He lies on one side, his side, of the unmade bed, hands tucked behind his head. There is no food in his refrigerator. He has no choice but to drive into Squamish today, but he will lie here, wait, that is, just a little longer. He does not look at the phone on his side table, but is as aware of it as if it were a trailer parked at his bedside. He stares at a dolphin-shaped water stain on the ceiling and indulges in a particular remembering. He conjures up the same few moments time and again. While the several other occasions have blurred together, he keeps this one intact and clear. He had fetched her from her daughter’s apartment in Vancouver’s West End. They were to go to Shannon Falls and then beyond, to the art gallery in Brackendale to see paintings of eagles done by members of the Brackendale Society of Amateur Painters. But he knew, even before he had gone to pick her up in Vancouver, that when they reached Elderberry Bay, some distance still from Shannon Falls, he would stop at his house, the excuse made that he had forgotten his camera there.
Although he knew precisely where the camera was to be found, he told her as he pulled into the yard that he had to look for it, and invited her to come into the house with him. She hesitated, and he thought, with some surprise, that she was about to accept his invitation. She said, however, that she would remain in the car, quickly adding, as if needing to justify her decision, that she wanted to watch the high-tide waves form and roll in. He did not press her, but her hesitation loomed large in his mind.
He entered the house, his heart racing, his brain as if it were on fire. He could barely think. He returned to the car without the camera. He walked directly to her side of the car and opened her door. She stared ahead at a wave forming. Neither spoke. The swell erupted and splayed its foam far out on the surface of the water well before it reached shore. She looked up at him. He uttered a word: “Please?”
He allowed her to lead the way to the house, stepping ahead to open the door only when they arrived at it. They walked quietly, he again behind her, down the hallway to the kitchen. He walked toward the refrigerator. She had positioned herself against a far counter.
“Will you drink something?” he asked. “Something light? Or, I can make coffee.”
She did not answer. He tried to read into her silence. Finally she whispered, “No. I am all right. What do you want?” In the quiet of her voice he had heard her composure, and his uncertainty vanished instantly.
These days he replays in his mind, over and over, the moments that followed.
He leaned against the refrigerator, his hands pressed behind his back, and in the quiet save for the electrical humming, he muttered, “This is strange, isn’t it? Being alone with you, I mean. It’s good. Are you all right?”
She nodded, and so he stepped forward. But she raised her hand and shook her head, gesturing no to his advance. He continued and she stepped sideways, raising both hands firmly in front of her. She said, softly but sharply, “No, Harry. Don’t. Stop,” but he mirrored her step and caught her hands in his. She seemed weightless when he pulled her toward him. The heat of her body and the form of her breasts, the unbelievable fact of them against him, caused the light in the room to seem to dim, and a quivering to climb his body, from his feet to his reddening face. She had suddenly seemed to relax, and so, trembling unabashedly, he loosened his hold. She remained there, lightly, against him, and this surprised him, as he knew she would have, through the thinness of her summer dress and the coarseness of his khaki trousers, felt his burning.
It was under the duvet of the same bed on which he lies alone, the full width of which he is still unable to reclaim for himself, that the two of them rocked their way into each other. But the point of his constant reliving of this time is always to arrive at the moment when, as if a decision had been made, Rose opened herself wide and, curling her body, drew him in.
Other occasions haunt him, too: the day she was in the water in front of his house, floating on her back, waving at him to join her. He had been watching her as he hosed down the path in front of the house. He had turned away long enough to shut off the hose and reel it onto its rack. When he returned, she had disappeared. Horrified, he ran into the house to fetch his binoculars. Through them he saw her walking on the gravel beach, with no towel to dry herself nor robe to wrap around her. When she reached him, she was tired but exhilarated. She had spotted a child in difficulty off in the distance and had swum to the child and taken her directly to the shore. She had been so at home in the water there, he imagined her content in Elderberry Bay.
His mind flits, too, to the time he had recounted for her his beginnings in Canada, the days when he drove for a taxi company so that he could put himself through school. He had wanted her to understand how he had risen out of adversity and with no family name or inheritance to ease him along, with no assistance from any arm of government—he had, as far as he was concerned, triumphed. He remembers her response: “I am married to a man who comes from the same background as myself, but it is a man who was once a taxi driver, and is now a gardener, who makes me happy.”
He tries to understand why, on returning to Guanagaspar, she drove herself to the run-down village of Raleigh, where he was born. She looked up the old couple who were like his family. She was surprised that they had remembered her. How could they not have? When she was a child, she had visited the fish market with her mother. Uncle Mako had wrapped colorful footballer fish in newspaper for her.
On her return from that visit to his friends, Rose immediately telephoned Harry. She told him that the old people, wiry and a little age-bent, wanted to know if he was happy, how he was managing, if he had good friends, kind neighbors. Tante Eugenie, in her unchanged style, slid fresh carite slices into hot oil, and the three of them ate. They wanted to give Rose everything they had; Uncle Mako went to the back of the house and returned with a bundle of dasheen bush, milk dripping from its fresh knife cuts. He went down to the beach and returned dragging a crocus bag full of live conch. The bag was so heavy that it took him and Rose, both lifting it by its corners, to put it in the trunk of the car, which she had to have cleaned the instant she got back to her house. Before Rose left, the old lady took her hands in hers and said, “Child, we old now; we going to dead and gone soon. But until then, we here for you just like we was for him. If you need anything, you come to us. We don’t have much, but whatever we can do for you, we will do.” She removed a chain with a cross pendant from around her neck and handed it to Rose. “Take this. Is for you to hand to our Harry, but you wear it until, God willing, next you see him.” It had been a gift from Harry’s mother to Tante Eugenie, a piece of costume jewelry worth only the memory of an uneventful Mother’s Day decades ago. Rose told Harry over the phone that she had not yet removed it, nor would she until she had the chance to give it to him herself.
All of this and then, so abruptly, no contact.
Was he no more than fuel to light a spark between her and her onerous husband? Was he, Harry, a good presence for them? In the silence that exists between them these days, such thoughts occur to him often.
Rain pellets flick hard at his window. He must go into Squamish before the shops close. He is bound to run into Kay in Squamish. After turning down the offer of Christmas lunch at her house, he dreads seeing her. But he does not have a drop of milk in the house, nor bread, nor eggs. He turns on his side and stares at the black piece of plastic that is his phone.
He picks up the receiver and listens. It works. In all of this rain, it still works. He replaces it quickly.
New Year’s Eve is just around the corner.