The Find (4 page)

—
♦ —

ANOTHER THING ANNA AVOIDED RECALLING
was the winter evening during her third year at university — long after her father's death — when she saw him on TV. She was in her pyjamas eating spaghetti with Julia, her housemate. Both of them had their feet propped on the coffee table. Julia pressed the remote and they were suddenly confronted by the image of a skeletal, middle-aged man strapped into a wheelchair; he was writhing in a kind of perpetual motion and at the same time struggling to bring a child's beaker of liquid to his lips.

Daddy
, Anna thought, even though it was clearly another person. She put down the plate, returned her feet to the floor. On-screen, a serene nurse helped the man, guiding his errant arm and a calm voice explained that these wild, uncontrollable movements along with speech problems, cognitive losses, compulsions and mood swings were among the symptoms of a degenerative condition called Huntington's Disease. It was an autosomnal dominant disorder affecting the basal ganglia in the brain, and currently incurable. A sufferer's children each had a fifty percent chance of developing it, usually in middle age. Until now, they had no choice but to wait and see, but a predictive test was about to be launched. It depended on genetic linkage.

On-screen, the man seemed to be choking.

‘Do we have to watch this?' Julia said, and in the kitchenette, the phone rang: Vik.

‘I'm already watching it,' Anna said.

That weekend, they drove home together. Their mother greeted them, dressed as usual in layers of splendid, intricate knits, but her eyes were deeply shadowed, and Anna realised, as she hung her jacket on the peg by the door, that she already knew why they had come. Part of her wanted to turn back, then, but the other two were already halfway to the kitchen.

Usually there might be a bowl of fruit on the table, or something she had found on one of her walks. Mama had set out a bottle of vodka and three glasses. Vik, his hands cupped together on the table, looked up into their mother's face and asked her what they needed to know.

Yes
, she had said, confirming with one word all their fears.

‘Mama, we shouldn't have had to find this out from the TV. Why didn't you tell us before?' Vik asked. She said nothing, just looked back at him.

‘When did you find out?'

Vik leaned on the table, his long frame hunched over his arms, his large head tilted down. He looked like Daddy, before the disease ravaged him; at the same time, waiting for his answers, he looked like the lawyer he wanted to become.

‘Suppose Anna was pregnant?' he'd asked.

‘I'm not, Vik!'

‘Surely, you could at least have told us the truth when we
left home
!'

Anna hated to remember how her mother's face had stiffened, and then dissolved. She'd crossed to the other side of the table, held her tight, called Vik over. How small mother was, but also how strong, she thought, inhaling the familiar traces of perfume and cigarette smoke, perspiration, lanolin, the faintest whiff of turpentine. And how fiercely she loved them, how very much she had wanted to protect them. That was all it was, Anna explained to Vik. And why know something like this until you had to?

Later that night, Anna and Vik lay a few feet apart in the two guest beds that now occupied what had first been their shared bedroom, and then later, Anna's alone. Outside, caught in the porch light, snow drifted down. Anna listened to Vik outline what he saw ahead, how they should both sign up immediately for the test, how if either of them were positive, they would not be able to have their own children and should ask to be sterilized.

It seemed to her that he was going way too fast.

Suppose one of them was lucky, and one not? And how on earth would Mama cope, if either of them had it? Who would want to go there? And as for children, testing positive would make having them a very difficult choice, not one Anna imagined wanting to make, but it would not mean that you
couldn't have
your own family. She felt the distinction was important, but she knew better than to mention it.

Vik was seeing someone and he felt that he should tell her right away, he said. Was she involved with anyone? Anna felt her brother's eyes on her face, the pressure of his need for her to signal that she'd heard him, that she agreed.

‘I think it might be better not to get too involved with anyone in the first place!' she said, finally turning to look at him. She reached out her hand across the gap between the beds.

‘Don't you want a life like everyone else?' he asked. It was as if he was angry with
her
, as if
she
had done this to him.

Eventually it all unravelled: for the linkage test, the lab needed samples from their father and his brothers at least, and a family medical history going back two generations. It wasn't there.

‘I can't bear it,' Vik told her. ‘I don't think I can go on like this.'

Though what Anna felt was the sheer relief, the utter liberation of being again unable to choose to know. Over the next weeks, while his face grew thinner, harder, Anna dug back into her work.

