The Last Woman Page 9

  By the lake, he props the boy against a rock and fetches water in his hands. Sucking noisily, the boy drinks, and when he’s had enough, Billy soaks a corner of his own shirt and dabs at the small face.

  “So what’s your name, guy?”

  “Ants,” the boy says.

  “Ants? Ants in your pants?”

  The boy giggles, and Billy tousles his hair.

  He hears footsteps on the path behind him. Turning, Billy sees his nephew emerge from the trees. Jimmy takes in Billy, the boy; he glances up the slope.

  “Your friends have left,” Billy tells him sharply, turning back to his work. In the deepening silence he senses shame. “Do you know who this is?”

  “Lance,” Jimmy says, scarcely audible.

  “That would be Lance –?”

  Jimmy sniffs and lifts his head; he will not look at Billy. “Cormier.”

  “Well then, let’s take Lance Cormier home.”

  They trek in and out of bays, beside the brilliant lake. Billy carries Lance Cormier on his shoulders. Behind, the slopping of Jimmy’s running shoes fades, comes on, fades: over mud flats, over tongues of baking rock, down troughed paths where their footsteps are nearly silent.

  Leaving the shade of the woods, they start across a sand flat. About halfway over, tracks appear in the greenish, scummy sand. Billy waits for Jimmy to catch up.

  “Beaver,” Billy tells him. “Really big –”

  Jimmy tosses his long hair, apparently indifferent.

  “So, look,” Billy says to his nephew. “I’m not going to tell your mother where you were headed. She knows about the gas anyways. I guess you know that. But this gas –”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  Jimmy’s eyes are fixed in some deep, burning space. It’s as if someone else has spoken; but his anger arrives like a blow. Billy turns away. As a boy, he would not have dreamed of saying such a thing to an adult. What business is it of yours? It seems a new kind of question, impossible in the old world. You didn’t have to be someone’s father or mother to care. You didn’t have to be someone’s child to listen. They don’t believe us any more, he thinks. They’re like those boys in that book, wrecked on an island. They don’t believe anybody. They’re going to eat us alive.

  They go on, through birches, through pines, through a field of weeds. They are close to the houses now. He can hear someone’s chainsaw stuttering in the heat. But he can no longer hear Jimmy; looking back, he finds the trail empty.

  He is awake for half the night. The next afternoon he finds his sister sitting on her back porch in the shade, Pascale asleep at her feet.

  “I been thinking,” he says. “Maybe this winter, in the holidays, Jimmy and I could go up to Silver Lake for a while. Check the cabin out. Maybe do a bit of trapping. Could help.”

  His sister turns her handsome face impassively. She daunts him, his sister; in her eyes he glimpses considerations that elude him.

  “There’s no trapping up there any more. I told you that.”

  She has told him that north of the lake, where most people have their trapping grounds, clear-cuts have broken up the lines. But he refuses to believe things are as bad as she says. His sister is a great doomsayer.

  “I haven’t seen the cuts myself,” she tells him. “Debbie Roy went up with her dad. She says it’s terrible. She says she cried for a week. There’s nothing left, Billy.”

  That night, he dreams of a three-legged bear. It has a queer, hopping walk, and keeps pausing to nose at its stump, which resembles a twist of melted plastic. In the fur on its back, a tiny roll of white cloth has been tied up with red ribbon: a medicine bundle? Then the bear turns into a woman with one eye, and the little bundle is tucked behind her ear, like a cigarette.

  He wakes soaked in sweat. When he goes outside, everything looks the same – the woodpile under its mouldering tarp, the view through birches to water – yet he senses that something has changed. For several minutes he stands motionless. In the north, over the tree-tops, the sky seems false, hollow: blue paint smeared on a board.

  Ann Scott’s failure to meet him at Mad Jack’s Island was not the end of their summer, not quite. Two days later, Billy was sitting on the steps of the blue house with Emma, helping her shell peas, when Ann walked up the path. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse and those shortish pants she called pedal-pushers. She was moving quickly, her head down, entirely self-absorbed, but when she looked up and their eyes met, he stood up abruptly, oblivious to the scattering peas.

