Whirl Away (2 page)

“Would you have left if she hadn't?” Anne asked late one night, her fingers gently touching the line of dark, curly
hair that ran down from his navel to his crotch. John hadn't answered at first, not until she pressed him. “Would you?”

“Probably.”

And while she didn't doubt that it was true, it wasn't anywhere near the answer she had wanted to hear. She wanted to punch him and say, “No, you dope. You say, ‘I would have left her, just to look for you.' That's what you say.”

But she didn't, and by then he was sleeping anyway.

There was lots of work that year, much more than when John and Bev had eked out a living on Bev's teaching salary and piecemeal carpentry work. John had been able to build the workshop by the harbour by the time he started living with Anne, and the shop was alternately busy with mundane work—installing cabinets here, pulling out rotten windows and replacing them with vinyl there—and the more involved projects in a small town, such as building new kitchens and pulling out entire rotten floors. She loved to hear about the tearing out, when John would come home with tufts of wet, rotten wood in the wrinkles of his clothes, with the rich, wet smell all around, pulling out small treasures to show her. A big round copper penny found caught behind a baseboard, or great long cut nails, every one of them over a hundred years old, solid and sharp and, she knew, not handled even once between the time they had been pounded into place and when John had pulled them out again. Anne loved the way he would open his big battered hands slowly, gently, as if he were about to reveal something as fragile as a flower or a small bird tossed from its nest, the way he would show her
something both simple and complex that he knew she was going to understand.

At times like that, she felt as if they had a unique connection, as if there was something between them that no one else knew, that they were lovers in a way neither of them had shared before with anyone.

It was the same feeling she believed they shared over the big jobs, the occasional work that brought special, expensive wood to the work shed, jobs that seemed, in their own way, to reveal some part of John as clearly as when he brought something back to show her.

John had built a custom dining room table for the president of the electric company—a man with more money than taste, John joked, but he loved the work intensely. The table was an oval sweep of light birch, the thread of the grain matched with precision and hours of careful work, the top glassy with varnish. Then he'd gotten the contract for an even bigger table, for the utility's boardroom.

Anne had brought his lunch down to the shop every day while he was working on the big table. She had caught him looking along the grain, his face a serious, complicated map, and when he'd seen her and straightened up, rubbing his hands on a piece of cloth, his eyes changed, like someone moving quickly away from the edge of a window and letting the curtains fall back into place.

“I don't know if I can give it up,” he said, and for a moment she felt a skip in her chest. He must have seen the stricken look on her face. “The table,” he explained. “I just
don't know what it's going to be like not to have it here.”

“That attached to it, are you?” she asked.

“It's not that. It's just that . . . It's just that sometimes people don't deserve things, even if they can afford them.”

Outside, the raspberry bushes were August high against the converted shed, and the wind coming off the bay made the canes switch back and forth gently across the exterior clapboard with a rhythmic, constant scrape. Some people might find it irritating, Anne thought as they stood there. John didn't even seem to notice it, and to her, it was as regular and reassuring as waking up in the black of night and hearing John's breathing beside her: regular, deep in his chest, her lover asleep flat on his back and completely unaware that she was even there.

In the end, the big table went anyway. John had to get the movers to come and take it in the big van, in sections, and then he spent an afternoon at the utility's head office, putting the sections together and tightening all the screws and fasteners. When he was finished, it was like a single piece of a huge tree, as if it had taken root there in the boardroom and grown.

“If they ever have to move it,” he said seriously to the receptionist on the executive floor, “tell them to call me. I'll come right in. It's strong enough in one piece, but you can't go dragging it around. It's not made for that.”

That night, they went out to celebrate at the Eagle, although Anne wasn't sure whether it would turn out to be a celebration or a wake; John had a way of drinking just enough to topple sharply off a cliff into misery, even when
everything seemed fine. One moment they could be laughing and the next he might be lashing out, a spiteful drunk for no clear reason she could fathom. And when they went into the lounge, she had a feeling it would be one of those nights, especially because Bev was at the bar with an after-hours group of other teachers. All the other teachers except Kevin, the grade four teacher Bev had left John for. Kevin, who had lasted all of five months before Bev had suddenly decided she wanted her quiet carpenter back.

