Aftershock Page 24

  Jules recognized the thick accent as much as the voice.

  Thanks for calling back. I’m trying to track down—

  Yeah, Chlo you’re looking for, yeah?

  Yes, Chloe, my daughter. Is she there? She called me from there.

  Oi, I’m afraid you’ve missed her, hey. She left, oh, I don’t know, a while back, I guess. She was here for a week, like. More, maybe. Poor thing. That bloke took her cash was a real piece of work.

  I bet he was, said Jules. You know, I called a few days ago.

  Aw, yeah, said Chandra, distracted, noise in the background.

  Do you think she was still there then?

  Aw, she mighta been, hey? Can’t say. Don’t really check voice mail too often, everything’s email these days, yeah? Technology, she laughed. Jules did not. She had also emailed, in fact, but there’d been no response to that either.

  Well, do you know where she went?

  Hey, Nick, where did Chlo say she was going?

  There was mumbling in the background, then:

  Not sure, but I know her friend was up in Piha, hey.

  Hey, Jules said, her radar picking up a target for her universal frustration. I have no idea who or where that is, she said through clenched teeth.

  Drew glanced at her quickly, shook his head; she was being rude, he meant, and it wouldn’t make this conversation more productive. She flattened her tone, asked the woman to repeat herself.

  Yeah, Piha. To meet up with someone named Lee, I think it was. Some surfing competition? Oh sorry, a whole busload just walked in, I gotta git— Good luck, though, I bet she emails you soon, hey.

  Jules hung up, wondering how, when Chloe was the one she couldn’t find, she could be the one who felt so lost.

  Feelings.

  When Chloe was little, they’d had a beehive under the roof of the garage that came back year after year no matter what they did. Chloe knew to stay away, or they thought she did. Jules and David were not exactly helicopter parents, but they tried to explain the danger to their daughter so she would know to avoid it. One summer afternoon, Chloe must have been seven or eight, Jules was sleeping when the sun reached her eyes, so she got out of bed to close the curtains and happened to see Chloe approaching the garage at the back of the yard, hockey stick in hand. Jules somehow knew what she was about to do and yelled at her to stop, but her window was closed to keep in the AC, so she banged on it, glass shaking. Chloe turned and looked up at her, her jaw set with determination. Even at this distance, her eyes were defiant. Jules watched as she raised her hockey stick to the hive, and she never saw the impact, never saw the hive splitting open, the outpouring of angry bees, never saw Chloe turn and bolt for the house, only heard the scream as she raced down the stairs to the kitchen, opened the back door and scooped Chloe inside, swatting away the last of the bees. Her own blood pounded and Chloe was hysterical as Jules looked her over, trying to distinguish injury from scare, and put ointment on the nine bee stings she found. (Stings the doctor later concluded were the root cause of Chloe’s severe bee allergy, after that horrible call from the school and the fast-acting teacher with her EpiPen.) But that day, Jules’s heart had broken at the sight of the welts puckering up on Chloe’s back and neck, and she’d wanted to hold her tight, but every time she tried, Chloe cried harder and said it hurt too much.

  Now, again, Chloe was unreachable, possibly in trouble, even danger, and Jules felt a visceral protectiveness that was both new and very old. An image, or maybe a memory: Chloe sitting alone, against a wall, knees drawn up, eyes wide in a worry that looked fundamentally wrong on her six-year-old face, then something had closed, her eyes, or a door maybe, and the image was gone.

  And suddenly Jules had the answer to Dr. Morrow’s question, maybe not an answer, but a clue. She popped that old home movie into the mental machine and scanned the tape for missed details, even though she knew every frame.

  That night, that terrible night, already feeling the blame coming from Nan, why wasn’t she home, what kind of mother was already back at work with an eight-month-old. Nan had never wrapped her coiffed blue head around the idea of postpartum depression. They wanted to take Chloe home with them that night, saying Jules was in no shape to look after her, but she couldn’t let them, couldn’t understand why they would want to take away the only person she had left. Maybe they thought she’d forfeited the right. Maybe she had. She only knew that to be alone in the house at that moment would leave her body empty of its heart. But eventually she was no longer strong enough or sober enough to resist. She didn’t care anymore. It had taken hours, Jules drinking on the floor while they stood over her, berating, and finally what she needed most was for them to leave, whatever it took. Was Chloe in the hallway that whole time? Recalcitrant Chloe, watching, unblinking, while Jules sat on the bedroom floor and drank half a bottle of Scotch?

