Wallflowers (26 page)

A wobbly voice interrupted her at the door.

“My butterfly net,” he said. “What did you do to my net?”

She lifted her neck to watch Jake charge into her room, a gangly thing in blue underwear. He sprinted at the bed and tore off her top sheet, then stared down at her bare, stubbly legs.

She sat forward and covered her legs with her dressing gown.

“I was going to clean it,” she said, which was true. She had carried it home to rinse off the tar and left it in the front hall umbrella stand for the night.

“My dad brought that net for
me
from the other side of the world.” He stamped his foot on the
me
. “Not for you or your stupid baby.” He stomped from the room and slammed her door on the way out. After a few minutes she heard the gush of the washing machine. And a few minutes after that, a gentle knock on his door. Gamelle’s voice saying, “Jake?” Jake saying, “Go away.” Gamelle saying, “Honey, what’s wrong?” Jake saying, “Go away.”

Gin lay there and watched the predawn shadows shift across her wall. Nights like these made her want to sleep with the window open so she could wake up with frost in her hair.

Early the next morning she hosed off Jake’s net. It looked okay after the second round, grey but clean. She wrung out the netting and dripped inside to the bathroom. She dried the handle with a hand towel and the mesh with Gamelle’s blow dryer. Jake was eating cereal in the den when she finished and slipped it inside his bedroom. She breezed back through the kitchen into the laundry room, found his sheets warm in the machine—he hadn’t slept either, or else he woke early. She pulled them into a wicker basket and padded through the kitchen back to his room. Then she made his bed. Tucked the linen smooth and symmetrical beneath his mattress. Folded the top sheet over the quilt in a mint-worthy crease. She flattened the pillowcase with the palm of her hand, laid the butterfly catcher diagonally between the posts, and left to start a pot of coffee.

The baby cried most of the morning. Gin knelt at her bedroom wall with an empty mug and the bird book and listened to Gamelle try to coax the thing to sleep. Her tone would stiffen as the morning drew on, cradle song hissed instead of hummed:
Go to sleep, go to sleep little one ... oh god, just shut up and sleep
. Gin’s knees were digging past the rug into the wood. They felt like they might be getting bruised. She pulled herself off the floor and went straight to the kitchen, found Jake standing with his nose pressed against the sliding glass door.

“Hi, Jake.”

He turned with his finger to his lip, then beckoned her to the window.

Outside in the rose patch, two cranes drifted between thorns. Their tail plumes trailed in the snow, and though they needed to lift their knees to clear the brush, they strolled smooth as gospel, as souls drifting to the river to be dunked and declared saved.

“I shot one of those once,” said Jake. He looked up at her, his big eyelashes. She hoped he never grew into them. “Well, my dad did. But he let me carry the gun.”

“Why?” she asked, and examined the birds, how red feathered across their eyes.

“It was drowning in that black pond.” He paused to glance at her again. “That’s where you took my net, isn’t it?”

She nodded, her eyes still planted outside.

“Well, thanks for cleaning it off.” He opened the window and leaned out over the sill, the cranes’ coos audible now, like softly rolled
r
’s. “My dad says they’re supposed to use sound cannons to scare the animals, but that the pond doesn’t exist because it’s too small.”

“Doesn’t exist?”

“Not inside books.”

“On the books?”

“Right,” he said. They watched the cranes ghost into the underbrush. Ochre feathers like dusters, sweeping snow for the spiderwebs that hung beneath low-lying trees.

That evening they made a scarecrow. Jake searched his closet for clothes while Gin forged a torso—a broom and baseball bat trussed with duct tape into a cross. They dressed it in an Oilers jersey. No pants, due to lack of legs, but Jake volunteered a werewolf mask for the face. Gin’s brother was working a double and wouldn’t be home until late, so no one fussed about dinner. Gamelle emerged with Clare once to microwave formula and Alpha-Getti, a second time to ask what they were playing, and a third to suggest that Jake dial a friend. But mostly she kept to herself, as though she didn’t want Clare and Gin in the same room. They decided to wait for daylight to raise the structure, so Jake crowned the effigy with a pink straw hat and settled with his father’s laptop, while Gin returned to her bedroom wall.

