The Find (7 page)

—
♦ —

ANNA HAD WOKEN FROM A DREAM
about Mike: they were outside a hotel that was the Mountain View but even more run down; she'd hit him and he'd fallen, crumpled to the ground and he lay there, not moving, eyes closed, blood gushing out of his nose. She was on her knees beside him, saying his name and trying to take his pulse when his eyes sprang open and he reared up, grabbing her arm... And now the darkness and terror of that moment floated somewhere between her and the calm, orderly room she sat in, and the sound of her own voice tearing at its edges made her feel more desperate still.

‘I already know,' Sheila said. A tiny woman, the complete physical opposite of her husband, Ray, the pollen specialist, she was impeccably put together in shades of dark red and cream, her hair freshly tinted and styled. She set her coffee down on a mat on her desk.

‘We'll support you fully, of course. Now,' Sheila said, ‘let's talk around this. Is there any background, anything that you could think of which might have precipitated all this?'

Anna bent to pick a paperclip from the floor; wanted to cry, did she have to explain and justify heself to anyone who asked?

I hit him
: she did not want to say that. The whole of her resisted it, that bit in particular.

Sheila waited.

‘We did have a disagreement after the find. But it was absolutely nothing to do with the find itself.' Sheila waited.

‘In confidence,' Anna told her, ‘he was bothering me. And I said no, but he grabbed hold of me. And so, in the heat of the moment, I — struck him in the face, and I made a real mess of it.' Her own face was a mess too, now, flushed, wet: she hid it in her hands. Sheila's touch on her shoulder made her jump.

‘Did you report it?' Sheila said as she squatted down next to Anna.

‘Did I
what
? I've tried to apologise, but he won't accept it.'

‘Apologise? It sounds as if there was kind of a sexual assault. So — well, that's something that should be reported.' A
sexual assault
? For the first time Anna looked properly at Sheila, who had not said
only a very sick person would hit a man like that
, who peered back at her, her mouth soft, her neatly shaped eyebrows raised in concern.

‘Even now,' Sheila said, ‘you should make a statement to the RCMP.'

‘But it was a misunderstanding. It may even have nothing to do with what's happening with the specimen... Well, it's connected, in that he's angry, but I don't want to blow it up out of proportion, not more than it already is.'

Sheila stood and went back to her chair.

‘Things are already rather out of hand, don't you think? It looks to me as if you're being punished in a big way. Look, you've got him three times. You have a great profile for your work here. You have found something of enormous significance,
in his field
, which, because you are female, is unacceptable, but, if he has you, then maybe it can become his. But, you say
no
.'

Their eyes met, pushed against each other. To explain to Sheila why she could not quite accept this account, why she could not dismiss a lingering sense of guilt, Anna would have had to say more, go deeper, further. She couldn't.

‘Didn't you once work on flight? There's a territorial element, for sure.

‘How's this?' Sheila said. ‘I set up a meeting of the research and funding committees. We'll approach the university, alert them to the problem and seek a solution. Meanwhile, it's been a huge shock. Go home now, get some rest.'

‘Sheila—' Anna was on her feet, glaring into the other woman's face, ‘How am I supposed to get on with my work?'

‘Go home,' Sheila told her. ‘I'll call you.'

Anna ran. She cut through a tangle of tracks and disused minor roads and then back a mile or so to the east. The ground was flat, but on either side rose the sheer walls of the meandering canyon, gouged out by glacial meltwater and then ever since blown and washed away at a rate of four millimetres a year, showed the ochre, rust and charcoal sediments of a vast alluvial flood plain and the remnants of a long-vanished sea; a landscape full of revelation. She was out of practice; her legs leaden, her chest tight but she slackened off and then, when she came back to the run, it was easier.

