Simple Recipes (20 page)

He took us out to West Vancouver, where the highway is cut into the cliffs, precarious above the ocean. The road curved dramatically
and Will leaned far to the side, wind rushing on the downhill slope. Over the city skyline, the sun was lowering and the moon
was full; neither day nor night. Those thin skyscrapers seemed to float on the water. In all the newspaper
boxes along the way, there were pictures of Indonesia, flags flying in Timor, a referendum, finally, to decide the future.

At a lookout, Will leaned the bike onto a shoulder. We got down, pulling our helmets off. There were islands in the water,
bare trees sharp on the surface. Will pointed out the nearest one. “That’s Bowen, isn’t it? Didn’t we camp there years ago?”

“I think so. I can hardly remember now.”

Will looked out, nodding. “It rained,” he said, his breath clouding the air. “I remember that it rained the whole time.”

He stood up and walked to the edge of the lookout, pointed out the other islands, their strange, heavy shapes. I watched his
glance moving over the ocean. “You’re barely here,” he said, turning.

I reached my hand out to touch his face. But his expression was so open and so trusting, it made me hesitate. “I didn’t expect
this.”

He looked at me questioningly.

“Perhaps I never knew what I wanted.” Will’s whole body seemed to sag but I continued on. “I mistakenly thought I wanted this.
And I don’t. I know that now.”

“Miriam,” Will said.

“This isn’t what I want,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Explain it.”

I shook my head. I didn’t know any more if I even loved him, or what I had once believed. Will’s
expression was beseeching. He deserved an explanation from me, but I could feel my emotions shutting off, clean and hard.
“I’m sorry.” I said. “I can’t.”

Will looked at me for a long moment. “Forgive me,” he said, when he finally spoke. “But it’s cowardly. This is a cowardly
act.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“You’re walking away with as little resistance as possible. You think this will save you somehow. From what, I don’t know.”

“I’m just trying to do what’s best.”

“What’s best? You don’t even know that. You can’t even be bothered to figure out what that would be.” He shook his head, impatient.
“It angers me, how little you’re willing to risk for me and for yourself.”

It had started to rain and Will pulled his hood up. The water fell forward in front of his eyes in a thin waterfall. All I
had to do was lift my hands and grab hold, but I refused. How could I tell him that I did not understand it myself? Whatever
feeling was necessary, whatever energy I needed, seemed gone. He was right, I wanted it all to disappear.

Later, when we climbed back onto the bike, I put my arms around his chest, hands flat. The bike took off and I watched the
highway. The line of a mountain range ran alongside us, an unbroken, hazy shadow, a separate history, a different life.

Will booked a ticket home to Ontario to give us some time apart. After he had left, I tried to picture him there — exhaling
drifts of air, man in the snow. Walking, he sinks a few inches down. He s very cold and the expression on his face is stoic.
At home, I lost myself in wild thoughts. Catching my face in the mirror, I was surprised by my expression — stunned. Uncertain.
Cut loose from what I knew.

Once, Will and I stood in my father’s apartment and tried to find all the ways that the map of the world had changed. The
Soviet Union was the most dramatic. The country crumbling at the edges — Estonia, Latvia, then falling away like a landslide.
We stared at the map in wonder. My father knew Southeast Asia. Will knew the ancient cultures of art, the old foundations
— Mesopotamia, Byzantine — that once existed. I loved Vancouver, the city wading out into the ocean, the border of mountains.
There we are in my memory, each of us drawn to a different region, each of us straying our hands across a different country.

In the days after Will left, I turned that picture of us over again and again in my mind. At that time, the news was filled
with Indonesia. In East Timor, the region had exploded in violence. There were photographs of refugees, the widespread displacement.
I
stood at my kitchen table, turning the pages of the newspaper, unsure then whom I was, in fact, grieving for. I recognized
my own selfishness. When I saw those pictures, I ached for the country I had never seen, the parts ofWill and my family I
had never recognized, the loss that seemed so unresolvable.

