Whatever it was, it was right there in front of me.
The sky thundered ominously as I walked into town. I started worrying about my cast and I darted into the convenience store. Ann was behind the counter again, checking lottery tickets for an older customer. She said hello. I kept one eye on the street, waiting for the rain, while I browsed. Then I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Taped up on the side of the counter, facing the magazine rack, was a single sheet of paper, advertising a memorial service for Ann’s husband, Henry. Who had apparently died the year before. He was pretty young — just sixty-four. I gaped at the paper while Ann finished with her customer. I grabbed an umbrella and put it on the counter.
“I’m sorry about Henry,” I said, as she rang me up.
“Oh, thank you,” she said, looking surprised.
“I’d like to come to the memorial.”
“Well,” she said. “I should take that down. It was a couple months ago now. But thank you all the same.”
My cheeks flushed red as I fumbled for my cash.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m sorry …”
I grabbed the change from her and hurried out, forgetting my umbrella on the counter. I didn’t want to go back and face her again. Instead, I crossed the street at Oak and turned toward the river. I went back to the bicycle. The one in the river. I had this crazy idea that something might have changed. The bicycle gone, maybe, in the night. Or a cinder block compressing part of the frame. But everything was exactly where I’d left it, deeper in the silt by a minuscule increment, whatever had accrued in the time since I’d left.
How could such a gentle force do so much work? So quickly, but only when you weren’t looking?
A car honked at me. I sat down on the riverbank. More cars honked. I wasn’t sure why. It started to rain, just a little bit. I got up, turned toward the crosswalk, and ran home awkwardly, my cast beating against my chest.
* * *
“Greetings from Cuba!”
The rain really started coming down when I crossed the threshold into my mother’s house. The door opened with a crash, propelled forward by the wind. Carl ran back and hid behind the stairs. There was a pile of postcards — all mailed separately — by the door, one longer message on the back of one (a picture of the café Hemingway used to frequent — my mother had also scrawled “great daiquiris!” beside the address) and just “Greetings from Cuba!” on all of the others, including a weird black-and-white card with a few lines of Spanish and some grainy corpses commemorating the successful foiling of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Hi Sarah. How are u? The weather here is so nice. Every night we eat by the ocean. Must be no fun cooped up in the house! Has it snowed yet? It’s coming sooner than u think. We went into Havana and it wasn’t as nice as the resort but Dan did enjoy looking at all of the old cars. For my part I am getting a lot of use out of my new bathing suits!
Be sure to remember to clean out Carl’s litter thoroughly before you go. I don’t want any nasty surprises when I get back. Dan says to remind you to keep the thermostat down when you are out of the house and at night when you are sleeping. You can save us a lot of money this way.
Thanks again! Love u.
Mom & Dan.
I couldn’t tell whether she’d written the message before or after my email, or if they even had a way of checking their email up there. I fired up my laptop, and nestled within a flurry of advertisements and concerned messages from Tom (the last one beginning, as I could see from my Gmail inbox, “I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but …”) was an email (“thougt you migth want to see these sarha! love mom and dan xxo xox”) of photographs of their vacation: Dan posing in front of old cars on Cuban streets; the two smiling together at dinner; Dan bleary-eyed, waiting for their flight, still wearing his bomber jacket; Mom on the beach acting coy for Dan behind the viewfinder (why did she include that one?); the two taking turns posing in front of a fibreglass swordfish that looked like it belonged to the resort. Once I finished looking at all of the photographs I deleted the email immediately.
I was angry that the email I’d sent, the one about Dad, had been completely ignored.
I yelled “FUCK!” at the top of my lungs. But the computer had cost me a lot of money, and I needed it to write, and all of my work was on there. So instead of throwing it across the room like I wanted to, I gently closed the lid and slipped it into its protective case, and then I put my head on the table, then fell back into my chair, then rolled onto the floor, then crawled under the desk I had been sitting at, then pulled the rug over my face and felt my breath beating back against me in the darkness until, much later, a whiskered face tentatively pressed against mine.
* * *
It’s helped me to write to you, to an extent you probably can’t imagine.
I’ve noticed that there is something in the air in Durham, timeless and lazy, which maybe partially explains this weird funk I seem to be in. That feeling is also somehow menacing, for reasons I can’t describe. It is the reason, I think, that everyone looks so old.
Do you remember Walid Khan? Weren’t you two friends? I saw him, yesterday, still working in the pharmacy, although now it looks like he’s the manager, or the owner, maybe. He’s gained thirty or forty pounds, and he has all of these lines on his face, like he’s a pack-a-day smoker, or something much worse than that. Anyway, he doesn’t look like he’s in his midtwenties anymore, even though he must be. I don’t know for sure, but I bet he has children. It looks like he has children. And doesn’t want them. Am I an asshole for thinking that?
Or are the lines on his face not from kids, but from the changes that work makes to you? I wonder if that’s what I look like in Toronto. Like a total lost cause. Sitting in front of my console, moving my hands frantically while I stare, dead-eyed, into the screen. I guess I have ambitions — good as those have proved to be — but I feel like I’m just scrambling from day to day, working for no purpose. I can’t see when I’ll get to rest — if I ever will. I don’t really go out, except to get drunk with Tom’s friends. I used to write more when I was a kid, and back then I went to school, too, and spent a lot of time worrying about my parents, and had at least Tiff and Jess to confide in. At least, sort of. More than I have anyone now. The truth is, my life is smaller now, and I am smaller. And exhausted. I don’t know how it all got away from me.