  She appeared as if she hadn’t slept for days. There were deep circles under her eyes, their gaze now evading his as she knelt to help him pick up the peas. When Emma went back in the house, they stood in silence.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come to Mad Jack’s,” she said finally, to the ground.

  He asked her what had happened.

  “Oh, what happens?” she sang, on a reckless note, as if an answer were impossible. “My father is insane, you know.” She daggered him an accusing look, as if he were her father, and pointed suddenly. “Let’s go over there.”

  He followed her toward the lake. It was a calm, grey day. Every sound – the knock of an oar, the distant plaint of a motor – distinct. She was quiet now, and as they made their way over the uneven bedrock of a peninsula, she seemed alone, scarcely conscious of him. Once or twice she glanced at him, then stood looking at him directly for a long time, her mouth a little open, her gaze lit with emotion. Heaving a great sigh – he thought she was about to cry – she walked away.

  When he caught up to her, at the farthest point of land, her cheeks were wet. “There’s something I should tell you –” she said, almost inaudibly.

  “What?”

  “What’s that?” she said, and she clambered down the rock to pick something up – a fishing float carved in wood, painted red and white, shaped like a little top. “Funny!” she said. “Do you want it?” He shook his head. She threw it in the lake. “A float that floats,” she said vacantly.

  “Come on, Ann, tell me.”

  “Just hold me.” Her body shook in his arms; she wept into his shoulder as she struggled not to weep. He doubted she had changed her mind about England; yet part of him, in the face of her odd behaviour, clung to that hope.

  “You don’t have to go,” he told her.

  “Go where?”

  “To England. You don’t have to go.”

  She went still in his arms, as if considering, as if this was a novel thought. He stroked her head until, abruptly, she pulled back to regard him. “I’m going tomorrow, Billy.” The tenderness in her voice hurt him more than what she had said. She flushed and averted her eyes. “I better get back to my boat.” They said nothing to each other as they went down among the houses and crossed the beach to the dock. Just before she drove off, her face lifted with a look of misery; again she seemed to be struggling with herself, on the verge of saying something she could not say.

  The next day, he hitched into Black Falls, determined to get an answer to the question she had avoided: What was it you wanted to tell me?

  In a phone booth, he leafed through the directory and found two Scotts. One of the addresses led him to a small, poor house by the paper mill: it was clearly not hers. The other belonged to a big frame place among a group of similar houses, held in a bend of the Old Woman River. There was a yellowing maple on the lawn and a deep, vine-shaded porch where a black-and-white cat sat watching him. The driveway, like the garage it led to, was empty. Certain it was her house (though he had no proof other than this certainty), he climbed the steps to the front door and banged the heavy knocker. Peering with cupped hands through a window, he saw magazines lying in disarray, a gleam of fireplace implements. Everything he saw spoke of her – of some facet of her, too new to be anything but mysterious – and of her disappearance: details of experiences with her he would never have.

  She finds herself entranced by her moored canoe, adrift on the deep, trembling flag of itself. By a rock wit
h the face of a Roman emperor. And by the mornings and evenings, banding the shores with a new geology of rosy light; and the ragged dark flames of the junipers; and the cedars huddling like bishops over the rock. Ecstasy: but melancholy at the core. She knows she will never live long enough or paint well enough to capture more than a sliver of it.

  Her giantess stalks into a rich, late-day light. Unscrewing a full-length mirror in the cottage, Ann lugs it to her studio and props it beside her canvas. Stripping off her clothes, she studies herself in the glass: her own body has become another object, a bit alien in its animal strangeness: what pale, erect, alert-eyed creature is this? Her brush dabs at the canvas. But no, she isn’t seeing clearly! She studies her reflection more closely. That branching vein. That mole.

