Aftershock Page 7

  LANCE COOKED THE fish in the galley kitchen while I looked around the yacht’s cabin of gleaming wood. Everything was bolted down or stowed in compartments beneath benches. Framed photos were nailed in place on the panelling.

  Is this your wife? Lance stood on a marina dock next to an onyx-skinned woman even taller than he was.

  Aw yeah. That’s my Kiri.

  Her cheek was tilted so it brushed against his wind-mussed hair. They weren’t quite smiling, but they looked happy with their whole bodies. Their bare feet.

  For minutes there were only the sounds of the water against the outside of the boat, the hiss and sizzle from the pan on the stove. I sat on a bench and stared out a window where the line between ocean and sky rose in and out of frame.

  He rattled the pan. Fish is ready.

  KIRI, A MARINE biologist, had outfitted the underside of Minke with an underwater microphone: a hydrophone, with a speaker inside the cabin. After lunch, we sat at the tiny navigation desk with its ancient radar system and scanned through the airwaves of ocean. Until Lance raised a finger to say, Listen.

  I heard clicking. Rhythmic and guttural, totally inhuman but speaking to me on another level. A call, loud and close, followed by a response, much quieter and farther away. Echolocation, Lance explained. Sonar navigation. Every pod has its own dialect.

  Dialect, I repeated.

  Aw yeah, they’re calling out their names, hey? To see if they know each other.

  Thinking that kind of linguistic interaction seemed unlikely, I suggested it was more like dogs knowing each other’s scents.

  Lance gave me a hard look and clicked the speaker off. Not exactly. Come meet them.

  OUT ON DECK, I watched a triangular fin cutting towards the boat, a slick, oily shadow ghosting along underneath it. At ten metres away, it did a slow roll, black-and-white body shining as it curled through the air, tail sticking straight up to give a wave before it dove, only to reappear beside the boat moments later. There were three, four, then five of them, circling Minke in formation, rolling, diving, resurfacing.

  Orca pods are maternal, Lance told me. This is probably a mother and her offspring. They’re very co-operative, yeah? Take down a whale bigger than any of them, or a seal. Surround it like a death squad.

  A couple of them started jumping, flying out of the water, sleek power twisting around before splashing noisily down again. It was impossible to think of them as fish.

  I couldn’t help the grin that hurt my face but tried to tone it down.

  Pretty cool, I said.

  These are Kiri’s. They know our boat.

  The orcas played in the water around Minke for a long time, long enough for Lance to go below decks for a while and come back with red eyes.

  Silly buggers. His voice was hoarse and torn.

  MUCH LATER, LANCE said, So, tell me about this girl who’s broken your heart.

  The sun had dropped behind the mountains on the coast. The sky closed in, the air cooled. We sat in the cabin and drank wine by candlelight.

  Jill. Her name was sawdust in my mouth. I told Lance how we’d left notes in each other’s lockers and texted at night, how we used to make out in the girls’ bathroom, and about the time we almost got busted together for shoplifting T-shirts from a vintage store. How we’d done everything together since grade ten.

  Then the horrible breakup over video phone.

  Lance cringed as he emptied the bottle of wine into our cups.

  You’re the one who wanted to go there, Jill had said, referring to my university in the eastern part of the province. Jill was studying art history, and much closer to home. You could have come here, she said, but it wasn’t good enough for you. (She wasn’t wrong. The math program at Jill’s school was a joke.)

  I love that you’re so open about it all, Lance said. That you’re like, fuck it, this is who I am. He gestured to indicate my whole person.

  Well. It is, so.

  It doesn’t cause you problems? Like, at school? Can’t be easy.

  Being queer?

  Or with your pals?

  They wouldn’t be very good pals.

  Maybe so, he said. But I still think you’re brave.

  A PORTHOLE ABOVE the table captured within its frame multiple layers of light and reflection: a diffused crescent of moon against a new-blue-jean sky, the shifty flames of three mismatched candles, the shiny curves of wine in cups and the pale shadows of our hands on the tabletop. All sliding and overlapping, doubled by the two panes of glass.

  I loved my Kiri, yeah? Still love her.

