The Find (26 page)

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AT SIX, THE LIGHT IS STILL STRONG
, the rock and asphalt throw back the day's accumulated heat. Scott parks the old Volvo in the staff lot next to Janice's Honda and he, Anna and Lenni climb out and then walk together along the sandstone path, past the pond habitat and the fountain. Anna's movements are pretty much constant now, and they slow her down. She wears flat shoes, and, in honour of the occasion, black pants and a new raw silk shirt, exactly the kind of thing Mama would have liked. Together, the three of them approach the visitors' entrance to the museum (this — the sun-warmed stone of the wall, the sudden shade as they pass through the first doors, Scott's hand on her elbow, Lenni's gasp as they see the display, Brian shouting out their names — all this might not have been, she thinks, but is).

In the entrance hall, just where she always imagined it, the pterosaur swoops down above them, big as an airplane, its spike-toothed jaw partway open, its vast cartilaginous wing membranes suggested by the long bones of the arm which seem to run straight into the tapering wing finger on each side. The vertebral column cuts a diagonal line through space,
diminishing towards the tail. The legs are tucked back and up — all of it has been coated unevenly with a gold finish that here and there catches the light from both above and below. As Scott looks up he can almost hear and feel the rush of air.

‘Nylon wires...much heavier...than the original,' Anna explains to Lenni, ‘Resin. Much stronger too... One of four made. Had to...fight like blazes to have it coloured that way... Alan, Thompson! Good to see you... You know... Lenni, of course.' Beneath the swooping pterosaur the much smaller people in the room hug and shake hands, move towards the tables at the back of the room.

‘Maybe she's after our canapÈs,' Lin says, looking up, before she slips a cube of cheese into her mouth.

‘Looks like a guy to me!' A reporter from the
Globe
grins across at Greta, who is wearing a skirt with a matching jacket; she nods back without returning the smile.
Curator, Marine and Flying Reptiles
, her name tag announces.
Director, Preparation
reads Lin's.
Palaeontologist
is Anna's description. She does have an official institutional title:
Research Associate
, which means whatever Greta and she make of it, but perhaps Andrew, when making up the tags, felt it was more tactful to generalise.

‘The actual specimen,' Greta tells the reporter, ‘along with one of the replicas, will go back to Big Crow as soon as the new Cultural Centre is finished. You must talk to Dr Silowski about that story. She's the one who—'

Though Anna is wary of too much talk now, of too much of anything. The room is filling fast and she has to say a few words later. Her voice does well enough, but as she tires, she becomes slower. She has to wait for the words to come to her, and sometimes they won't and she grinds to an impossible, infuriating halt. So, champagne later, but water for now:
I'll need what's left of my faculties
, she thinks. And should she spill, there won't be a mark. You have to think this way.

Linda Sampson from the HD Society has driven all the way from the city to bring Keith from the group.

‘You're looking good!' he says, as he hugs her a little too hard and too long. The entire museum staff, along with Janice and Don; Vik, Lesley, Frankie, Sam, Maddy and Chrissie — the twins waist-high now — are already here. Felix has brought a friend; the celebrity guest, Ben Morris, is flying in from the US and must be somewhere on the road right now; Maiko and Akira have been here most of the week. Friends, colleagues, the great and the good — the PhDs, the VIPs — it seems that everyone she is connected to, past, present, future will be in this room, although Michael Swenson, working again now in Alaska, did not reply to his invitation.

‘If he accepts,' Scott said when he heard that Anna, in consultation with Greta, had actually
suggested
inviting him, ‘I can't promise he won't suffer for it.' Even now, part of him is expecting the bastard to materialise like the bad fairy at the birthday party. He keeps checking the door.

On the right-hand wall, just where the entrance hall leads on into the galleries proper, a small red velvet curtain hangs at head height, the string ready for Anna to draw at eight, when everyone will be here. Meanwhile the hosts and their guests cluster around the tables set out in the centre of the entrance hall, their voices lost in the huge space.

Lenni, far taller than either Alan or Thompson, leans forward slightly to talk.

‘I saw the drawings for the Cultural Centre,' she says to Alan. ‘Looks wonderful.'