  Up by seven each morning, she takes her coffee on the deck. Everything, these days, has the clarity of first sight. The soft clunk of her dark blue mug on the table. The light’s slow guillotine down a rock. A merganser floating on green water, as still as jade. In her studio, every brush is alive. Filbert. Fitch. Round. Hake. She feels she’s re-discovered why she became a painter. She has the old exuberance again. She could be eight years old, sitting before a sheet of blank paper: a new world.

  One evening, pouring herself a second glass of pinot, she puts a Joni Mitchell tape on the boom box and dances around the living room. She is far, far in another place, as she moves slowly, at ease in her swaying body, singing around the living room and out onto the porch, past the hammock and the old table and the screens where the pines press close, just beginning to stir in a rising wind. When the phone rings, she tries to ignore it. Finally, she stops and stares at the black, ugly thing trilling on its wicker table until it stops. In another life, Joni leaves Africa behind, skating away down a prairie river. Moving abruptly, she runs the tape back to the beginning of “Carrie” and starts again. But she can’t get back, the garden’s closed, and when the phone starts again, she goes to it almost angrily.

  Richard sounds impatient. “Where were you?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” she says, immediately regretting the sharpness of her tone. “Great, actually.”

  “So have you called the Gotliebs yet?”

  “Richard, I said I would and I will.” The music is still blaring and she excuses herself to turn it down. She feels flushed, off balance: tensed against Richard for nagging her and annoyed with herself for forgetting to call. When she picks up the phone, he says, “Hey, I love you, you know.” A pause falls and she feels he is waiting for her to echo his phrase, but she can’t, not at the moment; the feeling isn’t there. “Thank you,” she says quietly, while the silence at her ear grows hard.

  She calls the Gotliebs and, for the sake of kindness, lies. “We’ve got our wires crossed. Richard has the minister of natural resources coming out that weekend – some other political types – party stuff, been on the calendar for months. I just didn’t notice.” She can sense Pamela’s withdrawal – a note of suspicion behind her cheerful acceptance – and suddenly Ann is sick of the small lies and soiled shortcuts of friendship, sick of herself. Later, outside, the sight of her deck chair floods her with sadness: the empty chair, a magazine dropped beside it, like a glimpse of a life she hasn’t lived.

  Her painting starts to go badly. Not all at once, but she is distracted now – by what she cannot say. She loses patience, curses at her mistakes, throws pencils and brushes around the room. She does some yoga to compose herself and, not entirely composed, tries again. By the next afternoon it is clear: the holy ghost has up and left. She knows it will do that, it has done it before; but how long it will be absent for – a day, weeks, years again? She struggles on, but a sense of panic grows in her as the painting no longer tells her what to do. Was that it then? Was that her rebirth as a painter – a two-week wonder?

  On Saturday morning, she picks up Richard and Rowan at the Harbour. With her work failing – the old desolation threatening – she turns to them gladly, with a hint of desperation. She fusses over Rowan and tells her story of the snake. She wants to be close to Richard. At supper that evening she tells him she’s rescheduled the Gotliebs.

  “Good,” he says distractedly and turns away to Rowan.

  As usual, he has brought his work. For the rest of the weekend, she hears him tapping on his computer or chatting on the phone. It might seem unfair, but you have to consider it from the point of view of the law. And: Uhuh, Uhuh. Uhuh. Speaking with a quick impatience she knows so well: he understands what you’re saying before it’s out of your mouth. She brings him snacks. Coaxing and cheerful, she tries unsuccessfully to draw him out.

  She turns to Rowan, who now and then will still allow her to hug him or stroke his hair. He wants her to play a video game that hooks up to their TV. You shoot at gremlins with a toy gun. The thing grates on her and she wonders how he can be so excited by the identical little figures chugging along to their inane music, falling off cliffs, climbing walls, coming on and on like insects in a nightmare. “I can’t do this!” she cries at one point, throwing the gun aside. At the look on Rowan’s face, she takes it up again. And outside: the bright day wasting.

