Falling (16 page)

And spring would turn to summer, and the days would pour from one to another, warm as honey.

Nearby, a slate-coloured junco landed on a rotting log, measuring him with its dark eye before it flew to the other end of the log, surveying him from a greater distance, as if
inquiring what he was doing there. Its head and back were sooty, almost blue, but its breast was white. Its beak was the colour of butter. It stayed for a moment at the far end of the log, then flew away.

It would take a while before anyone found him. He’d be nothing more than a corpse.

Damian took the gun from his mouth and shoved it away so it fell into the snow; he didn’t want anything more to do with it.

He stood, picked up the afghan, and shook it, putting it around his shoulders as he’d done before. He retrieved the rifle – making sure the safety was on – and brushed it off, walking back along the path the way he’d come. When he came to the dead hare, he bent over it. He took up the creature by its ears, so it hung loosely from his hand. Later, when he got back to the cabin, he leaned the rifle inside the door, found a rusty shovel in the corner of the mud room, and went back outside. The ground was still hard, and it was difficult to dig a hole for the body. He wound up taking it away from the cabin, since he knew the crows would find it. He covered it with snow and returned to the cabin, taking off his boots on the steps before going inside. He was breathing rapidly, he realized, as he washed his hands at the sink, and to calm himself he sat for a while on the couch.

He closed his eyes and thought of Lisa. How they’d once argued over Trevor. It was so long ago now, and it seemed idiotic to have let the argument go on, twisting into something else that had nothing to do with Trevor, about things that hadn’t mattered.

He made himself get up and go to the stove, putting a little cooking oil in the old cast-iron frying pan and cracking four eggs into it. What mattered, even now, was the look on
her face. He’d made her so angry she’d shouted at him. He scrambled the eggs and made himself some toast, eating straight out of the frying pan by the stove, breaking the toast in two and scooping up the egg with the pieces.

What do you know, Damian? Lisa had said. You’ve never loved anyone. You haven’t, have you?

He put the frying pan in the sink and ran water in it. The water bubbled and hissed as it landed on the hot pan and spatula.

Lisa, he shouted. He banged the frying pan against the sink so the spatula jumped out of the pan and onto the floor. Get the fuck out of my head.

The room was hot and Damian got up from the bed and went to the window, which scraped as he opened it. He didn’t care if it made noise, whether they heard it on the porch. He went into the bathroom and dropped his clothes on the floor, and stepped into the shower. The water washed over his head and chest, and he turned to let it pummel his neck and back. He soaped himself down, rinsed and stepped out onto the mat, reaching for the green towel, which was the one he’d been given, rather than the blue one, which he’d used earlier. The blue one belonged to his uncle, and it was positioned exactly where Roger knew to reach for it. There was a striped one on the hook at the back of the door; this was the one his mother used.

He put his clothes back on and went downstairs, but it was the last thing he wanted to do, so he went slowly. No doubt she was still angry with him. But it was strange that he heard no conversation, not a word between Jasmine and his uncle.

He opened the screened door onto the porch and found her curled up on a chair. She was sound asleep, and her mouth was half-open. Roger was sitting next to her, so still that he could have been asleep too.

Jasmine, said Damian.

She blinked, then sat up and brushed her hands through her hair.

I’ll walk you home, he said. It’s getting late.

Oh.

Are you coming?

It looks like it’s time for me to go, she said, but she wasn’t speaking to Damian, she was speaking to Roger.

She stayed where she was. She looked sleek as a cat, with her hair falling across her face.

Need a hand? Damian asked.

All right. She slipped her feet into her flip-flops, studying them.

I’ll walk you home, he said again, after she got up. I don’t think you’re clear-headed enough to ride your bike.

All right. She put a hand out to the chair to steady herself. Good night, Roger.

Be good, said Roger. It’s the witching hour.

She laughed.

It irritated Damian. It was as if they’d known each other for years. Yet Damian was the one who took her hand, who led her through the house and out the back door.

Jasmine tossed the hair from her face and slowly turned to get her bicycle. Damian didn’t help her, though she probably could have used some help, judging by her unsteadiness. And yet he’d have done whatever she asked. He’d fallen for her, and this, too, made him angry.