But by then it was too late. John always said it was as if he had hardened into something quite different than he had been. That he had cured quickly, like two-stage epoxy glue mixed together. There was, Anne knew, a certain flintiness about him now; Anne would run into it occasionally, abruptly, especially in the dark moments when John had had two or three drinks too many, or worse, when the work dried up and even the deep cuts on his hands had a chance to heal over. There was a great wide seam of distrust in there, Anne knew, and it was always unpleasant when she struck it.

In the bar, Anne stared across at Bev and the other teachers, and wondered what John had ever seen in the small woman. Damn, Anne thought, looking at Bev's rigid back, she even sits like a block of wood. That almost made Anne laugh out loud. A few ryes too many, she thought, trying to hold back the giggles. A piece of wood—she knew exactly why John would have been attracted to that. Drill here, plane there, she thought, and then she was laughing, shoulders shaking, face down on the table next to her glass. And
then John was back from the bathroom, and the band was starting again. He grabbed her hands, pulled her up out of her seat towards the dance floor.

Anne was sweating and strangely elated when she stopped dancing and pushed her way through the swinging door into the women's washroom. Late by then, and the bar was full of cigarette smoke and noise—the stalls all full, and Angie Porter, barely old enough to even be in the bar, was fixing her makeup in the mirror.

“Hi, Ange,” Anne said.

Angie turned and put a finger to her lips, pointing to one of the stall doors. “Bev,” she mouthed.

Anne shrugged. “So what?” she said loudly. Too many ryes for sure, she thought, hearing how roughly the words came out.

The toilet flushed and Bev came out of the stall, almost walking right into Anne.

“Looks like they'll let anyone in here,” Bev said, her chin up.

“Looks like,” Anne said. “You're here.”

Then Bev slapped her—hard. Angie fled the washroom, banging the door back into the wall as she hurried out. Anne's hand came up to the side of her face instinctively, feeling the heat welling up under her skin.

When she came out of the bathroom, her face still throbbing, Bev was gone.

“You gotta tell me,” she said to John later, after the moon had risen huge and orange and then had fallen back away
behind the horizon. They were walking, climbing slowly back up the hill, holding hands, weaving slightly.

Anne looked back over her shoulder at the one yellow light that was still on in Bev's house, one yellow light like a hard, staring eye.

“What?” John answered.

“You've got to tell me how the two of you ended up married,” Anne said. “You have to tell me how the heck that could happen.”

“It just did.”

“That's not an answer. That's an excuse.”

“Maybe it was her idea,” John said, and Anne could see he had already brought one hand up to the small curls on the side of his head. “Maybe we were together a lot, dating in high school, and it seemed like a good idea, like it was the natural thing to do.”

“Like, ‘Oh well, here we are, might as well get married'?” Anne asked, incredulous. “No one gets married because it's just the easiest thing to do.”

“Whatever you like,” John said. “You asked.”

The higher they climbed towards the house, the more the lights of the rest of Bay Bulls nestled down into a bowl beneath them. It looked as if all of the houses would fit into two cupped hands, like tight bunches of bundled Christmas lights.

“What was it like, with her?” Anne asked. “It couldn't have all been bad. There must have been a time when everything was clicking. A time when you were happy.”

John shrugged—not like he didn't know how to answer, but like he knew exactly what to say but was refusing to say it. “S'ppose,” he said, sounding resigned. “Jeez. Sometimes you sound just like her.”

Anne felt her breath stop, the muscles in her chest rigid and fixed like they might never move again. Like she'd been hit again.

