Algoma (3 page)

“Shit.”

She dropped the bedsheets onto the kitchen table, where they soaked up the spilled orange juice from breakfast, and ran to the closet for her coat. Wearing a parka and her blue flannel pyjama pants, her scratchy wool hat still in her hand, Algoma ran outside to see if she could catch up. She got as far as the end of the driveway before she realized she’d forgotten his lunch inside. She stomped her foot and ran back into the house. The day was not off to a good start.

Canvas lunch bag firmly tucked under her arm, Algoma walked down the street. She would have to walk all the way to the school to give Ferd his lunch, making her late for work. Josie was opening. It wouldn’t matter too much. She relaxed and slowed her pace. She could take her time.

The day was bright and sharp, the air so cold it was like a void stealing her breath. A sucker punch. If Algoma was going to walk outside in freezing temperatures, she preferred to walk in the early evening when she could look into her neighbours’ windows. The blue glow of the televisions, a dining-room light left on, dishes still on the table. Each window a different story. During the day, the windows were black. Uniformly uneventful. At least there was no one to see her in her pyjamas, night-knotted hair sticking out from beneath her hat.

The end of the street opened up into a football field, half of which was converted into two ice rinks during winter—one for children, and the other, the one with the white boards, for hockey. On weekends and holidays, the unwritten rule was that informal hockey games started at 1:00 p.m. Around 2:00 p.m., the less-skilled players were kicked off to the kids’ rink. Everyone wore different jerseys, so onlookers had trouble identifying the teams, even if the players never did.

Ferd’s school lay past the rinks and across the road. A one-storey red brick building, the windows adorned with symmetrical paper cut-outs of white and blue snowflakes and multicoloured paper chains. And behind it, forest. Everything in town was book-ended by woods.

The wind picked up and bit at the part of Algoma’s throat that was exposed. With one hand she held the top of her jacket shut, with the other, Ferd’s lunch.

The school bell rang. From across the snow-covered field, Algoma watched the last students round the corner of the building and disappear inside. She could almost hear the swishing of their snow pants as they ran. She continued along the well-trampled path the kids had created from their daily trips to school and back. The path stretched diagonally across the field, wove in between the two open-sided rinks, until it ended at the crosswalk.

As Algoma neared the rinks, she saw they were wet and glossy. A new coat of water hardening over old layers. Another gust of bitterly cold wind blasted her face. Head down, eyes up, she admired the perfect rinks, the old skate marks made smooth with water and constant care. There was a craft to maintaining ice. To enjoy it, to be on it, was to ruin it. It was only ever this perfect in the morning. Two sightless scleras of ice.

Algoma approached the hockey rink where the boys and Gaetan used to play. The white boards were topped with a chain-link fence that kept pucks from hitting passers-by. She looked in, half expecting to see Ferd and Leo skating in circles around the rink, shooting pucks into the boards.

While there was no one on the ice, there was something on it. A small, white square marred the surface. Before she even realized what she was doing, Algoma walked along the outside of the boards until she reached the opening. She carefully stepped onto the rink. Smaller boot prints had congealed into the ice. Ridges that would trip up players later on. In the middle of the rink, she squatted down, careful not to slip, and peeled the glazed paper from the ice. A piece of dry skin on an otherwise perfect face. She took off her mitts and unfolded the half wet, half frozen paper.

Dear Leo…

A month of lunches came and went. At every turn, Algoma found notes in the house, anywhere there was or had been water. Soon, the notes exceeded the stitched limits of her pockets, and nearly her sanity. With every note she retrieved, the word count increased. Soon, she could not find a single piece of paper on which to write her grocery list, nor could she take a shower without leaving with a wad of wet paper moulded into her palm. A one-sided conversation drying on the window sill.

Desperate to keep them from Gaetan, she had taken to storing the blurry notes in a shoebox behind a bucket of old rags under the kitchen sink. Each note looked similar to the last, different only in the way the water had blurred the ink. A homemade Rorschach test. She wrote down every word she could make out in a small journal she also kept in the shoebox. Within the first two weeks, she’d collected two hundred words, all strung together like a strand of mini-lights constantly blinking off and on in her mind, exhausting her.