INGRID BOUGHT A TICKET
for the
Maid of the Mist
. She’d been on it as a child, and now she saw it exactly as it had been then, when she’d waited in line, together with Roger, with one tall parent on either side. She’d stood very straight, because there were two things she had been told she could improve: her posture and her manners. She was very proud of her black patent leather purse with a gold clasp, a purse that opened and shut with a
click
, and had a blue lining that she was sure was made of silk. All she had in the purse was a handkerchief with lace around the edges, a piece of Dubble Bubble gum that her parents didn’t know about, a comb, and a tube, banded with gold, of Ruby Pleasure lipstick that her mother had thrown away and Ingrid had retrieved. She wore a grey dress, a hand-knitted white sweater, a black hair ribbon, and white gloves, each fastened with a single pearl, and she’d fanned out her white hands to look at the gloves as they waited. She had been deliciously happy because of her new dress, black ribbon, and white gloves, soon to be covered in a poncho, because they were going on a great adventure. But it was not a great adventure for Roger, who had been told to stop frowning.

How infuriating he was, thought Ingrid. Even now, so many years later. When he’d been lost on the street that very afternoon, she’d worried about him. He’d come in looking strained and exhausted, his forehead glistening and strands of grey hair falling about his face. His hands had worked frantically, folding and unfolding his cane. How could she calm him? She’d suggested getting a guide dog, but he didn’t want a guide dog, because he knew what would happen – he’d give it a name like Bounder and start getting fond of it, and then it would just get hit by a car or something. So she’d changed the subject; she’d told him about meeting Jasmine.

That’s the name of a flower, he said. Jasmine.

She has a nose stud, Ingrid said. A little green emerald. She probably has her nipples pierced too, for all I know.

So what you’re saying is you think she’s a slut.

No, I’m not saying that at all. She’s a pretty little thing, Ingrid went on. You can see why –

You can see why someone like Damian would be all over her.

She’s sleeping with him. He’s sleeping with her.

Ingrid, said Roger. Get over it.

I’m going out.

And she’d gone, banging the door behind her.

So here she was, no longer a child, but an adult in line with thirty or forty others, and together they made the descent in the elevator. She imagined that the elevator would get stuck, and then she’d have to spend the night with Jason, who had a Buffalo Bills cap and a whining voice, his mother, with her pink shorts and bulging thighs,
and his uninterested father. There was a man with sallow skin and green clip-on glasses, and his wife, two feet shorter, who wore a peacock-coloured sari patterned lightly with flowers; when Ingrid looked at it she felt as though she’d entered a jungle. An older woman with mauve-tinted hair dug her elbow into Ingrid.

Oh, she was sorry, she was awfully sorry. The woman clasped her hands in front of her and whispered to her friend that she felt claustrophobic, so claustrophobic in places like this.

When the elevator opened and disgorged them, it was as though they were moving down a tunnel to the gates of Hell. It was suffocatingly hot inside the terminal. Ingrid waited to be given her raincoat, which felt like plastic wrap when she put it on, and followed the peacock-coloured sari past the turnstile and up the ramp to the boat. It was cool on the deck, and even from this distance there was a fine spray from the Falls.

Though she’d been on the
Maid of the Mist
on that Saturday outing years before, Ingrid was surprised that the boat managed to move upstream at all. She could feel the river resisting them, as if at any moment the boat might be spun away and driven downstream. Yet the boat kept chugging deliberately toward the Falls, first to the American Falls, with the yellow ponchos making their way down to the lookout and back up, and then to the Horseshoe Falls. How dreadfully predictable it was.

There was so much spray as they approached the Falls that Ingrid had to draw the raincoat close and put up her hood. She felt the vibration of the diesel engines against the thunder of the water. Lisa would have loved it, thought Ingrid. Lisa would have wanted to go far too close – she’d
have wanted to be dangerously close. How like Roger she was, thought Ingrid. No. How like Roger she
had been
.

