The Find (9 page)

—
♦ —

WRAPPED IN THEIR COATS AND JACKETS
, on a sunny but chilly day, the memorial guests stood or sat in the rows of borrowed auditorium chairs alongside Anna's colleagues, Janice and the handful of new friends Grace had made since she moved. A surprising number had flown in from the East, friends and contemporaries but younger people too: Eileen Hudson, from her gallery, Chuck Tennyson who had collected the best of the work she had done since Leo's death, other artists, their partners, former neighbours, the children of old friends.

Anna wore one of her mother's hand-knit sweaters in oranges, browns and golds. Most of the women and a few of the men had complied with the request she had made in her will: they wore brightly decorated hats and colourful scarves, had draped shawls over their winter coats, so that the garden looked as if it was host to a flock of huge clumsy birds, some of which became human and spoke about her mother: a remarkable woman. Cared for her husband. Raised her children. Painter. Photographer. Optimist. A fantastic mother, Vik said, the best in the world.

Not long ago her mother had stood naked in the bathroom and asked Anna to photograph the mottled skin of her belly because the colours were so complicated and interesting, then laughed at the thought of those who would find it weird.

Oh, darling. Forgive me,
she whispered now, real and not real in Anna's ear.
Press Play now.
The music too had been specified — an eclectic mix. To the strains of gypsy fiddle music, the flock of bird-people struggled out of their chairs and made for the warmth of the house. Anna slipped Mama's camera out of her pocket and took a photograph. Vik looked appalled; Janice, beside her, linked arms.

It was impossible, when she returned to her office, to relate to the outlandish task of painstakingly extracting a winged lizard the size of a floatplane from the Cretaceous shale, still less to the notion that a man wanted to fight her for it. As for whether she was developing or would develop HD or not, she had no opinion and no longer cared.

The nights were extraordinarily long.

On weekends, and then increasingly during the week as well, she borrowed Janice's dog, Roger: knee-high, black and brown, bristly, perk-eared and of indeterminate breed, he was the perfect antidote to melancholy. He was keen, but well trained, sat with his tail thumping on the floor; he followed her from room to room, watched her eat and wash. If she closed the door, he waited on the other side until she opened it. He saw her weep, curse, sleep; he watched her sit on the floor in her mother's bedroom, so full of her things, so empty of her.

No one said anything against her occasionally taking him in to work, and she found herself taking him more and more. He was her dog, except that he couldn't be, because she was away so often. He listened to her phone calls, to her reading aloud her description of the skull of
Clidastes liodontus
.

Roger listened to everything, but was not in favour of self-indulgence. And he was a one-answer dog. His nails clickety- clacked across the floor and he waited for her by the door. Out! Out of this house, now! Out into the fresh snow, where white rabbits hide. She could still laugh at herself: a woman, a scientist, who talked to a dog.

After Christmas Vik took everyone to the Yucatan — a low-rise hotel with cabanas strung out along the beach, lush grounds populated by huge, dazzling butterflies and equally brilliant parrots, and turquoise pools.

In the rooms were white lizards that could drop their tails and bizarre flying insects as big as a fist, which took off almost vertically.

Lesley was pretty sure that she was pregnant. So to let her rest in the mornings, Vik and Anna took charge of Frankie and Sam, smothering them in sunblock and then getting them sweaty and covered in sand, and then rinsing them in the pool or the ocean, and doing it all over again. In the afternoons, Anna read in the shade, left the family more to itself, though once, she and Vik joined a diving trip.

Flying fish burst out of the water, then vanished again, leaving it a glistening, undulating sheet stretching right to the sky. When the boat moored, Anna strapped on the tank and checked the mask, waved to Vik; she slipped into the water, was immediately absorbed into a reality far more vivid than anything she had imagined on the way out: the otherness of the sea, its layered blue-green light, the weight of it, the intricacies of the reef, its impossible colour, the quivering shoals of striped and glistening fish. A clever octopus wedged into an impossible crack and peered out, just one eye visible.
Hello,
Anna could not but think at it.
What is it like to be you?

