Amanda headed up the rest of the way, holding on to Kaylee’s leash and keeping a sharp eye out for trouble. Ahead was the final outcrop. Not far now, she thought, pausing to listen. There was nothing but the call of birds and the swish of wind through the trees. As she bent her head to clamber up the rocks, a shadow fell across her path. She recoiled instinctively and looked up to see Luke standing at the top, watching her. Kaylee barked and wagged her tail, but he didn’t move. Amanda tried to read his expression. Was he happy to see her? Angry at the intrusion? Did he even remember her?
She forced a calm she didn’t feel. “Hello, Luke, it’s Amanda.”
He didn’t smile but gave a faint nod and turned to continue up the path. Was that an invitation? After a brief hesitation, she followed. For the tenth time, she wondered why she was doing this. There were many other paintings she could choose from. What compelled her to see this strange, troubled recluse again? What drew her to him? A sense of pity? A desire to help? Or a feeling of kinship. What made her presume he wanted her help, let alone her pity?
Chris had once told her she was a sucker for suffering. “Isn’t that a good thing?” she’d retorted. “Isn’t it better than callous indifference?” He’d hugged her close and murmured in her ear, “I don’t want you to change. I just want you to find a balance. Not everyone wants their lives fixed.”
Luke had spent almost her entire lifespan in this self-chosen isolation. He was not at peace — that much was clear from his paintings — but perhaps it was the closest he could get.
When they reached his compound, a brisk wind was blowing off the ocean, bringing with it the distant crash of waves. Amanda was glad she’d packed a jacket. Luke was dressed in ordinary clothes today: a pair of baggy khakis worn threadbare at the knees and frayed at the cuffs. His multicoloured, beaded suede jacket had been mended many times. He had lit a fire in the stone pit, and a pot of water was simmering over it. Spread on the stone beside it was a hunk of cheese and some bannock.
“Did you …?” she began in surprise.
His gaze slid toward her briefly. “I saw your boat. I’m glad you came.”
“You invited me.”
He blinked nervously. “Most people are afraid of me.”
“People are afraid of what they don’t understand.”
He sat cross-legged by the fire and poured hot water into a cup before sprinkling in some dried leaves. “Do you think you understand?”
“A little, maybe. I know …” She searched for safe words. “You have an artist’s soul, full of feelings.”
He held out the cup to her without reply. Without meeting her gaze.
“Aren’t you having any?”
“I only have one cup.”
The profound loneliness of the statement echoed between them. “I wish I’d known. I would have brought you one from Nancy’s place.” She hesitated. “If you don’t mind, we can share this cup.”
He shrank back. A step too far, she realized. To change the subject, she reached into her backpack. “I brought you some paints, though,” she said, spilling the tubes of paint on the ground. “The gallery helped me choose them.”
He picked one up and examined it carefully. “I usually make my own paints.”
“Then these will be different. They’re acrylic, and the gallery told me they’re colours that are difficult for you to make. Something for you to experiment with.”
He picked up another tube, opened it, and peered at the hint of pink inside. A smile flitted across his face as he set it aside. “The colour of a smile. For my soul. My feelings.”
She relaxed. He was staying with her. “How long have you been an artist?”
“As a child, I drew sketches of little things I saw. But paintings like this? Since I came to Tofino.”
“When did you come?”
He hesitated as if searching the distant past. “Time blurs because for so long it didn’t — doesn’t — matter. But I remember the beginning: 1969. I was twenty.”
“Why here? Why Tofino?”
“Friends told me about a commune. They said it was safe, you could live for free on the beach, everybody was looking for peace. For safety.” He shook his head ruefully.
As part of her research into the area, she had read about the hippie commune that had sprung up on the beach and adjacent cliffside near Tofino. The B&B owner had mentioned he was part of it himself. Communes were magnets for dropouts, flower children, and dreamers seeking a utopian world order built on sharing, spiritual renewal, and enlightenment through mind-expanding drugs. Some were fleeing trauma, but most were just seeking an escape from the pressures and expectations of what they perceived as the materialistic, spiritually bankrupt rat race defined by their parents.
She did not think that was Luke’s story, but did she dare ask him? Was it any of her business? Instead, she gestured to the compound around her. “But the commune wasn’t enough?”
He scowled. “They tore the camp down. Set fire to our home.”
A brief flash of memory made her shiver. “I’m sorry. Who?”
“The government. We were a menace, they said. We stank, there was filth and garbage all over the place. Drugs. They wanted a park for nice, clean families to visit.”
“Oh,” she said noncommittally. She could see why a beach full of drugs and garbage might not be popular. She took a sip of tea as she weighed her words. “That must have been hard. What did you do?”
“The fire.” He shifted. His gaze darted around the clearing as if looking for an answer. “It was a bad time for me. I don’t want to talk about it.”