  I stared at the glowing end of the joint in my hand, the flaked green nail polish from another lifetime, as Lance told me how he’d been in his office at the university when the 6.7 quake hit. Kiri, at home on the first floor, had been crushed by the weight of the second collapsing onto her. Their street had flooded, preventing rescue or even retrieval for seventy-plus hours.

  I should have been home, he said. Not . . . with a student. The way I was.

  He turned his cup in his hand, stared at the thumbprint pool of red in the bottom.

  It’s not an easy thing, to admit that you’ve done something you can never apologize for.

  His eyes had a liquid gleam. His inner forearm bore a faded tattoo of an anchor.

  Forces you to live in the real world. And that’s the challenge. Living with what you did. And what you didn’t do.

  I’d spent a lot of time in my life feeling both very alone and responsible for it. Something about Lance, and the weight of loss that followed him around, made me feel like I might not be the only one who assumed that when bad things happened, they were at least partly my fault.

  THE SKY BEYOND the portholes was deep black. We smoked the rest of the joint in silence. Something splashed nearby.

  Oi, we should go look at the stars, yeah?

  THE NIGHTTIME OCEAN stunned me with its endlessness. Lance stood behind me and pointed out Alpha Centauri. The stars may have been sharp and clear, but I wasn’t able to focus on them. They drifted in their halos. My legs wobbled from the wine.

  And that there is Beta Centauri. You can’t see the Southern Cross this time of year, but those will always point you in the right direction.

  Ha. My phone has GPS.

  He leaned with his forearms on the rail beside me. Yeah. Mine too. But that’s just the thing. You don’t need to know anything anymore. You don’t even need to see anything anymore. Just look it up on your damn phone.

  Hey, I agree with you. That’s why I’m here, on this trip.

  Oh yeah? To get away from it all, is that it?

  Well, yeah. Some kind of, I dunno, freedom? My mother’s a freaking data wrangler, did you know that? She puts people’s lives into algorithms. Everything they do online—profiles, location data, likes, friends. So she can exploit it. So her clients can make money off it. So. Yeah. Trying to un-map myself, I guess.

  But—you’re keeping in touch, yeah? They can still track you through your phone. You’re not really free. Right? None of us are.

  Don’t remind me.

  Ha. Yeah. Fuck technology. Except for the head. ’Scuse me.

  Alone on deck, with the breathing and creaking of ocean and boat, the deep silence of space, I felt the vastness of the sky crack open in my chest, like my ribs were peeling back, painlessly, to let it in. I imagined myself drifting among and between the stars, tasting and touching with my mouth and all my skin the fabric of space-time.

  I pulled my day pack from inside the bench where I’d stowed it, dug out my smartphone and gripped it in its battered plastic case in one hand. Thought about all the texts I’d sent Jill. And all the ones I would never send now. The only people likely to contact me now were my parents. Thinking about Amanda’s concern and the quiet expectation in David’s eyes, that I be a certain kind of person, dress like a girl, smile and act nice, the hurt on Char’s face every time I disappointed her, gave me an almost physical longing to make some kind of sweeping and dramatic g
esture to mark the moment. To definitively commit to my journey and separate the past from this new future.

  I stepped up to the rail, drew my arm way back and launched the phone as hard as I could. It arced up and out, caught on an ocean breeze and curved slightly, disappeared into the void and made a tiny splash I could hear but not see.

  What did you just do?

  Lance, frozen halfway out of the hatch. There was shortness to his words, they were clipped and tight, threatened to squash like a bug my sense of lightness and liberation. But the deed was done.

  It was done and I knew I’d done something horribly wrong, something I wished I could take back but would never be able to. Gravity was like that. Things fell.

  Let’s just say I cut the cord, I said. I made a throat-slicing motion with my hand, hoping to turn it into a joke.

  Wow, he said. He had a bottle of wine in one hand and our cups in the other, but with his rangy hands he could still climb the ladder onto deck, still gesture. He walked to the rail of the boat, looked into the darkness as though he might see my phone out there. His easy posture had sagged, defeated. He looked at me in a way that made me wonder if we ever would have really been friends.

  Why would you do that?

  His disappointment crushed me. Unreasonable thoughts went through my head. The night held me in place, there was nowhere to go.

  I just really needed to get rid of it.

  Wow, he said again, shaking his head, slowly, side to side.