When the letter came in March, she knew, because of the thickness of the envelope, that it must be good news: acceptance papers to sign. The word
pleasure
was in the first sentence:
Dear Dr Silowski, It is with great pleasure that I write concerning your application for funding the excavation of the pterosaur remains at the Big Crow River.
Wings sprouted on her back — she felt weightless, could fly there right now! Yet the body of the letter, longer than usual, evoked more complex feelings:

Since the circumstances of this discovery are unusual and more than one competent party has expressed an interest in excavating the site, the Society has decided to divide our support for this project between, on the one hand, yourself and Dr Maiko Yamaguchi of the University of Tokyo, and on the other, Dr Michael Swenson. The area surrounding the fully exposed specimen known as Crow River A will be your and Dr Yamaguchi's responsibility, and the larger specimen, Crow River B, partially beneath the cliff, will be Dr Swenson's. The two expeditions will be under separate control but are likely to be simultaneous; we hope you will find many opportunities for co-operation and economies of scale during this excavation and subsequent preparation and description of the finds…

‘We get one, he gets one,' Brian said, as they sat again around the big table in the meeting room. ‘The judgment of Solomon. I guess they didn't want either of you, or either institution, up in arms. Trying to smooth things over.'

Sheila hissed out a breath, tapped her notepad with her pen.

‘What do you think?' Anna did not usually ask other people how to proceed and everyone in the room stared silently back at her.

‘I think you know where I stand,' Sheila said.

‘It's still good,' Dave said. ‘I mean, if you put your feelings aside, then the fact is it's more or less how it would have been if the problem had never occurred. You and he would have been working together on this, right? So you still are, with the boundaries more defined. Okay, meantime you have fallen out. Okay, he gets to write his own paper. That's what he wanted out of it, if you ask me. Granted, the man's a shit, but you're still in there and that's the main thing. Compromise. I think you should look at it as a success.'

‘Yes,' said Brian, ‘could have been worse. But if you don't want to go ahead, given the importance of this find, we must consider who else—'

Someone else?

‘Of course I will do it,' she said; there were smiles and congratulations all round.

‘So should I be pleased,' she asked Roger, ‘that I've almost got something like what I wanted? Yes? No?'

♦ ♦ ♦

‘I have to advise you that if you are going to voluntarily work with Dr Swenson,' Pamela Schott told her, ‘it can only weaken any case you try to make.'

‘
Voluntarily?
The committee split the find between us, fifty-fifty.'

‘I don't think you understood me, Anna. Leaving aside whether it's wise to work with a man like Dr Swenson, look at it from the other side's point of view. A gift! And how will it seem to a third party, given that there are already weaknesses in your case, and that yet more time has elapsed before you start to disclose what happened?

‘Anna, you have to choose what's most important to you here: the find itself or the dispute with Dr Swenson.'

Put that way, it was very clear.

—
♦ —

TWO TECHNICIANS LOADED THE SKULL
of
Clidastes liodontus
onto a gurney and steered it towards the door.

‘Had enough of this guy?'

‘I need some space for this!' she pointed at the caudal vertebra from Big Crow which Ai Lin had prepared for the application.

‘Size doesn't matter, then!' The two men's guffaws were suddenly muffled as the door swung behind them. Freed from the matrix, the fossil perched on a sheet of glass. A vestigial neural spine, little thicker than an envelope, jutted up and back: it was a simple, perfect, almost weightless structure, suggesting, if you looked at it carefully enough, an entire architecture, a skeleton that supported the muscles and tendons which flight demanded.

Anna switched on her bench light. She settled herself on the padded stool, adjusted the light, reached out.

‘No!' she yelled as Roger shot out from under the bench.
‘No! Lie down!'
He obeyed, cowering, and then began to sound the alarm: a low growl, a loud bark, repeated. ‘
Quiet, Roger!'
she hissed at him, but already there was knocking on the door:

‘Are you all right?' It was Brian.

‘No.'

‘What's up?' The barking stopped as he approached.

‘Don't tread on it!' Brian's eyes widened, searched the floor. Fragments everywhere. Somehow, the vertebra had skittered to the edge of the bench, flown over it, hurtled towards the floor and then, even though it was so very light, burst apart.