  A few days later, Jules was falling asleep on Chloe’s single bed. Chloe was home again and curled into her, crying softly and saying something Jules was never sure she’d actually heard. I’m sorry, Mummy.

  But Jules was the one who was sorry, she should have been home and she wasn’t, everybody said so. The smell of baby powder: two little hands taking one of Jules’s and holding tight.

  THEY HAD DROPPED Marc at his office and were heading back to the house in rush-hour traffic, meaning long and repeated intervals of waiting to move. Drew’s neighbourhood was a few miles west, but to avoid the traffic he drove east, then south, and twenty minutes later turned to inch along the western waterfront until they would go north.

  It really is faster, Drew said for the ninth time.

  Three sides of a square. Makes perfect sense, Jules said. The city’s dysfunctional infrastructure was a running public joke, and they both chuckled. Drew looked over at her and smiled.

  What?

  I just . . . haven’t heard you laugh in a while. It’s nice.

  Lake Ontario rolled, ocean-like, the horizon endless water, the American shore too far to see. Today the sky was galvanized steel, the lake black as iron. It hadn’t frozen yet, the whole thing rarely did, but mid-winter would see ice between the shore and the breakwaters. They reached a section of Lake Shore Boulevard where the city had put parking between the east- and westbound lanes, with an overhead walkway for beach access.

  Can we pull in there? I just want to walk outside for a minute, without my— She tapped her ankle where the electronic bracelet had been until that morning.

  DREW STAYED IN the car. The temperature had plummeted. The November wind came at her with teeth and knives as she fought her way across the exposed pedestrian bridge. It cut through her peacoat and stripped her naked, tore savagely at her face and bare ears. She grinned into it.

  Along the edge of the lake, the bike path was ploughed clear of snow but almost deserted. A lone runner in earflaps and gloves puffed by, red-faced; a figure swaddled in a parka threw a stick for a dog oblivious to the cold. Jules walked right up to the shore, the strip of jetsammed beach. Dusk had set in, and with few lights down here, the water roiled, blacker and blacker. She felt her chest open up with the line of the horizon, the bite of the wind stripping away seven layers of grime, self-loathing and well-practised facade, and she had a moment—just a moment—of pondering how much it had cost her not to let herself feel. The smashing waves on the breakwater roared like monsters, clawing through the woolly fog of her perception in raw catharsis. She felt her cocoon of numbness start to split, the wind’s frigid fingers prying wider its fissures, and felt something wholly new carving its way out from within.

  And maybe, if she didn’t fuck it up, something newly whole.

  Breathe.

  A hospital waiting room

  the sound of a baby crying

  a familiar unfamiliar face, Mo-mo but not Mo-mo, Jules but not Jules, Lizzie but not Lizzie, all of them but none of them at all

  a baby crying in their arms, I look down at my own hands, I hold a stuffed elephant

  I know
why it’s damp but can’t remember

  dead is dead, Jansen says, no hard feelings

  Mo-mo laughing in a ripped-open way

  I try to yell but

  water fills me

  pale-blue light and salvation

  a million miles away

  hey, a voice cutting through,

  Hey, Chlo.

  I woke up, sharp and sudden, to Lee, backlit beside me by green tent fabric and pre-dawn glow.

  Alright?

  Her voice tight with worry. Embarrassed, I tried to smile. Yeah.

  I reckon it’s time you filled me in, yeah?

  I knew she was right. My dreams had woken both of us every night since I’d arrived. A familiar exhaustion weighed me down. Dark spots flickered in the corners of my vision, and the line between dream and reality wavered like a buoy line in a pool.

  I wasn’t quite ready to lay bare everything, so I started with half the truth.

  Remember when you took me surfing?

  Feel sick thinkin’ about it.

