The Last Woman (33 page)

Dad saw me coming back in the canoe – all hell to pay. Yelling through Inverness. Yelling about his brother, how he’d ruined his life by marrying the wrong woman, yelling about ancient history, about his own life gone wrong (I’d never heard that before). Yelling so hard he was weeping. Gripping me by the arm, making me promise I wouldn’t see Billy again
.

I locked the door of my room and took off all my clothes and lay down on my bed. I was amazingly calm. There was another life in me. I remember the window was open, I could see the pines through the screen. A soft breeze. It was all so simple, really. I had a baby in me. I loved the baby’s father – why not have the baby? So simple – a calm, good place beyond all this insanity. The feeling lasted about an hour
.

I saw Billy once more – went up to Pine Island. I almost told him, then I didn’t. What was the use?

The flowers in the market today. Little joy-bursts. I saw but couldn’t feel
.

The flower seller’s wife – a cheerful woman with a black eye. Did he give it to her? We have no idea of other people’s lives. Dark caves, with secret entrances. If we could suddenly be transported into another person’s body, another life, and just feel for a few seconds what it was like, we might come back to ourselves with amazement. Shouting in amazement, that such other feelings, thoughts, were possible. Or crying out in horror. Or maybe it wouldn’t be so very different, maybe the old man whose face is covered in warts feels much like me – I hope not
.

Richard came home today with tickets for New York. He means well – a surprise intended to cheer me. I feel sorry for him, putting up with me. Me with my uncombed hair and not even dressed yet, pretending to be delighted. I can’t imagine going to New York – the effort! Even the thought of MOMA leaves me cold
.

I suppose we’ll go. I see Richard smiling, out of love for me – at least I think it’s love – and all I feel is a kind of pressure. I’ve always felt it around him. He knows what’s best for everyone and insists on it, for their own good, of course. It’s a kind of blind willfulness. The first time I met him I felt it. At our wedding too. There was a moment at the banquet – people striking their forks on glasses, that horrible custom, to make us kiss. Richard seized me, bending me right back in an elaborate show, making a real production of it. The complete ignorance, or at least sweeping aside, of what I am
.

Richard can suck oxygen from a room. It was different with Billy. He creates a space I can expand into. With him, talking, I used to go on holiday; I made discoveries
.

Idea for a painting. A man asleep with his mouth open. His mouth frowning. His whole face, body, slack, unconscious. While sunlight floods in from the window, making a glory of sheets, yellow wall, a child’s toy on the floor. What he doesn’t, can’t see
.

We haven’t made love for three months. He doesn’t insist. I don’t know whether he minds or not. I mind: not not making love, but not wanting to. At twenty it was different. Sex: part of my love for the world. Indistinguishable from it. Who next? What next?

Thought of Billy today. That glimpse of Mad Jack’s as we went up to the Harbour (I often look there). A year since his last card from Florida
.

I’m drawn to him so much these days, or at least the thought of him. His absence seems part of his ache in me, the emptiness. Sometimes I feel if I could reconnect with him, if I could talk with him about – anything – a lot of this would come clear. As if with him I could go back and reclaim my life. As if with him my mistakes might be dissolved somehow. Resolved? As if, as if. Erica’s probably right: I’m immature. Yet is maturity always the answer?

Can we ever really escape the things of our childhoods?

Read an article today about parents losing a child. Sometimes it drives them apart – sometimes brings them together more strongly. It’s been like that with Billy a bit – except, of course, that Billy isn’t here and doesn’t know. All the years since that summer, it’s been a bond he’s not aware of. It’s there in my attraction to him, like a painful little hook – the loss we’ve endured together, though of course he doesn’t know about it. I used to imagine telling him one day, when the moment was right, but somehow it never was
.

I remember once, sitting up late with him in the Black Falls house, after Richard had gone to bed. He started to talk about having children one day. How he wanted to. How he wanted his son or daughter to have a different kind of experience from the one he had growing up
.

I keep thinking of the land claim years. We had something then, the three of us. Something was in balance, or as near to balance as it was likely to get. Erica wanted to explore this today. Did I think of myself as loving Billy? As a friend, I said, as an old, dear friend. But I used to catch myself watching his hands, his mouth. Also, I had a sense around him of permanence, as if he’d been there from the beginning, like a twin
.

And Richard? Erica said. Well, he’s my number-one guy, I said. My rock
.

And how is it, living with a rock? Erica said
.

I laughed while she waited, as she does
.

I love him, I said. And this felt absolutely true. I was moved. But there was something sentimental in this, just a touch of maternal pity. What do I pity Richard for? For having to endure my moods? That, partly. But also because in some way he seems innocent. I know I’m in some way older than he
.

I remember one time when the three of us were together. We had driven over to Maiden Falls for a picnic. Billy’s girlfriend was supposed to be there, but she’d had to go somewhere else. We sat at a picnic table overlooking the Falls. We were drinking wine. Richard started to tell a story about a paper route he had when he was a kid. He was doing imitations of his customers, or trying to. It wasn’t at all funny, but he kept pushing it, laughing hard at his own caricatures, as if he could compel a reaction from Billy and me. Anyone else would have sensed the failure and quietly given up. But he just kept pushing. I think Billy was as chagrined as I was, though we tried to laugh a little – to spare Richard
.

