Falling (28 page)

I want to show you these.

He moved the soup bowl to the counter and spread out Damian’s drawings in front of her.

Damian did them?

Yes. I, well – I got them out of the garbage. He’d thrown them away.

That’s her, exactly. It’s Jasmine.

You don’t have enough room there, said Raymond. Try putting them on the floor.

Ingrid got down on her knees to examine them.

It’s hard to say what it is about them, said Raymond. It’s not just that the drawings are good – they’re very good.

She came to the last drawing and then went through them again.

It’s rare, said Raymond. That kind of gift.

He
is
very good. I know.

She looked across at Damian. He’d always go to my husband, Greg, she said. He’d go to him when Greg was angry, and hold him around the knees, because, you know, Greg and I quarrelled a lot. Once Damian gave him a picture, with a yellow house and popcorn trees and a purple sky, and on the back he’d written, I love you, Daddy, in purple crayon. I remember looking at Greg then, and his eyes were so soft. I know he nearly stayed with me because of the kids. It wouldn’t have worked, but he nearly stayed.

Raymond helped her gather up the drawings.

I’ve lost a husband, a daughter, she said. I nearly lost Damian. That’s almost my entire family. She sat back on her heels. You have family; you know what I mean.

My son’s in a group home – he can’t live on his own. And my wife died of cancer some time ago.

Oh, I’m sorry.

Would you like these drawings?

Yes. I would, thank you. She smoothed out the drawings. I used to draw, way back when, she told him. I used to draw and paint. Nothing like this, of course, but it would take me into another world.

I used to play the saxophone.

Did you?

It was a long time ago. I used to think I could be really good at it. But whenever I listened to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane – early Coltrane, especially – I knew I would always be
trying
to be a musician. They were great. They made it seem as though they weren’t trying.

You could go back to it, she said.

He looked wistful.

You could go back to making something, she said. That’s the thing, isn’t it? You have a choice about it. Oh, goodness, I’m talking too much tonight.

It’s all right. I don’t often talk like this.

She rose, letting go of the drawings. Look, she whispered. He’s waking up.

Raymond busied himself with the drawings, rolling them up. He put the elastic around them, left them on the table, and went out, because the two of them needed to be alone. Once he was outside he realized he’d forgotten to take his warm jacket, and that he didn’t really want to go to the beach with Max. He’d been out already, but he
couldn’t stay in the house. He walked down the beach to the rocks, pulled up the hood of his fleece sweatshirt, and lay down, even though it was cold, and colder still when he lay on the rocks. Max nosed around him, licked the side of his face once, and then slipped into the darkness. There was only the sound of the water lashing stone.

The aurora borealis had completely vanished from the sky. He could see the Big Dipper clearly; all the stars seemed to have grown sharper in the darkness. Just hours before, there had been mysteries hidden by the coloured, shifting veil of lights, but now it had all changed.

INGRID SET DOWN THE COOLER
and blanket at the top of the bluff. Down on the beach, Damian was standing where the water laced his feet with white. The ocean gradually deepened to dark blue beyond a string of large, mottled rocks, and it was here that a straggling line of four cormorants nearly touched the surface with their wings as they flew along.

Damian waded into the water up to his thighs.

God – it’s
freezing!

He flung himself forward into the water, swimming parallel to the shore, and Ingrid lost sight of him behind a cluster of rocks.

Don’t be silly, she told herself.

He was nowhere to be seen, even when she went quickly down the rough, sloping track to the beach. She was gripped by panic.

Damian.
Damian
.

There was no answer. Then she saw him swimming back, his arms moving powerfully through the water.

This was what it was like, she thought. Always the fear. But here he was, trying not to lose his balance on the slippery
stones as he worked his way back through the shallows. He teetered, caught himself.

What?

Ingrid shook her head. He retrieved his towel and they walked along the stony beach and up to the bluff. She unfolded the blanket and spread it out.

I spoke to Roger this morning on the phone, and I also called your father. They both want you to call them – they have some things to say to you. She smoothed out a corner of the blanket. Have you talked to Jasmine?

No.