They stared at the pieces. The movie did not rewind.

‘I hadn't even looked at it,' she said. ‘How can I face Ai Lin?'

They knelt and collected the pieces. Brian's square hands and blunt fingers and Anna's small-boned digits were equally deft. Brian puffed unapologetically as he bent and reached; Anna's breath scarcely existed.

‘Well, you've got more of them? And it can be fixed. Lots of time and a bit of glue... But, Anna, I think you're going to have to reconsider the dog!' he said as they each placed their fragments into the lid of a storage box.

‘Okay now?' Brian asked at the door.

‘Yes, thanks, Brian.'

Roger? Casters over the laminate floor, action and reaction as she reached across? Involuntary movement? She did not know exactly what had happened. She would never know.

When she called him Roger came over, sat panting and looking up at her. He seemed to watch her as closely as she was watching him. She rubbed the back of his neck, and then clipped the lead onto his collar.

—
♦ —

IT WAS SPRING
;
THE WIND WAS WARMER,
brought occasional blasts of white-gold light between showers. Scott had just finished making a site for a band called DDT. At least, he thought as he drove home, he had made them
look
like they might be okay. He hoped Chryssie would be online and hot when he got in.

The front door was ajar.

‘Dad?' he called, standing a moment in the kitchen, where the light showed the dust and everything seemed unnaturally still. There was a CD lying face down on the floor: one of his system discs.

He knew already then, but strode to his room to confirm: all that remained of the Door to the Universe were two shadows in the dust on the desk. Gone: every last lead, cable and bit of it, even the mouse and its mat. Liquefied. He grabbed the paperweight, a mango-shaped rock he'd found by the river, smashed it experimentally into the wall. The thin panelling cracked, splintered — but it did not feel like enough.

At the liquor store, Fraser confirmed that indeed, Mac was there the night before, along with two guys from out of town. Scott bought whisky of his own. He waited in the lounge with the TV mute, the rock close by; he drank slowly, waiting, and thinking what he might say, the perfect, bitter one-liners:
So, I guess you didn't feel you'd had enough out of me? Look, there's something I've wanted to do for a long time.
He did not imagine what might happen afterwards, or care. When a car door slammed outside, he jumped up, the rock clenched tight in his hand, crossed to the kitchen. There was coughing outside, the sound of the key stabbing unsuccessfully at the lock.

He resisted the urge to yell, or to spring to the door and yank it open, because once he did that the whole thing would happen at once and he wanted Mac to realise what was happening, and why, to know what was hitting him. It seemed to take forever for the key to slide home, the door to crash open. Mac lurched in.

‘Scott?' he struggled to focus, and at the same time, to stand. Scott watched his father, bearded, his jeans buttoned but not zipped, register the unusual quality of the situation, sniff at the hostility in the air, and in slow motion, divine the reason for it. A lopsided, hopeless grin spread itself on his face. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a crisp new twenty.

‘Take it. Yours.'

‘Aren't you even
sorry
?' Scott's voice broke. He hurled the rock at the window, not at the old man with his flies undone who'd once lain with his mother in bed and started a life, his life, this one, his. ‘Look after your own fucking-self!' he yelled and then he was in his truck fumbling with
his
key, couldn't even see it, or what was beyond the windscreen.

Finally he pulled out of town. Go, go and go. You've been through all this before! he told himself. So what. Damn, fucking, pissing rain. Spring? It never stops here, he thought, as the wipers smeared dust and pollen across the screen.

He drove without thinking left and up, towards the reserve trail to the lookout on the cliff.
Your place too
, his mother used to say,
if you want it to be
. Never mind, she told him, the judgments about her leaving. There was family there still, a distant cousin or two. He'd seldom visited since her death, but he did feel something for the place, a pull.

Like mother, like son: loyal, stuck, screwed. Her time ran out: the aneurism. Over in minutes.
Scott Macleod, please come to the principal's office
(life as you know it is about to end).

A lesson there, no doubt about it.

Fucking rain. No jacket. Had enough.

