven days in a week, but how we feel that time pass has nothing to do with numbers. It has everything to do with how we experience the world during those moments. We remember our lives through isolated memories, not in a serial manner, not minute by minute.

  He was an ugly, zit-faced, sixteen-year-old reject, too much of a bully to be bullied or befriended, and a piece of shit like that doesn’t deserve such a prominent role in my life. But he took it anyway. I hate leather because he wore an ugly, black, fake leather jacket, even in the summer. It creaked when he moved and it smelled of shoe polish. The smell of his jacket masked his natural scent of bacon grease and pimples. They’d been staying with us a week before he summoned the nerve to make his way into my room. Coward. Was he just bored? Desperate? Sick?What makes someone an incestuous sociopath?

  It was dark, but I knew it was him because of the sound of that jacket squeaking whenever he bent an arm. I was seven. I knew nothing about the world or how I fit into it, I knew nothing about my body or his. By the time he left my house fifteen weeks later he’d taught me what my body was for.

  I couldn’t process the horror he put me through. I was too young to know what was happening. I only knew I didn’t like it and it hurt. The brain doesn’t know what to do with shockand things we aren’t prepared for. All I had to try and piece it together with was his words. He covered my mouth, his big hands almost blocking off my nostrils too, and whispered in my ear, “This is all you are good for. Don’t tell anybody or they’ll get mad and stop loving you. Nobody really loves you anyway. This is what you are for, so don’t complain about it.Don’t tell anyone you’ve been bad.” I believed him until I was old enough to understand what had happened to me. By then it was too late: I understood love only as something physical, not emotional, and I gave my body up to feel wanted.

  So tonight I have to wonder, Is this what happened with me and Owen?Was it love or merely our pasts that made us cross that line months ago on that hot, splintery wharf at the cabin? Do I not know how to feel appreciated and noticed by someone like Owen without whoring myself out to them because of those four months and everything that did to me? Is there more to Owen and me than that?

  Sometimes I think this happened because we both found each other at a mutually vulnerable time in our lives – him crawling back from rock bottom, me in the lowest point of my marriage. Since the miscarriage, it’s been…hard.

  Owen and I just happened to fill each other’s empty spaces at a time when we were both feeling empty. In each other lay all the answers to all the questions we had about life, all the proof we needed that life could be electric and electrifying, and then we crossed a line. Is that beautiful or sad? Right or wrong?The sex happened only to convey all the things words never could. At first, it was never a physical thing. At first the sex was a kinship, it was something spiritual, for lack of a better word. Does that make it necessary, excusable?We just needed to be that close to each other. The intimacy of it, not the cheap thrill of sex.

  Those four months with Tommy changed how my life turnedout. Growing up, I mistook horny teenagers fumbling over my bra straps and belt buckles as love. I never even had the confidence to really push myself at university, to apply myself to anything but motherhood. As an adult my identity is still shaky, all I know is that I am a mother of two and a doctor’s wife, and now here I am jeopardizing all I know of myself by sleeping with Owen.

  In the years since my marriage died, it has been my two little daughters that keep me together, the mightiest of bridges rest only on pillars. And this year, at least until the guilt of it all set in, there was Owen. A new support. But as of this week, any joy he brings me has to contend with all this guilt, and it’s a pretty even battle. So it’s all just one more tight knot in my belly. He did postpone what I am feeling like tonight as I write this, and because of him I almost got through November without falling apart, but…

  BUT!

  Of course there is a but. Every time we fall in love with someone new, we fall in love because we feel like there will never be a but with this person. We genuinely feel like things can only get better or at least stay at the same electrifying peak with this person. Sometimes, they say, it stays that way. But this I know: Owen is distant lately and that distance hurts.That distance puts me on the other end of loneliness, looking in on the world.

  I am starting to feel like he is around less when I am on my period. I know an affair is a physical thing, so I guess I understand, but I feel it makes a whore of me. I want to think there is more to our affair than sex, and I know I love it more when he kisses me on the forehead in passing than I do when we just fuck. He used to hug me and give my shoulders a little squeeze as he hauled himself from me. I felt safe and happy and pretty and wanted. I felt giddy.

  Now I don’t.

  Now I feel dirty, guilty, silly. What was I expecting out of this affair anyway? Escape from my reality? A new life?Was that even possible? This is so wrong and so unrealistic, and so many other things too.

  Things with me and Owen kind of feel like me and Alex all over again, and I am not going through that twice. I remember with Alex, his lack of interest in our sex life coincided with a tendency to dart his eyes on other, more attractive women when we were out somewhere. A cashier in the grocery store, a waitress. Friends. I tried so hard to keep him interested in me that I felt pathetic and lost any self-confidence I once had. I felt so pathetic and unattractive that it stuck with me. One week I bought lingerie and sexy pajamas, but he looked at me no differently than if I were wearing a turtleneck and overalls. I read all those tips in girlie magazines about spicing things up in a marriage: “the three things every guy wants to do to you but is afraid to ask.”The magazine advice failed me. One by one, the articles failed me. I told him I would let him do anything he wanted, and all he said was, “I’m not into all that,Han.Straight-up sex is fine with me.” But weeks would pass between being intimate. Then months, then infinities. Then Owen.He made me feel beautiful again.

