Elizabeth and After (4 page)

“Great.”

“He’s back on the wagon now. Dr. Knight said he’d have a hangover for a month. That or die.”

Chrissy was in the house on the Second Line Road, a few miles north of West Gull; Carl was three thousand miles west, halfway up Vancouver Island in a bunkhouse made by shoving two trailers together. But her voice was coming through so clear and perfect she could have been talking right into his ear, though he couldn’t feel her breath, just remember it.

“How much was it worth?”

“Nothing now.” She paused and in the silence Carl considered, as he had been ever since the beginning of their conversation, how unusual it was for Chrissy to be calling him. She sucked in her breath, the way she always did before letting out something she’d been holding on to. “If you come home, you can have half custody.”

This was, Carl knew, a time to say the right thing. Or nothing at all.

“What does Lizzie want?”

“She could use a father.”

“That could be me.”

“You’ll have to get a place.”

“Thanks for telling me.” Keep it light. “I was going to move in with you and Fred.”

“Funny man. I meant you can’t count on me to take care of you.”

I never could
, he almost replied. But stopped himself. The truth was that Chrissy had tried to take care of him, which was sometimes more than he had been able to do for himself.

“You still drinking?”

“Not much,” Carl said.

“Fighting?”

“No.”

“Well,” Chrissy said. “I’ll tell Lizzie you’re on your way.”

It came to him that the craving he had was like a wound. A line drawn by a knife through his flesh and soul. Everything had fled the sharp steel. Sometimes the yearning hunger grew more raw with every breath and if he tried to breathe deeply the knifeline opened so wide he felt dizzy.

Carl had been driving for four days, four days during which it seemed almost as many thousands of miles of highway had snaked between his eyes and coiled into his brain. He had the window open, the cab of his truck swirled with cool night air, the warm steady lick of rubber on pavement was running through him. He had his hands on the steering wheel in a way that unexpectedly reminded him of his father and he found himself recalling McKelvey in the kitchen, his hair a big unruly thatch, forehead burnt scarlet by the sun, swipes of grease on his T-shirt, wide lips wrapped around a cigarette while he looked mockingly across the table at Carl.

It was after midnight and to keep himself awake he had the radio on loud. Country music. Gospel songs. Hurting songs. Songs about men and women driving around in trucks and drinking and being sorry. All that hurting was enough to make you sad except that now it was also making him want to have a real woman in his truck, a real live voice full of smoke and fire and rough edges. Maybe it was Chrissy he wanted.
Ever since their conversation he’d been continuing it alone, picking it up and dropping it, explaining, complaining, blaming, saying goodbye a thousand different ways. Suddenly rounding a corner he was into the white glare of service-station light and he thought he saw a woman stepping out of the shadows, tall and wearing a billowy white shirt he couldn’t quite see.

Carl pulled into the lot. There was no one there. Just oil-soaked air coming up from the gravel and the smell of grease from the still-open café.

I
CE
R
IVER
, said the screen-door sign. Inside was a little of everything: fishing tackle, knives, magazines, groceries, a couple of shelves of clothes. He sat down at the counter feeling stunned. This was how it had always been when he dried out—sometimes his body would want a drink so much his circuits overloaded and he couldn’t feel anything at all.

“Hungry?” asked the waitress.

Carl looked up. She had on a white apron and he realized he must have seen her outside, getting something from the trailer parked at the back of the lot. Close up she was everything but ethereal: she was wearing a hairnet over dark hair that was twisted in brightly coloured plastic curlers, and as she waited for Carl to make up his mind she started tapping her foot and twitching her mouth in time.

“Just coffee,” Carl said. He’d skipped supper but couldn’t interest himself in anything on the menu. Then he noticed a glass case with desserts and ordered a piece of blueberry pie with ice cream. It was years since he had seen a crust soaked through and stained purple with blueberry juice.

“Home-made,” she said, bringing him what must have been a quarter of the pie. It tasted like home: sweet, sharp but no longer familiar.

