Coming Up for Air Page 5

  When they took Anouk home from the hospital, Nora said, ‘This is a different baby than the one we had two weeks ago.’

  And Red said, ‘No. She’s the same. Everything else has changed.’

  7

  Pieter

  Stavanger, 1951

  My son. my bear. There was a time, before you and your sister came along, when your mother and I didn’t think we were going to get our family. We tried and we tried and nothing ever came of it. Your mother’s heart was broken and I was just angry. After a while, you begin to accept your lot because there’s nothing else you can do, and you learn to rewrite your future. And then, after almost eight years of trying, there was Tilda. And then not even two years later, you. You were born in the late summer of 1951 and I was not in the room with your mother when you drew your first, rattling breath. I was made to wait in some kind of family lounge. Your sister had been left with neighbours.

  Your coming was long and it was complicated, which was unexpected – Tilda had been so straightforward. The first labour stabs came at three in the morning. Your mother woke me. She sat straight up in bed and spoke clearly, as if she hadn’t been asleep at all. She ordered me to collect your sister and the bags and to meet her in the front hall.

  It wasn’t until the following evening that you finally emerged, grey and floppy, your mother later told me, as a dead frog. Your heart rate was low and each breath a task. Before she had a chance to see you properly, you were taken to the other end of the room and surrounded by medical staff. With rapid pulses, the doctor compressed your chest until your breathing became regular. In essence, he breathed for you, mechanically, until you could breathe on your own. You and your mother stayed in hospital for a week before we were able to take you home.

  You were not an easy baby.

  For two years we didn’t sleep. You made sure of that. And you were tense. You were like – you were like grinding teeth. You were like a cramp in the calf muscle. All of this burden rested with your mother and for most of that time she was irritated with me, and with Tilda. And with you. I did what I always did when life became hard. I vacated. Our toy manufacturer was only just operating out of a simple factory; we hadn’t yet branched away from Stavanger. But the company was growing, so it was easy to find reasons to stay away from home. I set up a bed in the back office and slept in it often, and I can tell you, it became a comfort to wake up to the smell of wood shavings, to wake up to the smell of glue and paint and the labours of craftsmen.

  Once, I don’t know how long I’d been away, maybe it was three or four nights, I returned to a house that was dark and quiet. It was early evening, late November, more than a year after your birth. It had been snowing all day and the world was quiet; the world was dusk-blue and crystalline. I was thinking I would help your mother by wrapping you and Tilda up snug and taking you both for a night walk. There was a hill not far from our house that was ideal for sledding. I’d already seen children on it a few minutes before, when I drove past; dark, thick-limbed creatures tumbling all over the face of the slope, screaming in the near dark.

  So it was this I was thinking of as I opened the front door: taking you out with the sled. But the house was cold to the bone; the radiators had not been turned on for days. I called into the dark even though I knew the house was empty. I looked on the kitchen table for a note and found no note. Your mother often took you to stay with her parents so I called there first, but they hadn’t heard from her. I tried the neighbours. I tried our friends. No one knew where my family was.

  What could I do? I turned on the heat and put the kettle on the stove. I sat at the kitchen table and leafed through a pile of unopened mail. This silent house that was usually clamorous with child-cry and footsteps pounding on stairs, with various objects being drummed upon and the hiss of a hot iron over cotton, the silence of this house was disconcerting. Where was my family? The silence perched on my shoulders and blew into my ear. It lifted the hairs at the back of my neck. It ticked.

  After I don’t know how long, I became hungry. The refrigerator contained a bottle of milk that had gone off and a hard block of cheese and a half-eaten loaf of soda bread. Cold stew gone fuzzy in a cold pot. I opened a can of oily smoked mussels and stood crookedly over the kitchen counter, spooning the mussels on to crackers and taking bites out of a wedge of the hard cheese. Dribbling oil down the front of my shirt.

