To The Island

It’s Sunday afternoon on the dock. Claire stands on the dock, ready to swim to the island. Brianna, in her navy one-piece bathing suit, hands out triangles of watermelon from the metal bowl. Stéphanie, in an aqua polka-dotted bikini, poses beside Fischer, her boyfriend. With each bite of the watermelon, his neck darts out like a turtle’s. Beside them is a rumpled copy of the weekend Toronto Star open to the real estate section.

Claire can’t remember how Stéphanie and Fischer met and she doesn’t know if Fischer can swim either, but he has a truck. He helped move the better furniture from Michael’s old apartment on Nun’s Island last November.

Michael, her husband, wasn’t even sixty when he died two years ago. And although they’d been separated for longer, she’s puzzled by the abandonment she still feels. It hurts most when she’s here at the cottage. It’s a pain she doesn’t share with Fiona, her partner and workmate. But there’s no financial pain. She has a good job and he left all his money to her, along with fat gifts to the girls. They have choices now, choices she didn’t have at their age.

Fischer, lying on his back, is glued to the dock, laughing his oversized laugh and smearing zinc cream over his nose. When he does get up from the dock, his face is always in his cell phone as he wanders up to the road to find reception. The one time she saw Fischer in the canoe, he looked like a strange insect, the faded orange life jacket his carapace. The cedar strip canoe had belonged to Michael’s father.

But Fischer hadn’t flinched when he took the dead bird out of the wood stove. In June, he got into the water and helped Brianna to put the dock in. And he and Brianna will decide when to take it out this fall. But it won’t be done in the same way or when Michael did it. Claire hates relying on them. Lately, there are more and more things that she doesn’t have the strength to do, or, even more shameful, things she doesn’t know how to do, like changing the filters in the pump house. Things Michael had always done to keep this forty-year-old cottage running.

Yesterday, Claire overheard Fischer and Stéphanie making plans to upgrade the shower and repair the planks on the dock, the two places where Fischer spends most of his time. She should be included in the conversation. It’s Michael who’s dead, not her.

At times, Claire catches herself listening for the crunch of Michael’s tires on the gravel, expecting him to walk out from behind the dying maple tree on the lawn.

And when is Stéphanie going to tell her she’s pregnant? Since the Canada Day weekend, the sharpness of her cheekbones has softened and her breasts are fuller. Her stomach pouts outwards.

“Mom, that bathing suit’s older than me,” Stéphanie teases hooking her pinky under the sagging bum.

Stéph’s right. Her old swimsuit is stretched out and baggy on her middle-aged frame. “It works. I can’t bear to toss it and go to the trouble of finding a new one.” Another thing she’s said goodbye to is her youthful, muscular body. 

“We wouldn’t know what to do if you showed up in something flashy,” Brianna says.

Claire inspects the untanned band of her skin on her wrist where she wears the fancy watch that the girls gave her last Christmas. She’s forgotten it. All that timing stuff seems unimportant when she’s at the lake and not in the university pool. She folds her favourite green and white towel into a rectangle and places it on the corner of the dock. With a tidy dive, she stretches her arms into the warm water. Her body lengthens as she pulls away from the crowded dock. The silky liquid lake parts before her.

Her island, granite, covered with weather-stunted pines, is a kilometre away. Claire is fifty-nine and has been swimming to it every summer since she and Michael bought the cottage, over twenty-five years ago.

Who cares if dinner is late tonight? The kids have been slurping their watermelon and drinking their cans of kombucha on the dock all afternoon. They can wait.

Last night, they gathered at the picnic table on the screened porch to celebrate Brianna’s twenty-seventh birthday. Light-drunk moths flapped about the porch door lightbulb, battering their powdery wings against the metal screen.

Fischer, his long legs folded under the table, laughed in loud brays at things that weren’t that funny. Brianna, wearing Michael’s old Hip t-shirt, barbecued the chicken in the rusting metal barbecue. Michael brought that shirt back from a concert in Kingston in 1995. He was supposed to have been in Montreal for a conference. Claire was in Victoria doing fieldwork. It was her seabird phase. “Yeah. Me and Nigel cut out on Saturday afternoon once we heard about it. Took the train down. They were amazing,” he’d said. She hadn’t believed his story for a minute and guessed he’d met somebody, again. She could have left him then. They hadn’t had the girls yet.