‘Did...Ai Lin take you to see the...real fossil yet?' Anna asks him. ‘It's through that door... They left the lids off the...crates. You must see it, Lin is right there, she'll take you.'

Ben Morris strides up. His eyes are bright and inquisitive, his voice warm as he congratulates Anna on her splendid achievement. He has forgotten, she thinks, that he once mistook her for Swenson's assistant — and so will she: it's wonderful that he, the foremost expert in this field, could come.

‘Thank you so much for making the trip. This is Alan... Coxtis and Thompson from the Big Crow River First Nation... And Lenni, who's...currently conducting a feasibility...study into a biodiesel bus link between here and downtown Calgary in the summer months… And Scott Macleod, also originally from Big Crow... He was one of our...volunteers.'

She watches as Morris pumps Scott's hand, and asks him the question he used to dislike so much:

‘What's your field, then?'

‘We have bones in common. I aim to qualify as a physio next year, and specialise in neurological rehabilitation.'

‘Anna,' Andrew from Events whispers in her ear, ‘just to say don't worry, there
is
a microphone on its way.'

She leans forward to take a sip of water, puts the glass carefully down and then makes her way to the back of the room, where a thick maroon rope, hung from two gold-coloured posts, is looped across the entranceway to the galleries. She slips behind one of the posts and sits on the bench in the half-darkness of the display on geological time. Her movements are not too bad; they may even decrease a little, or feel as if they have done so, if she can just relax.

It's the dark, perhaps, that reminds her of the cave her father took her to all those years ago, before he was properly sick, before she knew or suspected anything. There was a long hike, just the two of them, on baking limestone, and then the sudden damp darkness of the entrance.

She remembers the earthy smell, the roots pushing through the rock above their heads, the goose bumps that suddenly covered her arms. How she asked him what would happen if the lamp on his helmet went out, and he said that it would not, but even if it did, they would simply feel their way back out: everything would be all right.

They moved forward through a tunnel on their hands and knees and at the end of it entered another underground room, filled with a chalky, wet smell and dripping sounds. Slowly, her eyes became accustomed to the light from the lamp her father had brought, and she saw the forest of stalactites hanging from the roof of the cave like so much melting wax, a creamy colour, here and there streaked with orange. Below them, the stalagmites, softer and growing more slowly, rose to meet them. Occasionally, a mite and a tite had touched, grown together. Everything glistened. For the longest time, she and her father crouched side by side and watched.

‘Anna,' Scott says now, sitting next to her in the dark and taking her arm. ‘Ready now?' She nods, lets him help her up, lead her back into the bright room that smells of wine and food and warm freshly washed skin.

Scott takes his place in the front row of the crowd and Anna stands near the microphone while Greta introduces her: her career, the find, and her qualities as a scientist, as leader, as colleague, her new work for the HD Society since she retired.

The woman standing not quite still by the microphone is still Anna, Scott thinks, but she has changed, is changing all the time. There are losses ahead, and the endless question of how best to deal with them. He still wishes he could have saved her, knows, too, that she would say that he did. He is glad that he has another life, and also that she is in it.

Anna taps the microphone, coughs.

There are so many people to thank, and a winged creature to offer up — a fragment of the history of life carrying in its narrow pelvis yet another discovery: a single egg, mango-sized, the find within the find, Lin's.

‘I'll keep this
very
brief,' she smiles at the faces turned towards her: at Frankie straight, tall and so much grown up, but as eager as ever; at the twins, quiet but not still; at Sam who stares solemnly at her, then suddenly smiles. At Vik. Brian. Thompson. Lenni. Scott.

‘First another introduction—'

She pulls the cord and the red curtain draws back, revealing the sandstone plaque, the name incised into it:

‘
Agas-to-pte-rus magni-corvi-ensis:
the amazing winged beast... from Big Crow.' She says the name she has chosen part by part, then, gestures at the glittering fretwork of bones above. No mistakes, she thinks, as applause ripples around the room and she too is airborne: blood surges through arteries and capillaries, her lungs fill; air infiltrates every part of her, pushes right into her bones. This world, she thinks. This moment. The people in it.

