Every Happy Family (14 page)

Under the dramatically bright warming light the winged fish hang suspended, facing one another, eyes wide open as ever, and he wonders if they're asleep. The floor of the tank is littered with neon pink, yellow and green stones and, to one side, a gloomy castle grows dark with algae. He read about a memorial reef off the coast of Miami, where people have their ashes mixed inside concrete sculptures and dropped onto the ocean floor. The accompanying photos for the article showed an underwater graveyard, fish swimming in and around what looked like giant chess pieces and a series of archways, black with algae and crawling with invertebrates. An eerie notion but no worse than the obliterating horror of being underground. Jill knows his wishes; cremation and ashes scattered in the place of her choice, a place that'll best house her memories of him. He joked about her mixing some of his ashes in with the peppercorns in the pepper grinder. “A little bone meal for you,” he'd said, secretly liking the idea.

He wipes his eyes. If he was doing the cooking tomorrow, they'd start with Pema's favourite soup – french onion – followed by halibut in a lime and Pinot Gris reduction, the risotto cakes Quinn likes so much, and fennel beet salad. He tries to think if there's something Beau especially likes, but food is simply fuel to that kid. He's an eating machine, Les decides, smiling.

The last time he tried making an Alaska bombe for dessert, on their wedding anniversary – tenth? twentieth? – something didn't work. What was it? The meringue. It didn't lift.

•••

Beau steps off the ferry bus in front of the Pharmasave at Royal Oaks Mall, his backpack hanging from his one good shoulder, his other having been dislocated so many times it now requires a twenty-minute tape job before games. He checked his suitcase at the Marseille airport, but it never made it further than London, or so he was told when he arrived in Vancouver last night. The baggage claim people said they'd deliver it Monday, at the earliest, which means the only clothes he has are these ones he slept in. His jeans are frayed at one knee and after twenty-four hours of travel he can smell the stink of his T-shirt under his hoodie. He wonders when the next bus is due and taps his pocket for his phone but remembers, for the tenth time, that he packed it.

In that suitcase, painstakingly rolled to avoid wrinkling, is the outfit he'd planned to wear tonight: black Italian-cut jeans that cost him nearly two hundred euros, a white silk shirt that had made the saleslady's eyes widen. He imagines his leather loafers and favourite belt being tried on by British custom guards. Mom had wanted him to dress up for this party but his only thought was impressing Pema. A bullshit idea, and his lost luggage serves him right.

A woman and her preteen daughter come towards him, the daughter cooing endearments as she coaxes along a puppy gnashing on its leash. Damn, his little speech is in that bag. He'll have to wing it. Mom had suggested a gift too, “something meaningful to you both,” as if he would've given Dad one of his jerseys or some old, rancid cleats. She'd made this celebration thing sound all happy so he ended up buying an expensive bottle of real champagne, although for all he knows Dad can't drink, a can of duck pâté and hand-dipped chocolates.

He breathes in the heavy but clean west-coast air, catches the cat piss perfume of that bush that blooms every spring along the path connecting their street to Cedar Hill. The smell brings an instant memory of biking up that path with Pema, him in the lead. And of capturing her in the pirate game at school, trying to outperform her on the trampoline. Everything in his old life was a competition, either with her or with Quinn, but mainly with himself. He thinks of himself now as more of a team player. That, for good reason, his individuality has been beaten out of him, literally.

A blue-smocked woman steps out of the Pharmasave, plants her back against the glass and lights up a cigarette. She draws in the smoke like nourishment and his stomach sputters a long growl. He's hungry but also nervous. Nervous about seeing Dad – Mom implied he looks a lot different than a year ago – and nervous about seeing Pema. He used to check out her Facebook page obsessively and follow her posts. Couldn't get enough of her face, so he stopped.

“You just missed the bus,” says the smoker. “Next one comes in an hour.”

He's surprised for a second that she didn't speak to him in French.

“I appreciate that, thanks.”

