Hellgoing (14 page)

BRENDA'S HOUSE WAS
mainly jungle. Hart's father had built it for her, for the two of them, twenty-five years ago. It was not the house Hart grew up in — Hart's hometown was Hardy. The bungalow in Alice was meant to be an oceanside retreat — a “love shack,” Hart called it, smirking — so the entire front was sunroom, windows from ceiling to floor. Over the years, Brenda stuffed it full of plants, to the point where barely any sun filtered into the main room anymore — the plants made up a dappled, verdant wall and when the sun came level with the windows, as it was now, the living room shone green.

They sat in the green around the coffee table. Brenda had put out Chips Ahoy cookies on a plate and placed a two-litre bottle of ginger ale beside it with two glasses full of ice. Then she went back to the kitchen, where she took a can of Blue Light from the fridge and poured it into a plastic tumbler for herself. She did not offer a Blue to Kim. Things were feeling stage-managed again, like the visit was unfolding according to certain guidelines.

“No caffeine, right, son?”

“Thanks for remembering, Brenda.”

Kim had never met a mother who called her son “son” before. It got downright odd when her other son arrived. She called them both “son” then, and both sons called her Brenda, not Mom.

The two of them, Brenda and Arlo, were diminished versions of Hart. Smaller, paler. Hart minus yoga and running, minus energy and height.

Hart enfolded his brother as he had enfolded those countless women in bars, Arlo's face in Hart's chest. The brother tried to pull away after a moment and Hart said, “No, man.” So they stood like that a little longer while Kim stared into the wall of the foliage. The effect was exactly like stained glass at church, if the glass was various hues of green.

“I love your plants, Brenda,” she said as Arlo and Hart disengaged.

“Thanks, Kim.” Brenda stood up and walked over to a grouping of geraniums. “These are my geraniums,” she said.

My God, thought Kim, she's going to introduce me to her plants.

And that was just what Hart's mother did for the next twenty minutes, as Hart and Arlo murmured to one another at the far end of the couch.

THERE HAD BEEN
no mention of Hart and Kim ditching Ozzieland and staying overnight at Brenda's, even after Kim had forced a long, exhaustive discussion of the cougar. Ozzie hadn't been lying when he said the cougar (“Or cougars,” reflected Brenda) had not yet come into town. But she (the singular cougar was a she, apparently) had been spotted at either end, so the residents of Alice were effectively in prison. The town sat on a road along the ocean; behind them was woods. On either side of them was woods. The minute you hit the woods, you were in cougar territory. Which meant cougar on all sides.

Brenda drank one can after another of Blue Light and Hart kept pouring himself ginger ale as Kim nursed hers. Brenda eventually brought out the entire bag of Chips Ahoy! and handed it to Hart.

“Hart, stop,” Kim muttered at one point, his hand in the bottom of the bag.

“How's Wilf?” Hart had asked about ten cookies in.

Brenda smiled and gestured with her plastic tumbler. “Oh — you know Wilf. Life of Riley down in Ucluelet.”

“I see him sometimes,” whispered Arlo as Kim clenched.

“Do you?” said Hart. “How's the old guy looking?”

“Hale and hearty,” smiled Arlo. “You know Wilf.”

MY GOD YOU PEOPLE, Kim wanted to yell.

“Same hair I bet,” said Hart, grinning. “Like Samson. Never changes.”

“Not our Wilf,” said Brenda. “Ever the hippie.”

The three of them laughed together anemically — their broken, family laughter. She had never heard Hart laugh that way before. Hart was the kind of person waiters in cafés had to ask to settle down. He was a head-thrower-backer.

“Kim and I are off to do yoga for a couple of days,” said Hart, slinging an arm around her and popping the remaining Chips Ahoy! into his mouth.

SHE HATED HIM.
She slept in the Cube. She didn't tell him it was because she was hating him, she said it was the cougar. It was, in fact, partly because of the cougar. But the cougar was a big part of the reason she was hating him.