He towelled himself dry. He bundled up his jeans and sweatshirt, and went to change farther up the bluff.

You can’t leave it like that, Ingrid persisted, when he returned. Jasmine has to know you’re all right. She was so torn up –

I can’t talk about it.

But, Damian, you have to tell her. She thinks you may be dead – we all did. It’s terrible not to know.

Let me do things my own way.

He twisted the wet towel.

She waited for him to speak, but he didn’t, and she opened the cooler. She closed it, shaking her head. Then she opened it again and busied herself with its contents.

There, grapes. And cheese. What else did I put in here?

What happened with Elvis – Damian began. All I can say is that when I finally found him, I could have strangled him. And then Jasmine and Roger. I went a little crazy. But seeing them like that –

Like what?

I saw Jasmine with Uncle Roger. They were in the
kitchen and he was holding her. She kissed him. I guess I thought – I don’t know. I still don’t know.

Damian, Roger would never – she’s just a girl.

Ingrid looked at him and then at the package of blue cheese in her hand. She stared at it as if it were a rock from Mars.

Maybe she was upset about something, she said. Maybe he was comforting her. You’re his nephew, Damian. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. Anyway, he’s always been a one-woman man, and that woman went out of his life long ago.

Damian chewed thoughtfully on a piece of nut bread in his left hand. He had a slice of cheese in his right. He took a bite of bread and then a bite of cheese, and Ingrid watched, amused, as he shifted from one hand to the other.

I was mad at all of them, he said. And I thought Elvis had broken the urn on purpose. Those ashes all over the sidewalk – I don’t know what happened to me.

Elvis wasn’t doing it to be malicious. He’s not capable of that. For days after you disappeared, he wouldn’t talk to us. He wouldn’t even play his guitar and he loves that guitar. I can see why you’d be angry with him, but Damian, you shouldn’t blame him.

He lay back on the grass.

There’s some cranberry juice, she said. And glasses – let me find the glasses.

I guess I was a shit with him.

Ingrid drew the glasses out of the cooler, taking two of them out of a plastic sleeve. Everyone’s a shit at some point or other, she said pragmatically.

He laughed.

What? She stopped pouring juice.

You never say the word
shit
. It’s like fuck. You never say the word
fuck
.

Fuck, she said experimentally.

You have to just say it, the way you say apple. Say apple.

Apple.

Now say fuck.

Fuck. She burst out laughing.

No, you just can’t do it.

Ingrid gave him a glass of juice and poured another for herself.

But Jasmine’s another story, he said. I can’t see that she’d want anything to do with me.

She came back to see me after they said you’d gone missing, said Ingrid. It was a comfort to have her there.

You must have talked about me.

We did, but we talked about a lot of things. You’d like to know what we said about you, though, wouldn’t you?

He ran a hand through his damp hair. No.

I’d say Jasmine is angry and confused, she said. And she has a right to be.

The light seemed to catch on everything around them. It was tangled in the dead petals still on the wild rose bushes, in the lacy leaves of the chervil, in the asters, in the flat pinwheel tops of the Queen Anne’s lace, in the plumes of goldenrod, and in the grass, which was dry and golden. And there, again, was the cool onshore breeze, riffling the surface of the water below and touching the grass on top of the bluff so it swayed.

She needs to hear from you, said Ingrid.

Ducks, raggedly forming a V-shape, flew southward. The swallows had already gone. There was a kind of
urgency in the air, but the sun, warm on Ingrid’s skin, lulled her. She looked down at Damian, lying beside her on the blanket with one arm shielding his eyes, and the other arm extended, fingers holding the glass of cranberry juice, ruby bright, on the uneven ground. His hair, not yet dry, was exactly the same colour as the grass.

Raymond lowered the screen out of its frame carefully and propped it against the side of the house. There was work to be done and he hadn’t been attending to it. Ingrid and Damian had gone off for a picnic that morning, and as soon as they’d driven away, he wished he’d gone with them. They’d asked him, but he thought he’d be in the way. They would be back in the afternoon, and the following day they’d leave for good; Raymond knew it was bound to take something out of him, even though Damian had only been with him a few days.

