VII

IT WAS THE ARCHAEOLOGIST that made her want to leave Merle Norman.

She and Wiley had gone on a weekend trip to the Radium Hot Springs for their third anniversary. Sebastian was not even two; she’d still been carrying the weight from the pregnancy. Her thighs and buttocks felt thick, weighed down as though ham hocks were lodged beneath the skin. The hot springs had been Wiley’s idea, naturally. Skipping just one province over to a mediocre small-town tourist attraction could barely be called a vacation in Belinda’s mind. She had expected the hot springs to be natural; she pictured pools of bubbling Technicolor water carved into jagged rock, mountains rising up on all sides. Instead, there was a concrete pool, painted with a sky blue bottom, seating all around the perimeter. Like a hot tub, but larger. The real hot springs were somewhere else, protected from view, while the water was filtered into the pool. Of course, thought Belinda. They’re too special, too important for us, the regular people.

Only twice did they actually swim — soak — in the pool. The first time, there were six men in the water when she emerged from the change room. Wiley was taking his time. She considered turning around, retreating back into the change room as though she’d forgotten something — a towel. But one of them had already spotted her. He eyed her, one arm propped on the rim of the pool as though wrapped around the shoulders of an imaginary woman. His expression was entirely neutral, but unyielding. Belinda resisted glancing down at her jiggling thighs as she walked across the pool deck.

The men seemed to be together — colleagues. The one man continued to stare, apparently in a sort of daze while the chatter of the others flitted around him.

For me, it’s the wrist, one of the men said to the others. Doctor says it’s carpal tunnel. Repetitive strain.

You sure he meant your golf swing there, Ed? another chortled, showing his giant square teeth. The five men laughed to themselves. The sixth broke his stare on Belinda, sank deeper into the water as she descended the first step into the pool.

The men then fell quiet, a thin line of tension knotting between them. She could feel her skin flushing, and hoped they would think it was the heat of the water.

Hi, one of them murmured, giving Belinda a small nod.

They were probably oil executives, Belinda thought to herself. Rich people on a weekend retreat, compliments of the company. Bigwigs. Her throat tightened.

Wiley then emerged from the change room, dripping from the shower.

You were fast, he said, zipping across the pool deck.

For Chrissakes don’t run, Belinda hissed. Wiley looked like a drowned rat with his shorts plastered to his thin thighs, the hair matted and slicked all over his skin. He plunged himself into the pool up to the shoulders.

Ahhhhh, he sighed.

For a moment, Belinda considered pretending she didn’t know Wiley. She smiled at him politely. But no, she realized, the men had seen, had heard them talking to one another. Although, to an outsider, she told herself, any one of these men could be her husband. She could have married a rich oil executive; why not? She had chosen for love. Back then, it had been for love. But there hadn’t been any other choice. Love or loneliness. Some women could choose loneliness; Belinda seemed to be missing the trait that allowed for it. A certain hardness. But for these moments, when it was still possible to imagine that Wiley was not her husband, she could pretend she had it. She could even convince herself.

As she soaked in the pool, she stretched these thoughts out, made a game of it. Imagine, she thought to herself, you are swimming laps in a pool. A real pool, like the ones they use for swimming tournaments. You are young, nineteen, maybe twenty, your thighs, your body, are slim, svelte, smooth as plastic. You cut through the water, you glide on the surface. It’s not a chore to swim — it’s invigorating. You sweat, the water cools you. When you come up for air, you see a woman sitting in the hot tub. She is the only woman at the centre of a group of men, most of them balding, overweight. She is alone. She is radiant in her white suit. None of these men can touch her.

Wiley gave her arm a nudge, making her twitch.

Isn’t that right, Bell? he said. Lived in Alberta for fifteen-odd years and never been west of Cochrane. The staring man perked his eyebrows.

I suppose, yes, it has been that long, Belinda replied. I haven’t had a reason. Until now.

And then, a woman entered from the change room. She seemed familiar with the surroundings; she walked casually across the pool deck, slid into the water like a hand into a glove. Belinda was conscious of herself staring, in a trance just like the man had been. But she could not help it. This was the woman she had just imagined; the exact woman — blonde, slim, young, sure of herself. She smiled at Belinda and sat just a few feet away.

Belinda forced herself to turn to Wiley and act as though she was involved in his conversation. She tried to picture what she looked like to the young woman, whose eyes she could feel upon her. Her belly began to suck itself in, even though it was concealed under the water.