  But now it is dissolving between us too. The emotional aspect of our affair feels absent, and the rest of it, the sweaty fumbling and grinding, isn’t worth losing my family over.Especially since he won’t even want that soon. The connection I have with Owen, it is true that I don’t feel it with Alex anymore, but we have two children that keep us together.Maybe that is enough, our past, our children. As for Owen, I can’t say the connection is totally gone, because some days it’s there and as obvious as the sun, but I can also say it has been two days since we kissed. I don’t think he has noticed this yet.

  Blah.

  What does it mean that two men, that both brothers, are neglecting me? It means I am a useless, ugly wretch! That’s what it means. Greedy for attention I don’t deserve.Worn-out, over with, undesirable. It means Tommy was right, I am a mess, a whore. He’d love this, me screwing one man in this bed by day and sleeping next to his brother at night.

  I’d hate me too if I were a man. That last ten pounds I can’t drop, these deflating tits, this aging skin. I look in the mirror in the mornings and I want to smash it. I want to go back ten years and stay there. I want love to liberate me, and I want to know it is real, not just what Tommy promised me it was.


  I wish Alex would wake up and win me back, love me like he used to. Was I just one more thing he collected and ticked off his to-do list while he was building his fallacy of a life? Look at him there, so defeated, who is he fooling?

  LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

  THE KEY SLID INTO THE door with ease. This inexplicably surprised him; he expected some rust, some resistance. Instead the house welcomed him in as if it was expecting him.

  It was a bungalow, a red bungalow with black trim. A patio surrounded the entire house, giving it the appearance of a UFO. At the back of the house was the kitchen, with a view of the ocean through its patio doors, and in the front was an oversized living room, with a fireplace and a well-stocked bookshelf built into the stone above it. The view from every window was so pristine the poetry wrote itself. Even the sounds made the place somewhere worth living: the distant gush of waves off rocks and the sounds of songbirds not present in a busy city.

  But what he last read in Hannah’s journal erased it all, pulled a curtain around it. He’d take it all in later. After he processed that entry. He read it on the bus, sitting straight up then slinking down, again and again, laying the book down over his knee, then picking it back up. His lungs felt too full of air. He never cried, but his eyes burned for her. She had it all wrong, and he could never tell her the difference now – that the sex was a byproduct of their kinship, not the purpose of it – and that impossibility hurt like being burned alive. She died never knowing what she meant to him. How she hollowed him out, softened his bones, every time she laughed or touched or kissed him. Like nothing or no one before her. How he loved the way her slender arms bent at the elbow. Her bellybutton. The two lines that formed brackets around her mouth whenever she smiled. When he thought of her, sex was the last thing on his mind. It was more about her being how he fit into the world.

  He opened a bottle of wine he found in his father’s wine rack. A Barolo, a wine that could last the twenty-five years since the bottle was stamped.1984 . He blew dust fromhis father’s old wine glass, rinsed it, poured the wine, and brought the bouquet to his nose: cherries, licorice, leather. He poured it down the sink after one sip. First the glass, then the whole bottle, mourning the clugging sound he missed so much. He walked into the living room, fell into a brown leather chair, and coughed on the cloud of dust that recoiled back up at him.First thing to do is find all the light switches and clean up a little, check the plumbing. Lillian told him she had already called about the electricity.

  He sat in the chair for twenty-five minutes, staring at a photo on the fireplace of him and Alex holding up two dead rainbow trout by their tails. He remembered the moments before that picture was taken, how it took about ten shots to get the picture because he kept dropping the slippery fish. In the photo, his father was standing between him and Alex, holding up the fishing rod he’d caught them with, an arm slung around each brother. In the moments that followed the photograph, Owen could remember Alex being fascinated by the anatomy and morphology of the fish. Dad! Why do fish have tails? Owen was more interested in the iridescent colours of the fish, what purpose they served, what the fish might have been doing right before they caught it.

  It was one of many memories captured in the plethora of photos on the walls surrounding him. His father had the walls and every ledge in the cabin plastered with photos. He always had a camera on him,“collecting moments.”Everywhere Owen looked he saw memories of what felt like another life, another time, another planet far away from this one. He remembered when and where every photo was taken, and yet there was something hazy about each one. Like they were all false or constructed memories.

