Michelle
It’s Scott’s idea: a long weekend barbecue in the backyard before the start of the new school year.
They used to have barbecues all the time—impromptu affairs that began with a shout over the fence to the Fraziers next door or quick texts to whoever sprang to mind, chaotic gatherings of families and burgers, kids and hotdogs. They haven’t had that kind of gathering for the past two summers. Michelle has barely been in the backyard in over a year.
“It’ll be great,” Scott said to her when he came back from his Sunday run. “A fun break for all of us”—he stopped, corrected himself—“the four of us, before things get crazy with school and work. Do what we used to. Mark the end of summer.”
“I can’t,” she said, casting about for a reason he would accept. “Astrid needs a new backpack and Zach—”
“Come on. I think what they really need is some family time. A little fun.”
“Right, I’m sure Zach will think it’s fun.”
“They need this, Michelle. We need it.” She’s noticed a new tone in his voice recently, an exasperation maybe, or an urgency, similar to the one she’s overheard him using on the phone when he thinks she is in her office or in Dylan’s room. A tone that says something has got to give.
“Fine, I’ll go pick up some things.”
At the grocery and liquor stores she buys pop and beer and more than one bottle of cheap rosé, chips and hamburgers and, in a burst of hopefulness, the ice cream pops Zach likes. She stands in front of the bright boxes of cereal and tells herself they don’t need any. Still, she picks up the one that’s Dylan’s favourite. In the car she opens it, inhaling the smell, and swallows a handful, then another. On the way into the house, she buries the box at the bottom of the recycling bin.
The water in the backyard pool fractures the sunlight into sharp, painful spears. It is just the three of them—Michelle and Scott and Astrid. Zach should be here, but as usual they have no idea where he is.
And Dylan. Dylan should be here.
With her chair angled away from the shattered shine of the pool, Michelle stabs a text message into her phone. Where are you? She watches for the dots to bounce in response. When they don’t, she puts her phone face down and casts her gaze over the far end of the yard. The plants and flowers she used to love and tend have withered and browned along with the foolishly ambitious attempt at a vegetable garden; even Astrid’s small “medicine” garden has gone to seed.
The sun is warm in the end-of-summer air, the wine in her glass is crisp and bright, and her stomach is even growling at the smell of the burgers drifting from the barbecue. She is almost relaxed—or thinks she could be if Zach would show up—when the phone inside rings. The landline never rings unless it’s a call from school or her mother.
“Leave it,” Scott says too casually from the barbecue. She tries to discern why, staring at him. He doesn’t look away, only leans towards her to top up her wine.
“Leave it,” Astrid chirps from behind her father. She is sitting on the ground with markers, colouring her toenails. Michelle would have objected to that, before. Now she can’t think why she would have thought the colour of her daughter’s toenails mattered.
The phone rings again and Scott moves closer, puts his hand on hers. She wills her own hand to turn over and take his, but can’t. There is a new barrier between them—she sees more than feels him holding her there. She could let the phone ring in the empty house. She could hold her husband’s hand. But instead she thinks of his hushed phone calls and suddenly she needs to know who is on the other end. “It might be Zach,” she says, slipping her hand out from under his, pushing herself up from the chair, and heading for the sliding door. As she picks up the phone, she hopes it is Zach, hopes it isn’t.
In the weeks after Dylan drowned, she was certain that every ringing phone was him, her younger son reaching out to her. Each time she answered to someone else’s voice on the line another layer of her was flayed away, exposing a raw anger at the caller’s inevitable sympathy if they knew what had happened, or their ignorance if they did not. The hope that it was him, the faith, was almost unbearable. She was convinced she must still be able to reach him. He couldn’t just be gone. He had to be out there somewhere, just on the other side of where she waited.
There is a crackle of static through the receiver. “Hello?” Dylan’s name is a prayer she repeats in her thoughts, even as she prepares herself for disappointment—or worse, someone whom only Scott knows.
“Hallo?”
A lightly accented voice, a beat late from long-distance delay, reminding her of when she was little and her mother would call her uncle on Christmas Eve; neither wanted to be the first to call, but they had to call before midnight, so each would try to wait the other out. Michelle never really understood the rules. Once there was the magic of them saying hello to each other without the phone ringing on either end. The wonder of that connection.