It would be best, she thought, to store the knowledge of her risk at the very back of her mind — and she decided then, it would be easier if no one else knew. It boiled down to what you could bear. Doubt was for some reason easier for her to bear than it was for Vik. If she looked at what had happened carefully enough, if she
decided
— and it was in theory at least a choice — that marriage and a family were likely not for her, then she was free to live an extraordinary life.

Anna immersed herself in her thesis on
Nyctosaurus gracilis
: she inhabited the body, the muscles and membranes, the maths and mechanics of flight; she frightened herself with the intensity of her attachment to the project: the hours, the task of description, comparison, the effort of imagination, the papers to absorb, the striving to make her language exact.

Vik drank and skipped classes. Then he took an overdose of his sleep medication — he called her to apologise and say goodbye; she got him to hospital just in time, sat through it, dropped everything for a week.

Afterwards, she insisted they live together in an attic apartment she found on Dalton Road, dilapidated, but with a huge maple tree to the front.

She tried to explain to him: how doubt could still be hopeful. How it was surely possible to forget the possible future for much of the time. And how in five years, or ten, there might be a treatment, even a cure. Either way, there was actually nothing wrong with him,
now
. She bullied him into studying again, and in return he made her leave her books and go sit with him in a bar. They met each other sometimes after his lectures, walked, saw a movie, ate; at other times they lived their separate lives and came home, pleased to find the other one there.

She liked to look up and see him stretched out on the sofa that had become his, a book in one hand, his forehead tight, and his jaw loose. He had a serious face that changed shape completely when he smiled. There was no need, for now at any rate, to be lonely. There were shaving things on the tiny shelf in the absurd little bathroom. Two empty wineglasses by the sink. She cooked. He did the laundry; he folded her things and left them in a careful pile on the bottom of her bed. They joked that it was a marriage of sorts.

He was proud of her, she of him. They did not talk about it but it seemed that while their risk set them apart from others, there was some kind of compensation because they were closer than before. On New Year's Eve 1986 they found themselves in the middle of a noisy boisterous crowd, hot, half-drunk, turning to each other for the midnight kiss. She reached up, he down, and then Vik's lips suddenly opened to her, hungry, alive, no longer remotely fraternal. His hands settled momentarily on her hips, and then they pulled apart, their hearts battering their chests.

No one had seen, or if they had, thought anything of what they saw: a prank, a parody. And objectively, surely it was nothing? Alcohol was clearly to blame. Yet what had happened became impossible to forget. By the end of the month, Vik had moved out: the best thing, of course, though there was a tiny part of Anna that thought, why not? Who could blame us?

It was very, very hard to remember that New Year, and the lonely months after he'd moved out. He went to counselling, began to study again, and eventually began a successful career. There was a painful reserve between them which never quite melted until in 1993, almost exactly ten years after that visit to their mother's, when the simple test that Vik so much wanted finally became available. Vik was one of the first people in the country to take it, and he came out clear.

‘It's the most amazing thing,' he told her. ‘I've got my life back, but it's far, far better than before. I feel as if nothing could ever go wrong, again, not ever.' He wanted Anna to have that feeling too, and all over again he was trying to persuade her to take the test, wanting to accompany her to the appointment, reminding her how his result had no bearing on hers, that chance was still fifty percent. She would be all right too…he just
knew
.

Sometimes she felt that way too. Sometimes she felt the opposite. Neither feeling, she explained to him, had any basis in fact.

Then Vik met Lesley, the children were born, and finally it seemed that Vik would allow Anna to go her own way.

—
♦ —

‘WE'RE IN OUR PYJAMAS WATCHING
Mulan
!' Frankie's voice was very loud in Anna's ear, and brought with it the entire person, six years old, with blonde braids and huge eyes, greedy for life. ‘Daddy's back at three. Mum's painting the bathroom. Did you go shopping in Japan?'

‘Maybe.' The children jostled for possession of the phone. Sam, eighteen months younger, was the more serious of the two.

‘I made a very exciting discovery yesterday. It must be a secret for now,' she warned them.

‘Sam,' Frankie said. ‘Promise!'

‘Yes,' he said, after a pause. An enormous winged lizard, she told them. One of the biggest ever found.

‘
How
big?' Frankie asked.

