Algoma (26 page)

“I can wait.”

Neither Bay, Steel, nor Ferd left the house that day, the sisters staying over a second night to watch movies. An extended slumber party. After a couple of phone calls, Cen, Port, Lake, and Soo arrived with sleeping bags tucked under their arms, the house filled with the people Algoma knew she would never really lose.

“We should do this once a month,” Lake said. She’d already pulled out her pocket calender from her purse as soon as she came through the door.

“You want to ritualize everything,” Cen said. “Let it go. Sometimes once is enough. Plan and you’re planning for disappointment.”

Seeing the wounded look on her sister’s face she playfully punched her in the arm. “Or once a month until we’re dead and even after then, okay?”

Standing in the kitchen, Algoma winced at the comment.

“Oh shit,” Cen stuttered. “Sorry, I meant—”

Algoma waved her off. “It’s fine.”

The evening became one of lower-middle-income extravagance. Plans were hatched and several women were sent out into town for supplies: wine, take-out, and movie rentals. Soon, they were settled into their old places on the floor—the same configuration they’d observed as kids. Cen and Steel by the window, Algoma, Port, and Lake with their backs to the couch, and Bay and Soo on their stomachs facing the television. The couch was empty. It was where their parents would have sat. Ferd sat in his father’s old chair, legs draped over the arms.

Algoma looked around at her family, what was left of it.

“Ready?”

______________

3:21 p.m. -21°C. Wind E, light.
Snow like a never-ending blanket.

Everywhere Algoma turned, there was noise. The sound of family members quietly talking to one another, the creak and slam of the side door as it opened and closed again and again. Too many times, Algoma thought. Too much. The sirens were piercing. She didn’t understand why they were still here. Hot red lights coloured everything. The emergency was over—over even before she realized it had begun.

Bags of chips—an impromptu dinner—were being ripped open, gutted, and poured into glass bowls. Bay walked around offering them to the people standing around in the kitchen and living room. Cen was in the kitchen making dip out of leftover sour cream. Algoma stared. Why don’t you leave, she wanted to scream. The phone rang. Again. The sound grated against the inside of her skull. She was grateful when Gaetan picked it up and slammed the receiver back down. He ripped the cord out of the wall, walked into their bedroom, and slammed the door behind him. Someone was wearing heels on the wooden floorboards in the living room. Each step sounded like a gunshot. Outside, a dog barked. Its owner was likely standing at the curb in front of her house along with the others looking in, or trying to.

Even Algoma’s own body was a grotesque symphony of unwanted noise. She swore she could hear each muscle sliding around beneath her skin like steaks in a plastic bag. Her knees popped like firecrackers when she tried to sit or stand, and she could not do either for any length of time. She rubbed her hands together, paper on paper. Her skirt sliding off her knees a waterfall of fabric. She tried to clear her mind using a technique she had learned years before. She had to focus on one object, every detail until everything else disappeared. Strawberries were her favourite. She pictured one, its contours, cleft chin tip. She counted each sharp brown seed and wondered how those small teeth did not tear your insides apart on the way down. Focus. The exact colour of the berry somewhere between a fire truck and a sunset over the river. How the sun reflected off the rippled water.

Water.

She couldn’t escape it. Most of her body was made of it. Part of the town surrounded by it. Her oldest son had just drowned in it. Focus. She pictured the river as she had seen it a thousand times in her youth, but now Leopold was in it. Leo. Algoma imagined a bump in the river like a child hiding under the covers, the negligible amount of water that his small body would have displaced. Focus. Summer evenings, the river looked like blackberry juice, thick and dark. There were no natural beaches along the shore, only softball-sized stones, mud, and marsh. Algoma always wore her running shoes when she swam in the river, a barrier between her high-arched feet and the slick toupees of algae that covered every stump and stone.

The length of the river was bordered by trees, a mix of deciduous and coniferous. Coniferous. She liked that word, so much like carnivorous that as a child she had feared all pine and fir until she’d learned the true meaning.

