Fifteen years is the greatest amount of time Yannick has ever lived in one house with the same people. This same house that is now empty, with Robin gone to university and Leigh just gone.
Back when they bought the place, when Robin was toddling around in saggy diapers, Yannick built her one of those backyard swing-sets. It had a curly slide and a teeter-totter. When Robin played on her own out in the yard, Yannick could hear the emphysemic wheeze of the swing labouring back and forth, and be assured that his daughter was where she was meant to be.
She grew up fast, though, as daughters do, and soon enough, the sun and the winters sapped the colour from the swing-set and rusted it, and the teeter wouldn’t totter any more. Yannick tried to dismantle the swing-set to take it to the dump but all the nuts had rusted into the bolts and the bolts had rusted into their sockets. The poles were fused together and no amount of WD-40 was enough. So he took a hacksaw to it and hacked that swing-set to kingdom come.
He’s thinking about this now because this is how his body feels, his knees and his back; the ligaments, what-have-you, the hinges, have rusted tight. Too many suns and winters. His bones have fused into their sockets and his muscles have hardened to rubber.
Kathleen. She was so geared up at him because of something that happened on the ferry, claiming he nearly caused some sort of traffic calamity, a disembarkation faux pas of the highest magnitude. Keeps asking him where he disappeared to. Keeps asking him if he’s okay.
But he didn’t disappear—she did. What happened was, she went out for a smoke and didn’t come back. So maybe he got a little restless and maybe he wanted to go for a walk too. He tried to find her and she was nowhere. Instead, he found the ass of the boat, and stayed there a while. Hang around the rear end of a big boat like that and stare at the wake, that white-water highway, and what’s inside a person’s head and what’s inside his heart will inevitably tumble overboard and disappear beneath the foam. Watch the wake for long enough and a pattern will be revealed, repeating without end, the water parting down the middle and folding back into itself, and at the furthest point, the white road dissolving back into the ocean like it was never there. Huh. Moon road.
Yannick is an old man. His hinges are no longer well oiled. Stand at the back of a big boat and you see its trace, and the trace dissolving, and you think about these things. How your body begins to fail you, how your last wife has left you. You think about your own white-water trace, your wake. And what you leave behind. And how all that will dissolve too. Poof. Never there.
Tonight, another motel close to the ferry terminal. Tomorrow they will get up early and drive to the site. Say it again: tomorrow they will drive to the site.
Yannick still doesn’t know what to call this place. This bones place.
It’s crossed his mind to knock on Kathleen’s door. He would very much like to sleep with her again, but doesn’t think he can stomach the way she’s been looking at him today. Nothing sexy about pity.
Better to sleep.
They leave in the morning under an indigo sky and make it to the edge of the park where the bones were found, a few hours’ drive into the mountainous interior of the island. It’s turned into a lousy-looking morning, dull with cloud.
Kathleen had the wherewithal to print out the map at the hotel’s Reception, which Lim emailed to her last night. It’s one of those satellite maps from the internet, and covers this small section of parkland. Lim’s instructions say that, from the parking lot, they are to follow one of the older trails until they get to a blocked-off section where the new trail, the one that will take them to the site, begins. There will be signs where the new trail peels off, telling them not to enter, but they are to ignore these signs. The new trail has been abandoned, will possibly never be finished, because of the bones. Apparently, the hike should take them about an hour. According to whose pace, Yannick would like to know.
Lim has drawn a circle around the exact spot. His message says it’s easy to find because the unfinished trail ends there, and because there is police tape tied around some of the trees. So.
‘Here.’ Kathleen passes a long, solid stick to Yannick. It’s free of bark and smoothly blond, with a natural elbow at the top for gripping. She’s been to the park rangers’ canteen and she’s packing two plastic bottles of water and some kind of nut-and-desiccated-fruit snack into her purse.
‘What’s this?’ he asks, rubbing his thumb over the bent corner.
‘What’s it look like?’
‘I meant, where did you get it?’
‘Ranger gave it to me,’ she says. ‘Don’t be proud. I’d take one myself if he had another.’
He grinds the worn point of the stick into the gravel in tight, crunching circles. It’s a good height, and firm.
The trailhead map shows walks of various distances, elevations and degrees of difficulty. Tacked next to the map there is a warning sign instructing hikers what to do if they encounter a cougar. Among other suggestions: maintain eye contact; pick up small children and pets; if the cougar attacks, fight back with everything you’ve got as this is a predatory attack. Yannick suspects that any outcome of a cougar encounter is likely up to the cougar.
The trail they are meant to follow is marked by a yellow-dashed loop. It runs along the lower slopes of a mountain with a lake on the other side. The path to the bones is, of course, not shown on the trailhead map. It doesn’t officially exist.
At first, the path is flat and hospitable, but very soon it drives upwards and Yannick is grateful for the leverage the stick provides. Kathleen walks ahead, and if the distance between them grows too big, she waits. The light is dead. The forest is pale and quiet.