Gaetan moved through the motions of his job and home life with little deviation from one day to the next. A bartender, he typically worked nights and slept through most of the day, seeing little of his family. He woke up to eat his breakfast in the early afternoon when the house was empty and came home from work when everyone was asleep. The tide of beer in the fridge rose and fell with the weeks.

“I don’t have a problem,” he said when Algoma had asked him if he thought he drank too much. “It’s part of my job,” he said. “It’s research. Technically, a write-off.”

The empties were piled high in the shed, boozy chimes that crashed together whenever Ferd tried to pull his bike out from the teetering stacks.

If Algoma pieced together her family member’s lives—her son’s early mornings, her husband’s late nights, and her middling days—it was endless, breathless. Each time of the day belonged to someone in the house, one person owning it as they would a room, arranging it to suit them and leaving everyone else to adjust.

Algoma owned the day, all overhead sun and shadowless.

______________

7:17 p.m. -17°C. Wind from everywhere, blustery.
Electric kettle at full boil.

Gaetan blew into the house after an unusually scheduled day shift at Club Rebar, a small bar a bottle’s throw away from the town’s pulp mill. He was in a good mood and sober, two things that rarely coincided.

“I brought home steaks!” he said. His dark brown eyes sparkled with pride.

Algoma poured water for her tea and tried to not think about what kind of groceries she could have bought with the money he’d spent on steaks. It was payday and he was king for a day.

As soon as she set the kettle down, Gaetan grabbed her by her waist and spun her around in the air, narrowly missing hitting her head on the doily-covered swing lamp.

While mid-air, she decided to tell him about the notes. He was her husband; he should know. When he set her down, she turned to him. “I have something to tell you.”

“I was thinking we could fry them up with butter like my mom used to do,” Gaetan said. He tossed the package of steaks onto the counter. “Do we still have that cast iron pan? The big one?”

“Uh, sure,” Algoma said. “I mean, yes.” She wasn’t sure if he’d heard her or if he was trying to avoid any conversation that might bring down his mood. She looked at her husband. For the first time in a year, she felt comforted by his presence. Maybe she would wait until after dinner to tell him about the notes, about the crack opening around their remaining son. A few hours wouldn’t matter.

Algoma set the table for two while Gaetan pan-fried the T-bones with a heaping mix of onions and mushrooms. Ferd was watching a movie with Lake at the Fox, a monthly ritual his aunt had instituted after Leo’s accident. After the movie, they always went back to her house, ate plain cheese pizza, and fell asleep in front of the television like teenagers.

“You smell like the bar,” Algoma said.

“You’re right. Watch this,” Gaetan said, turning down the stove. “I’ll take a shower. I’ll be quick. Five minutes.”

A half hour later, they sat down to a meal of steaks, frozen French fries, canned peas, and sautéed onions and mushrooms. Algoma looked expectantly at Gaetan who was shoveling forkfuls of over-salted peas into his mouth. He was smiling. The words did not come to her; they remained lodged in her throat like a dry piece of bread.

As soon as she was done eating what she could force down, she scraped the rest of her food onto Gaetan’s plate and stood up to put her dishes in the sink. She couldn’t tell him. It was only fair to Ferd that he had one parent who was keeping it together, even if only by a little. She resolved to keep each word she’d fished out of tub and drain to herself. The house was speaking to her one sopping, stuttering word at a time.

Gaetan ate quickly and in silence.

“Good?” she asked.

He nodded furiously, his fork and knife hacking apart the meat, drops of blood and grease spilling onto the table.

“Good,” she said, and sat down at the table.

As he ate, she drifted into worry about Ferd. Last winter, he’d been the only one to see Leo slip through the ice. The emergency workers who’d dredged the river never found Leo’s body, nor had the fishermen who lined the shore the following spring. Even the bear Ferd had reported seeing never turned up by hook or oar. Most people in town believed he’d made the animal up as a coping mechanism. An excuse. Something to take the blame away from his brother. While his parents openly grieved the loss, it was obvious Ferd did not believe his brother was gone.

Lost, said one of the notes. Come back when you’re ready, read another.