  So not your fault. I just . . . feel like the ocean is mad at me or something. For my phone. I know it’s dumb—

  Ah, Chlo. She’d been propped on one elbow and now lay back down beside me to stare up at the surface of the tent. It was a shit thing to do.

  Is that supposed to make me feel better?

  My dad, right? Lived his whole life on the water, helped start cleanup movements all over the world. He never did anything but worship the ocean.

  Sensing what was coming, I draped an arm over her sleeping-bagged form.

  And still it crushed him like a bug. Yeah? Because even though he practically lived on the water, felt like he was a part of it—and it was a huge part of him, let me tell you—at no point was it ever under his control.

  She took a ragged breath. I had the sense that she was giving me a glimpse of her that few people got to see. I felt a deep pull of connection, and went right to the heart:

  My baby sister died. I was there when it happened.

  The words hung, awaiting judgment.

  She turned her head to look at me. That what you’re dreamin’ about?

  I nodded. When I can sleep at all, I added. Lee looked back up at the tent ceiling and was quiet for at least a minute.

  You feel so powerless, hey.

  And guilty, I said.

  And guilty, Lee agreed. When I watched my dad go . . . Lee paused as her voice cracked. I was young, yeah? And I thought he was invincible. When I was real wee, he used to put me in a life vest and I’d ride on his back while he surfed—just small stuff, course—but it always felt like the wave did whatever he wanted it to. But when I got my own board and started going out, I realized he was just reacting to it, doing what he needed to, what the wave told him he had to. That’s all anyone can do. And when I watched him go under that day, and not come back up . . . and then come back up, but not moving . . . just floating into shore with his board . . . that was my world ending. And for a long time after, I thought, That should have been me. I was the one who was vulnerable, who was small and had only a couple years of experience, not twenty, like him. But . . . Lee wiped her eyes. Anyway, that’s why I nearly crapped my trousers when I saw you get hit. I thought, Oh no, not again. I’m constantly terrified someone else I love will get hurt.

  I took her hand and pressed it against my cheek.

  The previous afternoon, I’d watched Lee surf in the finals, riding monumental swells like so much flotsam, or like an orca, fearlessly flipping in the air, cutting down breaks. I got stoned on the beach with Sean and tried not to think about what could happen if things went wrong, tried to see the waves as impressive rather than deadly, tried to not imagine one crashing down on top of her, massively shattering.

  Tried not to remember my own swim for the surface—primally desperate for air, the marbled light of being suspended and weightless, outside time. Between life and death.

  On her final run, I held my breath as a swell raised itself up beneath her, a waking giant. But then she popped up to her feet, totally relaxed, just getting a lift from a good friend. When it finally broke, the wave was a twenty-five-footer, bent itself into another perfect pipe, and Lee carved a beautiful line down its underbelly before she exited, spectacular, like a motorcycle escaping a collapsing mountain underpass—and making it look easy.

  She did her high-fiving, backslapped Hero Walk along the beach while my heart pounded with awe and love and terror.

  So I knew what she meant. It was petrifying to see someone you cared about take on danger. To know that all you could do was watch and hope. To be waiting, always, for something to take them away.

  All my inner voices of caution sounded like Jules’s, and I had spent years arguing with them. But in this case, something actually scared me. And I didn’t want to be afraid of things, not for myself, and not for anyone else.

  But I’ll tell you what, Lee said. It’s ’cause of you I realized that. None of us is in control. Things just happen. And I need to remember surfing with my pa without all the fear and guilt. ’Cause those are some of my best memories.

  When I didn’t answer, she turned on her side to look at me.

  Chlo, she said. Let it out. If you want.

  Fear and guilt, I echoed her.

  They’re tough things to make peace with. But they’ll never let you rest until you do.

  I thought about my disjointed memories, the shadows that stalked my sleep. Dead is dead, no hard feelings. Mo-mo and the sound of Lizzie crying, then not crying anymore: the part of the story I’d wanted to tell someone for most of my life but hadn’t known who or how. The thing that laced itself through my dreams and made me feel crazy and deviant, and that I had never, ever put into words.