But I don’t feel dead. Not completely. Not yet. Something separates me from the people up here. Is it just the lack of options? I don’t want it to be an accomplishment that I haven’t completely succumbed. I want to feel alive, interested, excited. Genuinely. Like there’s something waiting for me. Like I sometimes felt when I was younger, despite all the problems in my life then. That there was something waiting for me on the horizon, that I just had to age into it, that it would come to me, eventually, if I worked hard, and applied myself, and was honest about my limitations …
I’m going home soon and I don’t know what to do.
Sarah
That was the last letter I wrote to him, though I didn’t deliver a single one. I couldn’t even be sure he was still in Durham, since I hadn’t seen him again even though I’d been heading up to the spot in the forest every day.
I felt like I was on the precipice of something, and there was something terrible behind me, and that the only way down was to jump. But I didn’t want to. I was afraid. I woke up in the morning and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and was afraid of what I saw looking back. Who. A kind of challenge in my eyes — but challenging whom? An unhappiness, an emptiness. Disappointment. But my disappointment was so general I couldn’t really tell what it was that disappointed me.
I was a type from an old novel: the disappointed woman.
Theoretically I should have been feeling better since I was at least taking a break from work, but I only felt worse, somehow. Everything just reminded me of how precarious I felt. How I was sliding further and further back with nothing to show for it and no idea what to do.
I’d responded to a few of Tom’s emails, but not with anything substantial. I didn’t really want to talk to him. I told him I was trying to figure something out, that we would talk when I got back, which, incidentally, would be soon. I didn’t have a new phone yet. Which was fine by me. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, so how was I supposed to have anything to say about us? To him or to anyone else?
But I would have to know within the next two days. That’s when I was heading back to our apartment, to work, to whatever it was that I’d been doing before. In the meantime, more postcards. A Cuban baseball team, one of Havana, an empty beach, fish in a market, and one of Dan and my mom with the resort’s logo in the bottom left corner, a neon pink overlay. The same message on every one, never varied. Greetings from Cuba!
Didn’t she have anything else to say?
* * *
Later I thought of my dream again, the one I’d had before coming up. My dad on the back of Excalibur, pointing toward the horizon.
I’d lost him, that second day.
Wasn’t he worth more to me than that? Maybe the next time I came up there would be no trace of him left at all.
I went up to the attic and lay down amidst all of his old stuff, staring up at the ceiling. I tried to forgive him. For leaving me. For never telling me the truth. I said, “I forgive you, Dad.” But my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t mean it.
“Why?” I asked, of him, of myself, getting floaters in my eyes as I stared up at the rafters where the bare yellow bulb was hanging. I asked this question several more times, until I started creeping myself out. It was so empty in there.
And it feels creepy waiting for a response that you know isn’t coming.
Since I had nothing else to do, I went down to my room and started going through the boxes from his office, hoping there might be something in them that might help to put everything in focus. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, exactly. I realized as I started leafing through the first box that I had gone through everything before.
I don’t know what happened next. One minute I was reading through some obscure memo, the next I had pushed the box I was rooting through off the stack and was lying on the floor.
That part of my father was dead. A long time ago now. Nothing worth saving. Nothing ever living. After making sure that Carl was outside the room, I screamed and pushed all of the boxes down with a hip check and my good hand. They collapsed with a satisfying crash, folding in on each other. Then I closed the door and went outside.
I didn’t really feel any better after that. I just wandered, at first reluctant to leave my mom’s crescent. Doing a couple circles, then slowly expanding my orbit and circling the whole town, from the IGA to the Giant Tiger, to the LCBO, to Joe’s in the plaza, to the river, to the gas station, to the pharmacy, and, finally, to the little park in the centre of town, where a decommissioned anti-aircraft gun stood, I guess from World War II, painted over with several coats of forest green. When I was a kid my dad used to sit me on it and point out targets: the barbershop, the town of Rouen, a dragon, your mother, the car.
I sat in the pilot’s seat and tried to play the game again. But I’d forgotten that the gun itself didn’t move, because all of the gears had been bolted to the frame. The wheel that was supposed to rotate the gun on the horizontal plane still worked, but they’d removed the gear attached to it, so it just turned without any resistance at all.
Why didn’t he tell me?
Someone should have told me.
It was while sitting in the gun seat, making low shooting sounds under my breath like a total idiot, when I saw Kent again. He came up behind me.
“War’s over, you know. Long time ago.”
I almost jumped out of my seat.
“I know,” I said. Pretending to be cool. “Just making sure.”
He sat down on the rigging.
“I thought you might’ve left town,” I said.
He shrugged. “No.”
“What are you still doing here?”
He didn’t say anything. Instead he put his hands on the wheel and gave it a few turns.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine. Why are you still here?”
“I’m leaving in two days,” I said.
“Where to?”
“Toronto. Back to work.”
“You’re lucky you can still do that with just one arm.”
It hit me suddenly. I sank down in my seat.
“What?” he asked.
“I can’t. I can’t do that. Oh, Jesus. Why didn’t I think of that before?”
“Well, what do you do?”
“I work in a call centre.”
“Why can’t you do that with one arm?”
“It’s not that kind of call centre. Most of it is automated, but I need to press a lot of buttons. Two workstations, four computers, at once. I set up the calls. It’s an awful job. I do ninety calls an hour. I have to. I need both of my hands for that.”
He just looked at me. Vaguely concerned.
“Oh my god,” I said, “what the fuck am I going to do?”
“I think there’s a law or something …”
I laughed. “If you can’t make quota, you’re out. They don’t necessarily fire you, but they don’t schedule you, either. I’m not really an employee. No one is. We’re all contractors.”
“Could you go on disability?”
“Maybe. Who knows.”
I banged my good hand against the barrel of the gun.
“Hey, I’m sorry …”
I stood up. “It’s okay,” I said. “Do you want to get a drink?”