That Savage Water (15 page)

The cell phone vibrated on the front seat. Flipping it open, he stepped out and undid his fly, turning toward the forest.

Hi – she said – Are you there?

Yeah. Just now.

What's it look like?

Hasn't moved.

So it's the same.

Nearly. Roof's fallen in a bit.

What's that noise?

I'm taking a piss.

Jesus…

Long drive, hon.

Her receiver made a noise as it scuffed against her chin and then he heard a soft cuss word like her voice was far from the mouthpiece. He shouldered the phone and did up his fly.

…I just stubbed my toe on the bed – she said.

Sit down then. Stop pacing.

So tonight? Will you?

The morning's better. In the light.

You promised, though.

I know…I know I did.

Closing the phone, he was alone again in the quiet. Through breaks in the cloud he caught brief glimpses of stars. The clearing looked brighter; his eyes had better adjusted. Dim bursts of light flashed through the branches as the beam from the Knife Island lighthouse whipped around from the far side of the bay. As a boy he used to lie in bed in the loft, the plaid curtain pinned back from the window, counting the flashes before falling asleep. The sound of the evening news muffled upward from the radio where a amp glowed beside the easy chair his father reclined in. If he snuck out of bed and picked silently across the floor, he could peer over the wooden railing at the mass of his father's hair, thick as bear fur, spiking over the headrest. Cans of meat stew still yawned open on the counter from dinner.
Get to bed
, his father scolded without turning. How can you tell, Dad?
I just can
. Maybe it was a raccoon.
You're a raccoon. Now get to bed.

From where he stood in the clearing, he could see up to the tiny window and the plaid curtain he'd tacked back on the nail. So much had happened, he thought. Some time ago. Ages ago. The same cabin, the same log walls. His own childhood seemed so remotely impossible.

After the kindling caught fire, he brought a heavier log to lay on top the pile. He assembled the tent to one side of the fire and then crawled inside to lay out the sleeping bag. From inside, the fire was a soft, constant glow through the nylon. He soaked up the pleasure of the tent, its paper-thin membrane that could trick you into believing that whatever lurked outside it couldn't get you. His own daughter Alexis had loved camping for the same reason. It was the idea of protection, she confessed, more than anything.

Webs snagged his hair as he stepped onto the sagging porch and felt above the lintel for the key. He hadn't needed to lock it since there was nothing inside worth stealing. Vandals and thieves weren't even a minor threat up here. People were just accustomed to locking up their things. It made them feel safer having the key to something – worthless or important, it didn't matter. The lock resisted in his hand. He forced the key inside and had to use all his might to twist through its rust for it to open. When it finally gave with a
thwack
, he hesitated. What if everything were the same?

He felt like a burglar when the door creaked ajar and a ripple of light from the fire outside fell onto two dinner plates still vertical in the drying rack. The kettle on the stove was a frozen grey hen. Cutlery was scattered like rusted tools on the peeling laminate. Covered with dust, a cracked bar of soap still lay in its dish. As he stepped inside, the musk of the place pulled into his nostrils: Mold, soot, wet carpet with its watersnake smell, damp paper, sulfur, some tinge of metal like the aftertaste of eating snow. Breathing it all in, his eyes closed involuntarily. Suddenly he was a boy and his father stood at the stove boiling water, his broad shoulders caped in the red lumberjack's coat that always hung behind the door. His dark terrifying beard, his thick hair pushed up at the back where the pillow had pressed.
You helping me make the coffee? Come here then. Measure carefully
. Can I have some too?
When it's ready, if you like
. The morning heat buzzed off the grasses outside, the whole clearing a hot August meadow. The sound of his father's boots on the floor, the steam from his first cup of coffee held cautiously in his hands.

