A House in the Sky (4 page)

After work, while some of my friends from the Drink were going to after-hours clubs, I was heading home to curl myself around Jamie as he slept. He and I had settled into a quiet routine. In the mornings we went for meandering walks along the Bow River. When he wasn’t working, we went out for expensive lunches. I found a used bookstore called the Wee Book Inn near our apartment and bought piles of paperbacks to read. For the first time in my life, I had real money in the bank, enough to fund a year at university. I’d just
turned nineteen. I knew I was supposed to want a stack of textbooks and some sort of high-minded career plan, but that didn’t interest me. I figured going to university would only put me in lockstep with all the twentysomethings in suits who coursed down our street in the mornings headed to their skyscraper jobs, resurfacing at the Drink ten hours later, acting as if they were fifty years old, flopping into the leather barrel chairs, saying, “Jesus, what a shitty day. I’ll have a gimlet, straight up.”

*

Back at home, my mother’s latest boyfriend—a cruel man named Eddie with whom she’d been living in Red Deer—had been sent to jail for racketeering. My brothers and I agreed this was a relief. She had dumped Russell back when I was twelve, but still she gravitated toward unstable men. As a result, I’d spent most of my high school years living with my dad and Perry in a house they’d bought in Sylvan Lake. Mark had moved in with friends, while Nathaniel had stayed on with our mother. We all loved her, but we worried anytime a man got close.

My mother was in her early forties, her dark hair not yet showing any gray. After Eddie left, I took the bus from Calgary every few weeks to have dinner with her. She’d moved into a sweet little house in Red Deer and found a good job with a Catholic social services agency as an aide in a group home for troubled teens. She’d been reading self-help books, trying to teach herself to meditate. She spoke about saving her money to travel. Her talk was filled with the language of fresh starts.

I used to joke with Jamie that my childhood seemed tailor-made for
The Jerry Springer Show
—not just an episode, more like a whole season. My mom had a thing for bad men. My dad was one of the few openly gay people in town. My grandparents prayed fervently to Jesus, speaking in tongues when the occasion called for it. My brothers struggled with drugs. I, too, had issues. I often starved myself to stay thin, obsessively counting calories. I cut my food into halves and quarters and then ate half of that. After going days without a real meal, I’d snap and
binge, eating everything in sight before forcing myself to vomit. This, too, was right out of the dysfunctional-family handbook.

Still, we tried. The year Eddie was sent to jail, my father called my mother and tentatively invited her to come to Christmas. They’d softened toward each other, my parents, over years of forced communication about school schedules and which child needed new shoes. Also, Perry and my father were as settled and married-like as the next couple, more so than my mother had ever been with any of her men. Slowly, she’d come to appreciate this.

Christmas morning, Mom walked through Dad and Perry’s door, with its tinseled wreath and velvety red bow, smiling at me and my brothers, apologizing all over the place that she hadn’t been able to afford gifts. What she’d brought was a painstakingly written batch of letters, printed on pages of computer stationery with colorful Christmas lights around the borders. One for each of us in the room, including Dad and Perry. I opened my letter and read it slowly. In it, she described a few of her best memories, clear and happy moments like the two of us horsing around in front of the mirror in that basement apartment in Sylvan Lake, fluffing up our hair. She spelled out her love for me, and her hopes that I would always have good luck and great adventures. I don’t know what she put in the other letters. All I know is that every one of us was silent and a little teary.

After that, we spent every Christmas together. We would never be a close family, exactly, but we loved one another in a certain fierce way.

J
amie,” I said, “let’s go somewhere.” We’d brought a blanket down to the river one late-summer evening about nine months after moving to Calgary. I was tired and antsy. I had been studying the travel ads in the Sunday paper—the eight-hundred-dollar round-the-world flights, the grainy pictures of palm trees in faraway places, the package deals and flights to cities whose names I’d never heard.

Jamie was on his back, watching the summer clouds slide through the sky. I admired the simple arc of his nose, the smoothness of his skin, the honey brown of his eyes. He was imperturbable, a puzzle to me. His ability to loiter in record stores and thrift shops, to pass time without purpose or go weeks without working, sometimes made me impatient.