  I left crumbs everywhere and eventually shuffled up the stairs to bed, warming myself under the blankets with the heat of my own body.

  Three more days your mother stayed away. No phone call, no letter. I thought about calling the police, but I knew I was being punished. I knew you were safe somewhere. For the first two days, I came home early from my work, expecting to find our house warm again and with a pulse. On the third day, driving past the sledding hill, I decided that I would go to your grandparents and confront them, confront your mother, because I was certain you were all there.

  But you were home. She had come back. I knew this before I pulled into the driveway, because once again the windows were lit and smoke rose from the chimney. One of Tilda’s snow boots lay on the front walk and I knew why. She would have thrown one of her tantrums and had to have been dragged by the armpit from your grandfather’s car and into the house.

  I opened the door to the sound of your braying and to the smell of onions being fried in butter. Tilda had barricaded herself behind a wall of cushions on the floor in the front room and you were in your high chair at the kitchen table, your face shiny and red from crying, chewed pieces of carrot drying in your hair. Your mother stood at the stove, drawing a wooden spoon slowly around the pan of onions in a kitchen that was steamed with heat and fry and noise. The radio was on but I don’t remember what was playing. It was just on.

  ‘Merete,’ I said.

  She continued to stir.

  ‘Tilda’s boot was outside,’ I said.

  ‘She didn’t want to come in.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Your mother swayed in motion with the wooden spoon.

  ‘How are your parents?’ I asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Isn’t that where you were?’

  She laid the spoon aside and forked slices of gammon into the pan; she hissed and rubbed vigorously at her forearm with the back of her wrist where a spit of grease had landed.

  We ate our meal in silence. I, with you in my lap, tolerating you even when you dug your pudgy hands into the food on my plate and threw it to the floor. I put Tilda to bed with a story while your mother bathed you and soothed you to sleep.

  In the darkness of our room, your mother and I alone in our bed, I turned to her with intimacy and an acknowledgement that the fault was mine. She took from me that night, with her body, in a way she hadn’t before and wouldn’t ever again. Afterwards, I searched for her but, even pressed against me, she was missing. It was clear she wasn’t going to tell me where she’d been for those three days, or however long it was you’d been gone. Not that night or any other. For me, for the time being at least, it was enough to know and to be humbled by the knowledge of what I had come so close to losing for good.

  8

  Anouk

  Ottawa River, 1987

  Anouk lay prostrate on The Cheese, a triangular wedge of hard yellow foam. With her hips elevated and her head down, she lay patiently while Red drummed with cupped palms up and down her back, between her shoulder blades. On the floor just by her head, a white, plastic cup. When she felt the urge to cough, she pushed herself up, coughed, and spat thick, sand-coloured sputum into the cup. She showed it to Red.

  ‘We can get more out,’ he said.

  She bent again over The Cheese and propped her chin in her hands and looked out of the window to the yard where Nora was hanging wet towels on the line, which had been strung on pulleys from a tree to the house. It was early morning and s
un hadn’t yet hit the line; in the shade, the crisp white towels looked blue. Everything Anouk saw was distorted, jumpy, because of the pounding on her back, so Nora looked almost puppet-like, or robotic, pulling another towel out of the basket and snapping the wrinkles out of it and securing it to the line with two pegs. She advanced the line forward and there was the raking squeak of the pulley mechanism, loud enough for Anouk to hear through the window. Another wad of phlegm was working its way into the bottom of her throat. She tensed her shoulders and her father stopped pounding. She spat into the cup again, showed him.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ he said.

  Anouk stood up. ‘Am I done?’

  ‘You feel clear?’

  ‘I guess.’ She went outside and sat on the edge of the porch with her toes in the cool morning grass and watched her mother. Nora in jeans that had been cut off at the knees and a ribbed red halter top.

  The tight sigh of the screen door opening behind her. ‘Anouk,’ Red said. ‘Come on.’