Every year, a new person announced they would swim across the widest part of the river for a charity or cause. Algoma did it once a year for no one, only to know that she had, and would continue to do it. She was a good swimmer—above average with enviable endurance for someone who was not particularly athletic. Focus. Further down the river, it thinned, became narrow. A shallow marsh complete with a neatly defined food chain: dragonfly, frog, snake, pike. Who was feasting on her son now? Or had he—his body—made it all the way to where the river widened again, where it became fast and furious and joined a larger river.

Focus.

Accidents were part of the river’s history: a father drowning while trying to save his daughter who would later be rescued; a teenager who dove head first into submerged boulders; a drunk who forgot how to swim, or no longer cared.

Focus.

Gaetan came out of the bedroom and appeared behind her, placing two small white pills on the table in front of her. He swallowed the other two he had in his hand.

Stones from the river.

Algoma swallowed the pills with a long drink of water. Within minutes, her body was awash in inky river water that slowed everything down. Every movement exaggerated yet precise. Her heart thumped slower and slower until she wondered if she had to remember to make it beat. Around her, family, friends, and police buzzed themselves into a blur. The priest sat on the couch eating a butter tart off a dessert plate. There were empty paper cups everywhere like small burial stones around the house. The room was unbearably hot. Algoma clawed at her sweater, pulling the sweat-dampened wool over her head. Everyone else was too distracted by what they should do or say next to notice her peel off her camisole and nylons and drop them onto the floor. Her shoulders were slick with sweat. Half-dressed, her bare feet tapped out the seconds.

When Ferd came out of his room, she motioned him to her lap. “Come here,” she said.

He hadn’t sat in her lap in years, but quickly climbed up into her comforting arms. His eyes were unfocused and pooling. Gaetan stood behind them, his hands gripping her shoulders, making bloodless impressions in her already pale skin. His head above hers and hers above Ferd’s. A totem pole of grief.

It was difficult to grieve when there was no body. It was not just the closure of being able to see the body, to trust what the authorities had already told you: that your loved one is dead. It was the practicalities. Should I buy a casket? Who do I have to call? Do you need a grave stone to mark the grave if the grave is empty? What should the inscription read?

Wish you were here.

Algoma tried to concentrate on the service instead. She was at least sure of that, what needed to be done. There needed to be a proper service, if not for her, for everyone else.

The first item: a photo. She needed a photo of Leo to have enlarged, so that it could be posted at the front of the church on an easel like they had done for the young private who had died overseas. The soldier had stepped onto an IED and his remains, what could be collected, had been shipped back to Canada—first to Trenton, then Toronto, then home. An impossibly long trip for the family. Algoma had attended the service. Several hundred weeping faces, only some she recognized. They had kept the casket closed while the priest spoke of service, acceptance and deliverance. Algoma still had the funeral card folded in her wallet.

She went into her bedroom and pulled out two family photo albums from the top shelf in her closet. Both albums had been sale purchases. She had immediately made herself like the tacky album covers because she was saving a dollar off each. The first cover was a Vaselined-lense shot of a fawn sitting in a field of dandelions. The second was of a young woman kneeling down at the base of a tree, her hands pressed together in prayer, her dewy face in perfect relaxation. Algoma sat on the floor and flipped through the thick pages of the album. The protective plastic covering on each sheet crackled under her touch. It didn’t take long for her to realize that there were no appropriate photos. Famously camera shy, Leo was always half out of the frame or had one hand obscuring his face in the last second before the flash popped. The only photos where he was in frame were when he was fishing or hunting. Leo and a wide variety of dead animals. Speckled trout, hares, partridge, pike, and pickerel. Algoma traced a finger along the edge of a photo of Ferd. He was leaning against the family car with his arms crossed over his narrow chest. He had the cool air of a twenty-five-year-old stuck in a miniature body. His face partially obscured by shadow and turned so the side of his neck where Leo’s birthmark would have been wasn’t visible. It was perfect. She carefully pulled back the plastic covering and peeled the photo off the page.

Who would know?