When she glanced back over, the woman was closing her eyes, her neck resting against the edge of the pool. Her face was delicate, flawless, skin slightly rosy from the heat. Her hair was a natural blonde, glowing under the sun. When her eyes flicked open they fell directly on Belinda’s.

In that moment, something strange happened. One of Belinda’s false memories flashed in her mind — another image of her sister, Prim, and herself as a toddler. It was summer, and she could see herself and Prim, wedged among the plants that had grown monstrous at the back of her mother’s house. The prick of a raspberry cane as Prim yanked her by the wrist to the spot where the garden hose hung, nestled in the weeds, obscured from the view of the kitchen window, behind which her mother was fixing lunch. Prim crouching over her, shooting a jet of water all over Belinda’s naked skin, her other hand cinched around Belinda’s wrist. Belinda had made a mess, she was sure, but the memory did not reveal what it was on her skin that Prim was washing away. The stony, determined expression on Prim’s face told Belinda it was dangerous, perhaps poisonous. But Belinda was screaming, wailing like a torture victim, her tiny limbs stiff and vibrating with the shock of the icy water. She was too young to have learned to speak. And it was too long ago to be an actual, accurate memory.

Hi there, said the woman suddenly. Belinda pulled herself out of her reverie and realized she had been gaping at the woman like a fool. Her face burned.

Sorry, Belinda said, you look like someone I know. Knew.

Oh really? she replied. She scooted towards Belinda, examining her face. Maybe we know each other from work? she asked.

I don’t think so, Belinda said. Do you work here? In Radium?

Yeah, she said. I’m from here, actually.

So you work in . . . tourism? Belinda ventured. Or customer service?

The woman laughed. I guess there’s not much else in Radium, is there? she said. But no, I’m actually an archaeologist.

Oh, Belinda, said, straightening in her seat. Well, that’s very interesting. An archaeologist! And you live here?

Yeah, it’s great. There’s so much awesome hiking and camping around here. I have my own condo, a dog. I live about ten minutes away.

Really, Belinda said. You’re so young.

Twenty-one, she said. She smiled, timidly, and it made her look even younger.

Perhaps this is a stupid question, Belinda said, moving closer to the woman, but what does an archaeologist do in Radium?

She laughed again. A lot of people ask that. There’s a lot of Native land around here. They need archaeologists to make sure developers aren’t digging into gravesites or disturbing artifact repositories, that kind of thing.

I see. Fascinating.

Belinda noticed then that the woman’s bathing suit was Nike brand. High quality. The swoop stretched smooth across the curve of her breast. It was the kind of bathing suit one would buy at a specialty swimwear store for an exorbitant price. Jessica had once asked for a Nike swimsuit for her birthday. Belinda had not been inside the store for more than five minutes before she headed straight back out empty-handed, spooked by the price tags and the saleswoman’s lofty talk of specially engineered swimwear fabrics.

Belinda continued to make small-talk with the woman, the two of them forming a unit separate from the men. Still, Belinda felt out of place. Isolated. She and this woman — more accurately, girl — were from different worlds. The girl talked about spending long hours working out in the field, ankle-deep in mud. It was tough work, gritty. It was not anything like the life of Indiana Jones, she insisted with a practiced chuckle, as though she’d made the comparison dozens of times before. Although Belinda could accept that it wasn’t like the movies, to her, it was even more glamourous. Every day this girl sacrificed her time, her comfort, probably even her safety, for her work. She was committed to uncovering secrets that had been buried in the earth for hundreds of years. She had wisdom, knowledge that people admired. What would it be like, Belinda wondered, to have your entire life figured out at twenty-one? Belinda hadn’t even thought it possible. But this girl had the whole package: a professional job, money, a dog, the freedom to spend a weekday afternoon soaking in the pool. Where would Belinda be now, she wondered, if it had been that way for her? Certainly not here, on a substandard three-day vacation with three children at home to worry about. Perhaps she would be on a business trip, sipping mimosas while working on a shiny portable computer in her penthouse hotel room.

Hey Bell, Wiley said, nudging her again. I’m getting wrinkly. Wanna go?

She wished the woman good luck with her work, and as she stood to leave, she noticed a small tattoo on her upper shoulder, near the base of her neck. A circle made up of tiny black hearts. She thought nothing of it at the time, but it would later become what she saw as one of the vital coincidences that brought her to her research. A circle. A sign.