  He wasn’t finished with her yet. In the kitchen there was a cupboard for Anouk’s drugs. Neatly stacked white boxes with generic labels, enzymes and antibiotics and vitamins. Red rinsed the spit cup in the sink and turned it over to dry on the windowsill. He handed her a glass of water and a small bowl of pills. Variously coloured tablets of penicillin derivatives. She could swallow three pills in one go. Red prepared her enzymes, pulling apart five of the large, dark-green capsules of Creon and emptying the granules into a bowl. He mixed the granules with a generous slug of maple syrup and stirred. Anouk poured a bowl of cereal and put a chocolate muffin on a plate, always encouraged to eat foods that would help to fatten her up.

  ‘Eat it all,’ said Red, putting the dish of maple syrup on the table in front of her, handing her a teaspoon.

  Even doused in sweet, thick syrup, some of the bitter granules stuck in her teeth and she worked them out with her tongue before they could dissolve and burn her gums.

  Nora came into the kitchen, hands in her hair, twisting a bun on top of her head.

  ‘You ready?’ Red asked Anouk. He was packing a bag for the day: two water bottles and a box of pills, some fruit and cookies wrapped in foil.

  ‘We’ll be out of your way soon,’ he said to Nora.

  ‘You’re not in the way,’ she said.

  At any given time, at least one room in their house was in a state of flux. That summer it was the kitchen. The robin’s-egg blue on the walls was to be sanded in preparation for some other colour – Nora hadn’t yet decided between a mustard yellow or just straight-up white. She was also restoring the cupboard doors and had stripped the tiles off the floor. Was considering a new set of taps.

  The dust wasn’t good for Anouk, so Red was taking her out for the day. For the work, Nora had recruited Jody, a friend they’d known for as long as they’d lived on the river.

  ‘Do you know where that box of sandpaper is?’ Nora asked. ‘It wasn’t in the shed.’

  ‘It is in the shed.’

  ‘Nope. Just looked.’

  ‘I saw it two days ago.’

  Nora shrugged.

  Red made a move for the door.

  ‘Don’t you dare look in that shed,’ said Nora. ‘I’m telling you it’s not there. Could it be in the basement?’

  ‘It’s in the shed,’ Red called over his shoulder, as the screen door slammed behind him.

  Nora leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed her arms over her chest. She frown-smiled at Anouk. Anouk knew, as necessary as the sandpaper was, her mother did not want her father to find it in the shed. Her mom was like a fish swimming against the current.

  Nora spooned coffee grounds into a paper cone and put the cone in the coffee maker and pushed a button, slipped two pieces of bread into the toaster.

  Anouk watched Red stride back across the lawn, empty-handed.

  ‘I’m sure I saw that box the other day,’ he said, coming into the kitchen. He was slowly scratching his beard, the place he often looked for what bamboozled him.

  Nora reached for the telephone mounted on the wall and dialled. The toast popped.

  ‘Who’re you calling?’ Red asked.

  ‘Jody might have some.’

  Red smiled at Anouk. ‘Got your shoes?’

  Nora hung up the phone. ‘He’s not answering.’

  ‘I’ll pick some up for you,’ said Red. ‘I’ll go now.’

  ‘You’ll be nearly an hour there and back.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘This is stupid. There was a whole box. It’s here somewhere.’

  ‘I’ll just go,’ said Red, flipping his Toronto Blue Jays cap on to his head. He gave the peak a little shuffle left and right before settling it in the middle, the hair at the back of his head sloping into its usual ducktail.

  ‘Red,’ huffed Nora, staring into the sink.