Ferd stared at a photo of his own face at the front of the church. Unsettled, he shifted in his seat, but said nothing. While he was sure someone had made a mistake, he didn’t want to upset his mother by pointing it out. The entire service, he thought, was ridiculous. All the effort and incense for someone who wasn’t dead. He’d woken up that morning convinced his brother was alive—he could feel it. Or more accurately, he couldn’t feel Leo’s absence. They would feel ridiculous when Leo came home. He stifled a laugh.

“We’re gathered here today by loss,” the priest said. He paused deeply between sentences so each one seemed more profound. “But we’ve always been together.”

“Beloved son,” Ferd read off a blue ribbon that stretched across the centre of an impossibly large wreath of white carnations. White carnations were his mother’s favourite flower, not his brother’s. Leo had loved Orange Hawkweed, a bright orange and yellow flower that grew alongside gravel roads and in meadows. The prickly stems that said don’t pick. In his mother’s next life, he hoped she’d come back and choose a different flower. Something harder to find. She made it too easy for people to show their love—even he knew that. Too cheap. A twelve-for-ten-dollar bouquet.

Anemone.

He would try to remember to tell her after the service that her favourite flowers should be anemones. His teacher had received them on her birthday last year and made the entire class repeat after her. Anemone.

Ferd untucked his dress shirt and unbuttoned the bottom button, his way of reminding himself that he had something to remember. He fidgeted in his seat and absently flipped through the pages of the battered hymn book while the priest droned on about mourning, God’s open arms, eternal happiness, whatever. Ferd thought that the priest in his long robes, threaded with gold, looked like a magician as he waved his hands over the child-sized white casket.

“I have to bury something,” Ferd had heard his mother argue with his father two days before.

It was like burying an empty time capsule. Nothing for future explorers and archaeologists to find hundreds of years from now when they unearthed the casket. Ferd laughed. He wished he could see their faces when they popped open the lid and found nothing at all. Maybe some dried out flowers, faded silk.

A blonde altar boy with rosacea swung the incense ball.

“Abracadabra,” Ferd said. “Poof, he’s gone.” He clapped his hands together and immediately felt the sharp jab of his mother’s elbow in his ribs and his father’s eyes on him.

“Have you no respect for your brother?” Gaetan hissed.

Ferd realized that his parent’s expectations were no longer split in half between him and his brother, that everything he did or did not do would be magnified. He was an only child by default, at least for now. He looked around at the other mourners seated in the church and tried to pick out the other only children. Tabitha. Jean-Marie. David. Lise. There weren’t many. The service droned on as family members took turns speaking about Leo’s love of nature: “So vibrant, so full of life.” Ferd rolled his eyes. They needed a thesaurus instead of a bible. Already he could picture making fun of the service with Leo when he returned. He’d have to remember to tell him that Aunt Danielle called him “a boy who had succeeded in being a part of the nature he loved so much.” It was like Leo had been turned to mud or a log. Ferd undid another button on the shirt his mother had carefully ironed the night before.

“You don’t even have to mist the shirt,” he’d tried to joke. She had been crying so hard that her tears had spilled onto the ironing board.

“Go to your room,” she’d said. “Just go to your room and get into bed. You don’t even know what you’re saying.”

Ferd wondered if there was a different category for only children who were only children because their siblings had died. Listening in on his parents’ card games when they had friends over, he felt he’d learned all he needed to know about life and death. From his bedroom, he could hear everything: cards slapped down, pots of quarters won, the fridge door being opened and shut. Tongues loosened with wine and beer, personal histories spilling out. He learned that not all babies lived through childbirth. Or some did, but with problems that would take them within the first year. There existed caskets even smaller than Leo’s. Everything did not always go as planned. Old age was a privilege, not a right.

Those nights standing at his bedroom door Ferd had wondered if the parents told their next child, the one that lived, that they were not the first. Not the only. A permanent replacement. He liked knowing that he had entered the world with a friend. His parents, through no conscious effort of their own, had ensured that he would never be lonely. At least in the beginning.

“In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit, amen,” the priest finished. He walked down among the pews holding people’s hands, handing them tissues that he pulled out from the voluminous folds of his hassock. He held Ferd’s hands especially tight.