Shot-Blue Read online

  Tristan didn’t know if he should try to wake her.

  Sitting a few seats back, Anuta liked the way Rachel’s neck looked almost broken as she slept.

  Keb wanted to wake her but didn’t know how he might.

  Codas was not unhappy to see Rachel like this. If things were bad, she would have to come to him.

  The woman who had given Tristan the clothes watched him closely. He seemed to have a sense of purpose, standing at his mother’s side, protecting her, though he didn’t know how and maybe it was impossible. Rachel’s head, bent past prayer, was like a flower broken by its own weight. In sympathy, the woman’s head started to ache. She should have shared her clothes, she didn’t want to punish anyone.

  Marie couldn’t see Rachel’s face, not her eyes. She had no hope of being seen in return. She stared at the rafters to distract from her disappointment. How had they managed to lift those rafters up there? Her mother didn’t know anything about rafters. Marie wanted to ask her father, but they didn’t know how to talk.

  Tristan put his head against his mother’s arm. She was asleep, so he tried to fall asleep too. He wanted to sit beside her where she was sitting. He would walk beside her if she were walking. He would wade out if she were in the water. He curled against her like a stray animal.

  Rachel caught fever. Her skin stayed damp and her body shook like a small boat tied to a dock in conflicting winds. She could find comfort by moving from the bed to the floor, floor to bed, but it lasted only five minutes before the ropes twisted again; they slacked, sashed, then snapped back so tightly you could walk across them. The dock rings strained. If she were a boat, she would scrape the dock and from the scraping shiver and threaten the only threat she had: to finally break.

  Portions of muscle burned away until she felt closer to her core, though also strangely immaterial, shot through with the window light. Her body was always too thin, now it was rugged. She thought her hands looked old and wanted to ask Tristan if he thought so. The bedsheets grew so disgusting she stopped pulling them to her face, worried that if she gave them to Tristan to wash, she’d never see them again. He would spread them in the water and let them fly.

  Tristan brought her what she asked for. He made tea from wintergreen leaves gathered on the high side of the island: he boiled the leaves, let the water cool, and picked the leaves out. He also brought the white cloth, now kept in the closet, neatly folded in the pocket of her winter coat. She still couldn’t believe she’d found it. He couldn’t believe she’d stolen it. ‘Pour some water on it.’ He did. ‘Twist it.’ He squeezed it like a rabbit’s neck to take the life out, then handed it over reluctantly. Rachel took it. She wiped her mouth, pressed the cloth to her eyes. ‘Go outside.’ She was always telling him that.

  Tristan left, but his camp was the front steps. He could do anything he wanted. He could fish and cut the fish open with his pocket knife. He could puncture the air sac with the knife tip, let it hiss, then spill the bright black guts out on the rocks and moss, and he did. It made him feel terrible. He hid the guts in the bushes, but they started to rot, it seemed, within an hour. He could smell it from everywhere and had to scrape the guts together and throw them off shore, where seagulls dabbed and picked at the bits that floated.

  He stretched out across the steps and pretended to be sick. He pulled a towel over his legs like a sick blanket and rolled his head on the hard board the way she rolled her head on the pillow. Up was the sun. Probably there was sky, but the sun was all he saw, like a breach, like a skinned knee that wouldn’t stop bleeding. The sun could be awful, but it was also useful in helping him to suffer on the steps below the door. The sun soaked through the towel, but no matter how hot he was, he would not take the towel off. It was their towel for bathing in the lake, the one they shared, and it smelled like her before she was sick.

  §

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ Keb called from the water.

  Tristan heard him but didn’t know how to answer.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  ‘I wouldn’t tie my boat up,’ Tristan said.

  ‘You don’t have a boat.’

  Keb had no habit of looking at the boy but now he did, annoyed with his uselessness. Tristan wore wheat boots and kid blue jeans with no belt. The dark blue elastic band of his underwear showed above the top of his jeans, tight around a tight stomach. He had a serious face and tiny body. He was filthy. The skin around his neck was dark and his hands were darker, grimy as if he’d been digging into something, or as if his hands were dug out of the earth. Taking this inventory, Keb was annoyed by a sense of responsibility: someone needed to wash him.

