Falling From Grace (14 page)

11

I made
my way back to my tent to find Rainbow's sleeping bag missing; I recalled seeing it draped around her shoulders on the other side of the fire. Mary's kids didn't seem to have bedtimes. Flicking on my headlamp, I retrieved a journal article from a plastic folder and burrowed into my bag to read. The article described a new species of fly discovered in ancient temperate rainforests.
The male genitalia are distinctive, especially the broad posterior surstylus lobe with its scalelike bristles
. I yawned and read the line again.
The male genitalia are distinctive
. . . The words seemed to melt away before they reached my brain. I tried one more time.
The male genitalia
. . .”Oh, forget it.” I snapped off the light and stuffed the paper and headlamp into a tent pocket. I zipped the sleeping bag up to my neck and listened for wild sounds in the dark, but other than the distant noise from the human revellers, the forest was quiet. All the animals had fled the party too.

I woke to the sound of unsteady footsteps shuffling through gravel followed by the whine of a zipper. A body fell through the doorway into the tent with a grunt. I jerked from a fitful dream where one step forward resulted in two steps back. Bear? I froze, heart racing.
Bears can't undo zippers
. “Rainbow?” I whispered and the mass at the foot of my bedroll whimpered in response. It was too large to be the little girl and it smelled of wood smoke, pot, beer, and sweat. I fumbled for my headlamp, a meagre weapon, and switched it on, ready to fight. Paul's face crumpled in a grimace at the sudden glare of light and he tilted away from me, his sleeping bag gripped in his arms like a teddy bear.

“Paul?” I jiggled his shoulder. “Wake up.”

He half opened his eyelids, the blood-shot whites visible through the slit. Outside, I could still hear the distant sounds of partying, the raspy melody of a harmonica, laughter.

I shook him again. “Where's Rainbow?”

“Mary.” He heaved his head and shoulders across my lap. “Mary doesn't want me anymore,” he mumbled.

“She kicked you out, did she?”

His head rubbed against my legs in what I could only assume was a “yes.”

I should tell him about Cougar. Cushion his heartbreak. He buried his face in my stomach. He was too out of it, the taletelling would have to wait until morning. I stroked his hair. He trembled, the heat from his body sifting into mine.

“You're my friend, Faye,” he moaned moss-mouthed into my belly button. “I love you.”

My fingers stopped their passage through his hair. His words conjured up a dust storm of emotion.
Give it up, Pearson
, I chastised myself.
The fool's drunk. He doesn't know what he's saying.
An addled declaration of affection the most I could hope for, this night a stolen gift, his head in my lap.

“I love you too, Paul,” I whispered, his response a ragged snore. “Christ.” I shoved him off my lap onto the bare floor and covered him with his sleeping bag. “Idiot,” I said out loud into the dark night, not sure if my accusation was directed at him or at myself. I doused the light and burrowed deep into my bag. The music had stopped. Overhead the wind rushed through the tops of the trees. It would be a roller-coaster ride up in the canopy tonight.

I dreamed of falling. Drifting, weightless, a single needle from the top of a thousand-year-old redcedar, unheeded by the dark and silent world, spiralling through moss-laden branches like a lone snowflake before a storm. I accelerated, plunging headlong to earth through the canopy, whipped by limbs, breaking twigs, tearing sheets of ragbag lichen from the bark, the dusty white debris falling with me, a kaleidoscope of colours flashing by.

I didn't hit the ground. Instead I woke to find Paul's arm and a leg draped across mine, his body warm against my side, our sleeping bags in disarray.

Trapped under the weight of his limbs, chest hairs and the smell of him in my nose, I lay still, uncertain what to do. His ribcage rose and fell against me, and if I concentrated, I could hear his heartbeat; the rhythm burned into me, setting me afire. How long I had wanted this.
Flaming as I fall
.

I'm a fool.

