The Year of Broken Glass (25 page)

“We've tried as much as possible to disguise the true identity of the one, or ones, as the case is, who must break the float. But your husband's meeting with Sunimoto was ambushed, and though we've been given a detailed report of this, and we know, or think we know, that your husband and Miriam both escaped unharmed, we don't know how the very secretive whereabouts of our location in Hilo was known to those who carried out the ambush. If they believe the false myth we've propagated, then our Sunimoto is already dead, and your husband and son are in no danger. But if they know the truth of who it is who must break the float, as I suspect they do, they are hunting your husband as we speak, if they have not already found him. And they will be coming here for your son, too.”

•

I'm running down the beach screaming for Willow. Where is he? Across the sand, over the rocky point, out onto the intertidal estuary. Barnacles, mussels and muck sucking and crunching underfoot. I scream out his name again, wheeling around on my heels. He's not here. The waterfall! I run toward the mouth of the creek and start thrashing my way through the ferns and salmonberry bushes, over blowdown alder and erratic boulders. I find him tucked in behind the trickling little falls, caving. That's what he calls it. Caving. He's built a bed of twigs and moss up beneath the overhang and placed a little log above it which he's using as a bench to sit upon while he picks pebbly stones from the cliff-face as though he were an archaeologist. He studied the Coast Salish peoples in his social studies component this past school year, and he's spent these few weeks since the quake scanning the beach for smooth little stones with a hole bored through the centre, sinkers the Sechelt and Sliammon made to hold down their fishnets, or digging for arrowheads and other rare artifacts up here at the falls.

“Willow,” I call out, but he's so engrossed in what he's doing that he doesn't hear me. When I get closer I can hear he's singing a little song to himself, not one I recognize. Most likely one he's made up while sitting here picking at the earth. I duck under the dank overhang and put my hand on his shoulder. He turns to me. “Mom. What's the matter?” I'm out of breath, and I've got leaves and twigs clinging to my clothes and tangled in my hair.

“I couldn't find you at the beach. I was worried.” He's perplexed. I'm usually pretty lax about his whereabouts. As I said before, I trust him. He's a careful child.

“But you know I'm always here if I'm not at the beach,” he says, picking an alder leaf from my hair. “I know Bub. I know.” I'm still trying to catch my breath as I talk. “I want you to come to the house, okay?”

He lifts a stone from his bench and holds it up. “Look what I found,” he says excitedly, beaming up at me. I take the stone from his hand and inspect it. It's flat, palm-sized, roughly triangular. It could easily be mistaken, in a child's wishful eyes, for an arrowhead. I haven't the heart or the time to burst his bubble. “You found an arrowhead!” I exclaim. “Finally.”

“Yeah. And I bet there's more here too. I knew I'd find artifacts here Anna. This is a midden.”

“That's great Bub.” I hand him back his arrowhead. “Why don't you come home for lunch now, sweetie. There are some friends of Ferris's here I want you to meet.” Distress washes over his face when I say this.

“Is he okay? Is Dad okay?” Willow only refers to Ferris as Dad or to me as Mom when he's frightened.

I give him a big hug, holding him tightly to me. “He's fine,” I say, still holding him tight so I don't have to look him in the eyes as I lie. Then I release him, holding him in front of me at the shoulders. “But he's broken down out on the water and these friends of his have a nice big boat for going to get him. And they want us to come with them. So you've got to come. They need us to leave with them right now.”

•

I've had second thoughts ever since we kicked off the dock. Both of these Frenchmen are nutty and now I've put my life and my son's life in their hands. But what else could I do? All the asinine myth stuff aside, if any of what they've told me is true, about people hunting Ferris and Willow, then I need to help find Ferris and I need to keep Willow safe—though I'm not sure being on this boat with captain coke-bottles qualifies. The boat's huge, though, and seems sound enough. She's probably over one hundred feet long. Some kind of small freighter.
Naacal Warrior
. For the love of God! There's a little blue helicopter strapped down tight to the front deck with
Churchward's Angel
painted on its tail, and beside it a big, high-powered inflatable skiff with
Sohqui
emblazoned across its bow. Whatever that means. I imagine there's a good quantity of rust beneath the fresh blue, green and white paint Vericombe's had the ship's hull and cabin coated in, but the engines seem to be purring along nicely, and the engineer, a stout and stocky man introduced to us as Figgs, seems serious and capable. Willow's taken a shining to him since he took us down into the engine room to show us around. Still I'm uneasy.