Her breath found its rhythm; slowly, the biochemical consolation for her efforts trickled in, lifting her mood a little. Marsh, she reminded herself, who had discovered
inter alia
, some of the first North American pterosaurs, had dealt with wolves, buffalo stampedes, sandstorms; his team lived under a constant fear of Indian attack. Back then, you returned from fieldwork glad to be alive. Surely that put her problems in perspective.

Though perhaps the human enemy was worse than the beastly one, and frank hostilities were different — preferable — to betrayal.

Did Mike believe his own lies, or somehow forget that he was telling them? What did he say to himself about this?

The sky lowered, overcast, its greys melding seamlessly with the mud and iron tints of the landscape below, and finally the rain came, smearing slippery, clayey dust over the road and forcing her to walk.

♦ ♦ ♦

Two days later, two weeks after the find itself, they convened in the boardroom, three abstract canvases behind them, and the blinds down against the late September sun: Sheila, Peter, Brian and Anna, at one end of the long polished table.

From the university: a faxed letter, offering a version of events according to Mike: how he saw the larger of the specimens first, and Anna had acknowledged (as he was sure any committee would agree) that he was better qualified and equipped to deal with a find of this kind and magnitude, and had given him her blessing to lead the excavation. But perhaps she had mixed feelings, because later that evening he'd become concerned because of her reluctance to hand over two small parts of the specimen which he had extracted. He felt her response was extreme, as had been her behaviour ever since. He was more convinced than ever that the university must insist on complete control of the find.

From the museum, the draft of a letter saying that they did not accept this account, would like to resolve; but if not, would take the matter further by making the funding bodies aware of the dispute and its origins.

‘It has to be said, all this is going to make a lot of ripples and cause bad feeling,' Pete said. ‘Are you ready for that?'

‘I have to ask— where are you coming from when you say that?' Sheila asked, and he looked at her, baffled.

‘I'm just flagging it up.'

Anna knew Pete was right. She had experimented briefly with the thought that she could walk away, let Mike have Big Crow, tell herself that the important thing was that it was excavated and prepared and who exactly did these things was irrelevant. But at the thought, the familiar surge of rage pushed through her: no, he's not having
this
.

‘Anna?'

‘I think we have to go ahead. And I think the letter's good.'

Sheila, Anna knew, wanted her to share the whole story, to at least hint at it. But she avoided Sheila's gaze, looked around the table at the rest of them as they studied the museum's ultimatum, their faces variously furrowed and contorted. Jan's pen clicked in and out. Pete yawned, pulled at his ear. It was as if, suddenly, they were back in grade one, struggling with the fundamentals.

‘Well,' Brian said in his deep, slightly hoarse voice, ‘not my department but it seems straightforwardly put. Let's hope it works.'

—
♦ —

ANNA WAS IN THE BASEMENT WITH THE KIDS
, watching first Frankie, in a tutu, and then Sam, as himself, walking along the back of a sofa and then leaping onto a beanbag that had to be moved farther away each time, when Vik appeared in the doorway and invited her to see his new toy. He led her to the garage with its polished cement floor and track lighting — large enough, the joke was, for an ordinary family to live in — and revealed a silver BMW, just weeks old and his alone, just for going to and from work. The very first of Vik's fancy cars, Anna remembered had been a black Camaro bought to celebrate his negative test.

They sat inside the car, inhaling the scent of its newness: leather, plastics, polish, pine. Vik demonstrated the seat adjustments, the computerised navigation system, the speakers; he flicked the lights on and off for good measure and then gave a summary of the vehicle's vital statistics and performance data.

‘Want to drive?' he asked.

The garage doors slid up. Anna eased out of the driveway, put her foot down once they hit some straight road. It was easy to slip over the limit; they both liked speed. Vik gave directions. The road rose towards the foothills, beyond which the peaks of the Rockies glowed violet white.

They parked at the viewing point, gazed back down and across the flat expanse that stretched east to the city, fading now in a haze of dusty light. Vik touched her arm.

‘What's the matter?' he'd asked, and she was grateful that he had seen through her, that he still knew her better than anyone in the world.