They go higher, and looking down to the right, through the trees, Yannick can see the dark movement of the lake.
Kathleen is waiting for him to catch up. She asks if he’s okay and he tells her she’d better not keep asking that or else.
‘Or else what?’ she sputters.
He walks right on past.
The trail winds upwards, steep and ridged with roots, interrupted by rocks, and they take it slow. Kathleen follows closely behind, and he supposes he cannot blame her. Big trouble for them both if his back goes again. When they reach the top of a particularly steep section she looks at him and he can tell she’s about to ask if he’s okay, and he sees her swallow those words in one wise gulp. They do pause, though, to share a bottle of water and eat a handful of nuts.
She pulls the map from her purse, unfolds it and holds it up. She squints at it as if she has the orienteering ability to determine where they are on the trail in relation to that scrawl on the map, the blue circle that marks the spot.
‘You think you know where we’re at?’ he asks.
She draws her finger along the map, almost to the point where they turn onto the new, unmapped trail. ‘I think we’re here,’ she says.
‘Based on what?’
‘I’ve been keeping track of the bends in my head.’
‘That is not how this is done.’
‘I’m kidding,’ she says. ‘We’ve been walking for an hour. I assume this is how far we’ve got.’
They hike on, he with his walking stick and she with her map. He cannot believe that after two decades of nothing, there is a map.
‘X marks the spot,’ he says.
She stops and eyes him.
‘You could laugh if it weren’t so grave,’ he says.
‘What?’
He attempts a chuckle, proud of his pun.
‘Yannick. For crying out loud. Explain yourself.’
‘We have a map,’ he says. ‘After all this time.’
She smiles bitterly. ‘It is a lousy joke, eh?’
‘It sure is,’ he says.
The trail continues to climb and they soon come up alongside a barrier of yellow police tape tied between two trees. Some of the tape is still secured tight but most is torn and fluttering limply. A more permanent metal No Entry sign is nailed to a rough post of yellow pine.
‘This is us,’ Kathleen says.
‘I wish that Lim guy never told us to ignore the signs,’ says Yannick.
‘So we could turn back?’
‘Yup.’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you feel?’ he asks.
‘Mixed up.’
‘Me too.’
They step off the old trail and pick their way around the taped trees onto the new path, which doesn’t feel so much like a path. The dirt is a darkly rich mixture of loose stones and clods of mud. Soft and harder to navigate. The established path was packed down hard and moved with the undulations of the forest floor as if it has always been there, an old scar, the edges blending smoothly into the vegetation. This path is more like a fresh wound, slicing into the woods around it.
And it has started to rain. Yannick knows it’s raining because he can hear the patter high up in the trees. The air has cooled and the rain has conjured up the smell of sawdust from the trees that were cut.
‘Are you getting wet?’ he asks.
‘Eh?’
‘It’s raining but I can’t feel the rain.’
‘Because of the trees,’ she says, waving a hand in the air like she’s some kind of expert. ‘Keep an eye out for the police tape,’ she says.
Samuel Lim’s written instructions say the spot is directly behind the uprooted base of a cedar tree (as if the person who dug the hole used this for cover). There is also, just next to it, a boulder the size of a car and of course more police tape; these are the features to look out for. The root mound, Samuel Lim writes, is roughly the height of a person.
Yannick’s heart kicks clumsily. He is thirsty but doesn’t want to stop for water or, more accurately, ask Kathleen for water, in case she thinks he’s weakening.
This trail is more level, cutting into the side of the mountain horizontally instead of driving up it. If it was Una buried out here, she would have walked. You cannot carry a person through this. Whoever it was, she walked. All through here. These same rocks, these trees, this same dirt. This time of year too, give or take, so it would have looked just like this; the air would have felt the same, the smell of the ground.
Something rustles in the ferns downwards from where they are. Some bird caws.
He’s looking for the bright police tape; he’s looking for the dark mound of earth, the root mound, the rock the size of a car. The place where this trail will abruptly, finally (too soon) end.
‘We’ve got to be close,’ Kathleen says, panting. She’s got the map in front of her face. No need for a map at this point but at least it’s something to hold.
Now the trail takes a dip and continues downwards, and the exasperated muscles of Yannick’s lower back are giving him the last of whatever they have got to give. He takes it slow, finding rhythm and comfort in a kind of sideways shuffle. A ripple of pain at the base of his spine and he has to stop and press his forehead against the stringy bark of the closest cedar tree. The smell of sap and damp bark is so strong he can taste it.
He closes his eyes and is surprised by thoughts of his three boys. He whispers their names, Sunny and Zachary and Devon. He whispers the name of his daughter, the one who is not lost. He thinks of her, of Robin.
‘There.’ Kathleen’s voice echoes strangely through the trees. ‘It’s there.’
Where she’s standing, up ahead, the trail has ended. The cut they’ve been following opens to a clearing with piles of dirt and unorganized stacks of logs. At the far end of the clearing is the fallen tree, its root mound roughly the height of a person. There’s the rock. The police tape.