  ‘She’s sick and doesn’t move.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Keb said, bringing his boat to land and tying up.

  Tristan ran over and looked in the bottom of the boat for the girl, but she wasn’t there.

  Keb absolved himself from caring for Tristan by deciding that he couldn’t catch him if he tried. ‘Stay and watch my boat,’ he said.

  Tristan waited until Keb disappeared up the path toward the cabin, then untied the boat and pushed it off.

  ‘It’s me,’ Keb called out, waiting at the door, not knowing Rachel couldn’t get up to let him in.

  Tristan had pushed the boat so hard that he almost fell in after it. He wanted to dash the hull on the rocks. He wanted to be the rocks and break the boat with his body. But the boat didn’t dash, it drifted and stretched out in the wind and sun and open water. The further it pulled into the clear, the more unsure Tristan felt. He had meant to put something terrible in motion, to answer the question ‘Where is your mother?’ ‘Here she is,’ the boat would say, its last words as the rocks ate it up. But he had put something else in motion, something desperate in its mediocrity: the boat gently sailed into the bay.

  Keb took off his clothes and got into bed with Rachel, thinking she was only asleep. Her hair looked wet but was drying, he decided. Her skin smelled bad, but he liked her body so much he didn’t pull away and would try to get used to it.

  Tristan slipped into the water in his underwear and walked out until the bottom dropped off. He swam poorly because he kept looking over his shoulder, back to the island. He knew that he was about to swim out further from shore than ever before.

  Where Keb held Rachel, around the lower back and ribs, bruises would appear later in queer shapes like aurora borealis.

  The wind was undecided. It carried the boat one way, then the other, spinning it in half circles. Tristan tried to anticipate what the wind would do next, but the harder he judged, the lower his head sank in the water. He took water in his mouth, swallowed some and spat the rest out.

  Usually Rachel held Keb’s weight off by squeezing her stomach muscles and using her hands to hold up his sides or hips. She didn’t have the strength. She could only look out the window for air.

  Tristan reached up and grabbed the boat’s high side. He was not strong enough to pull himself over, so he hung there, his feet kicking under the slope of the hull. He hung where fish hang on the stringer. He pulled with both arms and kicked the water. But kicking didn’t lift him, only rocked the boat down, then away with equal pull.

  Keb turned Rachel’s head with his hand to see her. He liked the way her hair stuck in dark strips across her forehead. Her mouth didn’t taste good, but he didn’t care. Rachel half-kissed him back, so loosely it was impossible to tell what was going on with her. He wanted to ask what she was thinking, but that was not a question they asked each other.

  Tristan remembered the motor, a war-green Evinrude many times the size of a human head. He needed to take it in his hands. He did. Then he needed to slide his feet on the top plate above the prop where he could stand. He felt with his feet for the plate, found it, and stood. Pulling on the head of the motor, he jumped and threw his upper body over the transom headfirst. His stomach caught on the transom lip, then uncaught, somersaulting him into the gaswell. Blood quickly coated the insides of his cheeks, but h
e smiled in relief.

  Rachel’s lips were swollen, dehydrated. He kissed her deeply. She was dreaming, and in her dream she was swatting wasps from her mouth, trying not to breathe them in.

  Tristan felt around with his fingers. His bottom lip had split against the handle of the metal gas tank. It was nothing, he thought, looking up at the old Evinrude. They were both shining in the sun, the motor in its perfection and Tristan in his wet underwear, satisfied at having failed to drown.

  She started to run to the water. There she could shed the wasps like a skin and leave them to dry into empty shells. She would be able to sweep them off the rock in time.

  There was nowhere to run, Tristan knew, hunkered in the back corner of the boat like an anchor. There was always this question of running, never an answer.

  Rachel made it to the water and dove in, and dove deep, past the top layer, to where the water was colder, but even there her lips pricked and burned.

  Tristan’s arm was too short to pull the engine’s start cord.