And then again, much later, the summer the girls were sixteen and fourteen, he’d had an unignorable affair with a grad student in their department. Claire had tossed him out. The girl, Lucie, had gone with him to Victoria. Claire called it his un-lucid summer and refused to let Michael move back in when he crept back to Montréal. But she found a way to share the cottage with him, allotting him the junk room with the built-in bunk beds.

And that year, before she and Fiona became serious, after too much wine, she’d allowed Michael to crawl into their old bed. They had sex, wordless and regrettable on the lumpy mattress that had been their marriage bed. But she never trusted him again. The day after, they slunk about the cottage avoiding each other. He left earlier than usual, careful to take all of his things. Brianna and Stéphanie must have figured out what happened. Claire smirks thinking about it.

She’s grateful she has Fiona as a partner now, someone who knew Michael too. Fiona saw how Claire struggled at the cottage with her memories of Michael. “I don’t belong here,” she said the one time she visited.

Last at the dinner, Stéphanie’s face had glowed in the candlelight. She sipped soda water from a goblet that had been Nan’s, her grandmother’s, while her hand rested lightly on Fischer’s thigh. Brianna thumped the platter piled with chicken on the table. These days, Stéphane was eating—no chicken of course, but a mound of potato salad and the lettuce, tomato, and basil salad that Claire made. No salad spinner. She made the salad the way her mother used to, whirling a tea towel full of lettuce leaves over her head.

“I’ll open another bottle,” said Fischer, bumping the table with his knee getting up.

That was new. Fischer didn’t do much in the kitchen other than pour himself a coffee or get a beer in the fridge. The bench of the picnic table felt harder on her butt than it did last year. She shifted about uneasily.

“There’s no cake and I love cake,” Fischer called out from the kitchen. 

“Didn’t want a cake,” Brianna said.

“Don’t believe you. Someone forgot,” Fischer shouted back.

“Birthday cakes were Michael’s department,” said Claire. All those years of ice cream cakes, last-minute cake-mix cakes, and the angel food cake that Stéphanie would eat. “That last triple chocolate mousse…”

“What I’d like for my birthday is some help finishing that brick barbecue he started,” said Brianna, her eyes glistening in the candlelight.

Fischer broke the silence by announcing that he and Stéphanie were considering moving to North York to be near his family, but not until next year. Why weren’t they telling her about the more obvious thing? And even if Stéphanie left, Brianna would stay in Montreal. She was too broken to fly away, still struggling with Michael’s death. Fischer and Stéphanie giggled over a private joke. The yodel of a loon sounded across the darkening blue surface of the lake. And the sadder call of its partner echoed back. The dinner hadn’t felt like a birthday celebration, and they all went to bed early.

Claire’s feet touch the muddy bottom in front of the rocks on the shore of the little bay at the island. She sits on the largest rock, hugging her bony knees, and stares at the break in the trees on the shoreline where the dock is. It’s too far away to make out any figures. The afternoon sun hovers above the maples on the hill behind the cottage.

She doesn’t want to swim back right away, so she pads along the worn dirt path following the southeastern shore. The fine soil seeps up between her toes and sandpapers her heels. She arrives at the cliff-jumping place where the bronze plaque is fixed to the granite wall at the bottom of the cliff.

Gerard Maillon Badeau 

March 15, 1981

August 25, 1997

The poor kid died the summer she and Michael moved back to Montréal from Victoria. By then they’d been married for eleven years. Brianna was one. Claire got pregnant with Stéphanie the same August that that sixteen-year-old boy jumped off the cliff and drowned. She’d never met the drowned boy, Gerard, or his mother. She traces her fingers along the letters and numbers on the memorial. She thinks of the grief of losing a beautiful teenage boy, his perfection preserved in the amber of his mother’s memory. But then again, that mother didn’t have to deal with the realities of children becoming adults.

She never worried about her kids drowning. Michael had done all the worrying for her. Before they learned how to swim, Michael had kept the girls zipped into their life jackets every time they were on the dock. She remembers the squealing and shrieking from across the lake, knowing they were safer with Michael than with her. She was too distracted with work.

Michael had smoothed her way financially and academically. She’d dashed about the globe researching flyways and lecturing, and he’d taken the back seat, teaching oversubscribed undergraduate classes. He hadn’t competed with her career for her love or attention. But several times, he’d found some outside love and attention. She smiles wryly to the listening pines.

