The Year of Broken Glass (18 page)

“Svend told me,” she offers without my asking. “I wanted to find Ferris to thank him for helping me, and Svend said he had gone away. On a sailboat to Hawaii for some reason.”

“We haven't heard from him. Did you hear about the eruption last night?”

“No!” she almost leaps from her chair, the baby fidgeting at her mother's raised voice.

I explain to her the reported magnitude of the quake and eruption, and I could swear she's fighting back tears by the time I'm through. She gets up from her seat, her baby tucked in against her chest. “I'm sorry,” she says. “I hope he's okay. It was very nice to meet you.” Then she turns from me and heads up the road.

•

Jin Su took the news of the earthquake in Hawaii harder than I would have expected, and all afternoon I've wondered why. If I didn't know better I'd almost suspect her to be Ferris's lover or something. I've always wondered where he stays on his delivery nights, but I don't ask because really, I don't care to know. If Ferris has a lover, it's all the more to keep him from me—from any more pathetic romantic overtures like the Joni Mitchell night. I decided a long time ago just to get through this thing with him till Willow is on his own two feet, and if his taking a lover makes the whole thing easier on him, then it's easier on me, and so on Willow, too.

But there are two reasons that make this woman being Ferris's mistress a complete improbability. First of all, she's Asian, and given the disdain for that ethnicity which Ferris has developed through his many years of difficult dealings with the Chinese buyers in Vancouver, it's safe to say she's not his type. And secondly, she's got an infant, which would almost certainly make Ferris the father, which is impossible. Ferris is congenitally incapable of keeping a secret, especially for any sustained period of time. If he had fathered this woman's child I'd have found out long before it was even born. So it's not that she's Ferris's lover, but something stirred her when she heard the news of the eruption. What? And where
is
the father of her child? Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I marched up the road to invite her and Svend for dinner.

“He came. I let him stay for a few nights, then I asked him to leave.” I'm explaining to Svend why Fairwin' Verge isn't still here with us. I assumed Svend had taken him back to Lasqueti, and Svend assumed him to be here all along. I've been angry with Svend for the role he played in the whole fish float shenanigan, so we haven't seen each other over the past few weeks. Now we're both finding out that wherever Fairwin' is, and however he got there, it's otherwise than what we expected.

“Whatever,” Svend says. “That old bugger could survive in the desert without water. I'm sure he's fine.”

It's a good segue into the question, so I ask Jin Su, “Where's Emily's father?” Svend shifts around, a bit uncomfortable, obviously, and I suddenly dread what I hadn't considered given Jin Su's predominantly calm disposition. What if he died in the earthquake? Perhaps that's why the news of the eruptions in Hawaii seemed to strike such a raw nerve in her earlier today. I'm about to apologize, to tell her she doesn't have to answer the question, when she clears the air.

“He's in Toronto. He works for Nike. He's in sales. He was at a training seminar for the week when the earthquake happened. He's still there, waiting for YVR to open to commercial flights. We're fine here with Svend, and there's nothing but a ruined city to go back to right now, so he's better off there anyway. We're thinking it might make the most sense for me and Emily to fly back east, actually, once we can. His parents have a nice place in the suburbs, and it helps that it's still standing.”

Listening to her answer I realize that I haven't yet asked her if she's heard from her parents, her adopted parents, the ones whose house on the North Shore she was trying to get to when she met Ferris. I decide not to ask, thinking it best to let sleeping dogs lie. “I'm just going to check on the salmon,” I say, and leave them sitting on the couch with their mugs of peppermint tea.

Willow is out in the yard building a fort with his driftwood. He carries a stick or small log home with him every day from the beach, and he's built up a good pile through the spring. Now he's stacking them up in an interlocking pattern like a log house. It's just a few days since solstice and the evening air is warm and clear, well past 6 p.m., with hours of daylight to go. Every day it seems he grows more and more to resemble his father. Maybe it's because of Ferris's absence that I see it as such, or maybe it's that time in his life, just pre-puberty, when his more masculine features are starting to emerge.

Either way, watching him now from the kitchen window is like watching a miniature Ferris at work, and it sets in unexpectedly how much I miss him. It's the last thing I would have seen coming, but I'm flooded with dread as I turn to pull the salmon from the oven. Where is he? Somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific, hopefully, on his way home. I place the salmon on the stovetop and sit back against the counter for a second to gather myself before calling Willow in for supper. I can't help but wonder if I pushed Ferris to go out on that sailboat. If all my bitching at him about buying the boat has pushed him to do something as stupid and desperate as that for money. It must be. Why else would he be in such a hurry for the money other than that he sees no other way to bring our life back to the relative harmony it had before he got the loan with his mom and bought the boat?

I feel ill. How many times have I accused him of not being the man that I agreed to have Willow with? As if I've not had a hand in moulding him into what it is he's become. I always thought I'd be happy if he'd just leave me, if he'd just be the one to end it so I wouldn't have to choose between enduring more years in this house, this life, or being the one to leave. Being the one in the story of our son's life who left. But I never fully understood what it would feel like with him gone. How could I? And I'm petrified, suddenly, standing in our kitchen where we've fought and fucked and fed together. Where we've provided our son with a sense of family, however tumultuous it has been.

It's not these strangers I want at my dinner table with me. That's why I sent Fairwin' Verge away. I don't need company, I need my family, together. I need Ferris home, whomever he's become and however he wants to be, and it's setting in just how far away from me I've pushed him with my resentment and my inability to let him live his life in the way he needs to. So far away from me that he's somewhere adrift in the middle of the Pacific, best-case scenario. I don't want to think of the worst-case scenario, but I'm unable not to, to wipe it from my mind. Jesus. What if in my uncompromising, unrelenting expectations, I've pushed the father of my child, my best and only true friend—I'm feeling right now even still my lover—to embark upon a journey from which he may not return?

