Glory Page 7

  “Hey, lady!” He reached for me, but I was too quick and dodged his reach. I slammed into the door and it swung easily, pitching me out in the parking lot. I skidded to a halt on my hands and knees.

  “Well, howdy,” Glory said, around a breath of smoke.

  She startled me and I flinched. How had she gotten outside so fast? I pressed my skinned palms into my pants. The night felt high and empty, like the sky was receding or a camera was panning out to leave me a dirty speck in a dirt parking lot. “I’m going home.”

  “Yeah? How? You gonna fly?” She laughed.

  I said nothing. We were quiet while she smoked, and I struggled against gravity to stand.

  “Go, then,” she said, finally. She ground out her smoke and looked carefully at me. “If you’re going, go. Don’t stay here if you don’t want to get caught up in it. But you better go now. The bar’s gonna close in ten minutes and this parking lot will be a zoo.”

  “Glory.” My voice buzzed, uncertain of its register.

  “God, Renee. You don’t know when to listen.”

  “I don’t know what to listen to! Or who! I don’t know if I can trust you or me or…” I lurched toward her.

  “Go home, little girl. Figure out what you want before you come back here looking for me.”

  “I’m not looking for you. Jesus!”

  “You won’t find Jesus here.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Get out of here. I’m serious.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do! I hate it here! I hate this place! I’m trying to get out of here!”

  She looked evenly at me. “Fine. Let’s go, then. Seriously. Let’s go to Vancouver. We can leave together.”

  “What?” I tried to keep her still, to follow what she was saying.

  “Let’s go. If you want to go so much, let’s do it.”

  “But, what about…”

  “Look, if you’re so unhappy, let’s do something about it. I want to get out of here, too. We’re a good team. We’ll just leave and start new. Vancouver. We can be there before suppertime tomorrow.”

  I stared at her with confusion. Hope bloomed in me. “Really?”

  “Sure. It’ll be great.”

  I reeled, rocking back on my heels.

  “You get the car and I’ll get my bag and we’ll meet at the boarded-up gas station in an hour, okay?” Glory held me by both arms. She spun me around until I faced the parking lot exit and gave me a little push. “That’s the way.”

  I recognized the main street once I started walking. I could feel the slow drop of the road down toward the lake, a great big emptiness pulling me to the shore. I walked and kept walking, and it would be easy to leave, I realized. I just needed to keep moving. I felt led by a string, so that I was free to watch the water coming into focus, into individual waves, then into only one wave making and remaking itself, the barest flicker of white at its tip.

  Out of town the street lights were sporadic, and once the sidewalk ended, the lights ended, too. I kept the empty hollow of the lake on my left. Eventually, I moved to the road’s centre line, only able to see silver outlines on trees and rocks. There were cracks in the asphalt—wide, sharp-edged craters created by the frost as it thawed and eased out of the road. I tried to avoid them. The potholes were darker patches on the dark road, but I couldn’t tell if they were ice skiffs or actual holes. I picked myself out of five before I reached the pub.

  The parking lot was empty except for our car. I considered my options: leave it and walk back to the house, or drive. My legs prickled where the skin was scraped raw from my falls. The hood of the car shone with ice.

  I dug the keys out of my hoodie pocket, unlocked the car, and climbed in. It felt so good to melt into the seat and to smell the familiar fusty air. I turned the key in the ignition and peered out the windshield, squinting to see if the fog was on my eyes or on the glass.

  I pulled out slowly. Neat piles of downed branches and massive jumbles of trees and brush stood ready to burn at the roadside. I drove past the old church and its graveyard with the tippy wooden fences, past hectares of woods and bush and trees. I drove, lost in the hum of the motor and the jangle of my own breathing. It felt like a canvas of the night was rigged on a roller flowing past, the stars on a wheel above me, spinning in place.