He approaches Kathleen and she hooks her arm into his.
‘I don’t need help,’ he says.
‘I do.’
Rain, harder now, falls through the trees and finds its way to Yannick’s neck, his shoulders. He shivers, though he is warm from the walking.
Kathleen is looking at him with a face he can’t read. ‘I want to tell you something,’ she says, but then says nothing and looks at him a little more.
‘Spit it out, girl.’
‘I know I’ve been pissing and moaning, but this was the right thing,’ she says. ‘You did the right thing, bringing us here.’
Now, he is not so sure.
‘We don’t have to go any closer,’ she says. ‘If you don’t want to.’
‘Ach. Last few steps.’
‘Come on, then,’ she says.
The ferns here are knee high and so thick that the ground is lost. Not being able to see his own feet, Yannick doesn’t want to break contact with the earth in case the next step is not where he expects it to be, so he considers each one, taking the next only when he’s sure of the last.
And here they are. A candle and a bouquet of flowers have been tucked lovingly between the feet of one of the bigger tree trunks. The candle is in one of those tall, wine-red jars you’d expect to find in a church. The flowers’ heads sag on broken necks and the petals have wilted and gone pale, and some have dropped to the ground, and the stems are held together with a pink ribbon that’s not yet lost its shine.
Kathleen kneels to the flowers and rubs the ribbon between her thumb and finger and then just stays there. He leaves her to it.
Looking at the ground, it’s not obvious where the digging occurred, where the actual burial site is. The earth has reclaimed this patch with sprays of young vegetation, like kids let out of school, bright green shoots and ferns and white, milky flowers. Yannick pokes holes in various places with his walking stick. He does this for what seems like a long time, before Kathleen notices and asks what he’s doing.
‘Looking for where they dug the hole,’ he says. Point Last Seen.
‘Okay.’
‘You think it’s okay?’
‘Fuck, yes. Probably not respectable, strictly speaking, but…’
‘I want to put my hands on the exact spot.’ He moves in tight circles, poking, and there is no way of telling where the hole is and where the bones were. He moves outwards, broadening his circle. He jabs the dirt. He hits a rock or root or some other unforgiving thing, and pain shoots up his arm and straight into his back. He is sweating and out of breath and swearing steadily with the crudest expletives he can muster. He stabs and prods, stabs and prods the dirt.
‘Yannick, stop.’
He is metres away from the rock, the root mound, so he weaves back again, stabbing the ground. Tripping over his feet and tripping over the stick. Your kid does not ask much of you, does she, other than to be remembered after she’s gone? He’s never before allowed himself to picture what her face might have looked like the moment she knew she was going to die. That look is all he now sees as he jabs his stick into the ground. He hits a rock so squarely and perfectly that the pain shudders through his body, like a harp, like fingers are plucking his strings. He hurls his walking stick and it ricochets off a tree, landing in the dirt with unexceptional silence.
Kathleen tells him again to stop and now her hands are on his shoulders and he is so out of breath he has to bend over. The rain is cool on his hot back.
‘The hole is filled,’ she says. ‘This is enough,’ she says. She looks at him with a tenderness so rare, he has to look away. ‘It will get better,’ she says.
The wind moving through the trees sounds like paper, like the curled edge of his hand moving slowly over paper when he has a stick of willow charcoal nestled in his fingers.
She pushes her hair back from her face and straightens herself and squeezes his shoulder roughly. ‘We should eat a little and get back,’ she says, tenderness done. ‘I don’t want to drive in the dark.’
He moves towards the rock and pushes both his palms against it, to feel its weight, its measure, and stands in this way until his breathing slows. Cool and damp and gritty, patched with black moss and dirt, this rock knew the body that was buried here for twenty years or more. Sheltered it. Made a place for it that can be marked on a map. Yannick would like to leave something behind, but he has nothing to leave.
‘Can we give her a minute?’ he says.
‘Her?’
‘Whoever this is. I want to give her a minute. We could light the candle.’
‘I don’t have a lighter.’
‘You have been smoking this whole time and now you don’t have a lighter.’
‘Correct.’
‘Could you check?’
She slips her purse off her shoulder and looks through it, then drops her purse to the ground and thrusts both hands in her pockets. One hand comes out gripping something, which must be a lighter, but is not. She shows it to him: a tiny, mechanical music box, not a helluva lot bigger than a lighter.
‘I found it,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t even work.’
He takes it from her and turns it in his hands.
‘I don’t know why I kept it.’
‘We could leave it, though,’ he says, passing it back. ‘To show we were here.’
She smiles. ‘Yes,’ she says. She goes over to where the dead flowers are, and tucks the music box in close to the red glass that holds the candle.
He again presses his hands to the rock. This enduring rock under these tired old hands. He pushes his forehead to its surface and he whispers, ‘Thank you.’