“Is this Michelle Stewart?” A tinny sound, a trill to the r that makes her name feel French and exotic. A man’s voice. She exhales a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
“Michelle Stewart-Petit. Yes.” She leans into the phone, presses it hard against her ear so she can hear him better. “Who is this?”
“Mrs. Stewart, my name is David Tabé.”
“How can I help you, Mr. Tabé?” She tries to pronounce the name the way he does, with a slight swallowing of the vowels, a lifting eh at the end. This is something she teaches in her workshops: names are powerful. People like to be addressed by name; it makes them feel heard. She glances out the sliding door. In the backyard Scott is bent over Astrid, examining something she holds in her hand; both of them look serious, deep in discussion, though she cannot hear them.
“I am calling from Iparei,” the man says, then pauses, as though waiting for her to acknowledge something. “We are an island in Vanuatu,” he continues, and this name rings a bell, echoing from somewhere so deep in her mind she doesn’t bother to reach for it. “Your people came here a long time ago. The Reverend and Mrs. Stewart.”
Clammy cold washes over her and Michelle slumps to the floor, her back pressed against the cupboards. “Mr. Tabé,” she repeats, her voice the only thing steady about her. “Of course. But how can I help you? It’s true, my great-great-grandparents went to your island. Sorry, I can never remember the right number of greats. But that was, as you say, a very long time ago.”
He continues to speak, calm and instructive, as though he were not making a request, but offering her something. And how strange it is, she thinks, for this man who is a link to some long-distant moment in her family’s past to be calling her on a sunny afternoon in early September.
All at once, time and space telescope for her and there is a breath on her neck, a voice in her ear. She is reminded of the time she visited the church in Dartmouth where these same grandparents were married almost two hundred years ago, where their names are inscribed over an empty grave, no bones to be interred, and where for an instant her body felt as if it wasn’t her own but was occupied by someone else, held someone else’s memories. The church grew colder and her consciousness suddenly flared to the infinite—it wasn’t an obliteration, but rather an inclusion. She had never been more aware of herself as a link between the past and the future, and certain of her place, her connection to her ancestors, to her children. And then, as quickly as it came, the sensation was gone.
She never told anyone about that experience, but she begins to explain it to the man on the phone—how she feels that way now, like everything is aligned, the past and the present, her and Dylan, her blood, stretching all the way back through those generations. But even as she tries to find the words, the feeling dissolves. The world collapses to the hard fact of her kitchen and she is left with only the emptiness of where Dylan used to be.
After Michelle hangs up the phone, she looks out the sliding door to see Zach has finally shown up, his fifteen-year-old body all angles and broken skin, slumped in the chair that she vacated. He throws balled-up leaves into the pool. His eyes are so shadowed they could be bruised. It almost hurts her to look at him. She’s read the statistics. Families fall apart after losing a child. Husbands leave, wives have affairs, children lash out. But she doesn’t know how to fight the almost inevitable.
She tops up her wine glass from the unopened bottle in the fridge, gulps it down, and returns to the backyard. Scott is joking with Zach, trying to call him back from wherever he always seems to be these days, lost in his phone or staring into space.
“Where were you?” she asks, and her voice is too harsh, but she cannot control how it comes out of her anymore. He shrugs, cuts his eyes away from her, stares hard at the swimming pool. There is a frisson around him, a charged energy that feels unpredictable. He could hug her, or throw her into the pool—either seems equally possible.
Instead, he asks, “Why did you get these?” He holds up an ice cream pop over his shoulder, melting in its unopened envelope.
“You like them.”
“Nope. Dylan liked them.”
His tone is hard, and she recoils from it slightly. Then she sees the bright logo of the ice pop in Dylan’s hand, the stain of blue on his tongue, and how he would threaten to lick Astrid with it.
Zach tosses the packet back on the table and it sits between them.
She is about to say something when Scott interrupts. “Who was on the phone?” His tone is neutral.
She tries to conjure the way she felt only a few minutes ago, the warmth of belonging, of connection, but she can’t. She is scraped raw again. She thinks of all the times she has asked Scott that same question in the past few months, the answers he has given her.