She thought about his facial scar, the flames painted across the ceiling of his studio, and the terror stamped on his memory. His words came much more easily to him than on her first visit, and she was anxious not to drive him back into silence. “It’s okay, you don’t have to. I know about fires. That fear stays with you.”
His breath seemed to quicken, and he wound a piece of grass tightly around his finger. She was looking for a way to distract him when he abruptly stood up. “Let me show you some paintings.”
This time he led her not to the shed where his tormented paintings were, but to the main cabin with its message carved over the door: Heaven’s Door. Kaylee rushed inside, ever eager to explore, and began to nose around the corners. Once Amanda’s eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, she took in the sparse, soothing surroundings. It was one big room, bathed in pale light from windows on all sides. She barely noticed the mattress, chair, wood stove, and primitive kitchen that made up the furnishings, because the far wall of the room was dominated by a massive tree trunk that formed the base of the tower on the roof. The trunk was intricately carved into shelving and nooks that held his paints, brushes, jars, and palettes, all meticulously cleaned.
Almost every inch of the remaining wall space was covered by paintings, and more were stacked against the walls. Unlike the paintings in the shed, these were mostly soothing: misty purple mountains, waves racing green and blue up the shore, jagged multicoloured rocks, boats, cabins, village scenes. They were fanciful colours and somewhat abstract, but they reflected loneliness, awe, and occasional joy, not terror.
Amanda smiled. “This is your safe place.”
He was standing in the open doorway, watching her as she walked around the room. “Do you have one?”
She was going to say no. Since that terrifying night in Nigeria, she had never been able to find a lasting peace. A peace she could rely on without the sudden threat of flashback or triggers. But then she realized that was no longer true. “I do. My home in Newfoundland. Sitting on the patio, looking out over Deer Lake.”
“Alone?”
Once again, she hesitated. That was a delicate question. Her safest place was lying in Chris’s arms, but it was clear Luke lived alone, and she didn’t want to break the tenuous connection they had found. “Sometimes,” she finally said. “There can be great peace in solitude.”
A helicopter thundered low overhead, and he glanced anxiously back up at the sky. As it swept over the trees, he flinched and retreated to sit in the corner, wrapping his arms around himself. Watching his frozen mask of fear and his rigid body, she recognized the signs of a flashback. The clatter of a helicopter had transported him back in time. She didn’t move in case she triggered panic, and she kept her voice calm.
“That’s just tourists, getting an aerial tour of Clayoquot Sound.”
He swallowed. Nodded.
“But it brings back something else, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t answer, but she began to put together the pieces. The helicopter, the yellow trees, the blood-spattered heart: 1969. “Were you in Vietnam?”
He stiffened and shot her an alarmed look. The roar of the helicopter was fading, and with it, his panic. “Who says that?”
“No one. It’s just your age and the fact you came here in 1969. I know thousands of war resisters came from the US to Canada back then, and many ended up here.”
He said nothing, but he quivered.
“I know it was a terrible time, Luke. And I’ve seen this destruction over and over. Victims of war, child soldiers, even civilians like me, who can’t forget what we saw. What we did. So many things trigger memories.”
Taking a chance, she went to sit on the ground closer to him. “Let me make us some fresh tea, and we’ll take it outside into the sunshine.”
“Sometimes … sometimes I can’t tell what’s real,” he said. “I see things. People come to visit me from my past, and I don’t know if they’re real. I smell things. Burning. Trash burning. People burning.”
“That’s a smell you never forget,” she said. Her heart began to race. Did she dare go further? Up on a mountaintop, all alone with this fragile stranger? She had often talked about her memories in her therapy sessions over the years, and yet they felt more vivid here in this lonely cabin than they ever had in the psychologist’s office. “Fires still scare me too. Even barbecues, the smell of steak …”
He unwrapped his arms in surprise and nodded. “I can’t eat meat. I can’t kill a living thing. I can’t watch its life fade away. Not now.” He lifted his head to look overhead. “I flew in those helicopters. I saw the fires and the black smoke that boiled up. The smell stays in your nose, on your clothes, your hair, your skin. I could never get clean.” He looked at his scarred hands. “Even now, sometimes.”
“Did anyone help you? I mean, afterward?”
He shrank back. “How? How do you erase that? What we did? What I did? Whole jungles napalmed, just so we could kill the Viet Cong hiding in them. Beautiful forests gone. Villages vaporized. Children, pigs, chickens, cows … running.” He shut his eyes as if to block out the memory. “The VC, they hid in tunnels. And in the villages. Everywhere! I was in the jungle, and I couldn’t find my unit. There was a woman. A villager. I was crouching behind a tree, holding on to my M16 for dear life. I was so scared she’d see me. But then her son, just a little boy, saw me and came running. He had a gun, and I …” He sucked in his breath. Whimpered. “Trust no one!”
Amanda knew the terror of not knowing whom to trust. Of being on the run in a desperate bid for safety. Hiding in ditches and deserted homes, avoiding panicked villagers and deadly Islamic terrorists alike.