When I was younger, I used to study all the details of Indonesia, its wealth and beauty, its lost ages. As if I could understand
my father and myself by knowing this, as if what I needed could be compiled, written down, and it would shore me up against
the present day.

Two weeks after Will went back to Ontario, the first snowfall of the year took the city by surprise. I lay in bed listening
to the phone ringing. It must be Will, I thought, but I did not know what to say to him. Lying in bed, I could see rooftops.
The snowfall had cloaked the landscape, so that now it seemed a place where you could walk for days with no sense of moving
forward.

I remembered the time I was a child, when I came down with pneumonia. My father blamed the snow. We had tobogganed on Mount
Seymour, sliding on Glad bags down the hill. Late at night, my father bundled me up and we drove home, down the dark
mountainside, the quiet roads where only a handful ofcars slipped and skidded on the ice. The radio warned us to “Stay in
if you can. If you can’t drive in the snow, don’t.” My father drove with both hands gripping the wheel, squeezed the brake
worriedly. The sky was luminescent with stars.

By morning, I was feverish and hallucinating. My father was already at work, turning the
Closed
sign over, polishing the glass, dusting the gleaming wood of the French Provincial sofas. My mother and I caught a bus to
the hospital. In the late afternoon, my father came and drove us home. I was bundled into the back seat. Through the windows
I could watch the city blur by — tops of trees, neon signs. The car was warm and self-contained, a moving house.

In the front seat, my parents spoke in whispered voices. “Noo-moan-ya,” my father said, testing the word out.

At home, my father fed me rice porridge from a plastic spoon. In the hollow of the spoon was a picture of two boys playing
soccer. They became part of my dream state. I thought I was speaking to my father. I was telling him how the boys were running
ahead and I was so far behind them, but my father was holding out a blue bicycle. He was running beside me, pushing me off
on my blue bike. Out I went, twirling like an acrobat, into the wide world. My father nodded and smiled, his hand cooling
my forehead.

On a cold, windy day when I felt stronger, we took a walk through the tree-lined streets, beside the drifts of snowbanks.
My father cut an icicle down and presented it to me and I held it gingerly in my mittened hands. “You have to take care of
yourself,” he said sternly. He was always concerned about my well-being.

I nodded, comforted by his attentions.

“Don’t strain yourself or get upset.”

“I won’t.”

“Good girl.” He patted my hair. “One day you will buy me a very large house.”

After the sun went down that afternoon, I sat at my bedroom window. In the backyard, my father was building a snowman. My
mother took a photograph, white flash in the dark, of my father standing beside his creation, one arm wrapped around its snowy
body. Inside, the image, ghostly, stayed with me. My father in the snow, smiling for all the world to see.

The phone rang all morning but no one left a message. I wandered from room to room in the apartment, picking things up at
random, then putting them down. Will’s books were still stacked in pyramids on the floor.
Art in the Byzantine Era, Rubens to Picasso,
and, at the very bottom,
What to Expect: The Toddler Years.
I flipped through, laughing at Will’s notes in the margins. He must have gone through and underlined
the art references: “Food blowing. Certain foods lend themselves better to dramatic expulsion.” And: “To some toddlers, a
bowel movement is a remarkable personal statement, a crowning achievement, something to celebrate, revel in, and if the spirit
so moves them, decorate with.” In the margin, Will had sketched a big-headed baby, with a list of names underneath:
Dumbo. Tin Tin. Babe. Hey Yu.

I turned the radio on but all they could talk about was the weather. This city, with its temperate climate, was always struck
dumb by snow. Buses were grounded, the roads undriveable. I rummaged through the fridge, found an old frozen pizza, and set
it in the oven. Then, pulling a jacket on, I walked outside. The kids next door stumbled through the white, diving head first
into snowbanks. They pelted each other with snowballs. Beside them, an elderly man shoveled his driveway. He tipped his fragile
body forward, his breath unfurling into the thin, blue air.

What would Will say if he were here? He’d say, “This is packing snow, all right,” both arms stretched out, a wide smile. “Ontario
packing snow.” When I lifted my face to the sky, the snow headed straight for me, converging between my eyes.