She told him: what Mike had done, what she had done, what Sheila thought of it, the dispute over the find: it came out easily enough.

‘It's driving me insane,' she said, and then waited a few seconds for him to weigh up what he had been told.

‘Yes,' he told her, ‘it is a shame you didn't report it.' But there was no blame in his voice. No sense that she'd brought this upon herself, had been unreasonable — above all, no sense that he thought she was possibly suffering from increased aggressive impulses, irrationality, mood swings and impaired cognitive faculties. If anyone other than her would think that, it would be him, but there he was, perfectly matter of fact. Already, she felt stronger.

‘I'd say find a way to go for him,' he said. ‘At the very least fire a shot across his bow: might send him packing. Not my field. But I know someone—' He hunted through his cell phone directory for the number, wrote it on the back of one of his own cards. ‘Here.'

‘I don't want to be aggressive about this,' Anna said. He laughed, and a split second later, she joined him.

‘You'll talk to her?'

Anna put the card on the dashboard. ‘I'm not sure. Now don't get bossy on me, Vik.' He picked up the card and gave it to her again.

‘You don't have to act on her advice, just hear it.'

‘I do have to act on yours?'

‘You could try that out, for once.'

‘I am grateful, Vik, really.'

Frankie ripped the exquisite Japanese wrapping paper from her gifts, and then helped Sam. They tossed aside the t-shirts featuring gorgeous, incomprehensible writing, yelled their delight as they came to the heart of the matter: robotic pets that walked stiffly across the room, communicated in a series of electronic warbles, beeps, whirs and squeaks and had to be cared for by pressing buttons in order to feed or soothe them.

Frankie slotted batteries into their bellies and remotes.

‘Point!' she yelled at her brother. Lights flashed; the creatures' plastic feet clacked across the wooden floor.

‘I'm sorry,' Anna told Lesley, ‘but they asked. They'll soon get bored with them and then you can use them as an example next time they want something dreadful.' Lesley handed her some glasses for the table.

‘You better be right,' she said, ‘or I'll send them to stay with you.'

‘Please! But after I've done this application—'

Lesley forgave Anna for the robots when her own gift slipped from the tissue paper it was wrapped in: a length of blue-grey slubbed silk that felt smooth and rough at the same time. The fabric, she said, was perfect. It would make a duvet cover and then a Roman blind... Anna did not care much about decorations, but she recognised the passion. Lesley had some similarities with Mama, and it was easy to see how Vik enjoyed providing for her: her pleasure in the physical surfaces of her life, in the tastes and smells and kinds of things was intense, and so, presumably, was her pleasure in him.

Vik grilled the fish. The low light streamed through the open doors, caught in the polished glasses and the coloured and colourless liquids they contained; it bounced around the table, lightly touching the knives and forks, the edges of plates, and burnishing the grain of the wood. Everything had a great depth and richness, and peoples' skin and clothes looked somehow more than themselves, as if it all were part of a painting, and Mama herself, her cheeks flushed, her white hair electrified, her upper body wrapped in an intricately crocheted purple cardigan, was likewise crying out to be made into a picture. They passed the camera around the table until Vik carried in the salmon, perfectly charred, and used the last scrap of memory for a picture of that. Sam settled on Anna's lap and soon her shirt was damp with sweat, his or hers or both, she had no idea. His head knocked periodically into her chin as she ate, using her fork only, the other hand holding him tight.

Later, when the kids tired of their robot pets and ran outside to play in the last of the light, Lesley closed the doors to the deck and Vik lit the stove; propane flames danced around the coals.

‘I'm really hoping we'll have one more,' Lesley told Anna as they cleared up, ‘once Sam's done preschool.'

Mama slept in the car on the way home from Vik's. Anna, driving under a sky clotted with stars, felt lighter. It seemed to her that she had let things get on top of her, but now she had support, a perspective on what was happening, and life would eventually return to how it used to be.