He got out and jogged through the forest towards the cliff, feeling the rain again as he emerged from the trees into the weather and the roar of the water below. The last of the melt was coming off the mountain; the muddy water crashed down the falls upriver and then churned and raced past the cliff. It was a year since the flood.

Can't leave
, he thought, staring down at the water skittering over the rocks on the other side, can't
stay
. Can't go back to that stinking trailer and live In Real Life with Mac going under and no chat rooms or games, no weird and wonderful facts at my fingertips. No credit. Still owe the bank. What else did he have? Chryssie — a person never actually touched, who'd send a photo of her (or someone's) slit and tell you what she'd like you to do, type in real time how thinking about that made her feel, but wouldn't step into your actual existence: not much of a tie. And irrelevant, given lack of hardware at home.
Can't leave. Can't stay.

The water churned below. Fast, not so very deep. Here and there you could still see rock. He thought of the men in wing suits, jumping off their cliff. His heart pounded inside him and the rain beat on his skin.
Can't go on—

‘Hello,' a voice said, right next to him. A person about shoulder height wearing bright blue raingear had appeared out of nowhere and was standing right beside him. Hairs rose on his arms and neck at the shock of it, yet she was real enough. Female, with brown eyes was about all he could tell. She held out a hand gloved in Gore-Tex.

‘Mr Bellavance? Anna Silowski.'

‘No,' he told her, his hands jammed in his pockets.

‘But I'm supposed to be meeting him here right now. Does that truck on the road belong to you?' she asked. ‘Have you been here long? What are you doing here?'

Mindyourownfuckingbusiness.

‘What are
you
doing here?' he asked, and at that, she looked away, down at the water. ‘If you're from CanCo,' he said, ‘don't tell anyone in this town.'

‘Well, no—' She looked back down the trail, and then took out a cell phone: it wouldn't work, but he let her go through with it. He started to shiver, remembered a half-joint in the truck; nodded in the direction of the road and set off, the rain beating on his back, his shoes soaked.

‘I guess there is no point in me waiting there,' she said, when she caught him up. They took the trail back together in silence. Her white Corolla was parked behind his truck. Hired: no one sane would buy white.

‘You're soaked,' she said, as if she'd just noticed him properly for the first time. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Just great, thanks,' he told her, and slammed the door shut.

He fired the engine, turned up the heat, stripped off his t-shirt and wiped his hands dry on the other seat. The lighter and half-smoke were right where he thought he'd left them; he found music, pushed the seat back and lit up.

He started up on the old script about Mac not being able to help himself because it was a disease. Though, of course, if he hadn't ever started drinking, it wouldn't have shown itself. It was a kind of potential that had to be activated. Ironic, of course, that Mum saw him as a way out of the kind of life she had as she grew up. He was just fine when she met him, she'd said. And maybe his inner alcoholic was just waiting for a good wife to come along so he could safely let rip. And now here he was, picking up where she'd been forced to leave off. It was almost funny, really… Scott was warm all over and just beginning to relax when a knocking on the window jerked him right up in the seat. He wiped the window and there she was again, the Woman in Blue.

‘My car won't start. But I've got lights. Maybe it's the alternator, or something? My cell phone
still
won't pick up.'

So she stood next to him holding an umbrella while he checked what he could under the hood. Nothing to be done without parts. He began to see the funny side: her, the umbrella, him stoned with no shirt. He hunted for the tow rope in the back of the truck but it was gone.

‘I'll drive you to town,' he said.

‘I really appreciate this,' she told him as she shoved her laptop case under the seat.
Hell
,
everyone
but me
, he thought, seeing it, and then turned up the fan, got the wipers up to speed. But he was alive, at least.

‘Scott,' he told her, as he heaved the truck into a U-turn; he couldn't see through the back, but hardly anything ever came that way. ‘So, what were you doing up there?'
Oh, come on,
he thought, watching her hesitate,
I've been half-naked with my arm in your engine. Don't I deserve to know? Besides, it could only be Forestry, Mines or Tourism, and who cares?

He had no shirt on and the car smelled of marijuana. They were avoiding publicity. She didn't know what to say, but couldn't not answer. She was good at avoidance, at keeping quiet, but not at outright lies.