The only solution was to work. When he worked, he got into a quiet rhythm that made him content. He’d done it a lot when he was younger. Manual work meant that he could turn things over in his mind, but not too rigorously. He’d done a fair bit of cabinetry work back then, and it had given him satisfaction to see the gleaming walnut surface of a captain’s table after he’d varnished it, lovingly.

He’d get the screens down and then do the storm windows. As he went around the house, he saw places that needed caulking, but he hadn’t done it. Next season, early, he’d get new windows. But one of the screens didn’t want to budge. He’d undone the hooks and wing nuts, and now he gave it a bang with the palm of his hand, hard, on the right side, until it loosened so he could pull the screen out and set
it down. He should have finished this business of the storm windows, but he’d put it off.

It was helplessness, he thought. He took out the next screen. He hadn’t been able to do anything. It had happened with Peter first, and then with Cecily. He hadn’t been able to protect them, and that was his job, wasn’t it? It was his job. He took the screens over to the shed where he stacked them, tidily, against the wall, beside the old lawn mower. Whether he could look after Peter by himself, he didn’t know. The very idea made him feel uneasy, because he was not a valiant man. He thought of how difficult it had been after Cecily died; Peter had been in the group home a long time by then, but Raymond had been so lonely he almost brought him back home.

He retrieved the screens on the opposite side of the house, and when he returned to the shed, he stopped. The shed door had swung open to show its dim interior, its hoes and rakes. He was afraid of dying in a way that Cecily had never been. She’d gone into it gracefully, but he didn’t expect he’d do the same. He wished that they could tell him, that Cecily could tell him what to do. How should he prepare himself?

Max came tearing out of the wild roses, looped around once, and crashed back into the bushes. He was chasing a soft brown hare. Raymond saw the alert tips of its ears, its light, bounding movements, the way the tail was dark above and white below. He took the last of the screens inside and shut the door of the shed. He’d do the caulking in the afternoon, and the next morning he’d put the storms up, but right now he wanted a good bowl of soup and a piece of toast.

It was when he was heating up the soup that he thought of Ingrid. He thought of her face when she’d arrived, and
he stirred the soup, thinking of what she’d said. How had she put it? That large moment, she’d said. He remembered holding Peter for the first time, how he’d been overcome with love as he gazed at the miniature fingers and toes. The skin, soft as the lining of a hare’s furred ear. Oh, he was getting maudlin, he thought, getting out a dish for himself and ladling the soup into it.

It had been a large moment, so large that he hadn’t been able to quite grasp it at the time. It was a moment lit with the radiance of first things. But how strange it was, he thought, with the soup bowl in one hand and a slice of toasted twelve-grain bread, dripping with butter and honey, in the other, that it was similar to the moment when Cecily had died.

He hooked his foot into the chair leg and pulled it out from the table. Sitting down, he bowed his head over the soup. He thought of Peter’s starfish hands, and the strength of that infant grip around his own finger. He’d loved him from the time the nurse had handed him the newly cleaned, pink-faced infant, wrapped in warm cloth. She’d shown him how to hold a newborn and smiled at him. He’d been the one to give Peter to Cecily, as if it had been his gift to her, rather than hers to him. And he’d sat beside them as Cecily had held Peter for the first time, marvelling. Everything had been new to them. It had changed them, so they were no longer two. There was a third, powerful thing between them, and it was not just this child, with the imprint of the forceps still on the side of his face. It was more than that. Cecily was crooning to Peter, touching his newborn face. She wasn’t aware of it yet, but Raymond could see it plainly. It made her more of who she was.

Ingrid and Damian walked up the track, which gradually ascended through spruce, bayberry, and wild rose bushes, up to a headland. Signs were posted at the edge of the cliffs, warning about the danger of going too close to the edge. The two of them kept close to the edge anyway, because they could get a better view of Cape George on one side and Cape Breton on the other, with the smooth blue ocean between. Several uprooted spruce trees, tilting in different directions, were suspended halfway down the cliffs. All along the sand below were fallen rocks, like pieces of a giant’s vertebrae; the land was eroding badly and would keep eroding, because of fierce winter storms that pared away the coast each year.