Brenda had told her the cougar had killed one man, a hiker from the mainland. Dragged him off and his body had never been found. Another man, local fella, she had attacked recently, but did not succeed in killing. The man had a penknife on him, did battle with the cougar, and won — managed to saw at the animal's throat after gouging her eyes. This was impressive, but the unfortunate thing was that the cougar had initially got the jump on the man. Literally, she had jumped on him from behind, from an overhead rock. She had clawed his face off. The man was alive to tell the tale, but would never look the same. You might see him, Brenda told Kim brightly, like they were discussing a mutual friend. Walking around town. Can't miss him, that's for sure. Keep your eye out tomorrow as you're leaving.

IT WAS AN
eight-hour drive to Tofino, Hart announced. She couldn't believe it.

“But it's an island,” she kept repeating.

“It's a big island. It's the biggest island on the entire west coast.”

“It's gotta be the size of a country. Of Australia.”

“It's actually pretty close to Taiwan.”

“Well, this is ridiculous, Hart,” said Kim.

Hart made an effort not to talk for a few minutes. He had that look on his face like he was trying to solve equations.

“Honey?” he said at last. “We have eight hours to hash this out. Then it's two days of yoga and camping and good food and I will not touch sugar and I guarantee you it's going to be gorgeous and beautiful and healing. Then — and only then — do we see Wilf. So let's hash this out.”

A week ago she would've thought how much she loved being with a man who uttered words like
gorgeous
and
beautiful
and
healing
with total conviction, with no trace of masculine shame. Because beauty and healing were full-on good, in Hart's cosmology — not ironic, not ridiculous — and should be spoken of with reverence and sincerity. The men in Kim's family were nothing like Hart. To her knowledge, her brothers and father and uncles had never deemed any aspect of their world — not even a sunset, or a woman — gorgeous. Or if they had, they'd rolled their eyes and say it with a drawn-out lisp. After she moved to the west coast in her twenties, men like Hart were scandalous and exotic to Kim — their unembarrassed exuberance. The subtle touches of vanity and primping — a bracelet here, an overgroomed sideburn there, an undone button exposing a toned, deliberate hint of chest. The deep, sexy joy of it. The fearlessness.

But the word she could no longer use was
ease
. Not about Hart. It was a studied ease. Which was not, in fact, ease.

And ease was so much what she wanted; what she thought she loved.

“WHAT'S MOST UNFAIR,”
said Kim, about two hours in, “is I can't even be angry. Being angry makes me a bad person.”

“Nothing makes you a bad person,” Hart said. “You have every right to feel your feelings.”

Kim gulped back a welling clump of rage. Her father and brothers were clamouring in her head — clamouring for Hart's effete, oblivious, hippie-dippy blood.
Feel my feelings? Did you just say that?

“No I don't,” said Kim. “Because you've suffered. You've suffered things I can't even imagine.”

“And I've dealt with it. I've faced my demons.”

Did you seriously just say —

But why do
I
is the question.

Why do I have to face them too?

“Hart,” said Kim. “As far as I'm concerned, you have every right not to get over what happened to you. Not to speak to him again.”

“But that would be wrong,” said Hart. “That wouldn't be the right thing to do.”

“It's not —”

“Just one second, honey,” said Hart. His lips whitened, mashed together in concentration as he negotiated the idiotic car around the latest in what felt to Kim like an endless series of terrifying turns. The road rose and fell and twisted through miles of hilly, outsized forest, and whenever Kim dared to look out her window there was more often than not just a sheer drop into a maw of clustered spruce beneath her.

The road did not even out for a long time. Hart concentrated and Kim forgot what she wanted to say.

After another hour of driving, she remembered.

“It's not a question of right or wrong,” she said. “It's a question of what's best for you.”

Hart drove in silence with his mouth moving. He was trying to remember where they left off.

“What I mean by
right
,” he said at last, “is the same as what you mean by
best
. What's best for me and what's right for me is to not lose touch with my family.”

