Falling (2 page)

The red-haired paramedic placed the mask over Lisa’s mouth and nose as he asked the question, and the man, relieved of doing
CPR
, glanced at his watch and told them it had been about fifteen minutes since he’d made the phone call.

Swiftly, they transferred Lisa to the spinal board. They scarcely seemed to shift her, so efficient were their movements. It was almost as if they rolled her onto it, bracing her as they did so, immobilizing her head with a C-collar and strapping her body in place. They cut her bathing suit straps neatly and peeled back the material, wiping her chest dry before placing electrode pads on her skin and hooking her up to the heart monitor on the portable defibrillator.

One of the paramedics took the mask off Lisa’s face.

All clear, he said, but Damian was still holding his sister’s arm.

Stay back from her – okay? All clear. Shock delivered.

Lisa’s body jumped violently when the paramedic shocked her. He held up his hand so none of them would touch her as he checked the heart monitor.

He shocked her twice more, then stopped. He picked up the bright red defibrillator that resembled a child’s toy but left the electrode pads on Lisa’s chest. The skin of her chest was white, in contrast to her tanned arms, and her breasts were exposed, yet chaste in their girlishness.

What are you doing? asked Damian.

Right now – giving her oxygen. And epinephrine –

But what about her heart?

We’re still monitoring her heart. The paramedic squeezed the oxygen bag attached to the tube he’d inserted into Lisa’s mouth. He spoke rapidly to his partner. And we’ll keep up
CPR
, he assured Damian.

The paramedics lifted the board and began carrying Lisa across the beach, instructing the man to do
CPR
as they went. He pumped Lisa’s chest as he walked alongside; it was awkward, but he did his best. Damian tucked in her hand so it wouldn’t hang over the edge of the board.

The dog no longer barked, but ran close beside them. They made a curious procession, winding over the rocks at the end of the beach and up the path, fringed with soft grasses, blond and dry at the end of summer, and clusters of mauve asters and goldenrod. The man was breathing hard; at times the path was simply too steep or too narrow for him to continue
CPR
. At the barbed-wire fence they halted, while the dog, tail wagging, nosed through the asters and found a stick.

It took a few moments to get the board, with Lisa on it, over the twisted fence, which had been pulled down so people could step over it. After the board was passed over the fence, the red-haired paramedic took over from the man and continued
CPR
. The dog did not come, but as they went across the patch of gravel at the side of the wharf road, the man whistled, and the dog came leaping over the fence, carrying the stick in its mouth. Damian, behind the others, was shivering. He had put on a T-shirt from which the sleeves had been ripped. His lips were blue, but he had no idea he was cold.

They put Lisa into the ambulance and the red-haired paramedic kept doing
CPR
. Damian climbed inside and crouched, shivering. He watched the paramedic dully. Despite everything that was being done for Lisa, something was missing. There would have been more urgency if –

But he couldn’t face thinking it.

At the back of the ambulance, the other paramedic turned to the man. He can’t come with us.

Let him, said the man.

The paramedic shook his head as he shut the ambulance doors.

And make sure he gets a blanket, said the man. It’s the least you can do.

The man watched them go, then turned and went back along the path, stepping over the barbed wire. The dog had gone ahead, but the man picked his way carefully down the steep path, sending a scattering of pebbles to the rocks below. The ocean was as calm as it had been earlier, and the sky was the same wide-open blue, and this was astonishing to him. There were tears in his eyes and he had some difficulty getting over the rocks and down to the beach. He slipped several times, despite his caution. Then, once he was on the sand again, he saw the footprints they’d made on the way to the ambulance. He stood helplessly, crying. He wiped his cheeks roughly with his hands and kept going directly to the place where it had happened. There was the four-wheeler and its trailer, with the kayaks tossed this way and that. He’d get these things off the beach, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it just then.

Yet he knew which cottage had been rented; he knew where he would take the four-wheeler, trailer, and kayaks. It was one of the smaller cottages, the one with the roof that needed to be reshingled, and it was rented each summer to a woman from Halifax. A MacKenzie, he thought. Yes, that was right. And these two, the boy and the girl, must be her children. He felt his throat constrict. She wouldn’t know yet about her daughter.