Was nice not having to scramble to form a coherent response. After two years in France, the language still takes a lot of brain power.

Beau is ten, fifteen minutes from home by car. An hour by foot. He's only got the backpack, which is light – laptop, toiletries, an extra pair of socks and boxers – why not walk, maybe even jog away some of this nervous energy? But first he'll buy a few protein bars.

The cashier's Harry Potter glasses and thin tie scream college boy. He drones off the total, then gives Beau a superior glance reminiscent of Quinn. Beau hands over the cash. Quinn and rehab. Weird. Things might have turned out differently if Mom had forced him to play a sport, anything to get him out of his head. Golf, even.

Maybe he'll offer to take Quinn along to the gym tomorrow. Teach him a basic routine or two. If, that is, he doesn't mock the idea.

•••

Placing his pencil back in its holder, Quinn blows on the graph paper. He's almost caught up on his work. Next time, though, his boss may not be so generous, so understanding. He catches his negative thinking and amends it aloud: “There will not be a next time.”

He swivels his desk chair to face the bed where Holly sleeps on her back, slack-jawed, arms and legs a far-flung tumult under the covers.

He met Holly in Jasper House. The first time they slept together was instant sexual ignition and so good he was afraid they'd already peaked. The second time was even better, coming at the same instant as if it was a single shared orgasm. They'd both spontaneously cried after, the heaving sort, and then – he was so thankful – she didn't feel any need to talk about it. They'd fallen asleep holding each other and woken to the morning chimes in the same knotted position only to skip breakfast for another equally unified go. Sex took alcohol's place, which made withdrawal a lot easier. “Do you want a drink?” became their private euphemism for making love. Relations between patients that went beyond friendship were frowned upon so they did a lot of sneaking around which only made things more exciting.

Holly approached sex as if it was a wholesome meal and no more complicated. She kept her eyes open and made slow disjointed conversation. For Quinn to do anything else but the same felt oddly embarrassing. With his eyes open he fell in love with the walleyed angle of her breasts, her boxy shoulders and surprisingly muscular arms, her small mound of a belly with its ghostly language of stretch marks – Holly had a four-year-old son, Owen. There was a weight and bovine deliberation to her movements that put him at ease, a lack of boundary in her gravel-coloured eyes that made him trust her and want to protect her. He thinks of her architectural equivalent as an old-style cement water tower on a smooth expanse of prairie. Instead of a white stencil-painted town's name, it's HOLLY, bold and wholesome.

He has yet to tell his parents that he's moved out of the sunny bachelor apartment Jill found for him in Nanaimo and into Holly's basement suite in Duncan. Is planning on revealing information about her in increments. The fact of his having a girlfriend was increment number one, her name increment two and today's introduction increment three. Luckily Owen is with his grandmother this weekend, he thinks, slipping his work into his briefcase. Between the cigarettes and crow's feet, Holly will be more than enough for Mom to digest. He catches himself. It's not his mother's business to love Holly, it's his.

The clock says 3:10. Holly worked the night shift last night at the seniors' home and wanted to be woken at three. Though he'd prefer to waltz in as dinner is being served, after people have had a few and are distracted by their appetites, he knows it would upset Mom. He's been out now for two months and twenty-six days, and today will be the first time he's been around booze. Holly says she'll be fine and not to worry about her. Though of course he does, because if she goes AWOL, he doesn't stand a chance. He'll be focused on Dad, he tells himself, the incredible shrinking man as he's come to think of him. He hopes Dad will meet Owen some day.

Owen's the first kid Quinn has ever paid attention to, or maybe it's the other way around; Owen's the first kid who's ever paid Quinn any mind. Four-year-olds are from another planet, a planet where everything springs fresh out of the sky for the first time. Each morning, he wakes to Owen leaping on his chest demanding a wrestle and answers to his questions: What keeps the ceiling from falling down? Can we eat acorns? Why don't dogs and cats get married? When he's on Owen's planet, there's no time to dwell on himself and his problems. Therefore no problems. If there was a pill to keep children four years old, he'd be tempted to give it to Owen.