‘Hmm… Its wings would stretch right across your living room and onto the patio. Its body might have been about your size, but lighter.'

‘Will you be on TV again? When are you coming to see us? Mum—' Frankie yelled, ‘it's Anna!' Then she was gone, but Sam remained on the line, not speaking but breathing heavily into the handset as if at any point he might. Then, suddenly, he dropped it onto the phone table.

Anna felt almost normal as she showered and dressed.

Downstairs, Lauren informed her that Mike and Colin had already checked out and were in what she called the breakfast patio: a bright room with French doors along one wall open onto a deck beyond. A hunched elderly couple sat opposite each other at one inside table; otherwise the room was empty. Mike and Colin were outside. As she stepped into the light Mike turned towards her and it felt as if all the air had been vacuumed from her lungs. As well as the lump across the bridge of his nose, his left eye had puffed up and turned blackish purple overnight; the eye itself was a livid red.

She was going to say how sorry she was, but he cut across:

‘I tripped on the stairs,' he said. The mismatched eyes remained fixed on her for several moments before he looked down at his coffee cup. The asymmetry of his gaze made it impossible to read.

Colin grinned and offered her a chair.

‘Just how much did you two drink, now?'

‘You've both missed your committee,' Anna feigned a smile as she sat down, and noted a grosbeak bobbing about in the new growth at the far edge of the yard. ‘But you do have a good excuse.' Colin nodded, mock-solemn.

‘Yes. I dare say we won't be fired this time. Just a detention, I expect…'

Mike, unsmiling, stared out at the trees. Even so, she felt her shoulders relax: at least there was to be no scene, no shouting or fists pounding on the table, no spilled coffee or startled elderly guests watching through the French doors. Naturally, Mike was upset. He had come out of it worse than she had and was probably ashamed of himself too. But the important thing was what they'd found: the astounding specimen lying just a few miles from where they sat, which had died, passed through processes of burial, compression, and fossilisation, and then survived the slow collision of tectonic plates, the heaving up of once-submerged layers of the earth's crust. It had lain underground while species became extinct and new ones flourished, while ice ages came and went. A river had carved a bed, revealing it, finally, to whichever human beings might pass by and be able to see what was there: to her, Mike and Colin. It was their luck, their opportunity — their responsibility, too. Forget the rest.

She tried and failed to catch his eye, poured cream into her coffee, sipped. If she did not have any time alone with him before they separated at Vancouver, then she would call him or send a note — something simple suggesting that they had both acted out of character and should put the incident completely behind them.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him glance at his watch.

‘We'd better go,' he said to Colin.

‘Ready?' Colin asked her. ‘The cab's due.'

♦ ♦ ♦

‘June next year would be the earliest that we could begin a full-scale dig. It'll have to come out with the matrix attached,' she said as they stood waiting on the wooden dock. The sea, a calm, silvery blue, was decorated with webs of mist. ‘We'll need a helicopter. That one close to the bank won't be easy.'

Mike, as if deaf, stared out to sea.

‘Then, in terms of preparation, it'll really cost,' Colin said.

‘Yes,' she grinned at him. ‘So?' It was a running joke that he did not have to cope with these kinds of problems, could bring what he wanted home in his pocket, more or less and keep an entire library of specimens on his office shelves.

‘We were so lucky!' she told him. ‘I wasn't looking for it. I was thinking aquatic.' The floatplane, its wingspan only a little larger than that of the creature she'd found, emerged just then from some low cloud on the horizon. Seeing it, they all picked up their bags, even though it would take some minutes to arrive.

They sat wedged next to each other, Mike in the far window, Colin in the middle, Anna on the nearside. The roar of the engine was both deafening and soothing and the vibration and noise together seemed to scour her mind clean. The ocean below looked more than anything like the skin of some enormous animal, though as they progressed its appearance became more complex. Huge quantities of deep green algae formed viridian clouds, shifting and billowing beneath the surface. A school of thirty or so porpoises, dwarfed by distance, leapt and sank back into the water in apparent unison, sewing their path through the sea. The plane passed over forested and rocky islands, harbours cluttered with yachts and docks, and then they were approaching the delta, the water suddenly smooth, shallow, and heavy with reddish sediments.