The thought came to him that if he’d just looked out the window sooner, if he’d got up for another cup of coffee – but of course he hadn’t. He walked to the edge of the water, thinking of the girl’s suffering, and how no one had known of it.

At last he turned and went up to his house, where there was no one to greet him. He brushed his hand across the thinning hair on the top of his head. Every summer for as long as he could remember he’d come from Halifax to spend a few weeks at Cribbon’s, in a house that reminded him of the place, not far from here, where he’d spent summers as a child. It was curious that he hadn’t known the boy or the girl, but he had always kept to himself, just as they must have kept to themselves.

Now he would have to live with the fact that he had not been able to help. He had seen several people die during his life, but never one as young as this. This thought depleted him, and he went up the path and then the steps of his house slowly, stopping at the top. The dog was with him, eager to get past and go inside, and in a moment he was by the door, his tail batting against it. But the man didn’t go inside. He stood on the deck, looking out at the deceptively tranquil water. He waited for a moment, as if to get his bearings.

Cecily, he said, and his voice broke. He sat down heavily on a plastic deck chair, putting his hands firmly on the armrests and shutting his eyes.

He continued to sit where he was, his eyes closed.

The dog whimpered, and the man opened his eyes. He knew that it was going to be hard on the boy, a terrible thing that he would take into himself. It would do things to him. But there was no changing it. It was like a stone falling in
water. A stone dropping with a little sound –
plink
– and a ring around the place where it had vanished, and another, and another.

He supposed he might have been more of a help to the boy. He knew he had the capacity to do such things, to offer a word when people were in trouble, and that this time he hadn’t managed it. He’d been a judge for more than twenty-five years. He’d gained a tolerance and kindness that went beyond professional tact. It had taken him longer to come to conclusions in the last decade than it had in the beginning, but he thought that these latter decisions had been a cut above the rest of his work. He’d been invited to sit on the Supreme Court, but Cecily had been sick then, and he’d declined the offer and retired.

Now he recalled that he hadn’t asked the boy his name, because it hadn’t been relevant. But he’d been so young, and so had the girl.

The dog whimpered again.

All right, Max, said the man finally, rising out of the chair. All right. He gave in and opened the door.

Through the windows of the ambulance, everything was as clear to Damian as if he were looking through binoculars, so close that it was unreal, but later he would not remember it quite this way.

It was a perfect late-summer morning, with sunlight falling generously across the slopes of Sugarloaf. It lay across a cornfield, where the stalks of corn were tall and leafy, with silky tassels, and it lay across the meadows below. It flecked the water of a small pond. It shone on the marmalade-coloured fur of a cat lying in the sun on the deck behind a
house. The hour was not yet noon, but already the air shimmered with heat.

On the harbour road, the ambulance was nearing the hospital. It appeared and disappeared, threading through stands of trees, mostly spruce and birch, on either side of the road, a tiny, white shape on the sinuous road that wound in and out along the water and then away from it. Occasionally the ambulance gleamed in the sunlight as it rounded a curve, going past a farm on one side, then a farm on the other, where a cattle barn was being raised. At a new house past the farm, a woman finished putting out her second load of laundry and gave the line a last, quick jerk to send it out farther.

Below the road, the water of the harbour was serenely blue. A bald eagle could be seen making a slow circle through the air above an island off William’s Point. A man cutting the grass at the small golf course at the end of the point stopped his tractor mower and got off to light a cigarette. He dragged deeply on it, scanning the water and the broad shoulder of Sugarloaf. Someone was paddling a green canoe beyond the islands just below him. Across the water to the west, the man could see a flash of white on the road near Lanark, but he didn’t know it was an ambulance. He threw the cigarette down into the grass and stepped on the butt.

After the ambulance passed the abattoir and the north end of the Landing, a trail that traced the edge of the harbour wetlands, it turned into the hospital. The angelus was ringing at the convent, a large brick building that lay on the slope above the hospital, just as the ambulance drew up at Emergency. The paramedics jumped out and quickly took the body on the spinal board inside. Damian followed.
Though it was hot, he still had the blanket around his shoulders like a cloak.

