Blood Secrets Page 2

  “Do you live here?” she asks, incredulous.

  “It’s a place to recharge, a place to dream,” he says.

  “What else do you get up to in here? I suppose many of these plants are intoxicants.”

  “Some, but just as many cure and clear the head. This is feverfew, good for old-style melancholia.”

  “How is this different from new-style melancholia?” she says.

  He doesn’t answer, so absorbed is he in his plants. She’s drawn to the lush purple of violets with leaves as dewy and heart-shaped as springtime.

  “Not your grandmother’s African violets,” she says.

  “No, those are from Ireland. In the Middle Ages the petals were tied to the forehead to cure insomnia,” he says. “And this is evening primrose. You must know what this is for.”

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “It makes women raging with hormones as docile as lambs.”

  “Only if picked at certain times. Such as when the moon is full, or close to the solstice.”

  “Like now. It’s powerful now?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” he says before moving on to other plants. She is mostly quiet then, listening attentively and instinctively, as she would after dark in a forest, her senses heightened. The stone pestle she picks up and holds in her hands quickly grows warm, like heavy flesh.

  His hand touches hers and it’s as warm as the stone she holds. He says, “That once belonged to an apothecary. It was dug up from an ancient garbage dump several metres down from the surface of the earth we live on at this moment.”

  “Strange,” she says. “To look around at everything and think of that.” And she shivers, thinking of the hollow sound of her own voice on the answering machine when she called home to see if anyone was there.

  BEFORE THEY LEAVE the pharmacy, he carefully tears a mint leaf, serrated and emerald, from a plant on the counter and she automatically opens her mouth although he hasn’t told her what to do. But it’s the right thing. He places the leaf on her tongue. She thinks of the coca leaves that Aztecs used to place on their tongues for spiritual journeys.

  As he’s locking the door, she feels time speeding up. Everything has collided so quickly, she’s disoriented, as though her family is a distant memory. Even though she doesn’t know if she will ever see this man again.

  ONE THING FOLLOWED ANOTHER until all that followed eventually became part of her past. She often wondered at what point her life became inevitable. If he hadn’t kissed her, and she hadn’t responded with a welcoming curiosity, would the memory of him have been dim, a memory of a kindness rather than of a man? Could even that kiss have been remembered as just another New Year’s kiss, intemperate, drunken and easily disregarded in daylight?

  He drove her home that night in his elegant car with heated seats, the streets still full of drunken people. On her tongue, the mint leaf tingled. Yet it felt strange to bid him good night and turn towards the door of her apartment building.

  She watched for Ruth and Colin from the frigid screened-in balcony of their second-floor apartment, where year by year they could feel gravity pulling them towards the enveloping maple pressed against the screen. She had carefully walked up the driveway, stepping into their earlier footprints in new snow when she returned, a superstition left over from childhood, so that it looked as though no one had come home yet. She was already a ghost in her own life.

  When her family stamped off the snow in the hallway and opened the door, she was waiting to greet them. As it happened, they had waited at the bus stop for her, retraced their steps several times to look for her, growing more and more worried. Her husband was prepared to call the police, and was obviously surprised to find her home. Their faces were the faces of ones loved long ago, and she was overjoyed to see them again.

  Ruth gave her hug, telling her, “I thought you were gone, like those people who spontaneously combust.”

  The three of them laughed at this, and how appropriate it would be for something as dramatic as that to happen on the night the millennium changed.

  Soon after, she lay beneath Colin, as he slowly peeled back the bandage on her brow.

  “Admit it,” he said. “You were out carousing and brawling.”

  “You should see the other guy.”

  “Oh, my fierce, fierce woman.” And he kissed the cut above her eye, now just a thin red line.

  She slept, her knee against Colin’s thigh, her breast molded against his smooth back. She dreamt they were standing face to face. Her groin to his groin, she held a snake in her hand, weaving it around their waists. But the man she dreamt of was not her husband. The man in her dream was still a stranger, although soon she would be standing on a busy street corner with him and saying his name, telling him she loved him.