Later, he and Billy explored the gorge while I sat and sketched. They were like two boys leaping over a gap in the rocks, one after the other, peering into a pool. I remember that very clearly. I loved them both
.

Richard flips to the final entries. They are made in pencil, not ink like the others. And they are brief.

What does it mean to love somebody?

I suppose that I have to ask tells me something – but enough?

I HAVE TO LIVE
.

In the mirror’s pool, his own face is pouched with shadow. Unable to sustain its stare, he turns from the dresser. He has thought of his life as being a certain way. Childhood, law school, meeting Ann – a comprehensible story, both like and unlike other stories – a basis of fact he could count on, that he could recite to others: here is my life. Now in the dusk-lit room he sees that for all these years, unknown to him, another story has been unfolding in front of him, under his own roof, in the bed beside him. It is possible that his own story, the one he has been telling himself about himself and Ann and Rowan, is only a subplot to this other. It is entirely possible, in fact likely, that it is false.

Shoving the journal back where he found it, he shuts the drawer.

In the morning, he drives up to Carton Harbour. Parking beside Whitbread’s, he walks to the water taxi depot and within a few minutes is sitting beside the driver of a fast launch, on his way to Pine Island. He hasn’t been on the reserve since the days of the claim, and when they swing around the last point, the familiar huddle of rooftops appears above the bay where the same dock still floats, surrounded by the same mob of steel boats, stirring in their bow-wave.

Leaving the dock, he crosses the beach and climbs among the small houses where, through a screened window, the sounds of Saturday-afternoon opera drift from a radio. In another minute, he spies the blue house
amid its cloud of cedars. Billy is sitting outside, at small table in the shade. At the sight of him, heat floods Richard’s face and chest, and he has the sense his arms have been drained of their strength; but he keeps on, aware now that others are here. Behind Billy, a boy with long hair stands swinging a bat; a second boy, a little fellow who wears his oversized ball cap backwards, stands beside the table, watching Billy thread a rawhide lace into a catcher’s mitt. Noticing Richard approach, the boy at first stares unselfconsciously, then at once, as if confused, his gaze dissolves into blankness. Billy looks up then, just as Richard stops before the table, and begins to rise slowly to his feet. Richard’s breathing is shaky, and he feels an urge to throw himself at the other man. But he manages to say, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you. Not yet anyway. Look, can a guy get a glass of water around here?”

Billy hesitates, then, gently turning the little boy by the shoulders, he sends him off toward the other, who has fallen motionless with his bat. “You guys go on to Mike’s now,” he says, as he walks toward the house. The boys trail off, the little one casting backward glances until they disappear.

As Richard waits for Billy, he fixes blankly on the lake. He can no longer remember why he has come; he is not sure, any more, what he will say. He feels he is waiting for understanding to arrive – from out there, maybe, where a herd of tiny islands has paused in the sun.

A
head of their canoe, islands detach themselves from the wooded shores – advance, loom, and fall behind to the steady bite of their paddles. Small sandy beaches drift by, solitary rocks surrounded by water, cliffs where ferns stand motionless in the shade, hillsides deep in pines. On a low point, a tent has been pitched. A striped towel drapes an overturned canoe. The little camp passes with an air of preoccupied stillness – perhaps its occupants are having sex or simply sleeping off the heat of midday. Ann watches the meshed doorway float by like a last outpost of civilization. She is bound for more extreme places. Sweat trickles from under her wide-brimmed hat, stings in her eyes. She would love a swim but judges her chances slim just now.

In the bow seat, Billy is at war with the water, stroking as if bent on shovelling the whole lake behind them – a pace he has kept up all morning. Several times she’s asked him to slow down, and though he does for a while, whatever it is that’s driving him soon takes over again. They are heading north, to the cabin on Silver. She sympathizes – Silver is so important to him – and apparently he thinks that going up there will help, will even heal, though really she is guessing, for on the subject of Silver Lake he has remained stubbornly uncommunicative.

And she could bear his silence, his attack on the water, were it not for her sense that his behaviour is in some way directed at her. Driving up that morning to Pine Island, her canoe in tow, she found him in a dark mood. She asked if he’d changed his mind, if he’d rather go alone. When he ignored her questions, she demanded, bluntly, to know what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, he told her. She did not believe him. And so she dropped the matter, thinking his ill humour would pass once they got out on the water. But presented, hour after hour, with his feverish paddling, she finds herself dreading the days to come.

Yet they had been getting on so well. The previous week they had driven to Perry Rapids Lodge, on the Armand River, for a few days of fishing and sketching among the pinkish cliffs around the rapids. He’d been out of the hospital for three weeks, and she felt he was much improved – more relaxed and readily affectionate. No one had ever come as easily inside her guard, or been as welcome there. And there was something else: a subtle
confidence, a sense of deeper reserves. He told her he had lined up some jobs at the Blue Osprey and was even thinking of getting back into band politics. He’d told her, too, about how he and a couple of his old ball cronies were hoping to get a boy’s baseball team together on the Island. Apparently his nephew Jimmy and a friend of his had brought him back to the sport again. But there had been trouble. The friend, Dwayne, had overdosed on something and had to be taken to the hospital. Billy had clearly been shaken. “It never stops,” he said, speaking with a tone of inevitability, as if this was something he had always understood.