It’s time to go back. Shadows creep across the path and she’s cold. She’s afraid that if she stays longer, she’ll be too tired to swim back to the dock. Goosebumps rise on her wet thighs and upper arms. On the shore of the shallow bay, the last of the afternoon sun warms the rocks. She squints to see the trio waiting on the dock but can’t. It’s too far. She slips into the warm velvety water.

After a few minutes of purposeful crawl, she catches the outline of a solitary loon swimming. Gavia Immer, the Common Loon. One of the pair calling last night? It watches her warily with one ruby eye. She’s so close she can make out the thin white vertical stripes of its collar and the checkerboard pattern of the plumage on its back. It does not startle. It holds its ground. There must be a nest nearby. She’s disturbed a roosting parent with her splashing. And where’s its mate? On the nest, she hopes. She imagines the newly hatched chick and its parents making the long migration to the Atlantic shorelines for the winter, abandoning what will become a thickly frozen lake for raging coastal winter storms. The loon dives and disappears.

She begins to swim again. All the things she’s done poorly in her life so far. Too tied up in the importance of her bird migration research. Not spending enough time with her daughters or Michael. Allowing her personal pack of fear-of-failure dogs to hound her. No matter how hard she works, there’s always more to do and to do better. Those famous feminist promises. Have it all. Raise children, have a career and have a life. She couldn’t have done it at the level she did without Michael and her mother’s help.

She’s crying now, her tears dissolve into the lake. Her underwater exhalations muffle her sniffling and snorting. She won’t stop swimming until the sadness passes through her. She creates a slash of churning foam, kicking more violently and pulling her arms more forcefully through the water. She resolves to be different—a better partner for Fiona and when the time comes, a good grandparent. And if they’ll let her, more loving with her daughters.

She looks up beyond the dock and above the cottage where the sun is touching the tree line, exactly where she’s watched it touch countless other August evenings. The lowering sun distorts the outlines of Brianna, Stéphanie, and Fischer sprawled on the dock. For them everything has continued without Michael and will continue without her. They have their own lives to live.

Her pace drops as though her body has decided that she shouldn’t go back to the dock, her daughters, the possibility of a grandchild and the absence of Michael. There is an emptiness in her that it’s unfair to expect Fiona to fill. She switches to a gliding breaststroke, quieter and slower. She could haul herself onto the dock, dripping wet and proud that she’s completed her swim, but instead she swims to the red granite shelf beside the dock where she can press her body into the sun-warmed rock and be alone and still.

As she hauls herself out, she feels a sharp pain over her right knee. Pink liquid trickles down her shins from the slash across her knee cap. She licks the tears from her upper lip.

“Mom, are you okay?”

Stéphanie, clutching the green and white striped towel, runs towards her with Brianna close behind. Don’t trip. She wants to tell them about the loon protecting its nest. How close it was. The fine markings. Her legs collapse underneath her. She doesn’t have the strength to walk.

Stéphanie sits her down on the grass, dabbing at her knee with a corner of the towel. Her blood marks it with angry blots. 

“Quite the gash.” says Stéphanie. “Lots of blood.” 

Claire’s throat is thick, her words trapped. She swallows. She feels her face muscles screwing up around her eyes and mouth. All that comes out is a moan. She sobs like a child who’s fallen while learning to walk.

“You’re crying,” Brianna says as both girls reach around her shoulders and hug her. They peck at her forehead and cheeks leaving scratchy little kisses.

Claire rubs her chest and she catches her breath. “It’s been hard for me. For us. Hard trying to carry on like nothing has happened.”

Stéphanie nuzzles against her. “It’s OK Mom. We’re here.”

A warmth rushes through her body. Yes. Her daughters are kind, beautiful people. And she has Fiona. “My towel.” She points to the bloody spots ruining the towel.

“We’ll wash it.” says Stéphanie. “A good cold-water soak with a cup of salt.”

“Like Nan would have done,” says Brianna. 

Yes, they’re her family and although the pain in her chest is lessening, she starts crying again.

“Oh Mom,” says Brianna wrapping her arms around her and Stéphanie.

Claire’s wet hair drips onto her cheeks mingling with the tears. “I love you guys,” she sniffs, promising herself to say it more often.