  * * *

  As promised, Red returned less than an hour later with sandpaper, and now he and Anouk were bumping along a dirt road towards the home of Red’s friend Fraser. Fraser was American. He was one of the draft dodgers Nora and Red had met in Toronto, and now he lived here and operated a sugar shack, where he boiled sugar-maple sap into syrup. Anouk’s favourite time to visit the shack was late March, or early April, when the nights were still freezing but the days brought on the thaw. In those months, the sap flowed the clearest and with the greatest pressure from the trees, and that was when Fraser tapped them with metal spiles, collecting the sap in aluminum buckets that hung from hooks nailed into the trees. He tapped until the leaf buds unfurled. Over wood-fuelled fires in the shack he boiled the sap in stainless-steel vats, and the smoke, sometimes backlit from the sun and rimmed so fiercely with light it almost looked like the smoke itself was on fire, that smoke would rise up into the blue sky over the naked black branches of the sugar maples. That was when the snow was the prettiest, the spring snow, kind of oldish with a sparkling top crust of paper-thin ice, pocked with bits of black forest debris and sticks and the frozen stills of animal prints. There was the deep-cold smell of the ground defrosting and there was the soft spring light, caster of the long shadow through trees, ghosts’ legs laid over the snow. When the tapping and the boiling was at its height, Fraser paid a guy with a horse and hay cart to take people for rides through the maple bush, and that was the best part of the whole thing, lying back on the moving planks of wood, bits of golden hay sticking into your neck, looking up at the sky and the black branches passing over you. The horses creaked leather and metal and other bits of tack; steam rose from their snouts and they shat hot apples of chewed hay into the snow. Outside the shack, Fraser would fill a trough with snow and pour into it wavy lines of hot, extra-thick syrup, and after a few seconds collect the cooled taffy on to popsicle sticks.

  Red and Anouk arrived now to a very different place, maple trees green and summer-lush, ferns and shrubs knee-high from the forest floor. Sun reflected off the red tin roof of the sugar shack and the wood shelter that leaned next to it, which housed cords of neatly stacked firewood for the spring boiling.

  Inside the shack, there was no one around, but the stainless-steel evaporator vats were a presence; cold and empty, waiting on top of ovens for the next sugaring season. Along the walls, shelves of glass bottles, amber-brown and golden. The cedar-plank walls preserved the smells of maple sugar reduction and smoke. This was not one of those mass-commercial outfits, where the sap was piped right from the trees into a network of machinery. Here, buckets were carried by hand from the trees to the shack. Wood was burned.

  ‘You want dark or light?’ Red asked. ‘Or should we just get both?’ He held up two bottles.

  ‘Both.’

  Fraser came in then from a door at the back. Denim overalls, bright-yellow T-shirt. He wore heavy boots and his burly arms, hairy and bare, were loaded with cardboard boxes. With a peach wedged between his teeth, juice on his chin, he reg
arded them with a waggle of his bushy eyebrows. He settled the boxes on a counter and took the peach out of his mouth, gently cuffed Anouk across the top of her head. ‘You’ve grown,’ he said to her. He looked at Red. ‘I always hated when adults said that to me, like it’s some big fucken surprise. But,’ he turned back to Anouk, ‘you have. Grown. You’ve gone from scrawny to not as scrawny.’ He tapped the bottle of darker syrup in Red’s hand. ‘That one you eat over ice cream.’

  ‘I can’t eat ice cream,’ said Anouk. ‘It goes right through me.’

  ‘Because of her medications,’ said Red.

  Fraser blew out his cheeks, shrugged. He sucked the last of the orange-yellow flesh off the peach pit and tossed the pit out the door. He looked at Red. ‘Anything else you wanted?’

  Red scratched his beard. Glanced at Anouk. ‘Ah,’ he said.

  ‘Come out back,’ said Fraser.

  Anouk had seen this act before. They would be gone for a few minutes and when her father came back, he would stink of pot.

  ‘Yep, yes. Okay.’

  Now alone, Anouk checked out her reflection in one of the steel vats, moving from side to side so she was either thin as a whippet, collapsing into herself and disappearing, or wide as a house. Stretched and blurred. Eyes like peach pits. Soon bored, she went outside and kicked around in the dirt a little, picked at an amber crust of dried sap running down the scaly trunk of a white pine.