John had let go of her hand and was still walking, the distance growing between them. Anne forced herself to walk again, forced herself to start breathing, trying to find a place to hold on to in a suddenly tilting world. The sky was alive with stars then, so Anne looked up at the wide, broad sweep of the Milky Way, deliberately trying to wonder if every one of the stars already had its name. Then she'd caught up, and John took her hand again as if nothing had happened, and the sky rushed back away from her and settled into its proper place.

John reached out and opened the gate at the end of the walkway, and the hinges squeaked just like they always did. Later, Anne would remember that it was the last time before the accident that she could recall actually looking—really looking—at his hands.

Ten days later, after the accident, she was packing up the last scattered pieces of his things, and almost absentmindedly turned on his cellphone. The police had returned the phone to her, along with his tool belt and the mitre saw and the rest of the tools and bags of clothes from the back of the pickup. Almost immediately, the phone rang. The ringing startled her, but she answered it anyway.

“John there?” a hollow man's voice said.

“Ah, no,” Anne said, flustered.

“Well, where the hell is he?” the man asked. “He was supposed to be out here a week ago.”

“Where's here?”

“Brooks. Brooks, Alberta.” The man on the other end of the phone sounded exasperated. “Look, I got him the damned job—sure, I know he's way overqualified for framing work—but I got him the damned job and now he's making me look bad for recommending him in the first place. He was supposed to start four days ago. When the hell's he going to get here, anyway?”

The cellphone dropped out of her hand while she was looking across at Bev's house on the other side of the bay. It was dark, and she was startled to see her own face reflected back in the window glass.

And for a moment, lying face up on the hardwood floor, the phone kept squeaking and whistling, like a small bird desperate for home.

K
EVIN ROWE
was on the front deck, hemmed in behind the fence pickets, looking down on the narrow street.

He was five years old, and he had serious, obvious eyes with small, square eyeglasses. Behind the glasses, emotions played across his face quickly, like a travelling storm. His eyebrows rose at the faintest hint of confusion, furrowing his forehead, and fell again quickly, leaving behind a blank, smooth slate that seemed never to have borne a mark. He had short hair, all of it cut the same length so that it stood up like bristles on a brush.

Kevin was just tall enough that his eyes were above the level of the deck railing, sharp blue eyes that didn't seem to blink often enough. He stared, unabashed, at passing cars, at walking people.

And he talked in short, tight bursts of words.

“Don't you care what I think?” he said over the edge of the railing, the movement of his lips barely visible but his
mouth enunciating every word. “Don't you even care what I think?”

The railing topped the brown fence that ran all the way around the deck, and all the way around the front of the small bungalow.

It was a white house, vinyl siding, single storey with light blue trim, occasional brushstrokes of blue lipping onto the white like bent feathers. All the windows of the small dark bedrooms at the front of the house were open, doing their best to shed the heat. It was uncomfortably hot for St. John's, the air thick and heavy and motionless. All-over damp, like the inside of Kevin's father's work gloves, when he had taken them off for a rest and Kevin had slid one of his own hands inside.

Kevin's parents were in the kitchen at the back, his father sitting down at the table with his work shirt off, his undershirt going yellow, his mother doing dishes in the steel sink. Kevin didn't like the sound of the dishes, the way the plates and cutlery rattled and scraped against the metal.

Before he went out, he had brought his bowl over to the sink the way he was supposed to, a scant handful of cereal Os swimming like life rings in the leftover milk. The handle of the spoon slid back and forth along the edge of the bowl with every step.

Then his mother told Kevin to go out on the deck. His father was looking down at his feet as if he was surprised they were still in the same place.

Kevin's father drove from St. John's to Boston and back, big rigs with chrome wheels, and every time he came home,
Kevin would come into the living room and be startled to find his father in front of the television or hear his father in the bedroom, snoring, like he'd never really left. For Kevin, it was like going into the kitchen and finding there was an extra fridge where there hadn't been one before. It was a magic trick, as if his father could just simply appear, again and again and again. By the time the surprise of it wore off, Kevin's father would be ready to head back out on the road, hauling fish to Boston and furniture back again.