Except she couldn’t hear a thing. Or she could—the trills of cranes out the window, more of them now, and synthesized music from Jake’s games, but not Clare—it occurred to her she hadn’t cried for a while—and not Gamelle. So she left her room and stood at their door. Hovered her ear at the open crack and still heard nothing. She nudged the door open with her foot and found Gamelle folded on the bed, florid hair sprawled over the pillowcase. Bare feet and gently pocked forehead pointed to the ceiling, torso twisted so that her elbows could lie flat on the mattress to nest Clare, who slept cosseted in her blanket and sleeper gown.

“Aunt Gin, we need to go.”

She turned to find Jake marshmallowed inside snow pants and a down jacket.

“What do you mean?” she whispered, and tugged the door closed.

“The cranes—there’s a ton, or at least ten, and they’re flying. Can you hear them? Listen, I can hear them. There’s thousands and they’ll land in the pond.”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling as she listened. It did sound as though there were at least ten flying over the roof, cooing prettily, rolling their
r
’s.

“Hurry,” said Jake as he waddled toward the front door, his snow boots tracking wet down the hall.

“Wait.” She followed him, her sock feet landing in his boot puddles. “Shouldn’t you check with your mother?”

“She’s sleeping with your baby.”

She glanced at Gamelle’s bedroom door, then back to Jake. She straightened the nightgown off her hip bones. “Well, we’ll need noisemakers.”

“Noisemakers?” he said.

“Pots and spoons. Wooden spoons.”

“Like New Year’s.”

“Right,” she said, and moved into the kitchen to unhitch saucepans and soup pots from their hooks.

“I own a kazoo,” said Jake, and he ran toward his room.

They met at the sliding glass door. Gin stepped into Gamelle’s gumboots, no jacket because then she’d have to set down the pots, and Jake led the way out, stomped down the path to the rose thorns, scarecrow over his shoulder and red kazoo nearly falling out of his coat pocket. It was one of those small bright moons that blanched cheeks and silvered trees and cast all the shadows bigger. She could just make out the last pairs of hanging feet as the cranes soared above the birches. Two loomed in the clearing between the roses and the tree trunks, their bills cocked toward her and Jake as they plodded through the slush.

“Shoo,” shouted Jake. He ran at the cranes, fumbled the kazoo from his pocket and pressed it to his lips.

Gin maintained her pace, bent her neck up to catch any birds in flight.

“Shout,” said Jake. “Bang your pots. Here, I’ll take some.” He grabbed two from her pile so she could manoeuvre her hands, then sprinted into the woods.

“Crane, crane, go away,” she sang softly, clanging together two saucepans. Then louder: “Don’t come back another day.”

She followed the kazoo toots through the trees until she spotted the scarecrow thrashing above Jake near the edge of the pond. The cranes circled overhead, their bodies suspended, coasting off the air without wing flaps. She banged a wooden spoon against her soup pot, just as she used to on December 31, hips bent over her Davie Street balcony rail.

“Happy New Year,” she shouted as she jerked the spoon against the aluminum.

Jake laughed and yelled it too—“Happy New Year”—between metal clangs and bugles from his kazoo. “Happy New Year.”

A solitary crane stood ankles-deep. He raised his wings at their approach, lurched back from the slickens, and lifted into the air. The others began to shriek and knot into a leggy cloud, some smacking neighbours with their wings. Gin beat her pot from where she stood on the bank and watched Jake run beneath them with the scarecrow, blaring his kazoo. The birds glided the way they came, the broomstick heaving at them from Jake’s arms, pink straw hat hucked off now and floating in the pond.

“What is going on?” said Gamelle from the edge of the woods.

She stood at the trees in her bathrobe and a winter jacket that dangled unzipped at her thighs. She trudged toward Jake, nearly tripping over her half-on running shoes. “Are you out of your mind?” She stared at Gin, her eyes red rimmed.

“We’re scaring the cranes, Mom.”

When he turned to face her with the werewolf effigy, she stumbled backward and yelped, then recovered her balance with a palm in the air.

“I told you we were making a scarecrow,” said Jake. He stepped toward her, enclosing her hand in his mitt. “Otherwise they’d have drowned. All those cranes—did you see?” he said, and folded inside his mother’s jacket.