As his father had been with him, he'd been as severe with Alexis. Daughters were gorgeous yet unpredictable as pastures. She'd spent the summers with him at the cabin as a girl trapping bullfrogs along the shore in crude rock paddocks while he chopped and stacked firewood. Her hair would turn bleached and matted with the sun, freckles spraying bright constellations across her nose. When the autumn arrived and the nights turned colder she'd never wanted to leave. But while in the hospital, she'd refused to even look at him. He stood beside her outside in the snow as the smoke from her cigarette bathed up over the bandages on her wrists, the frozen turquoise of her hospital gown, the plastic I.V. tubing that held her upright like the strings of a marionette, the fiery red of her dreadlocks.
You can't stop me, Dad. Not if you tried. I'm in charge of what happens to me. When will you get that? You haven't realized I'm not your daughter anymore
. Even his memories of her seemed to be turning colder.

The roof buckled critically over the small table his father had used as a desk. From the clearing he hadn't been able to tell, but from inside the whole back corner looked like a kicked-in cardboard box. Magazines were puffy with moisture. Rodents had shredded the newspapers. Cedar and pine needles blanketed most surfaces.
How can something endure such loneliness?
He wondered where he'd been, what tasks he'd been absorbed in elsewhere while the roof silently, gradually, caved in.

The sky through the roof beams brightened the room. From the opening a raccoon spied at him. Startled by the door, it perched guiltily out of reach. Behind him, the fire outside was centered in the doorway, a perfectly contained rectangle of light.

Still hanging on the nails that punctured the log siding, his father's hunting caps hung, limp and greasy. The old man once asked him to burn a stack of papers in the fireplace, so he'd gone and lifted the entire pile off the table. He squatted and fed them one by one into the fire: Old issues of
Canadian Geographic
, phone books, pharmacy prescription bags, grocery and hardware receipts, a few pages his father had scribbled on. He watched them curl into ashy feathers on top of the glowing logs.
Wait now…Stop. Did you take those pages too?
No.
The ones I was writing on?
Panic. No. Then the chair shoving backwards as his father stood up and the sound of his boots on the floor and the weight of his presence beside him as he stared silently for some time into the fireplace. I'll write them for you again, Dad.
No
, he paused.
A loss like that you don't make up for with something else...

Outside, the fire popped. A rash of embers exploded into the air. The raccoon shook its coat in a huff of fur, stared back one last time and then disappeared onto the roof. Its paws made a sound on the tin that reminded him of being underwater in a river – pebbles tumbling and clacking against themselves, wearing off their edges.

His pocket vibrated again.

It's me – she said.

I know.

Do you think you could do it tonight? I mean, would you?

Just one night, hon. The tent's set up.

Have you been inside yet?

Yeah. The roof 's a mess.

I said it would be rotting. No one's used it in so long.

I didn't think it'd been that long.

So will you? – Her voice faded out and he could tell by its tone she was looking down.

Alexis wouldn't have wanted this. She wouldn't have cared…

No, not for her. Jesus Christ, it's for you!

It won't change anything.

It will!

But how?

You've just become so, I don't know… – silence filled the receiver – …unbearable.

He stared at the empty fireplace, the ash heaped and spread like a litter box. Grey raccoon prints faded out across the floor.

Have I?

Why the cabin? he'd asked her one night in bed, her back towards him smooth as a dawn lake, the pink curve of her hip that after twenty years still fit perfectly into his palm. What difference would it make now? Why more loss after so much already?
Because I don't want to resent you
– she'd said –
And because you need to know what it's like to lose something for good. On purpose. Forever
. You don't think I did? We both lost her. Alexis was ours.
It's not the same
, her hip rolled from his hand.
I mean, stop trying to save her and lose something completely.

He ignored everything on the inside that told him he was right, that it wouldn't make any difference, that cabins didn't equal children. That the ocean had only done to Alexis what she'd tried to do to herself so many times yet never managed. That death would always come when you couldn't prevent it, rolling you over and over until your skull, at last, met something harder. That when she'd left for India right out of the hospital, she had turned her back on everything he'd done to try and help her. What's India got for you anyway? What's there you can't find here?
Everything, Dad. And by God I mean that. Everything.