Luke had been in a war far from home, far from a world that made any sense to him, thrown into a kaleidoscope of shifting meaning, cascading from safety to threat, good to evil, in shapes he no longer recognized.
As had she. During her time in Northern Nigeria, the community had been happy and peaceful. It had been desperately poor and extremely conservative, with hospitals and proper schools far away. There was never enough water, and the meagre crops were always on the brink of shrivelling up. A travelling medical clinic visited once a month but was barely able to treat even minor ailments. The government, with its pomp and corruption, seemed uninterested and far away, but with the help of various NGOs, the community was becoming a hub for both education and health care. Charities were working together to build a proper school with walls, desks, and a roof.
Teachers and health workers were being trained, and basic texts and manuals for reading and math had been delivered. The faces of those eager young workers like Aisha were etched in her mind. The pride and hope they felt, their excitement at watching the students learn, especially the girls who were catching a glimpse of a new future. Perhaps that’s what had caught the attention of the extremists.
Sometimes she had flashbacks of the guards, little more than boys, clutching their AK-47s and turning to flee in their Jeeps, leaving nothing but dust and the staccato drumming of gunfire. The predators descended in one brutal swoop, clad in black against the night, Islamic flags billowing, machetes dripping with blood, the stench of gunpowder and smoke carried on the wind. Screams, flames, fleeing shapes backlit by orange. The young teacher, the nurse … cut down in midflight. Someone yanked her to her feet and dragged her into the night, past the village, past the perimeter road, away from the bullets chewing up the ground around her. Still the ferocious grip on her arm propelled her forward. Until with a sudden jerk, the grip loosened. Aisha’s eyes wide and white in her black face as she melted to the ground. Her co-worker. Her friend. “Run, run,” she’d said, the last words she uttered as those big, beautiful eyes grew dim.
Amanda ran. Trust no one! Luke had said. She shut her eyes now as she remembered that desperate flight to freedom, never knowing at each encounter whether she’d be met with food or a bullet. Not knowing, until a month later in the safety of Lagos, the fate of that village and those children. Eighty-nine dead. Two hundred and ten kidnapped.
Luke was watching her now as she pulled herself slowly back to the present. She breathed deeply to calm her heart rate. Ride it out, she’d been taught. She’d come a long way back in five years, and she knew she would find her footing again.
“People think I’m crazy, you know,” Luke said.
She focused on him. “Do you think so?”
“Sometimes.” He unfolded himself from the bed and walked over to look at one of his paintings, a tranquil beach at low tide, with sandpipers pecking through the seaweed and a hint of whimsical shacks huddled against the dunes in the distance. There were no people in the scene.
“This is an old painting,” he said. “From the way it used to be.”
“On Long Beach?”
He nodded. “Wreck Bay,” he said and pointed to a brightly painted lean-to propped up by huge driftwood logs at the edge of the scene. What looked like seashells and wind chimes were strung across the front. “That was my place. They tore all this down. We were a tiny corner of the beach. Long Beach is ten miles long, and we just wanted one corner. But they tore it down.”
She scanned the other paintings. “Your villages are empty. You have no people in these paintings. Only in your studio.”
His eyes flitted to a painting turned against the wall in the corner before he looked away hastily. She approached and turned it over. It was indeed a person. A young woman half-turned away, gazing down the beach. Her long, sun-bleached hair cascaded down her back and over her naked breast.
Amanda peered more closely. A small pink flower was tucked behind her ear. “Who’s this?”
He turned toward the door abruptly. “Pick a painting if you want, and then you should go,” he said and walked out.
Outside in the bright afternoon sun, they stood in awkward silence. Amanda wanted to apologize for turning the painting around, but she was concerned any more mention of the woman would upset him further. In the distance far below, she heard the drone of motorboats. Scraps of laughter drifted on the breeze. Luke’s mood blackened further.
Amanda trod carefully. “Do you have a painting you’d like me to have?”
“Not her,” he said before disappearing back inside. After a few minutes, he emerged, empty-handed. “It’s hard to part with any of them. They are my life, my memories. But I know what I would like to paint for you. Come again in a few days and I will have it.”
Her heart sank. She was already several days behind her scheduled departure. “I have to go back to Victoria in the morning.”
He risked a glance, and she saw the dismay in his gaze. “I will be here when you come back. Will you come back?”
She turned to gather up Kaylee’s leash. “Yes, I will,” she said as she headed toward the path. Before the forest swallowed her up, she heard once again the shrieks of laughter over the sound of the boats down below.
It felt like a violation of this sanctuary and of the peace Luke was trying to find. As she walked down to meet Pim, she wondered what Luke would paint for her and whether he would put a person in it. As a sign of progress and reconnection.
Her thoughts returned to the painting of the young woman on the beach. Had she seen that woman before?