Gin searched the snow for something else to look at. Her eyes fell on her broken parade. The fox drooped off the stump, its limbs softer now. Some of her ducks were booted out of line by the commotion, their feathers spattered with kicked snow, eyes too dull to spot in the dark. It occurred to her they stank. The cold had delayed their decay, but the flesh was rotting now, and it mingled woozily with the stink of the oil.

“Oh,” said Jake. “We lost one.” He pointed toward the pond.

Next to the hat, a crane floated on its stomach with stretched legs and spread wings. Gamelle tilted Jake’s chin away from the pond, hugged his cheek to her chest.

“I can’t feel my hands,” Gin mumbled as Gamelle smoothed the hood of Jake’s coat. Neither of them seemed to hear her. “Maybe I’ll go back.”

“Is the crane dead?” Jake asked Gamelle. “Can we save him?”

Gin turned to face the woods as Jake suggested they fish the body out with the scarecrow pole. As Gamelle replied, “I don’t know, sweetie.” Then: “Is that my hat?”

She walked up the bank toward the thin white trunks and listened to her boot bottoms suck free from the thawing mulch. Their voices faded as she navigated the roses, her nightgown’s wet hem slapping the backs of her knees, the thorns clinging to her collar, which flopped open as she trudged toward the house. She stamped up the wood stairs that led to the deck and stepped over the doorsill into the balmy thaw of the kitchen. She could hear Clare crying as she slid the door shut, stepped out of her gumboots, and breathed into her palms—this one the rhythm of half-hearted bursts that subsided whenever Gamelle entered the room to pick her up. She filled the kettle and set it on the stove, predicting the cry’s pause and restart, higher pitched the second verse, almost a whistle. She leaned against the counter and waited for the water to boil, calculated Clare’s next pause, the decrescendo. Then she followed the sound into the hall.

Clare lay tucked in the centre of the bed, her rosy eyelids clamped shut, forehead dimples scrunched toward the scoop of her nose in lieu of eyebrows. Gin lingered in the doorway until she heard Jake and Gamelle clomp into the house, heard Jake note the kettle and ask for hot chocolate. She nudged the door closed with her heel, and Clare stopped wailing long enough to blink at her. When she started again, it was the whistle rhythm, her mouth waxed open. The tears gathered in the dips beneath her eyes, and Gin watched how the lines graphed the curve of her cheek, eye to nose to lip. How they dripped off her chin and seeped white as radio static into the cotton collar of her nightgown.

We Walked on Water

Land of the misty giants. Cedar, alder, ponderosa pine. Cascade Mountains pushing out green like grass through a garlic press. The veg here is fungal. Jungle. Where am I—Thailand? I could be in Thailand. Bangkok, British Columbia. The Coquihalla. It’s all rainforest: fern-webbed paths and moss like armpit hair, the exclusion of seventy per cent of the sky. You see the tallest trees in the first half of the drive—between home and Hope, Hope and Allison Pass. I’m the kid at the back of the bus with a packet of apple rings, slouched in his track pants over two velour seats. I could have cycled: Chilliwack to Penticton, 285 k, a hundred klicks longer than the route in the race. But it’s best to not overdo it. Rest well, race well. Taper time now.

Aunt Bea will meet me at the terminal, in her plaid-patched skirts, smelling of patchouli. She’ll drive her Volvo from Nelson—kayak on the roof rack when she rolls into the lot. Last year we “made a week of it.” Our parents browsed bookshops and bead shops; Aunt Bea sat on the beach and sliced watermelon. Liv and I trained in the lake. We raced between the Peach and the Riverboat, and sometimes I let her win. Once she almost won for real, but I grabbed her heels and yanked her under. She kicked me in the hip and I let go. Asshole, she said. She splashed water into my eyes and swam to the shore to practise handstands.

When you train, numbers are everything. Kilojoules in and out, pounds per inch, the speed and duration of mass in motion. Zeros and ones, like a computer. Liv understood how to be a computer better than I did, though I think I’ve caught on. Our nutrition plans were similar: four to six small meals. Fistful of protein, fistful of starch, two fistfuls colour. We ate space food. Sports gels in squeeze tubes: Accelerade, Perpetuem. She dipped salted pretzels into cottage cheese. I drank nonfat chocolate milk.