  I just don’t want to talk to anyone, I said, but my words felt weak.

  You know what kinds of toxins are in those things?

  Toxins? The whole framework of the conversation collapsed under me. It’s just a phone, Lance. One phone. You’re the one who said fuck technology.

  He started for the back of the boat. Heavy metals, radioactive shit, plastics that will take centuries to break down—

  There was a horrible moment where I thought he was going to cry again, only now I was the one making it happen.

  I’m sorry, I tried to say, but he didn’t even acknowledge it.

  I’m going to bed. Drop you in the morning, yeah?

  He disappeared down the hatch. I heard wood sliding, and a slam. And that was that.

  I WOKE UP to sunlight beaming through the porthole over my bunk, searing my eyeballs. Rolled out of my sleeping nook into an empty cabin. I took a piece of cold, crispy bacon from the pan on the stove and climbed up on deck. Lance was sailing, looking distant and at home, his eyes watching the horizon, the sails, the waves, his movements relaxed and sure. I sat on a bench right in front of him. He didn’t look at me, didn’t speak. I commented on the temperature, which was mild, and the landscape we passed, which was rugged. Lance answered, agreeable but monosyllabic, and kept sailing.

  He was nothing like me after all, I decided. If anything, he was more like Jules, with secret rules he expected me to follow, self-medicating to avoid dealing with his heartbreak. Forever disappointed by what he judged to be the failings of others.

  Eventually, we approached land. A few small, wind-rattled buildings clutched at the shore, harsh coastal cliffs rising like rogue waves behind them. Way up the coast, tiny figures cut in and out of rolling surf. They looked like a school of fish, and for a moment that’s what I took them for, dolphins playing in the tide. But then they would stop, their movements suddenly less fluid, more human, as they inched their way out from shore, only to catch another wave and ride it back in. Surfers.

  Lance lowered the sails and steered in by motor, swung around until the starboard bumper nudged the end of a long wooden quay that jigged and jagged up to a scrap of beach, rocking on floaters. He jumped out, secured a rope, then jumped back in.

  There you are. He pulled my duffle bag out of its storage compartment. His tone was cool and civil and his eyes hid behind shades.

  What—here? We were nowhere, or maybe somewhere, but without my phone I had no idea where that was.

  You wanted to be free, yeah? Independent? You don’t need anyone? There’s a town with a hostel over that hill.

  I looked up at the cliff wall, whiplash switchbacks of road cutting across it.

  I tried again: I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.

  He tossed my bag onto the floating pier and everything recoiled as it landed. I automatically bent my knees into hockey stance for balance.

  Nah, I’m sorry, Chloe. Shouldn’t’ve lashed out at you like that. It’s just sacred to me, yeah? The ocean. Beings, intelligent, sentient beings, live down there. I thought you got that. You’re a nice kid, but . . . Anyway. I just got upset.

  I still couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew he wasn’t looking at me.

  You can call your dad, let him know where you are. Guess you’ll have to borrow a phone.

  Lance hopped onto the dock again and started untying the ropes. Meantime, I gotta be alone. Got to find myself some peace. Get my perspective back. Finally, from his crouch on the dock, he pointed his face directly at me. I felt caught, paralyzed by guilt.

  And you need to figure out your shit. Now get off my boat.

  Drive.

  Drop me at the hospital?

  Rod had left his Porsche at work in Hamilton the night before and had taken the commuter train in to Toronto.

  I thought we might get into our cups last night. Didn’t think I should drive.

  Jules nodded as she sipped her coffee in the hotel’s restaurant. She was trying to think of how to broach the subject of needing a refill for the pills. A re-pill. Rod would not be impressed, would say she was taking too much. And maybe she was, but when she had a flare-up, of her back or her neck or her shoulder or hip, they were the only thing that made it bearable. And the last few weeks had been one long, slow fireworks show of pain.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to take the drugs. In truth, the drugs, even as they softened the signals to her pain receptors, made her feel like crap. Weighed her body down like sodden and stained clothes she couldn’t remove. If she hadn’t needed them the way she did, she never would have taken them in the first place.

  This is where she was, where she’d been. A gruelling pregnancy, an abysmal postpartum depression, the baby dying and everything that came after had cumulatively amounted to three and a half Very Bad Years. Her default mode became—after she’d moved into the spare room, and when she wasn’t at work—lying in bed and watching TV.