“Paul,” I whispered, then louder. “Paul.” I pushed his arm away and he shifted, stirred, his lips in my hair. His hand slid across my abdomen. A wave of yearning swept over me. His fingers slipped under the bottom edge of my shirt, scrolling patterns on my skin. The night was black as coal.

“Sweetheart,” he murmured against my cheek, his breath sour. His fingers inched under the waistband of my long johns and into the folds between my legs. I closed my eyes, the rising desire unbearable. He thrust the fabric below my knees in two clumsy movements.

He rolled on top of me and covered my mouth with his. His weight pinned me to the ground. Instead of pushing him away, I found myself kissing him back, his beard rough on my face. His musky scent overwhelmed me. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, my reach inadequate. How many years had I wished to feel him like this? His amulet pressed into my skin. He rose up, the white glow of the tooth swaying in the air above my face as he entered me.

The briefest of moments. The first domino in a line of tumbling dominoes, stretching into the months and years to come. His body stiffened, he grunted and fell still, his weight pinning me beneath him. I suspected he'd fallen asleep, but then he slid off onto his side, stretched out beside me, and nuzzled my hair, breath hot in my ear. His fingers resumed their downward journey. His mouth formed words I will never forget. “Mary Mary, quite contrary.”

A tsunami of anger crashed over me. I brought up my knees and grabbed his arm. “I'm not Mary.” I forced his hand along my arm from shoulder to fingertip. “See, short arms, Paul.” I sat up and wrenched the sleeping bag away. “Stunted legs. I'm Faye. Not Mary. Faye,” I shouted.

Paul jumped away and onto his knees. “Faye?” he sputtered, head bent forward, hunched over, a spectral shadow against the blousy fabric of the ceiling. “I thought . . . aghh.” His voice faded into the strangled sound of a snared animal. He fumbled for the flashlight and turned it on, the half-dome space illuminated by its indirect glow.

He stared into my face, eyes wild. He groaned, fumbled for the sleeping bag, and drew it around me. “I . . . are you all right?”

I dried tears from my face with the edge of the bag and pulled up my semen-soaked underwear, the air sharp with its musky odour. I wanted to gag. I wanted to suck the semen off my fingers. I wanted to push him to the ground and do it again. I wanted to hit him.

He raised his palms and gazed at them as if they were foreign. “I'm . . . I'm sorry.”

What was I to do? Forgive him? Wind back time ten minutes? Forgive myself?

“I'm not,” I answered.

Weariness overtook me. I huddled into my bag and turned my back on him. A few minutes later I heard him zip up his own sleeping bag. He clicked off the flashlight, plunging the small space into welcome darkness. I listened for the sound of his breath. After a long while, welcome sleep stole both of us away.

12

A pileated
woodpecker drummed into the trunk of a nearby snag already riddled with insect galleries and beetle bores. Unable to sleep, I crawled from the tent at dawn, careful not to wake Paul, unwilling to meet his eyes, rehash the drama of the night without a chance to think. A ghostly figure in a white nightgown rattled a pot on a stove on the other side of the clearing. I was surprised to find any of the protesters up before dawn after the late-night festivities. But today was a big day. Their next night on a hard cot in a jail cell.

I grabbed an apple and walked the downstream trail west for an hour. The morning light expanded into the spaces between the trees. One day last year Paul and I had hiked the trail all the way to the ocean, a two-day trip there and back on a rough and muddy path. We'd camped in the open on a gravel beach above the high tide line and in behind a sheltering root wad at least the height of two men. Past midnight the scream of a cougar from the bush adjacent to the beach shocked us awake, the sound like the terrified cry of a woman. I shivered at the memory of the eerie call. Was it ten steps away? A thousand? We listened for the cat to scream again, the sky overhead crowded with stars and moonless, but heard only the grack of tree frogs in the grasses at the edge of the beach. We woke at morning light to find a grey whale feeding in the bottom mud near shore. Its calloused head broke the water's surface, the poof of its exhalation a quiet punctuation on the day's evolution.