“Where do you want to go?” he said.

“Anywhere,” I told him. “I mean it, anywhere. Let’s just plan something, go somewhere.”

Here was what I loved about Jamie: the slow-breaking smile, the long-fingered hand that clamped affectionately onto my shoulder. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Anywhere’s good.”

*

The next day, I was at the Wee Book Inn, digging through old issues of
National Geographic
. Where I wanted to go, really, was Africa, but that hardly felt like a beginner trip. The only place I’d ever been outside of Canada was Disneyland as a kid, once with my dad and once with my
mom, after her divorce settlement came through. Jamie had never left Canada. I tugged out a thick plank of magazines, slid to the floor, and started shopping for a destination.

Jerusalem? Tibet? Berlin? The funny thing about
National Geographic
was that it told the same sort of elemental story every time—featuring whatever was lost or unexplored, mystical or wild.
You’re here,
the magazine seemed to say,
and we’re there.
It was not meant to be a taunt, more like a small flag planted on behalf of the stay-at-homers. Having the magazine was a gesture of respect for the world’s outer limits, its predators and prey.
I see that it’s all there,
it enabled you to say,
and now, thank you, I’ll stay put.

For me, it was also a provocation. There was a cover article on Bolivia and the Madidi, a small national park in the upper basin of the Amazon, where parrots flashed through mahogany trees. In another story, I found photos of white-mist waterfalls slicing into the forests of Paraguay. I unearthed an old issue I’d had as a kid, with a story about a slablike magical plateau somewhere in Venezuela called Roraima, covered in quartz crystals and drifting above the clouds. The names alone seemed delicious and made up. They ran through my mind like poetry as I walked home, erasing the blunt syllables of the place I lived, the places I came from.
Madidi. Venezuela. Paraguay.
The decision about where to go seemed straightforward. No city, no country, no coast in particular. Just a continent: South America.

*

There was a place called the Adventure Travel Company a few blocks from the Drink, where two women sat behind computers, encircled by a mini-coliseum of glossy resort brochures in racks. The cheapest plane tickets we could get from Calgary were to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. It was now early September 2001. I reserved two seats for a trip in January, with return flights six months later, paid in cash.

It was done, happening. The trip became our organizing principle. This was how Jamie and I started our sentences: “When we go on our trip,” or “When the trip gets closer . . .” At the secondhand bookstore, I bought a Lonely Planet guide to South America, thick as a Bible, five
years old, and already thumbed-over. Jamie and I went through it page by page. We imagined ourselves pushing through tangled jungles, communing with the Quechua on our way to summiting snowy peaks beneath a blinding sun.

We read the guidebook’s section on insects and snakes and flesh-eating flies that tunnel into your legs and pythons that dangle from trees, and we let that unsettle us. We read the section called “Dangers and Annoyances” that said we could be pickpocketed or mugged or conned into handing over all our money to an orphanage that wasn’t really an orphanage. We read the warnings about malaria and flimflam artists and highway bandits. We allowed our parents to heap on their concerns about car accidents and fatal fevers. We imagined the worst—or what, in our innocence, we thought of as the worst—because that seemed to be some necessary part of our preparation, owning up to the inherent gamble.

*

By the time Jamie and I left for South America on a frigid morning in January 2002, the world’s dangers were more overtly on display. Thousands of people had died on September 11. There had been anthrax scares and false alarms and people talking on television about a jihadist underworld and an axis of evil. Just before Christmas, a terrorist had boarded a plane in Paris and tried unsuccessfully to ignite his shoe. In Pakistan a few weeks later, a
Wall Street Journal
reporter named Daniel Pearl set off to do an interview connected to the shoe bomber’s financing. He was kidnapped and later beheaded. When it came to danger, the totally unreal had, in the span of a few months, become entirely feasible.