On the way out he bought an Ice River T-shirt to give Lizzie and a shirt for himself so he’d have something clean. While she was entering the numbers into the cash register, the waitress asked him if he was going far.

“West Gull,” Carl said, as though it was a place everyone must know.

“You want to gas up? Last chance for a hundred miles.”

Hours later, still running on Ice River fuel, he was arrowing south from Northern Ontario to the rock-studded farmland that surrounds Long Gull Lake. He was back to thinking about the emptiness inside himself—the fear, the nervousness, the sometimes desperate craving that made his hands reach out for whatever could fill them. But as he got closer to home the landscape flooded into him and every moon-silhouetted tree, every silvery rock formation, every stretch of water glittering black with nightlight calmed and soothed him. He was looking at the moon, at the way it transformed the clouds into sculpted sand dunes that arched across the sky. Then there was a series of heavy thumps beneath the truck. In the red glare of his tail lights a raccoon lay motionless on the shoulder, its body torn open from neck to tail. As he pulled over and turned off the engine he was engulfed by a tidal wave of insect noise: cheeps, clicks, hums, whirrs, all supported by the slow rhythmic croaking of frogs. Carl got down on his knees and crawled under the truck. He lit a match—there was a long smear of blood along the exhaust, a patch of bloody fur on the muffler. When the match burned out Carl lay still for a moment.

In the distance he heard a car approaching. As it crested the hill its horn began to blare. For a moment the light caught his eyes and he thought the car was going to smash into the
back of his truck. Its horn was still going when it passed. Carl could feel the side wind through his hair and slapping against the back of his neck.

“She asked for you,” Chrissy had said. “She asks for you almost every day.”

In the glove compartment was a stack of postcards from Lizzie held together by an elastic. He’d sent them to her at Christmas, stamped and addressed. For almost seven months they’d been floating back. “Love, xox, love, Lizzie.” “Love from your daughter.” “Goodbye for now.”

The road and surrounding bush began to emerge in the dawn. Mist covered the swamps and lay in the hollows of the fields, and the pure light of morning played hide-and-seek with the hills and tall maples. When he came to the farm he stopped. The house, once fronted by a big garden that was supposed to feed them all winter, had been put into grass, spotted with baby poplars, pines and birdhouses. The house had been clad in metal siding and the Richardson Real Estate sign swung from a black post planted near the road.

Carl got out of his truck and stretched. He looked at the house where he’d been born and had lived until he and Chrissy got married and moved into their first place, the apartment above the West Gull barber shop. Away, he’d often thought that seeing the farm again would set off an explosion of anger or nostalgia. But now it just reminded him of his father lying on the kitchen floor, too drunk to move. His mother’s absence. The reception after the funeral. His own child self that had gone missing from this revised and prettified landscape.

Back in the truck he zigzagged to a small road that ran beside a creek where he would be able to clean up without being seen. After he’d washed and shaved he sat looking at the
moving water. On the surface were tiny rills, trails of bubbles, folds and curves that stayed constant as the water shaped itself to the rocks below. He could already feel himself coming back to West Gull the same way, fitting himself to everything that couldn’t be changed.

Chrissy opened the door to him and her first thought was that he had shrunk. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, green and blue checks, creased across the middle and the sides as though it had just come out of the package five minutes earlier. He was standing in the doorway, frozen. She was, too. She hadn’t expected it to hit her like this—just the sight of him. Then right before her eyes, in this little time bubble neither of them seemed able to break, he was growing back to normal, or was it just her heart trying to jump out of her body and into his.

Lizzie was coming down the stairs. Fred had already left for work.

“Well,” Chrissy said, because she didn’t want Lizzie to find them staring at each other like zombies.

“How are you?” he asked. She could see that his eyes, though apparently aimed at hers, were in fact slanting away, the way she used to see them do with strangers. Carl’s eyes, when they really looked at you, were soft and unmoving—soft green-brown baby eyes that let you fall apart inside. Except when he was in fighting mode, and then they narrowed and turned grey; no person or thing wanted to be in Carl’s way when he was fighting.

Carl offered her his hand.