It was over, Damian thought. How quickly life went out of someone. This was his first time seeing it, and he knew, without absorbing any of it fully, that he would never be able to forget it. He would walk through these doors and something would come crashing down. The years would come to him; he could see them as if they were shapes in the distance, but this single event would mark the rest of his life. He was alive, and Lisa was not.

He hesitated for a moment. It was dark beyond the doors, but once he got inside his eyes would adjust to the light. This went through his mind as he paused, though he paused for no more than a second or two. One of the paramedics glanced back at him, and he knew he had to follow. He took one step, then another, but as he moved it seemed to him that he moved through one year, another, a third. He went across the threshold and felt the unbearable weight come down on him.

Then the glass doors closed behind him, and he was lost to view.

THEY COULD HEAR THE ROAR
of Niagara Falls when they got out of the car.

Damian stretched, but Ingrid set off immediately down the wooden stairway, lured by the thundering sound that came up through the leaves of the darkly crowded maples. He caught up with his mother at the bottom of the steps in a parking lot set with rows of jewel-bright cars. Beyond was a green swath of lawn and clicking sprinklers near the old power plant, and tour buses making a slow funereal procession along the road by the river. A great plume of mist lifted into the air as powerfully as a raised fist, forming and dissolving into a shifting, changing shape that softened and folded into air above.

You shouldn’t be seeing it like this, murmured Ingrid.

Damian glanced at her: white hair pulled back from her face, straight nose, tanned skin. Her chin was lifted up slightly, as if she were trying to catch the scent of something.

How should I be seeing it? he asked.

I should have brought you here years ago – you and Lisa.

It had been a long drive, and now the heat made him dizzy. He closed his eyes and stood swaying as small, dancing shapes sparkled behind his eyelids. He wasn’t keeping up with her train of thought.

Are you all right? she said.

I’m okay.

He was thinking of how his father had taken him, together with his sister, to see the waterfall at James River when they were young. It had been nothing like this; it had been merely a modest rush of water over some rocks. The path to the waterfall had been thick with spruce, but there were places where the trees weren’t so dense and dark. They seemed to be filled with light, and his father called them hardwoods. He had scooped up Lisa and carried her over a puddle and set her down on her feet again, and it was then – just then – that a ruffed grouse made such a loud drumming that Damian, startled, fell back against a birch. Finally they had come to a very steep bank where someone had rigged ropes to guide people to the bottom.

It’s fine, his father had said. We’ll just go slowly and hold on to the ropes.

But his father wasn’t with them now, Damian thought, as he walked across the parking lot with his mother. They were two sleepwalkers, walking a little apart, as if leaving space between them for another person. They’d arrived at Niagara Falls in the middle of the afternoon, but he had the feeling of having woken up in another country. A country of clamour. The exhaust from the buses was blue, and there were tinny voices on intercoms hawking tickets. A helicopter flew over once, twice, and at intervals a great balloon, striped with gold and scarlet, rose straight up, slowly, and descended just as slowly, settling on the American side of
the Falls. Damian crossed the road, lagging behind his mother, and a leather-clad man on a motorcycle swerved to miss him. The man turned to raise a gloved hand, middle finger extended.

Now get together, said a man with a camera, facing a little group posing in front of a flowerbed, where exotic blooms of amaryllis stood, darkly crimson, behind them. The man pushed his cap back on his head and waited for people to move out of the way.

All righty, let’s get this show on the road. No, get in closer, Dwayne. Closer. Okay, say
cheese
.

Ingrid said she’d meet Damian in half an hour in the same spot. Was he listening? She was going to buy a few bottles of water. Her white hair was beaded with diamond-fine droplets as the mist fell over it. He nodded, wanting to tell her about the droplets, but she’d already turned to leave, and he squeezed into a place at the railing beside a heavy-set woman. The Niagara River ran swiftly past, just beneath where he stood, and thinned to green transparency before falling over the ledge of stone. It began with water, thought Damian. Things began and ended with water.