  What would happen if I left? I wondered. To Thomas and to Danny? The thought of the baby brought my milk ducts buzzing to life again, and a new surge of wet seeped through my shirt. Damn, I thought, and tears sprang forth, too, dripping down my face. My nose ran. I hadn’t meant for this—I’d just been after a yoga class, maybe tea with new friends, mothers, too, who understood my whirling emotions. I hadn’t intended to be alone in the night, lactating uselessly, my husband scared for my whereabouts. I wondered whether Danny had called the cops. What would he say to them? And what about Thomas? We had formula, but had he taken a bottle? I was an awful mother. I cried and hiccupped.

  Eventually, I rattled up to the driveway. I took my foot off the gas and coasted until the car stalled and stopped. I stared out the windshield and saw my own porch light shining through the trees. I was soaked and shaken, close enough to call out to my husband, but I didn’t. I opened the car door, careful not to slam it closed. It barely caught. I leaned against the cool metal and watched the house. No inside lights, no movement.

  I got my legs working and stumped up the driveway. When I was close enough, I could see Danny asleep in a chair. The fire was out. He looked cold, huddled up in his clothes, white-faced and rumpled and drawn. I should open the door, I knew, but I hesitated. I shouldn’t smell like smoke and beer. I should have been home before morning, but the light was creeping out of the lake, leaking over the water, giving individual facets to each wave. I listened to the rocks rattle in the bay and watched my husband sleep. How could I leave? I thought of Glory, standing outside the gas station waiting for me, of more blank days, of winters like the endless winter I’d just passed. How could I stay?

  CHORUS

  Dr. Allan Albright, Classico Coffee and Tea,

  downtown Fort St. James

  All through the winter, the ice makes its dissatisfaction known. It groans and cries, grinds itself into itself. It shifts and cracks, unreliable and ruthless. There were winters we used it as an ice road from town to Pinchi and Tache, bringing provisions to those reserve towns and doctoring there. Those years the ice was better than the highway; it was a smooth, wide-open highway across miles of frozen water, fish underneath you, wondering at the vibrations of tires, I guessed. I thought about that while I drove.

  But it rots, you see, and you can’t know when it will happen. You hear stories. We saw an ice house swallowed overnight, stovepipe and all. We woke in the morning to smooth snow covering the surface, the fishing hut gone. We weren’t sorry—there had been parties in that hut all winter: ice-fishing parties with fireworks and booze. Sarah and I watched from the porch. They drove down our driveway like it was a public access onto the lake and parked behind the ice house. We didn’t call the police out of fear of retaliation. We weren’t sorry when the lake ate it whole.

  Thirty years we’ve been in this house on this bay and every year the snow is different, the ice is different, but the winter always feels interminable. Because it never thaws the same way twice, you can’t tell if the ice will be off in April or in June. Some Februaries were so mild I was fooled into planting, but then the snows came again and the spring was harsher than ever. Sarah always says don’t fuss, that spring will come, but I’m never sure. The years the weather is late in breaking, my patients come in with burns, cuts, bruises—domestic abuse and, in my opinion, the results of unbearable pining for open water, frost-free days. I see people wound tighter and tighter over the winter, and when the sun finally melts the dirty snowdrifts in town, I don’t see anyone anymore. Business drops off to nothing when it thaws.

  February through May make me want to pack up and leave. We consider it, Sarah and I, and if it weren’t for h
er illness, we would travel more to make living here more bearable. I think about retiring to Grand Cayman. I think about sea turtles and a warm breeze, not the freezing gale off this godforsaken lake all winter long. I wouldn’t look back, but Sarah would. I read an account in her weather journal of the ice coming off in the spring of 1978 that rivals a poem; crystal, she wrote, and columns and tinkling, and when I read it, I could see our lakeshore in my mind, the black hole of open water beyond the ice, the ringing chimes of ice spikes succumbing to lapping tongues of water. She loves this place.

  I tend the wounded and the ill, the men and women and children who populate this place at the end of the highway, and sometimes I can’t see for all the hard cases and the cracks in the skin of my hands. Sarah sees the water, the lake nibbling its own shore, and knows its beauty. Will we leave here? No. She never will, and I couldn’t sleep without my wife at my side or, truth be told, the sound of the waves on this shore.