  Keb came but the feeling was quickly gone, with no wake, and his body stayed tight. Rachel’s eyes opened but she blurred and narrowed them to see only his shoulders and chest, not his face. Her dream was done.

  The oars clicked into the oarlocks. Since the boat wasn’t built to be rowed, it slugged through the water one foot at a time with no glide. Tristan remembered a story his mother once told him about a man who had shot a black bear down in Gaspereau Inlet. He shot it dead but couldn’t lift it, not even one of its huge arms off the ground. He’d only thought of killing, not of what comes after. He didn’t have the right knife on him to cut through the fur; his knife rubbed and tore, and so the bear was left to rot. Once the water shallowed, Tristan stopped rowing and took one of the oars, stuck it in the bottom rocks and used it for leverage to pull the boat to shore. He jabbed the oar into crevices and twisted to make it stick.

  Only when Keb stopped moving did he realize that he was crushing Rachel. Her breath took long, sticky pauses. Her eyes had gone thick. ‘Are you crying?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  As he walked down to his boat, Keb still felt tight, and for the first time since they’d met each other, he wondered what would happen to Rachel. She couldn’t live on the island through fall, not into winter. He looked southwest, his favourite direction because it was the mouth of the ruling wind, and he tried to tourniquet a building feeling of dread around the question of what he was doing. He thought he’d been taking care of Rachel, but it wasn’t true. He promised himself he would never come back. His legs cramped, his knees hurt, and he looked out at the water harder.

  Keb saw that the oars had been pulled out of his boat and one was mangled. The promise he had just made to leave and never come back was too new a promise to deter him, so he started back up the path and kept walking until he walked into the cabin without knocking. Rachel was still in bed, the sheets pooled at her waist. What did he think, that she would be up, washing her arms and legs? Sometimes she did that and let him watch.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, holding the oar over her.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, realizing how ridiculous an excuse it was for coming back. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Today we’re finished,’ she said.

  ‘He wrecked this.’ Keb put the oar against the wall.

  ‘Who?’ She had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘Why do you act like you’re okay?’ he said. ‘If you’re not.’

  ‘Am I acting like I’m okay? I’m not okay, I’m sick as fuck.’ She spoke quietly. ‘And I’m crying, I think, but I can’t tell.’

  ‘You’re not crying. You were before.’

  ‘Oh my god,’ she said. He was breaking their deal to keep his distance.

  ‘Oh my god, what?’ he asked. She had cried through it all and he had never stopped. Never thought of stopping: all he could think of now. She shouldn’t have let him do it. She should have stopped him and helped him.

  ‘Your face,’ he said. Her scar that was always white was red.

  ‘I don’t care about my face,’ said Rachel, closing her eyes on new tears. She heard him walk to the counter, where he took back the money he’d put down.

  ‘None of this is helping you,’ he said. ‘You need to do something else.’

  Rachel couldn’t get up to stop him from taking the money. She almost said I hate you, but she didn’t hate Keb. She only wanted to know why he was standing at the counter and she was lying flat. Why did he get to have those long straight arms and hard lines in his back? Tristan would be strong enough to bring him to the ground, but not yet. He would be able to take the money back. She imagined Tristan as a young man, the powerful feeling of him, and this feeling, his strength, was also hers. She imagined him protecting her, then she passed out and didn’t move, not a little, and slept through the afternoon into night.

  In her dream huge angels came down and couldn’t fit through the door. They had to talk her out of bed to come outside and join them. They had come for her. But if they lifted and carried her, they did not take her all the way, not to where they were going. They put her down at a waiting place. Rachel only knew lakes. She’d never been to the sea. But what else could this be? There was no far shore where they left her. The horizon was so wide she had to turn her head to understand: not where the water ended but where it kept going.