When Holly's on night shift, Quinn makes the boy breakfast and walks him to junior kindergarten where Owen, as openly affectionate as his mother, bear-hugs him goodbye. It's only recently that he's stopped being surprised by this.

He lets Owen play with his old Lego ships, watching with a shaky kind of euphoria as Owen crashes them into the couch and sends pieces flying. Then he helps rebuild them according to Owen's eccentric specifications.

Quinn goes to the closet and rechecks the pocket of his vest to make sure what he wrote for Dad is still there. Hopes he's not expected to read it aloud. Mom wants him to wear a suit and tie. He'll give her the tie but chooses one of his aunt's creations: narrow blue suede with brown leather piping. Mom will think Holly's not good enough for him, not educated enough, but Holly's a social genius compared to him. And compared to her, if she wants the truth. And if universities gave degrees for being real, Holly'd have a fucking doctorate.

The thought of spending the weekend with his family propels him to kneel at the end the bed, where he carefully tugs up the sheet. As he plants a slow row of kisses along the flat arch of Holly's foot, she half sighs, half moans and he moves to the inside of her ankle.

“Is that a sea anemone on my leg?” she says with a rumbling laugh.

Yesterday at the beach with Owen, they were gently sticking their fingers in the creatures' centers for their contractive rubbery kisses.

“Yes,” he says, adding suction to his kisses and continuing upward.

Arriving a little late should be okay.

•••

The weather has been clear and blue right across the country but now, just past the Rockies, the windows darken and the plane jerks and dips, overhead bins rattling.

“You call British Columbia home?” pipes up the woman beside Pema as she lowers her book to her lap. Except for exchanging smiles at the start of the trip four hours ago in Toronto, they haven't spoken. Clearly the woman is anxious.

“Yes,” says Pema, to keep it simple. “You?”

The woman speed-talks about having visited her son in Guelph, his course of study at university, then moves on to her home in Brentwood Bay and some invasive weed “with sticky-fingered hands” overtaking her garden. Westerners, thinks Pema, are quiet on the outside and noisy on the inside, while the Tibetans and Nepalese are noisy on the outside and quiet on the inside.

The woman describes her basement flooding last spring and Pema wonders what home really means beyond walls and a roof. Pictures the two-room house in Jampaling, the grass-stuffed mattress on top of two wool carpets that was her bed, a bed she shared with her two half-sisters. Datso and her husband slept on the other side of a thin cotton curtain in the same small room. When she first arrived and saw the set-up, Pema wanted to stay elsewhere, even pitch a tent outside. For as long as she had memory, she'd slept alone in her own bed in her own room. Her fourteen-year-old sister, Kitsi, blatantly resentful of Pema, had been all for the tent idea, but Datso wouldn't hear of it. That first week was painfully awkward, Kitsi's random kicks in her sleep always finding their mark, Datso's snoring, some invisible night bug leaving welts on her face and arms, her gut reacting badly to the food and therefore her having to use the outhouse in the middle of the night, terrified of snakes, which Kitsi assured her were deadly. But it wasn't a month later that her stomach problems and bug bites were gone and it became only natural to fall asleep surrounded by warm bodies and synchronizing her breath with another's. And as if Datso knew it would, sharing the peace of sleep eased Kitsi's jealous anger – though it could also have been the shared care package from Jill. And if Datso and her husband did make love behind the cotton curtain, it was after Pema and her sisters were long asleep.

Last night she slept in an airport motel in Frankfurt. For two months she's been pumped about the idea of a real bed, a shower with hot water, being able to spread out and watch that most modern of contraptions, TV. The shower was heaven and she can't remember ever feeling that clean before. In Jampaling she has ‘washcloth' showers from the kitchen sink, cold water only, her own precious sliver of soap. Once a year, on the eve of the lunar calendar new year, Datso boils water for a hot bath in a large steel tub. But since everyone takes turns, oldest to youngest, the water never feels quite clean.