I'm on my knees in the bathroom, dizzy and nauseous, and I hardly remember rushing in here. I'm hyperventilating and sobbing uncontrollably, and I can hear Svend calling from the living room, asking if I'm okay. I wipe the saliva from my mouth. “I'll just be a minute,” I manage to call out. I run the water, strip down, and climb into the shower. The water's near-scalding, my skin lighting up bright red, but I can't feel it. I step back out of the water's stream. All I can feel standing in the steam, watching the water swirl down the drain, is the emptiness at the centre of myself, the one Ferris is supposed to fill, for better or for worse, though till this moment I've not allowed myself to see it clearly as such.

•

Ferris,

The moon is near full and through the small spaces between the houses across the street I can see its light skipping across the water. Time is much kinder at night. John Berger wrote that in his latest novel, a book of letters written in the voice of a middle-aged Palestinian woman to her lover in prison. I've just read it cover to cover this evening. Svend was here with his lovely niece Jin Su and her daughter. We ate a chinook he caught off Point Upwood, an early catch, with rice, and salad from the garden. The quake didn't seem to upset the lettuce! When they left I read Willow to sleep, then thought I'd do the same for myself. Now it's late, or early, I suppose I should say—it's the middle of the night, and I'm out on the front porch wishing you were here, wanting to say so many things. So I'm writing to you instead, as Berger's A'ida would do each night to her incarcerated soulmate.

Earlier in the evening I made myself sick thinking of you lost at sea. I can say it's a fear I'd learned to live with long ago so I could care for Willow when he was an infant and you were out off Tsawwassen, hauling in the gales. Now I'm wondering what part that has played in all that has become of us. How much has the fear of losing you in that way I can't control forced me to push you from me in the ways I can?
 

I've just smoked the last of my tobacco. We'll have none till the late fall now, till the Perseids, but I knew we would run out long ago. I planted twice as many seeds this year, and they're all thriving in the heat, so we shouldn't run out again. It takes a lifetime to learn a life, I think. Just when you think you know what you need, you need more. Or less. Or different. I'll confess I had convinced myself I didn't need you anymore Ferris. That we didn't need each other. I would be surprised if you said you hadn't done the same. But now I wonder. No, I don't wonder, I know that is wrong.
 

Absence is the aphrodisiac of the soul. I don't remember who said that. It's from some book or movie we both loved once I think. If you were here you would tell me exactly which one. You've always been the one to sift the chaff from the grain for me Ferris. Here's one I can recall. Distance is the soul of beauty. Simone Weil. Come back to me Ferris. Come back to me, and come back to me. Time is much kinder at night, Berger writes, there's nothing to wait for. But he's wrong. Because this night here is unkind without you, and I am waiting.

Your love,

A.

I fold the letter four times, carry it to the bedroom, and slip it under Ferris's pillow, for him to find when he returns. I know he will. With everything around me silent and asleep now I can feel him. I know he's still in the world, that he's left Hawaii safely and is on his way home to me. I say a little prayer for him to whatever god or gods might still be here, then I lay my head down on his pillow and curl up on his side of the bed. There's a little songbird—I haven't the faintest clue what kind—nesting with its young in the attic above our bed. I've never seen it, but every so often it sings in the night. Short, pretty trills. Tonight they fall through the dark like a song of blessing answering back from wherever my prayers might be heard.

•

The world is elevated in the light of love found or love renewed. I'm not naive to this. It brings the soul to the surface, the way some deep sea fishes rise to the light of the moon on clear nights. I don't resist it. Willow heads off to the beach in the morning and I go out into the garden. It's a hot June day, no wind, and I spend it watching the bees trip from stamen to stamen, then fall asleep in the shade of the broadleaf maple behind our house and dream of a day a lot like this one, back when we'd first moved from the city. Willow was teething, fussy, so we loaded him into the crummy and drove up the east side of the inlet to Tuwanek, then up the logging roads into the Tetrahedron Range. Willow fell asleep before we even left the pavement.

Somewhere in the mountains we pulled the truck over beside a small creek and made love on the front bench seat of the cab. It was muggy and hot and we finished with a slick film of sweat and dust coating our bodies. We got out to wash in the creek, the world around us silent but for our splashing and the ticking of the still-cooling engine close by, in the distance a float plane lifting into the air from the inlet waters far below. I dreamt this all clearly, exactly as it had been. Ferris came up behind me while I was bent over the stream washing my legs in its cold glacial water. He leaned over me, so I thought he was going to take me again from behind, right there on the side of the road. Instead he put his mouth to my ear and whispered, “I'd pick you one, but it doesn't seem right. Come see what I've found.”

On the far side of the creek the blasting scree rose steep and barren back to the trees. In amongst the granite cobbles and shards were these little bunches of flowers. Tiny, with yellow petals and purple sunburst centres. They were the only growth on that inhospitable slope. Perfect clusters of flowers, growing as though out of nothing. So small in relation to the magnitude of their surroundings—the aggressive man-made road cut through a slope of towering firs and hemlocks, the wide view of the sky to the downslope side, the long inlet below—those flowers would have been impossible to notice if it weren't for the afterglow of our lovemaking.

I woke up with this in my mind, and have been lying here a long while savouring the feeling of that day as it still lingers inside me, watching the late-afternoon sun illuminate the chlorophyll in the maple leaves above as they rustle in the lightest of winds now blowing in off the bay. I've also been thinking of something else I read in Berger's novel last night. I want to recollect it properly, as he wrote it, so I rise and go to the house to retrieve the book. It's on the front porch where I left it and I quickly find the quote I'm looking for.

What lasts is women recognising the men they come to love as victors whatever happens, and men honouring each other because of their shared experience of defeat. This is what lasts!