Alright. If it means that to you...

Not for me – she refuted – Jesus. This is for you.

For me.

How can you not get that?

A loss like that. Equal.

The path to the shore was free of blow-down. It was just a tree-lined tunnel leading to the lake, crisp with moonlight. He spotted a dead cedar off the path and grabbed a hold of its trunk, tugging its grey burl of branches onto the trail. This would do it. He didn't agree he needed to lose something more. Alexis had been both of theirs. You don't make up for something broken by breaking something else, he reasoned. But this would prove it for her and that's what was needed to move on.

The tree barely fit through the door of the cabin. He bent his knees and pulled with force. A branch hooked under the drying rack and the two dinner plates smashed to the floor. Like the wake of a boat a trail of copper leaves followed him in. He could have started it on the porch but it would be a better fire this way, from the inside. A curl of birch bark held the flame alight as he brought it past the tent to the porch and then through the door. Was it true he was unbearable? That she'd resent him? Would they recover on the surface yet somewhere deep beneath, down the line, this would thunder into them again, collapsing roofs, sweeping away buildings, another child, igniting forgotten underground fires?

Fuck you – he exhaled as he lit the tree.
Fuck you.

The dry cedar caught fire with more speed than he expected. The branches hissed and twined as the hungry flames built. It was close enough that the easy chair soon caught and then the wooden cabinets, which brought the fire over to the wall. He'd never seen one spread so quickly. It poured over the surfaces like a liquid and then sat still to dig in its stubborn teeth. It licked at the hems of the curtains then shot up the walls toward the ceiling. It leapt the wooden stairs and then started in on the roof.

At first from outside he could barely tell it was on fire. Drizzles of smoke escaped from under the roof 's overhang, more like a wet sock that steamed as it dried. Muffled pops, the faint sound of crackling, then the warm, earthen glow of someone curled up inside reading a book with a beer and old moccasins. In the loft window the flames took hold of the plaid curtain and mauled it down.

A loss like that
. Sure.

He stood confronting the burning cabin in the dark of the damp grass and dialed the phone.

Did you?

Yeah. Just now.

Thank God – she said – Thank you, oh thank God.

I don't feel any better.

You will – her voice sounded lighter, relieved – I promise you will.

He turned his back to the clearing and followed the path to the lake. The water seemed black and distant, as though it contained something sinister inside it that he would forever connect to what it had done to Alexis, as though its reflection mirrored back at him something more than just the shredded moon. The guilt of a good lie, perhaps – the kind people tell themselves with a straight face for a lifetime. Or the pale of her skin with all the sadness it had collected from some place he was never invited into. The red of her bandaged wrists and how in his mind he'd always held on to her, clinging even harder as she fought and struggled to get away. His girl.
Unbearable.

Then, as if to wound it, he picked up a rock and threw it. The surface shattered, swallowing the hole in its splash. In endless, detached circles, the moonlight rippled outward and then gradually reformed. He could break its reflection a thousand times, with a thousand rocks, and always the moon would repair itself. Invariably the water's surface would heal. On the far edge of the lake, the beam from the lighthouse spun in slow rhythmic flashes. Down here he couldn't hear the fire, just the soft vacuum of forest and the constant rustle of waves onto shore stone.

Myaing renamed herself Mali the moment the lights of the patrol boat had extinguished behind the breakers. Hidden up the beach behind a fallen palm trunk, she listened as the surf buried the throb of the engine like shovels of wet sand. As far as she could tell, she'd been the only one to make it to shore. The soldiers must have hauled the others back into the boat under the frantic spotlight that illuminated the open-nosed machine guns that sprayed out their ammunition so endlessly. She studied the water for any sign of her sister: Nu was the stronger swimmer and might already be waiting farther up the beach. Mali's clothes and hair were drenched, her tiny chest heaving with exertion and adrenaline as she pressed herself down into the dark warmth of the foreign sand.