  Later, they paddle into the marsh to search for the snake. The hull brushes through the dry weeds, and for a while they are stuck in a shallow patch, until she gets out and heaves them free. And the sun is hot, and the gunnels are tacky, and among the reeds, nothing moves but themselves. Rowan is wearing a hat; but still she worries about his getting sunstroke. Her son seems to her to exist perpetually on the edge of dangers he is not aware of, so she must be doubly vigilant. Give the boy some space, Richard keeps telling her, and she knows he’s right. She loves her son too much, she thinks: or not well enough.

  They beach the canoe to explore an island. While she detours into the bushes for a pee, Rowan goes on ahead, and when she finally catches up to him, he’s stopped on a flat rock beach on the other side of the island, facing a seagull standing thirty or forty feet away. The white bird is watching him closely. Rowan seems to be trying to engage it: he has hunched himself up, like the bird, and is holding out his arms like wings, slowly moving them up and down, with more patience and grace than Ann would have thought possible. The bird itself seems unsure. It ruffles its feathers and, throwing back its head, emits a cry. Rowan answers with a softer cry. Now the bird stretches out its wings as if about to take flight but then, apparently thinking better of it, folds them again and tucks up one leg while balancing on the other.

  Rowan, too, tucks up a leg. And so the two regard each other, boy and bird, balancing on one leg, while Ann watches them both. At last the gull flaps off. As Rowan turns to follow it, he finds Ann and, to her delight, calls to her eagerly.

  “I was talking to a bird!”

  “Yes, I saw!” she cries back.

  They go back toward the canoe together, climbing up and down over the hills of rock. He is talking about the bird, but not maniacally, not out of control, not in the least. He is calm, and keeps pausing in consideration. Ann stays as close to him as she can on the rock, among the prickly junipers: listening intently as his face floods with animation, reaching out to brush his damp hair.

  That evening, Pamela and Larry Gotlieb come by with their boys to pick up Rowan: he is staying overnight at their cottage. When they leave, Richard goes back to work. At a loss after Rowan’s departure, she washes the dishes and cleans the stove, thinking the whole time she should paint. But she cannot make herself go up the stairs. There is a kind of repugnance in her. Because what if her painting’s no good? What if she’s been fooling herself? So much work and worry and stress – for some colours smeared on canvas! It seems madness to go back to that, and she wants it more than anything. But she cannot make herself go up the stairs.

  Later, she keeps herself awake by reading in the living room. Now and then the whine of Richard’s computer sounds in the porch. At last, he turns it off and comes in to her, sitting on the couch w
ith a pronounced sigh.

  “Hard go?” she says, smiling. She has been waiting for him.

  “No harder than usual. I have to say, the law has lost some of its allure.”

  Something in her comes awake at his confession. He rarely allows her these glimpses.

  “You think politics would be better?”

  “More variety,” he says. “Worse money. It’s not really about the money.”

  “A chance to help?”

  He shifts uncomfortably. “The law, the kind I do, it’s beginning to seem all the same. I never really cared for the law.”

  He has never admitted this, though she has half-guessed it – that he has chosen the law not out of love, but for more practical reasons; perhaps he never really chose it at all. Dragging his hands over his face, he falls silent. Concerned he will slip away again, she says, “You’ve been a wonderful lawyer though.”

  “There are better.”

  She can sense his disappointment in himself – a vulnerability that moves her. “If you want to run, I’ll be behind you. I can’t promise I’ll play the political wife, at least not like some play it, but – I want it for you, Rich. If that’s what you want.”

  Still he remains silent.

  “I just hope we don’t drift away from each other. It’s hard enough as it is. People have to make time for each other –”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing now?” he says, a bit peevishly.

  “Yes! Yes!” Whenever they talk like this – and the times are rare – she comes up against his resistance; and behind the resistance, what? Fear? Anger? She thinks of his father, who tyrannized their little house with his rages. And his mother, the last word in interfering women. When Ann first met Richard, Doris was still buying his underwear.

  “I’m afraid for us sometimes,” she says. It comes out before she can think. “I don’t mean that to be as ominous as it sounds, but we have to be more than a business partnership who keep our sides of this – enterprise – going. We’ve become kind of dry, don’t you think?”