“No one, just a wrong number.”
A few nights later, Michelle is in her office, too exhausted to sleep, having just coaxed Astrid back to bed after another of her night terrors. At least once a week, her daughter cries out, sounding smothered in her sleep, and Michelle, panicked, goes to her. There are shadows watching her, Astrid says, the shades of people, and they want something. She clings to a stone she took from Dylan’s room, which she whispers to sometimes. At first Michelle thought the nightmares were because of Dylan, but if that were the case why had they only started five months ago? Why not when he drowned, almost a year and a half ago?
Michelle slumps into her office chair, peers at the dim room around her, takes in the neat stacks of paper, the organized bookshelves. Everything in its place. She presses her palms to the desk in an attempt to anchor herself. There are moments when it feels like Dylan drowned yesterday, and moments when she feels like she’s crossed an ocean of time, only to find more water ahead. There are moments when she is sure he is right here next to her, and moments when it feels like he has disappeared completely.
Everything is a marker of his absence. Even the financial statement in the folder centred in front of her. Dylan’s trust. Each of the children has one. She and Scott started them as soon as each child was born, and they were bolstered later by her father’s will. These are their nest eggs for the future—for school, or travel, a house when they are ready. She is surprised by the substantial amount of money in Dylan’s, passed down through generations, always with an eye to the future.
Scott wants to dissolve the trust. “Then we can decide what we want to do with the money later. Split it between A and Z, or, I don’t know, whatever. But we might as well invest it—put it to work for us.”
She doesn’t understand why he insists it must be done now. Doesn’t understand why he keeps picking at it, asking her if she has signed the document yet.
Why do they have to end the trust—and with it all of Dylan’s possibilities, when there had once been so many?
She fingers the papers. She should just sign them. Would that help her move on, help them get back to normal, like Scott is always saying? She stares hard at that awful date on the form: May 26, 2012. One year, three months, ten days ago. She slams the folder closed and picks up the post-it note on its cover with David Tabé’s phone number.
At first, she had tossed it away. After all, the idea that they would fly halfway around the world to a tiny island for some kind of reconciliation ceremony is absurd. She remembers her father telling her the story, and then later listening as he told it to her sons. The story goes that her distant ancestor, the not-quite Reverend William Stewart, was looking for absolution after a Road to Damascus–style epiphany. He hadn’t been a good or a kind man, but then he found Jesus and was certain he’d been called to share his transformation with other unfortunates. In the 1830s, long before any authorized missions to the area, he and his wife, Josephine, travelled to what is now Vanuatu.
Almost everything that happened after they arrived is a mystery. All that is left of them are a couple of drawings that Josephine herself made of each of them before they departed and some loose pages from what was presumed to be a diary recovered years later and eventually returned to the family by a church group. The unnumbered pages are a confusion of superstition and fear, moments of connection, and vivid descriptions of the people who lived alongside them before their story ended abruptly. William and Josephine Stewart were killed on the island, and while there are theories, no one really knows why.
What can she and her family do about events that happened centuries ago? The past is the past. There is nothing to reconcile.
But then yesterday, when she came into her office, there was the notepad that normally sat beside the phone in the kitchen. The top page was missing, but she could still see the impression of the phone number. As she traced the indentations with her finger, she remembered making rubbings of gravestones with Zach and Dylan on school field trips. She picked up a pencil and rubbed the lead across the page. The figures appeared in relief.
She touches the number now and feels Dylan beside her. You should totally go.
And as she hears him say it, she pulls her feet up and spins herself in her chair, the way Dylan used to, the way Astrid still does—she grips the desk and winds up, then pushes herself around and around. She closes her eyes against the movement and imagines the swirling around her is a tropical wind, imagines Dylan in her lap, imagines dialling the number, the long plane journey, the heat of the sun and the wild spread of the ocean. She can almost smell the salt.
But what good would it do?
She spins faster and faster, and when she opens her eyes, she is dizzy and slightly nauseous. As the backyard flashes by, something—someone—flickers in the murky light refracting off the swimming pool.
She slams to a stop, her feet thump to the floor.