  Come with us, the angels said, and Rachel went because they might not ask again. When they abandoned her, she called at their huge backs and at the slopes of their wings. She didn’t know their names so she cried for help. She also called her own name, to her own surprise, fearing never to hear it again. But why would they answer calls of her name? Maybe it was that kind of stupidity that had made them abandon her in the first place. Rachel didn’t know what she had done wrong. Everything she knew was useless. It had always been useless, now it was more. For having briefly known them, she was more alone. One had held her hand on the way out, which was also the way in, and now her hand was empty, aching in a way she’d never known it capable of. It was strange, because she didn’t want the aching to stop. Rachel was afraid, but she would stay and wait in case they circled back. She wanted to see them again and confirm the ache in her hand. And when she woke finally, two days later, it was with such reluctance that she was not completely there. She was still holding watch. She was, she guessed, at sea.

  §

  Over the next two months, she tried to keep their routines going. It was obvious to those who saw her on the lake or at the trading post that she wasn’t feeling well. She seemed to have trouble hearing. Tristan knew it was hard for her to get dressed in the morning. She would pick up and drop her clothes. She would have to sit down and pull them on. It became the only thing he could see when he looked at her: how hard she was trying.

  In October, winds from the north subdued the pines, slowed their sap to a drip. Frost took the knees out of the ground life. Sometimes there was a southern wind that rustled the ground and made it look alive, but only in passing before the cold took back everything it owned. There were warm afternoons that felt endless, but then they ended: a trick of the senses in the headrush of decay.

  In late October, after the first heavy snow, Keb took his family to town, to a small house they kept there for winter’s harshest months. The lake was freezing up at shore, and in sheets in the calmest coves, but the ice would quickly spread, closing the open water. If they were going, they needed to get out.

  The day his boat went by, packed high over the gunnels, Rachel asked Tristan to help her pack the canoe. His mother slept as he threw their clean and dirty clothes into a garbage bag. He had to wake her to roll up the bedding, and together they put that into another bag, tying the top tight against dirty weather out on the water. When Rachel wasn’t looking, he took her mirror off the windowsill, wrapped it in a tea towel, and put it in his inside coat pocket, where it would sit, hard against his chest – it could have stabbed h
im – for hours as they paddled through a light snow. The snow fell white against the black water, and white and grey through the pines on shore.

  He was strong in the bow. He needed to be, though he couldn’t feel his hands, his fingers as red and white as a Red Devil lure from the wind’s lash.

  So they ended up on Treble Island after all, on the chapel grounds, living in the outbuilding, no more than a shed with a woodstove. Rachel didn’t have anywhere else to go, or money to get there. Bringing her a box of supplies and speaking with her politely, arranging for a delivery of firewood to her door, Codas thought Rachel understood him finally, which she didn’t; she had never tried to understand him. She understood only that winter was unthinking. She understood they’d grown low on supplies and that the water at shore where Tristan drew his buckets full would freeze early and stay frozen. The cabin door had already frozen shut one day, and they couldn’t open it until the afternoon sun beat relentlessly against it. Only the sun had the secret knock.

  The chapel shed had a simple metal bed and a potbelly stove that in the dim light looked like a black dog hunkered in the corner. Everything was in reaching distance: from bed you could reach out and touch the stove and table. Sitting at the table, you were sitting on the bed. There was an oil lamp with a tall glass shell and a reservoir of yellow liquid at the base. At the foot of the bed there was a tin basin for washing dishes, where you also washed your hands and face.

  Tristan felt anxious trying to sleep, his skin dry against the sheet. The winter air was so dry it tightened everything. The lake tightened to ice, and the water flowing from the eaves and branches tightened into icicles that broke in the wind. It was hard for him to breathe deeply. Sometimes he felt it most first thing in the morning, when least expected: a shortness of breath. Maybe it was the woodstove burning, eating up the air.

  Tristan liked to open the woodstove door to watch the fire. His mother sometimes let him, but other times without a word she would get up, come over, and close it. The darkness suited her. She felt she wore it around her shoulders. When she went out, Tristan would open the door until the hinge pinched. Sometimes he lit the oil lamp too, not to see, just to watch the flame, which he thought of as a knot of wind he might untie by staring at it. They had to burn the oil carefully, slowly and low, his mother told him, because it cost them. But he couldn’t help it. She would go out and he would raise the flame until it lashed and blackened the sides of the glass tube. There was guilt at that, but the worse he felt, the more he needed the light.