Despite it all, we were going. Our plan was to drift from Venezuela into Brazil and then to Paraguay. Sitting on the tarmac in Calgary as our plane was de-iced, I tried to push away any thoughts of death and disaster. South America was not the Middle East, I told myself. It was not America, even. We’d compressed and rolled and shoved our belongings until they were dense as bricks, making room for what we saw as necessities—extra bottles of mosquito spray and sunblock,
laundry soap, antifungal spray for our shoes, plus a giant squeeze bottle of ketchup and the salt and pepper packages we’d been collecting from fast-food restaurants for months.

When I visited my grandmother before leaving, she donated a hefty jug of antibacterial gel and some Tupperware, all of which I improbably managed to fit into my pack. By way of goodbye, she offered a cheery and quick double disapproval of my travel plans and my everyday fondness for short skirts and high heels. “I hope you know you won’t be able to go down there and wear those, you know,
model
clothes you like to wear,” she said as I planted a kiss on her cheek.

From his recliner in their living room, with its old piano and Grandma Jean’s collection of ceramic purple roses, my grandfather added, “I hope you know if you get yourself into trouble, we won’t have any money to get you out.”

I let this comment float right past.

C
aracas late at night looked only a little like the jungle city I’d been imagining. Our cabdriver spoke English and pointed out landmarks. Most of the buildings were shuttered for the night. I could see big palm trees, their fronds pinwheeling heavily over the broad boulevards. The city looked sedate, leafy, exotic.

This might have been a moment to tuck myself under the crook of Jamie’s arm or kiss his palm and say something about how alive I felt, having traversed this impossible-seeming curve of the earth with him in one day, beginning in the numbing cold of Canada and ending in the drippy heat of another hemisphere. But I didn’t do any of that. It wasn’t that sort of moment. Some part of me was scared by what we’d done.

The next morning, we woke in a three-star hotel room, which our travel agent had booked in advance and was more expensive than any other place we’d stay. I drew back the curtains and got my first glimpse of the waking city. A massive Pepsi billboard sat outside our window. There were skyscrapers in the distance and jets flying overhead. On the street several floors below, people sat in their cars, staring blankly ahead as they waited for the stoplight to turn. It was oddly, depressingly familiar. There were no donkey carts, no parrots, no panpipers or charming old women wearing ruffled blouses and lace on their heads. Only the air felt foreign—thick and a little mossy.

I pushed open the window and peered down. On the sidewalk, several
brown-faced men in baseball caps were selling fruit out of wooden crates: piles of oranges, peaches, papayas, and several things I didn’t recognize. “Jamie, come see this,” I said.

Looking over my shoulder, he said, “Should we go buy some?” Jamie was always hungry.

I was remembering what the guidebook said about fruit and vegetables, how everything had to be scrubbed and peeled. I was afraid of bacteria at that point, the same way I was afraid of terrorists and bandits and being alone. I was planning to eat nothing but thoroughly cooked rice and beans all the way through South America, and to do a lot of hand-washing. Beyond that, we had our ketchup.

“Let’s not,” I said.

*

Here’s a lesson we learned quickly: Your guidebook—especially when it is five years old—is at some point going to fail you. While the world’s Hiltons and Sheratons, with their breakfast buffets and Friday-night poolside mariachi bands, will probably be there for eternity, places like the Hostel Hermano and the Posada Guamanchi, in the strata where rooms rent for eight dollars a night, come and go. The
doña
who once fixed morning
churros
with sliced mango and hot coffee for guests leaves for an indefinite visit with her grandchildren. The elderly man who runs an “immaculate and friendly” guesthouse near the bus station hands it off to his son, who worries less about the spiders and roaches and the creeping shower mold and focuses on making late-night passes at all the tanned lady backpackers who, without an update in the guidebook, have yet to be directed elsewhere.

In our first weeks in Venezuela, Jamie and I walked miles, strapped sweatily into our backpacks, looking for low-interest money changers and two-star posadas that had morphed abruptly into massage parlors or motorcycle repair shops. We waited at a roadside bus stop in the withering heat only to learn hours later, bickering and thoroughly sunburned, that the Tuesday-afternoon bus to Caripe was now a Friday-morning bus.