Her head and stomach still spinning, Michelle stumbles to the kitchen, where she stops in front of the sliding door that leads to the backyard. A shadow separates itself from the hedge along the fence, then stops and crouches by the pool, dips its hand in, and splashes water over its face.
The way he holds himself, the even line of his shoulders—it’s Dylan. She’s certain of it. She reaches out, the glass a hard surprise when her hand meets it. Dylan glances at the door, then stands and lopes towards the side of the house. She moves to the laundry room and stands frozen, just out of sight of the side door. It’s impossible. Her heart is beating loudly and soaring out of her body as if to meet him, to bring him home. The door handle clicks itself loose and she waits for the familiar screech of the outer screen door when it closes.
She feels the shift in the house, another presence.
He’s there, a shadow pinned against the door. He’s grown during his time away. Not a surprise—he’d been growing so quickly it had cost them a small fortune to keep him in hockey gear.
She shapes his name with her lips but is too terrified to speak it in case he disappears.
“Mom?”
His voice pierces her.
Zach. It’s only Zach. And how she burns with shame at the thought of that word—only.
She exhales deeply, with relief and anger at once. “For god’s sake, Zach, it’s the middle of the night. Where have you been?”
He says nothing, only shakes his head and goes to move past her. As he does, she can feel the heat of the outdoors radiate off him in the air-conditioned dark. She lifts her hand to touch him, and he jerks away as though burned.
“Nowhere. Just out.”
Her heart thuds in her throat. She hadn’t even realized he wasn’t at home.
He starts up the stairs and she wants to stop him. He was such a tactile child, always touching and hugging her, using her to climb over or on top of things. She used to joke that she was his favourite piece of furniture and for a while he called her that jokingly—Hi chair! Hey table!—before collapsing into giggles. She cannot remember the last time she touched him, this body that used to be hers to cuddle and hold.
“You can’t do that, just take off. It’s not safe.” In the half-light, Zach’s features seem to flicker some and she finds anger rearing up in her, a black and red thing that sits at the edge of her vision. “Anything could happen to you. You can’t just—”
Zach pauses on the third step. “As if you even care.”
There is silence, the sense of the house breathing. They stand in the gloom, neither of them moving. She’s about to say of course she cares, when there’s a loud thump as the air conditioner kicks on, circulating a low hum.
“You told him you’d get it fixed,” Zach says. His voice is low, like his father’s. It breaks constantly now, moving between childhood and adulthood. She wonders what Dylan would have sounded like as a man.
“Get what fixed?”
“The air conditioner. Dylan hated it. Remember?” Zach laughs a little. How can he laugh? “It woke him up and he’d show up at my door terrified. I don’t know what he thought it was. Maybe he just wanted the attention. It worked.”
He steps up a stair and, before she can stop herself, she is reaching for him, wanting to pull him to her, wanting to throttle him. She misses his arm but catches his shirttail, and as he turns to shake her off, it rides up. She is surprised by the shape of him, the leanness of his waist, the cut of muscles emerging from the skinniness that has always been there. Then she sees the stain of a violent bruise rising up from his hip bone and spreading across his stomach, the angriness of it evident even in the dim light.
“What happened?” She tries to lift his shirt higher, but he is already retreating up the stairs, moving stealthily into the darkness before she can say anything more, before she can demand—what? An explanation? An apology?
She doesn’t follow. She remains standing at the base of the stairs, her hands empty of both her sons.
Then, somehow, she is back in her office. For the past year she has found herself arriving at places without quite knowing how she got there.
The backyard is empty now, the ink of the pool like the wound on Zach’s side. She wants to scream, to rip the world apart. It is three a.m., her son’s body is bruised and broken, and she didn’t even know he was gone. She tears at the neat lines of books on her shelves, throws them to the floor. She sweeps everything from her desk, papers snow-falling around her.
She collapses against the wall, knocks photographs of Zach and Dylan and Astrid askew, slides to the floor. Her pulse pounds in her ears, repetitive and strong, and she wishes it would stop. Her breath and her heart, the concussive sound of her own body. She has to do something. She has to do more.
She picks up her cellphone and dials the number, then waits for the voice on the other end.