‘I am sure she will continue...to change all your lives and thoughts, as she has mine...' Anna smiles, finds Scott's eyes, studies the card she has propped on the lectern, and then looks up again; cameras flash, magnesium white.

In retrospect, I can see that this novel was inspired by two things: the beautiful skeleton of an elasmosaur which hangs, invisibly suspended, in the Courtenay & District Museum, and a couple of sentences about genetic testing in an article about biogenetic intervention entitled ‘Bring Me My Phillips Mental Jacket,' by Slavoj Žižek, published in the
Times Literary Supplement
and sent to me by my friend Sue Thomas. Between the spark and the finished book are countless hours of daydreaming, reading, research, writing, and rewriting — a huge enterprise, requiring support of many different kinds. I wish to thank all of the people and organisations who helped me, as well as those I do not have space to name here or have forgotten, and even those who did not realise that they were helping. None of them, of course, are responsible in any way for how the book has turned out, or for any errors that I have made.

One of the bonuses of writing fiction that requires research is meeting, face to face, on the page and online fascinating people with knowledge, experience and approaches to the world very different to my own, and being offered a glimpse into their lives. Lorna Cameron and Shari MacDonald were very generous in sharing their experience of coping with HD as sufferer and carer respectively; likewise, generous were Linda MacLaren, Loretta Young and Dr Michael Trew, who shared with me details of their work in genetic testing and the ongoing support of families with HD. The websites of the Huntington's Disease Societies of the US, UK and Canada were excellent resources.
Mapping Fate
by Alice Wexler was invaluable not just for the scientific and historical background, and as an inspiring story of ongoing collaborative work, but also for the personal material it contains, which deepened my understanding of the emotional and moral complexities of making a choice about genetic testing for a condition that is, currently, incurable.

In every novel, there are many seams between the real and the invented. The work of local historian Chris Arnett opened my eyes to the richness of local First Nation' history and culture, and to their ongoing struggles (the place where I live and work is part of the land claim of the Hul'qumi'num), but Big Crow is an invented town and the First Nation band, the St'alkwextsihn, or Stallquakseen, and their particular language, situation and stories are imaginary. Likewise, parts of
The Find
take place in the National Museum at Greentree, Alberta, a place in many ways like The Royal Tyrell Museum at Drumheller, but fictional rather than real. Staff at the real museum were extremely patient and helpful, and especially so were Don Brinkman, Jim McCabe and Marty Eberth. Monique Keiran's book
Reading the Rocks
was an inspiration; likewise Wayne Grady's
The Bone Museum
, Jack Horner's
Digging Dinosaurs
and
Fossil Legends of the First Americans
, by Adrienne Mayor. I would also like to thank Walter W. Stein for his take on the way palaeontology works, author David Spalding for the many useful references he gave me, and Rolf Ludvigsen for his book
West Coast Fossils
, as well as for his advice. Author Brian Brett directed me to the works of naturalist Loren Eiseley, where I discovered not just a mind at once rigorous and passionate, scientific and poetic, but also a man who may well have refrained, for fear of inheriting or passing on his mother's mental instability, from having children of his own. Richard Hebda helped me with technical questions about permissions. Kathlyn Stewart was extremely patient with my queries about the vocational aspect of palaeontology, and steered me away from a major error. Chris Harvey, at www.languagegeek.com was a pleasure to correspond with, as were the experts at www.translatum.gr.

The writing of
The Find
took several years and it could not have been done without the generous financial support of the Council for the Arts. Lesley Thorne, Anne McDermid, Kim McArthur and Svetlana Pironko each offered crucial advice about this book, which would never have been completed without the friendship, support and draft-reading capacity of Vicky Grut, Margaret Thompson, Helen Heffernan, Gillian Campbell, Maureen Moore and Jen Howe. Pamela Erlichman dealt valiantly with the typos.

Of course, the biggest thanks of all go to my husband, Richard Steel, whose love, support and faith in me enable me to continue to write. Marriage to a writer entails not just compulsory manuscript reading and many hours spent discussing people who do not exist, but also, in our case, frequently looking after the house and children while I work: it is impossible to thank him enough.

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