‘I'm a palaeontologist,' she told him.

‘Dinosaurs?' he asked, turning to her, and then back to the road, ‘Here?' She hesitated again. ‘Well,' she said. ‘Not
exactly
dinosaurs. Winged lizards. A different part of the evolutionary tree.' She wiped the window with her sleeve and then pushed back the hood of the blue jacket. A huge amount of dark hair, still dry, sprung out to either side. How old was she? He couldn't tell. But it was interesting: until now, palaeontologists had been wind-tanned men with big beards mumbling long words on TV, not women with huge eyes and wild hair.

‘We're hoping to excavate them this summer.'

‘Cool!' he said.
Stop there
, Anna advised herself. But he was very kindly driving her and she returned his smile.

‘Yes. Exciting,' she said, ‘though there are issues. It's actually going to be extremely challenging—' and then she found herself telling him about the bone, and how it was only millimetres thick and honeycombed with air pockets, yet strong enough to bear the huge strains imposed by flight muscles, and how the creature had a fused section of backbone in its chest area, and wings that were built from membrane stretched onto an enormously long finger and that this was nothing like a bat's wing or a bird's… And that scientists did not yet agree as to whether the pterosaurs had evolved from the thecodonts or were a separate offshoot of the diapsid archosaurs, but certainly they were not at all related to the Cretaceous or Jurassic birds, and that flying in all its forms, which included gliding, active flying and soaring, had evolved separately several times and that it was an ability that could also be lost (likewise, sea-dwelling animals had moved to the land and then back again, the whale being an example). Air, Anna told Scott — and it was something that stuck in his mind afterwards — was basically a thin fluid. They could think of themselves as standing — or now, driving — on the very bottom of an ocean of air. Flying, she said, was really a kind of swimming — by this point they had arrived at the Mountain View, where she was staying and he worked.

‘I'm on shift in ten minutes' time,' he told her. The handle on her side of the truck had seized up. He got out and opened the door for her, saw her properly for the first time as she emerged: thought how she was like some strange kind of creature herself, with that springy hair and those eyes that looked as if they might jump out of their sockets, and the whole of her somehow emitting a high-pitched kind of vibration, a sort of hum.

She dived back in to retrieve her laptop, thanked him. They shook hands. He rushed home to change.

I should not have told him all that, she thought, still waiting for Bellavance's call while an overall-clad man from Roadside Assistance drove her back up to the Corolla. I'll have to sort that out somehow. Just as Bellavance finally picked up, the phone beeped and went dead again.

♦ ♦ ♦

All that day, Scott clung to the strangeness of the woman he'd met on the cliff, used it to keep his mind away from his lost computer and the thing he'd almost done. He discovered that she had stayed at the hotel for two nights last September. He Googled her, skimmed through snaps of her outdoors, arm in arm with a group of people in what looked like a desert in Mexico (actually, Alberta), wearing dusty boots, shorts and cool shades, her head tilted back, laughing: curator of marine reptiles, two degrees, forty years old: a life as different to his as could be.

There was also a photo of her in which she posed with her hand resting on a monstrous skull on the table next to her, striped light coming in through the Venetian blinds to the side: more like a painting than a photograph. A portrait. You met her gaze and she looked right back at you, completely herself, like:
yes, and you
?

When Anna walked into the lobby shortly after ten that night, looking just like her photograph, he startled both of them by saying
Good evening
, as if they were characters in a black-and-white movie, or at least in a better kind of place.

‘Good evening. Did you get your vehicle fixed?' His name plate was right there on the cedar and tile counter he stood behind, and he saw her take it in.

‘Scott—' she said. ‘I did, and thanks for all your help.' Either she didn't really want to talk, he thought, or was shy but overcoming it. She ran her fingers through her hair. It was between ringlets and waves, seemed to him a vast twisting mass. Her face was bony, her eyes almost black; she wore a muddy red lipstick and looked even more sci-fi now in the double-bright lobby lighting that made everyone pale: she looked part animal, part android — some kind of being from another planet. Weird, and almost wonderful. A palaeontologist.