Inside, while I shook the powder from my shoes, the phone started up again.

“Thank God,” my mother said, before I’d even said hello. “Thank God you’re home.”

A car outside the window stole my attention. It fishtailed left, slow motion, then burrowed into a snowbank.

“Miriam, I’m so sorry. Something’s happened.”

The passenger door of the stalled car popped open. The driver climbed out and stood still, watching the snow come down.

“Miriam? Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Your father,” she said. “Someone found him.”

The room was moving. I couldn’t concentrate. Outside, the driver of the car was walking away. “What happened?”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Her voice broke. Then, “Miriam, you need to get here now. We’re at Vancouver General. Your father
attempted suicide.”

I looked around the room. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“There’s something in the oven,” I said, my voice rising higher. “I can’t come right now.”

“Miriam, listen. The buses are stopped. There are no cars on the road. I couldn’t get hold of you. You need to come right
now, okay? Do you understand?”

She hung up first. I stared out the window, at the car abandoned in the road. An inch of snow coating the roof.

I was still wearing my coat. When I opened the oven door, the pizza was still there, wrapped in plastic,
frozen solid- The oven was cold. This made me laugh, an unsettling sound that filled the room then stopped, broken off. Somehow,
I knelt down on the floor and put my shoes back on. I turned all the lights off, then let myself out the front door. The walk
to the hospital wasn’t long, perhaps fifteen minutes, but I wondered if it was possible that I was too late. Not only in body,
but in desire, in thought. And if not too late, then something else. Too blind.

Through the snowfall, I could see the red Emergency lights. I walked through the automatic doors to the reception desk and
gave my father’s name. A nurse pointed me upstairs. Somebody took my hand, another nurse, and we turned off the main hallway,
pushed our way through a set of double doors, into a very silent corridor. She opened a door to the waiting room, off to the
side, and led me through.

“You’re here,” my mother said, looking up. She came and embraced me, her warm hands against my face. “You’re freezing.”

“Is it too late?”

She put both hands on my shoulders. I bent my head towards her until my forehead was resting against her chest. “You made
it,” she said, very gently. “It’s okay.

Her eyes were red and tired. She took my coat and then together we walked to Intensive Care. A doctor joined us and he started
speaking very softly. Then
we stepped behind a white curtain and I looked away, up to the ceiling. When I looked down, I could see the machine that monitored
my fathers breathing. His heartbeat was amplified in the room, the sound like a slow dance, open and even, open and slow.
There was a metal pole, silver hooks to hold an intravenous bag, A deep cut ran along his forehead, partially bandaged. They
had fastened an oxygen mask to his mouth.

Eyes closed, my father swiped clumsily at the mask, trying to dislodge it. His hand missed, then grazed it, moving the mask
slightly to the left. He swiped once more, hitting the tube in his throat. I grabbed his hand and held on; it seemed very
small and light. His eyes stayed shut.

“It’s me,” I said. His hand felt loose and full of bones, not at all like what I remembered. My father opened his eyes and
looked at me. He breathed my name. I wept, then. I couldn’t stop it.

That minute, standing beside him, seemed to last forever. I was holding on to my father when the doctor came to re-adjust
the mask. “He fell,” someone said.

I nodded and then I pulled away. My father’s grip grew tighter. I brought my other hand to rest on his and I removed his hand,
as gently as I could, until both hands were free. Behind me, someone lowered the blinds. A nurse came and unhooked an intravenous
bag. I pushed through the curtain blindly. My
mothers hands were on my shoulders. “Miriam.” she said, but I was already walking away down the wide hallway, through the
double doors, walking until they let me go, through the maze ofhallways and staircases, following one colored line then another,
as if to lose them. Past white walls and reception islands, nurses moving and laughing and watching. Will, I thought. If only
Will were here. I felt my way outside, blind now, into the cold afternoon. The snow was dropping fast. I stood still, one
ofmy arms reaching out to catch it, swimming in front of my eyes as if it had come loose.