  “The air temperature is -8, the sun will set at 4:47 P.M. And I love … ” and she would say his name, Ferrall, a strange name that once belonged to his mother as her maiden name. It was a name that she loved for its uniqueness, not diminished even when it grew quickly familiar.

  “These are facts,” she would say, knowing that he liked facts, the predictability of chemistry, the novel logic of an absurd explanation. Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true, but she said it anyway, as though correlation of facts with willfulness made her less culpable. And she suspected even then that she would only know him for a short time. He would prove to be a timid man—so eager to elicit response in her, so uneasy once he had succeeded. His eyes were not filled with kindness, as she had first thought, but merely distance, always focused elsewhere.

  SOON AFTER, SHE WALKED the four blocks from the museum to the pharmacy to return his washed scarf. The holiday season was finally over and the store was busy as people recalled their daily needs and aggravations. She lined up behind women who talked to him about birth control, blood thinners, anti-inflammatory drugs and skin creams. But ills and deficiencies had nothing to do with her.

  When it was her turn, she said, “You know all our secrets,” and was shocked that he didn’t seem to recognize her with her washed hair loose around her collar, her fearless red mouth. He smiled with recognition once she placed his folded scarf on the counter.

  “Only the secrets of the body,” he said.

  “Are there any other kind?” she asked.

  He left the store to the care of others and they walked through windy streets cut off from the sun by high office towers. She knew no one here, her neighbourhood being the ramshackle apartments of other artists and carpenters in an older residential area. They entered a frozen park where blocks of ice, tantalizingly transparent but indecipherable, had been delivered in preparation for the carvers to begin their sculptures for winter carnival.

  “I want to see your drawings,” he said and cleared snow off a bench, his black gloved hand sifting through insubstantial glitter.

  He turned each page of her pad slowly. When he came to the sand hill cranes dancing, hopping with huge muscular wings outspread, he laughed.

  “Very whimsical.”

  “They’re for a children’s book about the family behaviour of birds. Although this dance isn’t something you would do in front of the young ones.” She felt she was apologizing, but he looked at her with frank curiosity and she started to relax. “I use the birds at the museum for models.”

  “I haven’t been there for years.”

  “You’ve raised children?” she asked. Her hands were getting cold and she put her gloves back on, not looking at him when he answered, “I still do,” without offering anything more.

  They walked along Metcalfe Street to the museum, a stone castle guarded by carved mastodons. At the top of the sweeping marble stairway they watched the giant pterodactyls frozen in flight, circling, with salmon in their beaks. Their tour was almost wordless, moving quickly through time, from the formation of the earth’s crust to the fossil record of tropical ferns found in northern Canada. They stood before the bird dioramas, each parallel reality so believable because the taped sounds were so
immediate—fog shrouding the windy cliffs in one, sunshine in a winter forest in another. Joyce felt as though she was on display, inhabiting her own discordant diorama, the climate-controlled environment of the museum all wrong for her racing heart.

  They didn’t go near the floor that had been Ruth’s favourite when she was younger, the room tucked away on the top where the living were housed among the dead. In large aquariums, banana slugs left their slow trails of slime across broad green leaves. Ruth would dash from that aquarium to the next one, putting her small hands against the glass that contained a filthy kitchen sink where cockroaches furtively dashed from rusted tin can to the underside of a crusted plate. These reminders of what could live beneath the surface of the world she recognized interested her far more than dinosaur bones.

  OVER THE YEARS, there would be attempts to overcome the distance between Joyce and Ruth, on both their parts. Before Ruth had her own family, when it still might matter to her to set things right with her own mother, they had spent a weekend together at a spa in rural Quebec in the dead of winter. There were few people registered. Nobody spoke their language so they were quite alone with each other, at first laughing and joking about the ridiculously relaxed bodies sleeping in bathrobes all over the public spaces—women with sagging chests lying inert on sofas in the lobby, snoring beside the roaring fireplace. The faux-peaceful music of birdsong piped throughout the treatment rooms gave them both fits of giggles whenever they looked at each other.