  RENEE

  Thomas gurgled and sang in his cot when the heat made it through the blackout curtain over his window. It was too early. I waited to see how long it would take him to get from singing to yelling his head off. He yelped to see if that would rouse us, and my eyes flickered open.

  “Hey,” Danny said in a soft voice.

  I waited a second. Then said: “What?” I didn’t have anything for him: kindness, patience. I could give him nothing.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Compared to what?”

  Danny lay back on his pillow as if defeated. I rose up on an elbow and faced him.

  “What?” I asked again, but I didn’t care to know.

  He stared out the window, then seemed to decide to be direct. “Where were you? Ren, you were gone all night. I thought you might be dead.”

  “Obviously, I’m not.”

  He turned to me. “What is with you? We don’t talk except to fight. You stay out all night, and you don’t think it’s worth talking about?”

  Thomas squawked and we heard him thumping the bars of his crib with his feet. I tossed off the covers. I rose, naked, and left the room.

  Danny yelled from the bedroom, “Renee, talk to me! Don’t walk away!”

  “Lower your voice.” I came back into the room with Thomas in my arms. He was delighted to see his dad, yelling and flapping his arms, squirming to get down. I set him on the bed and he lunged to clamber all over Danny and pressed his open mouth onto Danny’s cheek in a kiss.

  “Hi, son.” Danny was distracted from the conversation, as I meant him to be. Thomas crawled toward the edge of the bed. Danny grabbed him as he leapt for the carpet and leaned over farther to set him on the floor safely. “Something happened last night. I can tell. Tell me.”

  I stood at the full-length mirror, pushing my arms through the sleeves of my housecoat, watching my own face.

  “Renee,” Danny tried again, “I thought you were dead.” I turned to him then. “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said. He reached an arm across the bed in my direction.

  “Well, you did. Here I am.” I was an asshole.

  “Did you hear the part about how I was scared you’d died? What if you had? What would I do then?”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “I didn’t say you have to…but listen. Ren, we’re in this together, right?”

  “In what? Danny, we’re not talking, we’re not helping each other. I’m stuck here on my own… I can’t even go to the store without asking you! I can’t go out, I can’t get away, I haven’t been on my own in ages, and when I do go out you get mad at me because you don’t know where I am!” I pulled my belt tight and walked out of the room. Thomas scooted after me. Danny whipped back the covers and followed, too, grabbing a towel from the back of the door to wrap around his waist.

  “Renee, what is going on?” Danny grabbed me by the arm. “What are you saying? Do you need more time away? Because we can do that. What do you need?”

  “Nothing.” I shook him off. In the kitchen, the sun reflected off the painted floorboards, lighting up the cobwebs in the rafters. Thomas crawled into in a sunbeam and sat, chewing on a ball.

  “Talk to me, Renee. I was dying last night. I couldn’t stand all the things I was imagining about you. I thought you’d been kidnapped or raped or that you’d drowned in the lake, and I couldn’t stand it. I went crazy. I got Thomas to sleep and I felt like I was losing my mind. I realized…I realized that I don’t want this anymore. I can’t stand it.”

  I stopped. I listened carefully—maybe he would say it. Maybe he wanted change, too.

  “Renee, we have to try harder to get along.”

  I huffed my breath out and looked away.

  “What? What did you think I was going to say?”

  I continued to stare out the window for a minute longer, then I looked right at him. “I don’t want to do this anymore, either.”

  “Really?” He was excited, ready to reconcile.

  “I’m done, Danny. I can’t do this. I’m doing a shitty job. I hate it. I…” But he didn’t understand me. “I have to go. I can’t do it. I have to go and I’m leaving you. And Thomas.” I had him by the arms now. He pushed me off, his eyes huge and hurt.

  “But you can’t just leave.”

  “Danny, I have to.” I was sweating, pleading. My housecoat stuck to my back. My heart beat hard.

  “But why, why can’t you try some more? Maybe I can fix it.” He was leaning in, reaching with his voice to turn me, keep me here.

  “You can’t fix it! I’m broken! I’m fucking it up! Leaving is the only solution. It’s the only way Thomas isn’t going to grow up broken, too. I have to leave. Don’t try to stop me.”