  At least one weekend every month, his family came to this cabin. Every Sunday morning before they’d head back to the city, their father would take them fishing or hiking over inTerra Nova National Park, explaining the relationships between plants and animals, sun and soil, and how insignificant people are in the grand scale of things. He’d always fuse a biology lesson with a contempt for human ignorance that even a ten-year-old could pick up on. “We are here solely and simply because of these plants at our feet. They can use energy from the sun and make their own food. No grocery stores necessary. And then we eat them or the animals that eat them. That’s how we get our energy. Understand?”He always waited for at least one nodding head to carry on.“And if that wasn’t enough, without them, there’d be no more oxygen on earth for us, because they breathe out what we breathe in: oxygen. Imagine! And yet every day, in every place on earth, we’re pouring cement over forest! Keep that in mind when you two grow up to be leaders of the world, okay?”

  Two nodding heads. “Okay!”

  His eyes shifted to another picture on the wall. One of him and Alex chasing a red squirrel through a field of daisies and Solidagos , their hands full of peanuts they wanted to feed the squirrel. Moments after his father took that picture, Owen asked him why daisies were white and the Solidagos were yellow. His father smiled and said that the answer didn’t matter.

  “What matters is that you asked.” He sat his kids down, one on each knee, and carried on. “There might be a long, complicated, scientific answer, but it is just someone else’s guess. What’s your guess,Owen?”

  The brothers came up with theory after theory on why some flowers were different colours than others, and their father laughed at their childhood wonder.

  He spoke so confidently, like a god. “There are answers for everything, kids, but they don’t mean a thing. Because every time you go searching for an answer it ends with more questions, and the questions chase the answers like a cat chases its tail. Do you want to get dizzy like the cat or enjoy this day?”

  It was a metaphor for life he said, the one thing he hoped his kids would remember him teaching them.

  “Life isn’t about finding the answers to questions; it’s about not needing those answers,” he said, standing up.

  Owen sat up from his chair, plucked a few photos off the wall, and threw them in the bottom of the linen closet. He had always felt that his father lost his mind looking for something more meaningful than him, Alex, and their mother. That he’d lost hismind to cope with his not being a pre-eminent journalist, respected worldwide. A changer of lives. And that made his father a hypocrite. A man who needed something more.

  He limped over to the kitchen window. All he could see was the black ocean and the endless blue sky streaked white with cirrus clouds. He leaned into the windowsill and sank his chin onto his arms and stared, waiting. All he needed now was a sense of what he was waiting for. He tried to imagine the cabin filled with the patter of a child’s excited footsteps running from room to room, and a wife, sitting out on the patio with a book opened over her thighs. A good book. Maybe she’d feel the need to share some of the lines, or insist he read it when she was done. She’d have a cup of tea on the arm of the chair, but be so engrossed in the book it would get cold before she drank it. He’d entertain the kids, and make supper, just so she could finish the book and tell him everything she loved about it later, when they were in bed together, because he loved the sound of her voice. He’d dedicate all his novels to this woman, because she’d be the one who read every chapter as he wrote them. And then again as he rewrote them.

  He checked all the appliances. The fridge, the stove, the microwave, the toaster full of rock-hard ancient breadcrumbs, and anything else with a cord attached. Everything was still working. He searched the closets for a broom, mop, and cleaning supplies and found them. He dealt with the expired food and made a list for some basic needs he could buy up at the gas station.

  When he got to the station, there was a black truck parked in the parking lot, a handmade for sale sign on the windshield. He’d need a vehicle of some kind. The truck would do. He didn’t know where else he was going to find a car for sale in that little town and didn’t have the money for anything worth more than a few thousand dollars anyway. There was no proper grocery store in Port Blandford anymore, but Clarenville was only a fif
teen-minute drive and had everything he could need, including a Walmart and a hospital. The sign, handwritten in black marker on a piece of loose-leaf paper, was stuck to the windshield with a needless fury of tape: For sale, 2000 bucks or so. Clearly there was room for negotiation. Ask the lady in the gas station. So he did.

  “Keen on Clyde’s truck, are ya? You knows your fadder was buddies with the owner of it?”

  Owen was confused by the father reference. He didn’t know the woman.

  “What? I knows you must be one of Roger’s two boys. Not much gets by us that lives here, b’ye. I seen ya gettin’off the bus earlier. See, my husband’s been watching over Roger’s place since your fadder, you know, got sick in the head or whatever you wants to call it. So he called to say he seen ya goin’into the house earlier on. Besides, we seen ya growing up, and then there’s all the pictures on the walls down at the house. He used to have us all over for a laugh, for a feed, and once he got a few drinks in him, he’d crack out the pictures of his two boys. ‘What’s they gonna be,’he’d say,‘by the time they’re an old feller like me?’”

  Owen didn’t know what to say, or how to compose himself. He darted his eyes onto a hangnail, into her eyes, and back down to the hangnail, flashing his most friendly smile maybe too much. She was talking to him with such familiarity for a stranger. He felt like he should be shaking her hand maybe, and explaining he’d be living here now, for a while at least.