  David, the love of her life, had been worried. She saw that. Chloe was maybe seven or eight by then, and she often looked worried too. David had strongly and repeatedly suggested some kind of therapy, but Jules thought she needed to get out of her head, not further into it. She knew he was suffering alongside her, knew she was making it worse, but couldn’t stop herself from wanting to burn it all down.

  Then one day Jules saw a show about a woman whose son had died. In her long depression afterwards, the woman had gained three hundred pounds, and she was now subjecting herself to televised fat-shaming: “to get my life back,” she cried.

  Jules didn’t approve of these shows, of all that newfangled reality television in general, of weight loss shows in particular, and this show she thought was the worst of the worst. She could not imagine willingly undergoing such humiliation, having struggled with her own body image for most of her life. She flipped onto the show by chance but ended up watching the whole thing in what began as morbid fascination and ended in tears of catharsis as she recognized herself in the fat woman’s narrative.

  The trainer on the show got the woman to start running on a treadmill, and by the end of the hour she was running two kilometres, a hundred pounds lighter and smiling.

  And Jules thought, well, alright then, and started running. A lot. Obsessively, according to David. Five days a week, six in the morning, forty degrees or twenty below, it didn’t matter. It helped like nothing else had helped, thinned the impenetrable murk of her depression to a light haze of realistic pessimism. She had more energy, dropped twenty pounds, felt
comfortable in her skin. Drank less. Had to buy new clothes—and shopped for them without emotional breakdowns. Sex, for a while, was almost appealing again. She measured her week in miles and minutes, the looped distances around parks. It gave her life structure, and purpose outside of work and David and Chloe—whom she saw more than before but still kept at a distance. They were too hopeful, too doe-eyed, too expectant. Like they were waiting for something she couldn’t give them, which really meant they were waiting for her to fail.

  Then one day she lifted a box of files onto her desk at an awkward angle, and she felt something give. It didn’t hurt, but she felt wrongness ratchet up along her vertebrae. And then it did hurt. By the next day she couldn’t get out of bed. She’d blown a disc: major herniation, they said, probably from the impact of running with a weak core. And that was that. A year of physio, a lot of time spent lying in bed or doing exercises on the floor, and now her life was measured in counts of ten, the road to healing much longer than any she had run.

  Two years later, when she finally felt as if she could run again, she was “strongly advised” against it. So she walked. A lot. Pulled her groin; returned to physio. After the groin, it was the hip, then the shoulder, then a second disc above the first one, then her groin again. Just as one thing was healing, something else would go. She was on and off various pain medications, forever increasing dosages. Her mood, her spirit, fell, like a stone through the ocean, sinking, plateauing and sinking further, an inexorable journey towards an unseeable bottom. After much pleading by David and her doctors, antidepressants were added into her daily cocktail. Those years blurred for her now. Exercising when she could (less and less), drinking heavily when she couldn’t (more and more) and always returning to the spare room, the flickering blue light and the bottle of Scotch. It was a bleak time for her, for all of them in the house of loss, each of them shrouded in a private grief.

  And then David left. The baby had been dead seven years and Jules was still in mourning; Chloe at thirteen was almost self-sufficient, and he had met someone else. Those were all the reasons he gave her, not that he needed a reason to go live his life, since they clearly weren’t living one together anymore. Although she initially panicked at the idea of it, of having to look after Chloe and the house and herself without the crutch that was David, she quickly found that a great strain had eased. Chloe was furious with her for letting him go, for pushing him away, for not even trying to stop him from leaving, and she raged about it, frequently, for six months (or was it twelve), but Jules didn’t think it was her fault or her problem to solve. It was simply the way things were and they would have to carry on without him. Her injuries, her discomfort, continued, but she was able, slowly, to reconstruct a more functional persona, was able to move, however slightly, out of crisis mode. Pain became more about management than simply suffering. With a tentative new optimism, she sought out new doctors, new treatments, new exercises, new explanations. Had her failure to do some basic physical activity left her weaker than everyone else her age? Was it a genetic deficiency? Or some kind of disease? Someone had to be able to tell her, to find out what was wrong and fix it. But no one could.