For a moment Anna let her eyes close, and allowed herself to imagine a huge winged creature, downy with brownish hair, its legs tucked up, its neck folded down, slowly beating its way through the air and tracked by its shadow on the water below. Its sight, far more acute than human vision, allowed it to see beneath the water — warmer back then and far more profuse with life, home to car-sized turtles, enormous squid. For a moment, she saw what it saw — and then the floatplane, rejoining the water with a bounce, jolted her back into the now: they climbed out into a breeze that still smelled faintly of cedar.

Soon they were in Departures, a man-made bubble of recycled air and flickering fluorescence, a world of grey furnishings and static electricity filled with a subdued, brain-numbing acoustic of murmuring voices and the turning over of mechanical systems. Meanwhile, outside, dimly visible behind UV-filtered glass, the real world — ancient, vast, complex and extradimensional, continued without them. The three of them, marooned there in their dusty boots and practical clothes, could not afford to fall out.

‘Mike — wait!' She fell in with him as he made for security. He bent to retie his bootlace and then stood facing her. They examined each other: he'd shaved carelessly. His left eye, in its purple casing, was smaller but somehow far brighter than the right; the pupils of both eyes were small, his lips tight.

‘I'm sorry for my part in it. I just reacted… I didn't mean to hurt you.' Ignoring her, he turned away and joined the line into security. Colin appeared, waved, and pausing to raise a hand, followed suit.

Why on earth these playground games? she thought, furious all over again. She could be dwelling on the insult of it:
I notice you screwed someone else so what about me?
But really, who cared? And now what? Would Mike tell Colin on the way home? If so, would Colin tell her he had been told? How far would it all go? How much of her attention was it going to take? She strode through the automatic doors, back outside.

Cars crawled by, dropping and collecting passengers; she crossed and made for a bench in a small garden area by the parkade: a square pond, some dwarfed conifers and a box of orange begonias: an odd combination, habitat-wise. A small, vivid green frog,
Hyla regilla
, sat close to the edge of the pond; its whole body, glistening wet, beat with a tiny pulse. She slipped on her sunglasses. Overhead, plane after plane carved up the sky.

Before long, she would be up there, and then down, out and through to the outside world again, breathing real air even if it was thick with fumes, and climbing into her own car.

♦ ♦ ♦

Once Calgary was behind her, she stopped for gas and called home. Soon she was on Highway 9; to either side stretched broad, flat fields with their swathes of stubble and rich brown earth, the occasional groups of staring cattle. It appeared to go on forever, but forty minutes later came the familiar surprise: the road's sudden plunge into an increasingly arid, meandering canyon. The town itself, a straggle of dino-themed hotels, malls and campsites was an irrelevance soon left behind and she drove on and out into a windswept landscape where low grasses and sages had bleached to silvery green and beige, studded here and there with yellow flowers. Prickly pear still bloomed, and on each side of the river was a narrow but lush strip of cottonwood and alder, their foliage just on the turn.

Home
, Anna thought, finally forgetting everything else, and soon she was on the driveway and approaching the cream clapboard house. Her mother had chosen and then decorated it when finally she'd agreed that life would be more pleasant for her (she refused to say easier) — if they lived together again.

The door was unlocked and the smell of good food cooking filled the house. A note from Janice, their careworker cum housekeeper, mentioned lasagne and that salad dressing needed to be made. Anna found her mother dozing on the back porch, her face in shadow beneath a huge straw-brimmed hat. After all the places she had been, it was sweet to pull up the other wicker chair and sit there a few moments, watching the gentle movement of her mother's breath. Stuffed between her leg and the chair was a sketchbook, and to the side on the table were a pile of magazines, a jar of pencils, water, pills, the wind-up radio she insisted on using, the phone and one of the photograph albums from her room. Between the hat and her white-framed Jackie O sunglasses her face was more or less invisible. She was wearing a paisley print blouse in blue and turquoise, and a pair of the stretchy pants she had taken to of late because they were easy to deal with in the bathroom. She seemed smaller than ever, though her hands, which lay curled in her lap, were too big for the rest of her and, with their swollen, shiny knuckles and curled fingers seemed almost to belong to some other kind of being. Despite her own ingenious attempts to escape and the mercies of technology, she was increasingly trapped in her body. Yet she never complained. For some reason which was not simple pity, Anna found herself in tears as she leaned in under the hat to kiss her mother on the cheek.