I put Willow to sleep in the second-storey stateroom we were assigned aft of the cabin—the boat's three storeys high: galley, head, first-aid and storage on the main, bunks above, and the wheelhouse deck above that—but I couldn't sleep, so now I'm up playing rummy with Fairwin', who also can't sleep, though not on account of any uneasiness or anxiety, but because of the engine noise. “There was a time I wouldn't have batted an eye. When I worked the lighthouses that diesel sound was always there, day and night. But I've been living in the forest so long now,” he explained to me when I first wandered into the galley. He was playing some kind of solitaire when I came in. Now he's got me roped in with a cup of herbal tea and his insistence I sit down for a game of cards. I want to know what Fairwin' really thinks of all this; of Vericombe, and this glass float mythology that's claimed my husband and child as its unwitting heroes. So I've taken his tea and he's presently walloping me at rummy. “Vericombe tells me you haven't known him long,” I say, laying down a low run of spades.

“He arrived on Lasqueti yesterday. It's the first time we've met.”

“So what? He's a friend of this Miriam lady, right? Did she leave you his number before she left in case something went wrong or something?”

Fairwin's wrinkled face brightens when I ask this and he seems to be lost in his memory for a moment. “I suppose you could say that,” he says, grinning. “Miriam dropped her phone from the cliff below my house the day before she left. I found it last week in the alder bottom while looking for oyster mushrooms. It was all smashed up, but I brought it up to the house anyhow. I thought I'd throw it in the garbage next time I went to False Bay. When I heard about the eruptions in Hawaii, like I said earlier today, I thought maybe it was too much coincidence to be just that, so I had this guy I know on Lasqueti recover the phone's memory. I recognized Arnault's name as the man Miriam said had told her the myth, so I called him.”

“And here we are.”

“And here we are. Rummy,” he says, and lays down the remainder of his hand in one go, a straight flush of diamonds, seven to king, three aces and three fives. I fold my cards on the table without acknowledging his latest in a string of wins.

“You don't actually believe any of this shit do you?” I ask. “I mean, I'm here because there's obviously a bunch of quacks who believe in this stuff and I'm convinced it's possible that some, if not all of them, are dangerous. And I want my husband back. But it's a little much, don't you think?”

“There was a time, Anna, when people thought the world was flat.”

“That's right, and they also thought it was the centre of the entire universe. But it's not. We know that. And we've known the story of Atlantis is just a story for a long time too, Fairwin'. So what gives? All of a sudden Hawaii's the tip of a sunken continent and my husband's found a fish float that sets off major earthquakes whenever it doesn't like the way things are going?”

“Possible. It's possible.”

“I suppose. In the same way it's possible that hell can be reached by passing through seven gates at the end of Toad Road in York, Pennsylvania. Come on. This is fanatical cult stuff, Fairwin'. I wouldn't think an old misanthrope like yourself would go for it.”

“I'm not a misanthrope, Anna. I'm a recluse.”

“What's the difference?”

“The difference is I'm not absolutely suspicious of every other person's motives. And I don't assume superiority because I know better or more than others.”

“That's not my point, Fairwin'. My point is these people have got my family all wrapped up in something that shouldn't have anything to do with us.”

“As far as they're concerned, it has got everything to do with you. Or at least with Ferris and Willow.”

“And what if we're getting caught in the crossfire of some battle between two factions of this cult, this Children of Mu thing?” I lift my pack of sinillators from my pocket and take one out.

“You can't smoke that in here, Anna,” Fairwin' reminds me.

“Honestly,” I say, as I light the smoke. “Do you think I give a shit? Vericombe gets my son. I get to have the odd smoke. Seems fair enough to me.”

“No one forced you onto this boat, Anna. You and Willow could be home alone right now if that's the way you wanted it.”