  Joyce was delighted with how easy this felt, and hoped that trouble was all behind them. She thought that now she would be free to talk about the past. They happened to be there on Valentine’s Day, an occasion that didn’t mean much to either of them. Joyce had not remarried; Ruth dated rarely and never sustained a relationship long enough for Joyce to learn a young man’s name. This trip away would be a way of celebrating themselves. Joyce scheduled facials for the two of them. They giggled together as the attendant brushed a cold slimy substance on their faces.

  “Yuck. Snail slime,” Ruth said.

  “Slug spittle,” Joyce answered.

  “Frog spawn,” Ruth said.

  They were laughing so hard, so infectiously, that the attendant had to wait, brush in hand for them to calm down. A drop of clear thick fluid dropped from the bristles onto Joyce’s lap.

  “I hope you’re using protection, Mom,” Ruth said, starting a new gale of laughter. Joyce was a little shocked, but not as shocked as she was the day before when she saw her daughter’s body on the table next to hers, naked, before the layers of algae were wrapped around her. It was a woman’s body, ready for all that nature expected of it, with full tipped-up breasts and a delicate concave belly waiting to be filled. But her daughter’s body was marked too. With faint silver scars along it. Some of these scars Joyce had known about, from the piercings she got through that winter of 2000, before Joyce left home. The rest were fine cut marks on the softest parts of her flesh.

  When the attendant left the room, telling them to keep still for “une demi-heure,” Joyce thought that Ruth’s comment had given her the opening to talk about that time.

  “Do you remember the winter you were sick? When you got all the piercings and that horrible infection? I was going through something difficult too. Something I couldn’t explain to you at the time.”

  She took Ruth’s silence to mean that she was ready to listen, so she told about her own distraction, her own craziness that winter. It was her attempt to finally bring those two conflicting worlds together, although she couldn’t say his name to her daughter, even now. She hoped she didn’t sound self-centred, even though she knew that’s what she had been then.

  “You think I didn’t know?” Ruth said.

  “You knew?”

  “I didn’t want to know. Dad might have been blind, but I wasn’t. Don’t tell me any more. It makes me mad to think about how careless you were, how little you cared really.”

  Joyce was shocked.

  “I cared,” she said.

  She hoped Ruth heard her regret, but the conversation seemed to be over. The silence between them was hardening like a carapace.

  THAT WINTER WHEN EVERYTHING blew apart, there had been a disappointment for Ruth—a relationship that didn’t survive. That much, Joyce had known. Later in the winter, she had seen her daughter standing under the street light outside their second-storey apartment with the shadowy figure of a boy. Snow swirled around them and the shape of the thick light made it look as though the storm raged around them alone. They were obviously arguing. Ruth bent forward slightly from the hips, her face pointed upwards so that she took the snow and wind full force. Now and then she raised her arms emphatically. Joyce didn’t pay much attention to the young man, apart from noticing his height and the way he was half-turned away from her daughter, edging out from under the streetlight’s pale storm. Then he would step back into the centre, back into the disagreement they were having. It was a painful dance, with her daughter assuming the lead.

  At the time, Joyce had been fascinated by her daughter’s passion. She felt a thrilling kinship with her, completely different from the protective bond she had felt up to then. Alert to any other woman’s sexuality, she hadn’t expected this new keening awareness would be directed at her own daughter. That winter, she imagined a time when the two of them would talk about their relationships and about the secret that was distracting her from her life.

  She hadn’t thought of Ruth’s pain. But perhaps Ruth had been trying to reawaken the maternal in her because soon after, she stopped washing, and soon after that, stopped eating. Colin was hectoring in his determination to get Ruth to eat, until Joyce, late in their bedroom one night, said, “Leave her be. She’s a teenager.”