  So I told her. I told her how I’d been home from school, in bed with a cold, the babysitter downstairs on the phone. How I’d heard the baby start to cry, and how the crying wouldn’t stop, and finally I got out of bed, my stuffed elephant Eloise dangling from one hand, and walked to the top of the stairs to see the edge of Maureen as she moved past the kitchen door, her voice low and tense, then rising, stretching, cracking: Fight With Boyfriend. Do Not Interrupt.

  So I tiptoed down the stairs to the front hall, where Maureen had parked the baby in a car seat by the front door.

  Lizzie was wailing away; I couldn’t figure out why. I tried to pat her and rock her and said shh, but nothing helped, I even made Eloise dance in front of her, which usually made her laugh, but the wailing only got louder and I only felt more desperate for fear of Maureen coming in and yelling. Or worse.

  There was no soother in or near the car seat, so I put Eloise’s trunk in Lizzie’s mouth, to see if sucking on it would make her happy so she’d stop crying. And she did stop crying, she sucked a little and blinked a few times at me, then closed her eyes and fell asleep, just as Mo-mo’s voice escalated to a hot rage, its apex the smash of the cordless into its cradle. I darted back upstairs before I could be seen.

  A little while later, after the clatter of lunch dishes in the sink, I heard the quick rhythm of Maureen’s footsteps, the flush of a toilet, the bang of the screen door as she went outside for a cigarette and again when she came back in. After all that came the rise of her voice in panic, followed by a quiet that made me cold with dread. I waited a long time, but the house only hummed, telling me nothing, so I crept back downstairs to see Mo-mo’s back, out on the front porch in a weird hunched-over position, the car seat beside her. I reached up to press the latch on the screen door, still heavy for my small hand, and Mo-mo didn’t turn around, but she must have heard me. Just go back to your room, she said. GO. I retreated, hearing, as I pulled myself slowly up the stairs, the murmured words. This is all your fault. A little while later the siren, the ambulance, the dark-blue uniforms carrying something away below my bedroom window. Until my mum came home and Maureen left, and Nana and Grandpa were there too, they were all in my parents’ bedroom for hours and hours while I watched from the hallwa
y and no one spoke to me, no one even seemed to notice I was there. Then my grandparents took me away without telling me why, even though I knew: my mother didn’t want me around. She wouldn’t even look at me.

  I must have leaked some tears while I was talking, because by the time I was finished, my cheeks were wet. But I just felt numb. Lee curled around me and hugged me tight.

  It’s all so fuckin’ random, she said. But it’s not your fault, hey.

  I shrugged, unconvinced and out of words.

  I got you, she said.

  Some memories will buoy you up, I thought, and some will drown you.

  We lay there in silence while the universe spun around us.

  Departures.

  This was the place. This exact level in this exact parking garage, the short-term lot connected by walkway to the international terminal.

  Waiting, she was waiting, she had waited for David, standing right here, and when he didn’t come and didn’t come, she’d sat on that very curb, unable, possibly in response to his inability to get home faster, to go into the terminal to meet him.

  She’d needed him in that moment more than any other before or after.

  But then he did arrive, finally, his flight pushed back another hour, another hour, his short connector fogged in at Montreal, until six hours in the parking garage had her going out of her mind. She did try, at one point, to relocate to the terminal waiting area, figuring the twenty-hour flight prolonged into over forty was punishment enough.

  But she barely made it. Emotions crackled like fireworks all around her as she fought her way through throngs of arrivees and greeters, departees and farewells: they assailed her, they had nothing to do with her. She ached for goodbyes she would never say and wouldn’t be meeting her husband with any kind of joy. She took a few minutes of refuge in a bathroom stall to steel herself, then bolted back to the relative isolation of the parking garage.

  Where, she remembers, the despair, the grief of the previous two weeks filled her head, her entire being, in an endless wailing song, a noise she couldn’t quiet. She sat on the curb beside the luggage trolleys and keened, her back turned to the people unburdening themselves of their bags. She could hear them behind her, could sense their looks, but didn’t care. Until she managed to re-submerge her emotions, to breathe past them long enough to focus on practicalities like letting Nan know she’d be even later than she’d suggested the last time she’d called.