I perched on a car-sized boulder above the creek and watched a stick twirl in an eddy. The current caught and swept it away. In the fall, returning salmon would batter their way up from the ocean to spawn in the gravel beds and die.

The ultimate symbol of the cycle of life. Unlike the salmon, I knew I'd never travel that cycle. Sure, I'd been born, would live, and will die and rot like everyone else. But the rest wasn't in the cards. A mate. Reproduction. Not because I couldn't, I possessed all the right parts, a normal-sized torso, a vagina, a womb, the requisite needs and emotions. But men went for the best specimens. The biological imperative. Tessa, Mary
.
I chucked another stick into the eddy, and thought about an incident in high school. I couldn't recall the boy's name, but I remembered he was tall, athletic, and on the honour roll, all the prime genetic traits. Grace, in her usual Samaritan zeal, urged me to swallow my suspicions and accept his unexpected invitation out. “Give him a chance to get to know you. How could he not like you?” He left a note on my locker the day after he failed to show up at the movie theatre, poignant with its stick people illustrations and the scrawled words,
You've got to be kidding!
“We had a nice time, Grace,” I'd reported to my mother, “but he's not my type.” I understood why he'd done it. I was different, strange. An oddity like the white bears on the central coast, the golden spruce in Haida Gwaii, the rare albino crows on the island.

I started back toward camp. After the spawn, bears would drag the rotting fish carcasses up the bank and into the forest, as far as the top of the ridge, to feast on the protein-rich stomach and brain, leaving the remains to the gulls, the eagles, the decomposing insects, the bones fertilizer for forest trees. Nitrogen from salmon laced the heartwood of these rainforest trees, the boundaries between plant and animal blurred. Trees dining on fish, served by black bear waiters. But the banquet had dwindled, streams decimated by logging no longer supporting large runs of salmon. A dipper landed on a rock upstream. It checked the pool for food with its slender bill, its small grey body bobbing up and down, dip, dip. No salmon eggs nestled in the sediments today, the surviving fry long hatched and gone to the sea.

Each year on the birthdays of her children, Grace had recorded our heights in pencil on the kitchen door frame. The day I turned six, I noticed the measurements marked
Faye
weren't getting higher, unlike those of my brothers. I scrutinized the white-painted board, the terse black lines, the progress of my annual growth rings. The awareness that I was halted in time inched higher like water rising in a storm. My mother found me hanging by my fingertips from the door frame, face tear-stained and determined. Grace gave me one of her talks about individuality and the irrelevance of human differences. I learned I wouldn't grow much more than a few inches taller. Grace used the word
dwarf
. And the phrase
Good things come in small packages
.

I understood too about Paul. His reaction sent the same message as my high school suitor
. You've got to be kidding
. I stopped and threw a rock into the pool, frightening a red-legged frog from a crevice. He darted, legs pumping, across the surface of the water and under a ledge. Guilt swirled around in the pool with the twigs and the frog. I could have stopped Paul . . . and I didn't.

• • •

He stumbled
white-faced from the tent around nine, hair awry, shirtless, barefoot, and belt undone. He squinted, then scanned the clearing until he spotted me by the stove stirring oatmeal.

“Hangover?” I said.

He limped his way across the gravel, grimacing with each step.

I handed him a bowl and he set it onto a stump, grabbed my arm, and steered me to the outer edge of the camp near the river.

“We have to talk,” he whispered.

“You don't have to whisper,” I assured him. “They left hours ago.”

“We have to talk,” he repeated.

“About what?”

“Come on, Faye. You know about what.”

“What's there to say?”

“Lots . . . there's lots.” He ran his hand over his dishevelled hair. “We . . . you . . . I . . . we had sex.”

“I said you don't have to whisper.”

He made a fist and struck it against the centre of his forehead. It felt satisfying to torture him . . . a little.