“You make good dinner,” Gaetan said to Algoma.

“You bought it,” she replied.

They sat together in a moment of comfortable silence.

Gaetan popped the last piece of meat into his mouth and smiled. “Let’s watch a movie after this, okay?”

Algoma nodded and stood up. As she reached over to pick up his dishes, Gaetan, feeling the water from Ferd’s latest note bleed through the back pocket of his jeans, inched his chair away from her. It was the third note he’d found in the shower drain that month. He was surprised the pipes in the house still worked at this point.

“Everything will be fine,” he said, as she walked away.

Algoma looked over her shoulder. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” he said. He couldn’t say it twice because he didn’t believe it.

Ferd woke up from a dead sleep, jarred awake from a terrible dream. Feeling the hard ground beneath him, he panicked. He couldn’t remember where he was. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he remembered he was at his Aunt Lake’s.

In the past year, he’d felt adrift on a series of different beds in different houses, mostly those of his aunts who felt it their duty to care for him, feed him, have him sleep in their spare beds, on couches, and at Lake’s, mostly on the floor. He’d become a talisman. If they held him close, did well by him, nothing would happen to their loved ones.

He stood up and went into the bathroom to pee. After washing his hands and drinking from the tap, he eyed the bathtub. The clean, white enamel and round edges looked inviting. He climbed into the tub, curled up, and fell back asleep. With his head next to the drain, it was the closest he’d felt to Leo in months.

______________

4:00 p.m. 22°C. Wind S, light.
Birds bathing in the Coca-Cola-spiked birdbath.

From the backyard where they were lying in wait behind the shed, Ferd and Leo could hear their mother cry out from the guest room and the sound of her pumps hitting the pale green linoleum. The side door opened.

“The chocolates! You ate all of the chocolates and wrapped the box back up again!” Algoma said, her voice high and shrill. While the backyard appeared empty, she knew her boys were hiding there. She shook the empty box in the air. “I can’t believe you two! What am I going to do now? They were special.”

The boys tried to muffle their laughter, hands over their mouths.

Algoma was going out with an old friend to celebrate her birthday. She’d bought the chocolates as a gift, an annual tradition that had started before the boys were even born. They would never understand, and there was no time or money to replace the gift. The Beaudoins lived pay cheque to pay cheque with Gaetan’s drinking soaking up any extra they had each month, and then some.

“Ferdinand!” Algoma stamped her foot in frustration, tight fists at her sides. The point of her heel slid neatly into the sprinkler-softened lawn.

“Leopold!” She struggled to release her pump from the ground and almost fell over.

The boys peeked around the corner of the shed just in time to see their mother turn around and storm back into the house. The door slammed behind her, the brass Virgin Mary rattling against the wood.

Ferd turned to Leo. “Guess she hasn’t seen the fridge yet.”

A howl erupted from the house.

Leo put his face in his hands. “Maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” he said through his fingers.

Like he’d seen his father do with friends, Ferd threw his arm around his brother’s shoulders. “It was fun, right? And you’re full? Don’t worry, everything will be okay. I promise.”

Leo pulled his hands away from his face and nodded. He wanted to believe his brother, but didn’t. He’d gone along with it because he wanted to see if it was easier to just do whatever Ferd wanted. Yet he had known he would regret it and already did.

Waiting for their father to return home from work, Ferd and Leo sat at the kitchen table, their legs too short to hit the floor. Down the hall, Algoma sat on the closed lid of the toilet seat in the washroom and sobbed into her hands. A narrow woman, she was folded over herself like a switchblade, her power, her edge, for the moment at least, weakened. She’d cancelled dinner with Audrey by feigning sudden illness—something “food related”—and told Soo she wouldn’t need a sitter. Algoma had telephoned Gaetan at the Club and had told him what had happened. He’d left right away citing a family emergency.

In the kitchen, the fridge door was open to reveal the thin ribs of two wire shelves and the empty plastic belly of the crisper. The boys had eaten everything to be had. All of it eaten in the short amount of time between the beginning of Gaetan’s shift and the end of Algoma’s. A small window of time where the boys were trusted to not burn down the house. Instead, they’d eaten it.