She’d given up on trying to read. The train had already made four long stops. At this rate, she wouldn’t be arriving in Salisbury until noon. But on the positive side, she’d been enjoying the time alone with her thoughts. As the train wove through the green countryside, Belinda saw herself surveying the scenery the way an archaeologist might — as a theatrical stage set against the curtain of history. The stage was only the magical surface of things; what happened behind the velvet folds of the curtain was unsensationalized reality. How many unknown stories remained embedded in those hills of chalk, infused in the splaying branches of ancient trees, waiting to be uncovered?

Stories of crop circles had been a part of recorded history as far back as 1678. An English woodcut pamphlet from that year, entitled ‘The Mowing Devil,’ told of a miserly farmer from Hertfordshire who refused to pay a labourer the demanded price to mow his field. The farmer told the labourer he’d rather the devil mow his field than pay the sum, and his imprudent wish evidently came true. That evening, the grain blazed as though it had caught fire, but by the next morning a perfectly mown circle had miraculously appeared in the field. The circle was too perfect, the article pointed out, for a human to have made it. A primitive ink illustration pictured a man with the legs and horns of a goat swinging a scythe to flatten the grains. Two rings encircled him, the mown stalks rendered as sharp diagonal lines leaning against each other like fallen dominoes. Leaf-shaped flames danced recklessly around the rings.

Belinda understood how it would have been easier back then to attribute the miracle to the devil. It seemed too destructive and self-indulgent to be an act of God, and any notion of supernatural forces beyond good and evil had yet to be imagined. In a way, there was something almost sinister about perfect concentric circles, the centres of which could only be pinpointed from the sky. A mark of doom, a bull’s-eye.

In fact, the first time she came across ‘The Mowing Devil’ while reading library books in bed, the illustration sent chills down the back of her neck. It reminded her of Egyptian hieroglyphic drawings, eerier than realistic drawings because they stripped everything to the bare bones and forced your imagination to conjure the details. The white, unblinking eye of the devil seemed wise and all-knowing in its simplicity. She showed the illustration to Wiley, but he only groaned and rolled over.

But isn’t it fascinating? she said.

Everything is fascinating to you, Wiley said into his pillow. He flipped over. When are you gonna finish doing all that research? he asked.

Finish? Belinda said, almost laughing. This isn’t some sort of temporary hobby, she said. What if I asked you when you were going to finish playing piano?

That’s different, Wiley said. That’s part of my job.

Well, Belinda said, you can think of this as my job. It’s what I’m passionate about, after all.

Too bad you can’t make any money off of it, Wiley said.

Right, Belinda said. Because you make piles of money as a piano teacher.

Wiley’s lips tightened. Go to sleep, he said, reaching over her and switching off her bedside lamp. Belinda sat still for a moment, her book still open on her lap.

I’m going then, she said, climbing out of bed. I’ll read in the living room. She gathered her stack of books and put on her slippers.

You’re living in books, he said to the darkness as she left the room. They’re like stories. It’s not real life.

It was true, in a way. Belinda had never actually seen a crop circle. But by that time she had already decided she was going to make her way to England, where she would finally step foot inside her first crop circle. It would confirm everything she believed in. She promised herself that when the moment was upon her, she would remain acutely aware of every feeling running through her body. Many people who had experienced walking inside a crop circle, even some who had been adamant skeptics, admitted they had felt lightheaded and lethargic upon entering the area. Some even reported hearing high-pitched ringing sounds that seemed to drop out of the sky above. When cereologists took soil samples from underneath these circles, the tests detected high levels of magnetism. Belinda saw these as warning signs. Beneath the beautiful, swirling patterns lay a power beyond human control. It occurred to Belinda that uncovering the answers might even be dangerous. She’d read of animal corpses, porcupines and rabbits, recovered from several recent crop-circle sites. The corpses had been severely burnt, although there was no sign of fire anywhere in the field. One charred porcupine appeared to have been shrunk down to half its size like a cooked mushroom.

She knew it was a silly and hopelessly romantic thought, but Belinda felt sure that her first experience walking into a crop circle was going to be life-altering. And now, with every turn of its wheels, the train brought Belinda closer to fulfilling her connection to the phenomenon. In Salisbury, she would meet Dr. Longfellow and join his team of researchers. She felt like a child on a rollercoaster, knowing the big drop was imminent but still breathless with uncertainty.