Scott stood in the airport with his parents, one eye on the baggage carousel. “I hear that Heather’s class is trying.” His mother’s voice sounded strained, as though she was forcing her words through a filter of sadness. “I heard,” she offered, “that one boy keeps, ah, keeps setting fires in the washroom.”
Scott shrugged a noncommittal shrug. He was watching a gangly teen with a surfboard lope across the lobby to retrieve his dog, still in a travel cage. Terrified, the collie had foam on its lips. The teen clapped his hands in greeting, and the dog yapped, relieved.
“A US airline cooked a dog,” Scott’s father announced.
“Why would you tell a story like that, Rusty?” his mother demanded.
“It’s true!” Rusty was indignant. “When the case went to court, they said the temperature in the hold of the plane went up to one hundred and forty degrees Celsius.”
Scott watched the boy free his dog, which celebrated by chasing its tail. The surfer then hugged his mother, a tall woman straddling the line between gaunt and glorious. Time had erased the softness from her face, leaving it chiselled and angular, her teeth and nose larger, her smile more feral, more like the boy and his dog. They seemed at ease in the world, he decided, still open to adventures.
“Is Heather at school today?” his mother asked.
“I dunno, Mom. She’s gone.”
His mother swallowed. “What do you mean?”
His mother looked distressed. She liked Heather, who was attractive and good with children. But she knew better than to press Scott. When it came to women, Scott was like a man walking through a sandstorm, she decided, the wind filling in each step as soon as it was formed, so when Heather left, she was gone, his mother realized, just gone.
Scott darted forward as his mother’s suitcase rolled down the belt. When he returned, his mother asked, in lieu of anything important: “Did she take the Wyeth print?” Scott shrugged a yes.
Raindrops were hitting the windshield, spreading like poached eggs, fat, clear circles of unpredictable size. Scott was driving his parents home.
“How was Cora’s funeral?” he finally asked.
“Oh, it was fine.” His mother sighed. “It was a long trip. . . . That’s all.”
“I’d give it a four,” snapped Rusty. “A two for artistic impression.”
In the rear-view mirror, Scott saw his mother staring at the white-grey sky, which had, on this day, no clouds or gradation in colour. It was a flat, finite sky, without mystery or joy. It had been years since Scott had seen Aunt Cora, a widow who had moved to Florida. Once there, Cora joined an order of Wallis wannabes, older women who fashioned themselves after the late duchess. Anorexic, they chain-smoked Camels and lived in discount loungewear. Liberated from family by death or design, they drank heavily and made a point of boasting that they dressed for dinner.
For a moment, Scott was tempted to tell his parents about Tootsy’s, about Turmoil Davies. He was tempted to tell them he had sparred with Johnny LeBlanc, an actual fighter with thirteen wins. He was tempted to tell them about Ownie. And then he decided against it, remembering how his parents had lived for his paddling, and how he’d crushed them when he quit. If he told them about the gym, they would latch on to it, they would make too much of it, trying to reclaim the relationship between parents and athlete, the exhilaration and the hope. They would try too hard.
“It was the headstone,” said Rusty. “It started off okay. It said, ‘Cora Henneberry, wife of Bernie.’ And then it said, ‘You Reap What You Sow.’”
“It was Cousin Bryce,” his mother whispered. “Cora had wanted angels.”
“He got into drugs when he was a teenager,” Rusty offered for his wife’s sake. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
They arrived in Dartmouth. Smithers called the city Darkness, but he and Scott were not talking about the same place. Dartmouth wasn’t a high-rise, a shopping mall, or an industrial park. That was the extraneous backdrop, but that wasn’t it. Dartmouth was water, one pivotal piece in the jigsaw of life. That’s all Scott saw when he crossed the bridge from Halifax; that’s all that mattered.
“Oh, I saw Timmy.” Rusty was hoping to salvage the outing. “He was driving the bus to bingo.”
The lakes, the essence of Dartmouth, were a gift from the ice age, left by glaciers on their slow retreat, twelve-thousand-year-old craters filled with meltwater and purpose. Dartmouth had two dozen lakes, but Scott only cared about one, the world’s greatest flatwater course. Scott called it the Lake, but there were really two, connected at a narrow point, and part of a longer, broken chain. The course, with lanes for one thousand metres, was on the lower lake, but paddlers trained on both. Rowers shared the space.
Historians waxed about the beauty of a pristine waterway in the heart of a city, they described the thrill of seeing an otter or a crane, the joy of passing under a stream of commuters while communing with secrets of the past. When alone, you could imagine porcupines in hemlock stands, bears in bogs. Scott never thought about deer or birchbark canoes, but he knew how many strokes it was from the overpass to a scraggly spruce. He knew which lane got wash.
“Tim always liked to drive,” Rusty added. “Remember he used to drive the boats up to nationals?”
“I went with him once,” Scott reminded Rusty.
His mother attempted a conciliatory smile, drawn from happier times. Going to Nationals had been a ritual, like putting up Christmas lights, a ritual that peaked on a summer night when the boats departed. Anything, it was understood, could happen after that.
“Do you remember when he slept under the boat trailer outside Montreal with a Swiss Army knife?” Rusty asked.
“The Quebec police wanted to arrest him,” his mother added.
Taylor was a safe subject. If Scott’s parents were not allowed to talk about paddling, a sport that had once consumed the family, they could, they had discovered over time, still talk about Tim. Tim was raw and rough with a deformed finger and a mangled ear. He was outrageous. Charging down the course, Tim exemplified fearlessness and ferocity. Scott’s parents had loved to watch Tim race, and in their minds, that’s all there had been: the glorious, death-defying drive. They had not seen the setbacks, the heartache and pain, and Scott had, in some form of kindness, allowed them that much. After Scott quit paddling, Taylor stayed in the sport, reaching, driving, lurching, with every step forward fighting for his life. That’s all, Scott believed, that he knew how to do.
“I remember he wore that T-shirt: SECOND PLACE IS THE FIRST LOSER.” Rusty chuckled. “And the other one: REAL MEN PADDLE C-BOATS.”
Scott’s mother smiled. Scott laughed and everyone, it seemed, felt better.