“Is he even a member of your family anymore? I mean after what he's done, does he even have a right to call himself —”

“It's weird how we keep talking about rights,” interrupted Hart. “Like it's a legal matter.”

Kim could not stop herself from pouncing on this. “Well —
yeah
— that's a whole other —”

“Honey, no,” said Hart.

She sat back. He had told her, very firmly, on the ferry that police had never been an option. That he had chosen “a different path.”

“It's not an issue of our
rights
,” said Hart, actually laughing a little at the word. “I have every
right
to hate him; he has no
right
to be in my life anymore — to be a part of the family. I said that kind of stuff to myself for years. It didn't resolve anything. It didn't help me to be okay.”

It didn't help me to be okay
— Kim was starting to recognize Hart's therapy-language. She didn't know if he was trotting it out more than usual, or if he'd always used it and she just hadn't noticed — had thought of it as his own unique vernacular.

They were driving along the ocean now. It was blinding and as big as the sky.

“Everything is too big on this coast,” said Kim. “Too much.”

THEN THEY JUST
did yoga for two straight days.

Everything is stupid here, thought Kim in Downward Dog. She allowed herself to think whatever she wanted as she moved through the postures, didn't censor the worst of herself. Bunch of idiots, she thought in Reverse Warrior, gazing into the mirror at the roomful of knotted bodies of which she was one. Waste of time, she thought in Dancer's Pose. Her family would be appalled to know what she was doing this weekend.

But that was the kind of thing Kim did, after all, her family would have joked to one another — had been joking to themselves for years. Pay good money to stand around on one foot and tell herself she's better off for the experience, healed by all the pointless exertion and suffering. By the live drummer, shirtless and ecstatic in the corner. By the stink of contorted men on every side.

Because Kim was the kind of person who moved to the west coast to go to art school in the most expensive city in the country.

Because Kim was the kind of person who took a job in a copy shop so she could concentrate on music as the years passed and she grew less young. Who lived with a depressed person for eleven years and somehow convinced herself his passivity meant he couldn't live without her. Who deliberately straddled the poverty line, who chose basement apartments of her own free will. Who dated people like herself — people with too many guitars and not enough square footage. As the charm of it trickled away.

And what did she spend her meagre earnings on? What sort of recreations? With what manner of man?

Kim stared at herself in the mirror, balanced in Eagle Pose, a twisted, one-legged malformation.

ON THE SECOND
day, something shifted. She felt the clump of rage she'd swallowed in the car nudge its way upward from her stomach, lodge centre-chest and pop like a blister. She sank into Child's Pose and placed her forehead against the mat, losing track of her breathing. The instructor knelt beside her and placed a hand against her sacrum.

“This happens sometimes,” he told her, warmth radiating from his palm. “Everyone else,” he called to the room, “please take a vinyasa.”

A person couldn't nurse a rage-clump through two days of non-stop yoga, she later understood. The body would not have it. At some point in all the stretching and breathing and releasing the ultimate release had to be undergone.

She felt so much better, felt she had reached a new level; worked through her inbred negativity and come out the other end to take honest stock of the glory that surrounded her. She was lucky; she was blessed. She played music for a living. She was in one of the most beautiful places on earth, eating great food, exercising her body, accompanied by a man unlike any she had ever met — a man who wanted only happiness, who courted it the way other men she'd dated courted the opposite: reflexive pessimism and bogus outrage and — most tedious of all — irony. Hart was the most un-ironic person in the world. He had come through the kind of life that a guy like the Tom Waits imitator from Point Grey, for example, could never comprehend. Hart had experienced enough honest-to-goodness suffering in his life — he didn't indulge the affected kind. He chose light over dark, wellness over addiction, exuberance over cool — he told her that he loved her on the hour.

EVEN AFTER THE
eight hours of talking in the car, going over and over everything, Hart never told her what Wilf had done exactly. He wanted to spare her, he said, the “gory details.”

“But if I'm going to meet this man,” she said. “If you are expecting me to sit across a table from him, to shake his hand.”