  He was quiet, but then, suddenly, like I’d never seen him before, he was angry. His eyes flashed behind his glasses. His teeth showed under his lip. “You are so selfish! Who the fuck do you think you are that you can call it all off! You don’t get to go! You don’t get to say, ‘I’m done, I quit,’ and leave! You’re the mother. What am I supposed to do with Thomas! He’s not even weaned!”

  Thomas began to howl. I scooped him up to shield him from Danny’s voice. “He took breast milk in a bottle last night, didn’t he? He’ll take formula.”

  “Don’t! You’re leaving, remember?” He took Thomas from me. He gathered the baby close and hugged him to his chest, rubbing his back and jouncing him. He glared at me, but he seemed calm, and terribly, terribly angry.

  I watched them walk toward the window. My sweat cooled. I was already untethered, light-headed, unspooling as they walked away. It was happening and I couldn’t process it. Tears welled and spilled down my cheeks.

  A second ticked past, and then another. “Where will you go?” he asked.

  “Home,” I choked out.

  He waited a moment, then said to the window: “This is home.”

  “I meant Vancouver.”

  He hugged Thomas close, rocking back and forth. “Go now, why don’t you. If you’re going. Go.” He didn’t look at me.

  “I…I have to gather my things. Get stuff in order.”

  It was happening too fast. I thought I’d have more time. I’d imagined it differently—the packing, the planning, some sort of soft goodbye.

  “Renee,” Danny said, turning from the lake, “just go. You made yourself clear. You don’t want to be here, so go.”

  I stared at him, dumb and weeping. My husband. He was different than I thought—same soft face, same smooth skin, but he was tougher, somehow, suddenly real and fierce. I didn’t know him, I realized. My son was in his arms, my future; in those two bodies at the window I suddenly saw a future, but I’d already said I was leaving, and Danny was telling me to go. It had stopped being an idea. My knees buckled. I stumbled to the couch.

  Thomas batted at dust motes. He talked to his hand. He touched his dad’s face. I could smell him. No, I remembered his smell. I shook, remembering the first time I saw his feet. I looked across the distance of the room and thought
of the texture of his footed pyjamas, how someone else would wash and fold them—Danny, not me. I’d done this. I tried to breathe.

  Danny asked, “Who are you going with?” He swallowed hard. “Did you meet someone at the bar?”

  “Yes.” I pressed my palms into the pain in my chest. “Glory.”

  CHORUS

  Danny Chance, point at Chance Bay

  The first I heard of her was out at Henry’s on poker night with all the guys from work.

  Halfway through a hand, Paul reached behind him and turned up the volume on a cassette player. The murmuring in the speakers became a woman’s voice. I heard bar noises—glasses clinking, chairs scraping the floor, bursts of sudden laughter. Henry stopped shuffling the cards and Bud stopped talking mid-sentence. I took a swig of beer.

  Her speaking voice was like broken glass under a car tire, but beautiful, if that makes sense. A single guitar picked out a melody. A banjo joined in. I liked it—the bluegrass sound and the predictable up and down of the song, but then the silk and gravel of her voice sat me back in my chair.

  “Who is that?” I asked, as applause rose over the last chords.

  Paul laughed that I’d never heard of Glory. He said she wrote the song, that the mountain, the lake, the story of it all happened here. Jacques jumped in and said she was as good as anything on the radio, her and her cousin what’s-her-name.

  “Crystal,” Bud said, chiming in for the first time. Everyone laughed and he flushed.

  I kept one ear on the music as Henry dealt and the play went around the table. Glory broke off her songs to chat or drink, but the banjo player, Crystal, was silent despite Glory’s jibes and commentary. Jacques lit another cigarette and Bud won the hand.

  I asked Paul how he got the tape. I thought there might be a story in it. One night last year he went drinking at the pub, but he’d forgotten his wallet. She gave him a break, and she got in trouble from the bartender for it, too. He told her he’d make a recording the next time she played, to make it up to her. He’d kept a copy for himself.