I consider this for a moment. Have I made the wrong choice, getting on this boat? What if Ferris shows up at home while we're off in Hawaii looking for him? The magnitude of it, the ludicrous idea that we could just go find Miriam and Ferris. But what if he is in trouble or danger and we don't go searching for him? And once again, what if there really are dangerous people coming after him, and Willow, too?

“There's a big difference between what I want and the choices I've got,” I say. “I may be here Fairwin', but it doesn't mean I don't think this whole thing is fucking insane. These people want to believe in some stupid myth about ocean life dying off because of some curse put on a fisherman and his glass ball tens of thousands of years ago? It sounds to me like a particularly hare-brained attempt to not acknowledge responsibility where responsibility lies. I'd have an easier time being on a boat with the global warming detractors. At least they're dealing in real world matters. Sort of.”

My second-hand smoke is hanging as a thick cloud between us, obscuring my view of Fairwin' as he leans back beyond the glare of the one shaded bulb burning above us. “There are matters in this world beyond politics Anna,” he says, the condescending fucker. I'd like to stab his weathered eyes out with my burning cherry, but instead I stand up.

“You know what I think? I think you're as unsure about this whole thing as I am. I think you're scared,” I say.

“I saw that glass float fall Anna. It didn't have a scratch on it. I'm convinced there's something going on here. It may not be all that Arnault believes, or exactly as he believes it, but it's not to be brushed aside because we can't comprehend it. If there's one thing I've learned in my life Anna, it's that things are often much more, or much less, than they seem. Either way we're just along for the ride and all we can do is hope things don't get too bumpy along the way.”

Cliché statements like that don't deserve a response, not in my eyes. So I scoff instead, get up from the table, cross the galley and exit out the cabin's side door.

It's cold out on deck. There's no moon visible through the light cloud cover that blew in as the sun was setting. I lean my head over the railing and watch the steel hull skim through the water. We must be travelling at twenty knots or more. The breeze built by the momentum, refreshing earlier in the day, lifts and ducks under my clothes at the neck and waistline and sends shivers down my arms. It gives me goosebumps. I walk to the stern to take shelter and light another smoke. I know Willow's sleeping soundly. I've done a good job, at least, of convincing him that this is okay. That this is what we should be doing and that everything is going to be fine. I'm not so sure though, and I wish more than ever that Ferris had never found that float. Or at least that he'd not been so desperate to get the money from selling it, or to get away from me, that he chose to embark on this whole thing.

It's times like these more than any others that I need him. He used to have this ability to keep me centred when the whole centre of the world seemed to be spinning out of control. And I imagine he still does. That he could still do so if he were here, if I would let him. If I would trust him enough. But I know I haven't trusted him since he bought the boat. I knew it was a bad idea; too risky for our position in the world. The irony of course is that Ferris's ability to take risks is one of the things that first drew me to him. He was so ballsy and bold, he'd stick his neck out and try anything, undeterred by the perceivable obstacles, when he felt that things were right or worthy. He has good intuitive instincts, something I suppose he gained from growing up on Lasqueti, out in the world with the wind and the sea.

It does something, the wind and the sea, as it is for me now. It blows away all the crap so one can find clarity. I can see myself from a distance in my mind, tucked away in my office, avoiding Ferris. I can hear him pleading with me to stop hiding. Stop blaming him. To come out and help him sell his fish privately for good money, to make the fishing business work. And I can see myself instead slouching further and further over my own work, digging my heels in deeper and deeper, drawing a perimeter line around myself I refused to let him cross.

Life hasn't felt as precarious as it does now since before I met Ferris, when I was young and alone in the world, and it strikes me just how easy it's been to take for granted what his presence in my life provides. The stability of knowing he's always there. For better or for worse. He's asked me a dozen times or more through the years to exchange that vow with him. But I always assumed it already spoken, somewhere beyond words. I always assumed so many things. Simple to see, now that nothing can be assumed any longer, not even that Ferris is alive. Simple to see how easy it is, in the midst of it all, to take the one you love for granted, as if they'll always be there. And even more, to feel smothered by them
because
of this sense of permanence. And for a prevailing resentment to build up, a sort of sustained claustrophobic panic that obscures the reality of what and who that person is. Your family. Your home. Your one and only place in the world.