  “Leave her to waste away? Leave her to die? Like you do?”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic.”

  “Where are you? Where are you living? Not with us, I’ll tell you that,” he said.

  Joyce didn’t answer. He was too close to the truth for her to risk even looking into his face.

  “Maybe it’s time you thought about coming home,” he said.

  She couldn’t, and didn’t know then that she would never find her way back home. Her daughter had transformed into this gaunt damaged stranger. She wanted to avoid her. The rank desperate smell of her, the lids that only appeared half-opened over enormous grey irises filled her with restlessness. She didn’t want to be like this feral female she was living with, simmering with self-destructiveness. There was a sexual, heavy-hooded look to her daughter’s eyes that made Joyce feel both repulsed and resentful.

  Then came the piercings, through the eyebrow, fish hooks in a line along her ear, a bolt through the back of her neck. Then a gold ring almost as wide as a wedding ring through her lower lip.

  “How is anyone supposed to kiss her?” Joyce said to Colin.

  “I think that’s the point,” he said, without accusing her further.

  Soon, she heard her daughter moaning with pain in her sleep and went in one night when she couldn’t bear the distance between them. She put her hand on Ruth’s forehead and found her drenched with fever, her mouth angry red. Her thin body had not been strong enough to heal the wound of the last piercing and had become infected.

  Joyce went to his pharmacy for antibiotics. Later she wondered if she had been trying to sabotage the affair by making him fill the prescription, forcing him to see how much damage had been done. She had talked to him about Ruth, wanting to draw him into the next level of intimacy.

  But as she stood in line, she watched him gently cajole another woman who had a fur collar that seemed to bristle and crackle with energy under the florescent lights. She saw him pluck a mint leaf from the plant he kept under grow lights on the counter. The woman opened her mouth and he placed the leaf on her tongue. She could hear the woman’s laugh and his eyes were still bright when she reached the counter with her piece of paper, so flimsy and dead compared to the mint leaf. She, too, had often fel
t the tingling in her mouth that winter, the sensation lasting until she got home. It was a secret she carried after all the other traces of him were carefully washed away in the shower.

  Just seeing that gesture, a replica of that private interchange that, between them, had seemed almost sacred, started to turn her away from him. He seemed to know that a change was taking place. He was efficient with her, professionally deferential as he answered her questions about the strength of the antibiotic, and even more so when she filled the first prescription for antidepressants for her daughter soon afterwards. Another prescription followed by another as Ruth sickened and reeled through a frightening array of side effects: tremors, nausea, nightmares as terrifying as the first nightmares of her early childhood. There was dizziness and muscle twitches and blinding headaches until Ruth cried, “You’re poisoning me. Get away from me.” The only solution was for Joyce to take her at her word and leave.

  In a makeshift apartment, she lay awake far into the night and remembered the moment when any future was ahead—her life with Colin and Ruth, not yet laid down and lost, not yet buried under yards of discarded debris like a medieval village known only by layers of garbage metres below the surface.

  “IT’S STOPPED HURTING,” she says to the stranger who is tapping gently at the bandage above her eye, making sure it will stay in place. She can see the slanted face of his silver watch, the minute hand already halfway into the first hour of a new millennium. And beyond his watch, she looks down the dark tunnel of his cuff at the hairless underside of his wrist.

  “You’re a shaman. I’m perfectly healed.”

  She can’t help the flirtatious tone of her voice. He scares her. Being here scares her. His smell is so unfamiliar, yet strangely inevitable.

  “Maybe you’re a quick healer,” he says. “But you may have a scar. The skin is thin on the forehead.”

  “Oh, no,” she answers. “I never scar.”

  “Never?” he challenges.

  “I am an athlete when it comes to pain.”

  He laughs.