“Good,” she said. She took his hand. It was rough and sandpapery inside, the way it used to be. No special pressure, no hidden messages of love or violence. “We shook hands,”
she almost told Fred later but at the last minute stopped herself because she knew Fred wouldn’t want to think of her touching Carl. And then she noticed his moustache; no wonder he had seemed smaller. Black and carefully trimmed, it made a precise line across the top of his mouth. She would tell Fred about the moustache. “Makes him look foolish,” she would say, though in fact she was already getting used to it.

Lizzie had arrived beside her. She had Carl’s eyes and they were on him now, drinking him in. He shifted his weight as though he was going to reach down to her, then changed his mind. Tiny motions Chrissy would not have noticed in anyone else, but being with Carl had tuned her to his microcosmic dances, his split-second jive steps disguised as ordinary breathing. And now, without thinking about it, she was on his wavelength again, tuned to the the exact movements of their bodies through space, suddenly uncomfortable in her clothes, wanting to brush back hairs that had strayed across her forehead, hearing and not hearing the beat Carl always lived to.

“I’m Carl. Do you remember me?”

“Sure I remember you,” Lizzie said in a complicated voice Chrissy had never heard before, a voice inflected with winning and losing and ownership.

“We could go for a drive or something.”

“I’d like to.”

And then their backs were turned and they were walking away from her. Halfway across the grass towards the truck, Lizzie’s hand came up and slid into Carl’s. Chrissy was crying. She didn’t know when she’d started. She was crying and for all she cared she might have been crying from the moment she opened the door to him. She wiped her eyes and by the time she looked out again Carl had his hands on Lizzie’s waist
and had hoisted her high in the air, lifting her while Lizzie kicked and laughed as though she were a baby and not seven years old.

“She stayed faithful,” Chrissy thought. “Now she’s getting her reward.”

He opened the door for her and Lizzie jumped up into the seat, quickly, as though afraid to be left behind. When Carl got in his own side Lizzie had the glove compartment open and was looking through the postcards she’d sent him. Now he got his first real look at her: her hair, tied back in a pony-tail—slightly frizzed the way it always got when it had just been washed—was darker than it used to be, almost black, but laced with burnished chestnut highlights from the sun. Her face had lengthened from round to oval; the tiny perfect baby teeth were now replaced in front, their new whiteness contrasting with her tanned skin. He didn’t remember her long dark eyelashes being so thick, or most of all her eyes, a bright startling green he hardly recognized.

Meanwhile, not wanting her to feel stared at, he started up the truck and drove it to the turnaround at the machine shed. Where Chrissy’s uncle’s rusting tractor had once been parked was a new riding lawnmower. Carl resisted looking for other changes, kept his eyes resolutely forward as he glided back to the road.

“Where we going?” Lizzie asked as they turned onto the blacktop. She was leaning back now, totally at ease, her feet propped up on the dashboard, chewing a stick of gum from the package on the dash.

“See your grandfather, I guess.” That had been his plan. Go into West Gull, get that part over with, his first time back after three years.

“Too early,” Lizzie said. She pinched her nostrils and made a voice so like William McKelvey’s that Carl had to laugh. “Never wake up before noon. Always hated breakfast.”

“How about an ice cream?”

“The Dairy Queen doesn’t open until ten.”

“Well—”

“I want to show you my school. They got monkey bars last year. I’ll teach you my tricks.”

There was a new sign at the edge of town:

Like Lizzie beside him, everything had prospered. Every house seemed to have had its trim painted, its siding replaced, its grass fertilized into a brighter more sparkling green.

He pulled to a stop in front of the West Gull Elementary. A low wide building, an oddity in town because it had been faced with yellow bricks instead of red. The old metal roof had been painted a bright blue that matched the shiny blue doors and windows; the effect was to make the whole school like an oversized plastic toy.

“Your grandmother used to teach there. Did you know that?”

“Lennie?”

“No, not your mother’s mother. My mother. Elizabeth.”

“Your mother,” she sighed. “Were you ever in her class?”

“Once.”

“Was she nice?” Lizzie’s green eyes were slits in the sun.