Ah, this was familiar, wasn’t it? Tunnel of rage, tunnel of sorrow. It was at this point that she would blame Damian, even though it was no one’s fault. It was no one’s fault, but why shouldn’t she blame Damian, who had left the keys for the
ATV
where Lisa would find them? Who had been sleeping as his sister drowned? She wanted to throttle him, yes, she did. What allowed him the right to mess around with a pretty young thing named Jasmine, who had a nose stud, and possibly a belly button stud – a stud for this and a stud for that?

She wasn’t being fair. No, she wasn’t.

She gripped the rail of the boat. How she hated the woman with the mauve-tinted hair who was claustrophobic, and the podgy-looking woman next to her, with the gentle face. She hated Jason, with his Buffalo Bills cap, and Jason’s mother with her grotesque thighs made even more grotesque by the nearly transparent blue raincoat, and Jason’s father, who hated it all as much as she did. She hated the boat and she hated the captain, who was just now turning the boat downstream, away from the Falls that Lisa would have loved.

When the captain turned the boat it was as though someone had let out a breath; something was released. It did absolutely no good to get angry, Ingrid thought, but she was angry. She couldn’t stop it. What would put an end to it? Some miracle would put an end to it. She looked back at the wall of rushing water.

Why did it make her think of the boating accident? A man had taken his neighbours’ children out for a boat ride. They’d struck something and the shear pin had broken.
Without the shear pin, the boat had no power. She knew this as if it had happened to her.

One of the children had gone over the Falls. She imagined the boy’s flight, his fall. His name had been Roger Woodward. She thought of him floating over the Falls like a gull’s feather. She could see him whirling in the air so he was only a pale figure with legs and arms windmilling out from the orange square of his life jacket. She saw him falling. There was a long moment of nothingness, then the plunge into the water, the jerking down into a wild, swirling darkness, the bobbing up to the surface of the river. A boy, coughing, with his mouth full of water.

He had lived. Ingrid’s mother had saved the newspaper story about him, with a photograph in which he was gripping a life preserver that had been thrown to him by a man on the deck of the
Maid of the Mist
.

His name is Roger, Ingrid’s mother had said, as if it were the name of an angel. Roger Woodward. Isn’t that something? Just like our Roger.

The child’s legs were thin as needles. He had lived; it was impossible, but true. Ingrid imagined him looking up at that wall of whiteness from below. Perhaps he was still alive now, so many years later; perhaps he was dead. All his life he must have remembered that moment, Ingrid thought. He must have remembered being saved.

He’d had a sister, Ingrid recalled, as she filed behind the others down the ramp from the
Maid of the Mist
. The terminal was as hot as before, and even when she took off her plastic raincoat and put it in the bin, it didn’t make her feel any cooler. He’d had a sister called Deanne. Roger Woodward’s sister, Deanne, had been thrown out of the boat above the Falls. There hadn’t been a picture of Deanne
in the newspaper article, though; there was only one of Roger. The two children had lived, but the man who’d taken them out in the boat had died. Honeycutt – his name was Jim Honeycutt. The story had been all about Roger, though, because he’d gone over the Falls, while Deanne had been thrown out of the boat above the Falls, close to Table Rock, where a tourist had rescued her.

Ingrid moved into the elevator, and people followed, pressing against her. She hardly noticed. She was thinking about how Honeycutt’s boat had struck a shoal that broke the shear pin, so the propeller didn’t work. By that time the boat must have been rolling forward, carried by the rushing water toward the brink. There must have been time for Honeycutt to realize, as he tossed the remaining life jacket to Deanne, that all three of them would likely die. But it wasn’t a big thing that had gone wrong: it was a small thing. The shear pin had broken.

Ingrid walked back to the house thinking about how Lisa’s fascination with the Falls had begun. Maybe it had all begun with the book. Ingrid had bought
Paddle-to-the-Sea
, for Lisa’s fifth birthday. She had bought it because the same book had been bought for her, years before. There was a bookplate sticker on the fly leaf that read, in large letters, that it was the property of Lisa Felicity MacKenzie. They’d sat on Lisa’s bed looking at the pictures, and Lisa had sucked her thumb. Ingrid told her big girls didn’t do that.