Thought you’d like the spider. 30 feet tall & her belly full of marble eggs. An elegance of legs and space.
All love,
Felicity
I opened the back door for fresh air and so that I could see tulips growing at the edge of a cobbled yard. There were several outbuildings – sheds and things – and beyond that, grass with a stone bench and a path that led down to a small orchard. I remembered these trees – just a half-dozen apple trees, too small to climb and wind-twisted even there behind the house. I could smell the sea, too. Salt. Coins. Rust.
Then a sound. I startled, half expecting to see – who? Gran? Granddad? Not Mateo. Or Felicity, suddenly arrived with suitcase in hand to surprise me, hello and my love. But no, none of that. Nothing as gentle. Instead, the goose paced across the cobblestones, honking and squonking, sticking its neck out and making a God-awful, ear-quaking racket.
MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS TO SLAM THE DOOR TO KEEP it out of the house. And the others, too, assuming there were others. Geese aren’t solitary birds, are they? They come in flocks. Or is it skeins? Which sounded like something in flight and the one I could see certainly wasn’t. It stalked around the shed, upturning stacks of flower pots, buckets and bins. Everything crashed to the ground, bouncing on the hard stones or shattering to pieces. I checked the lock on the kitchen door. It felt strange to be alone.
I slipped my shoes off and pulled myself up onto the counter so I could watch out the window more easily. With its hard, black beak, the goose hammered on the shed door and then, as I watched, pushed the door open and marched inside. Then, a bedlam of brushes and boxes, more broken pots and an imperious honk. More clatter and a yellow tin clanged across the yard.
Fry’s Cocoa.
I supposed it didn’t really matter how much mess the goose made out there. Everything would need to be sorted through and disposed of one way or another. You couldn’t sell a property full of stuff. Besides, there might be something interesting to take back to Ottawa. Maybe not dented old tins, but something. A lantern. An old tackle box. Something antique.
I looked around the kitchen to see what was there and, on top of the cupboard, I spotted Gran’s blue glass cake-stand. Mateo might like that. In the cupboard, I found an olive-wood cruet set, three pottery jugs, and a gravy boat. The coffee mill, which would certainly be useful. Folded paper napkins wrapped in waxed paper, empty jam jars, scrubbed clean, and a tall berry-dark bottle marked ‘sloe gin’. Behind another door, a stack of lovely teacups – some chipped, but enough to make up a set, certainly. Then, pushed to the back, a row of squat bottles with ground-glass stoppers. Inside, there were dried needles like rosemary, seeds like apple, and dusty flower petals, pink, red and yellow. Nothing familiar, not quite at least, and I wondered what Felicity might make of them. I probably couldn’t get them through customs. Not without knowing what they were. Mateo tried to bring sausage home last summer – a long loop that he bought at a Spanish market. I told him that it was never going to work, that he was really just buying lunch for the airport staff, but he shrugged, looking smug. I was right, of course, though he put on a show for the officials.
‘I promise I will not share it. No risk to the Canadian population, I assure you. It will pass no other lips than my own. Unless you would like to try? I might share with you.’
The customs officer shook his head and Mateo had to leave the sausage behind.
Maybe I should just sell the lot. There was never going to be space in a new condo for these old things. I could call an auction house and have them clear the place. Sell everything and head back home.
Another tin clattered across the yard. Oxo this time.
Home meant Ottawa. Mateo. Work. Home meant routine and habit, and that didn’t have much space for china teacups. Home used to mean the camp, but I left because it was time for me to choose. A free woman chooses – that’s what they had always taught me, and I got to the stage where staying didn’t feel like a choice any more. It was just procrastination.
I’d been working in the village store, selling cigarettes, groceries and booze. The kind of job teenage girls pick up after high school when they’re waiting for life to start, and it was like that for me, too, in a way. After I mailed my equivalence tests in the province and they sent me my diploma, I started at the shop as a way of making money before my next step, but then I stuck around. It was familiar and comfortable – like everything else. Most of the year, I knew everyone who came in, though it was different in the summer, with the cottage people and folk heading north to go hunting. But mainly, it was routine. Mothers came in mid-morning with small kids. Seniors needed help finding things every week. Just after the mass at one o’clock, a grey-haired man always bought a two-four of Molson and told me to smile. Always the same. Except one day, he asked me what I was waiting for. He said I looked tired, like maybe I was drowning. Who was he to comment? But later, I wondered if he recognized something. I couldn’t say what I was waiting for. People came through Birthwood and told us how lucky we were to have this slice of creation for our own. Maybe I was waiting to feel that. Bas and Rika did, obviously. And Felicity, too. I thought it would come with time or age. Except now, apparently, I looked like I was drowning. Well, that wasn’t true. I was just – what? Caught in an eddy, going round and round and watching the same piece of sky.
So, I made up my mind and chose to move to Ottawa.
I’d leave most of my things behind: my old photo albums and papers, the bookshelves Bas made me and my work clothes. I’d rent a furnished apartment at first, I decided, and find a new job. I could learn to live alone in the middle of a city. Eat meals on my own, visit museums and galleries, maybe even find work there, and when I actually managed to do all that, I told people that was why I had moved. For work and culture. For art.
But that wasn’t true. I moved to Ottawa because it sat at the end of the river. The T-junction of the Gatineau and the Ottawa. T is for time to go.
When I was small, the river map on the wall showed the Gatineau curled like Felicity’s hair. It laced among a hundred lakes and Bas told me the name was Algonquin – Te-nagàdino-zìbi – which meant the river that stops your journey. There were rocks to portage around and narrow places where even a canoe couldn’t slip through. But there was also a story about a French explorer who drowned in the river, and he was called Gatineau, too. Nicolas Gatineau. There was a high school named after him and I found his name in a history book. Some stories come twinned and some things are true.
Gran’s tea towels still hung on the hooks by the stove, and her spices sat on the thin shelf with the egg timer. But no coat by the door, no teacups to be rinsed. I noticed these things and waited for grief. I expected it and watched myself, waited. But it didn’t come. Instead, I felt disconnected and cold. I didn’t know how to do this.
Felicity should be here. Well, not sitting on the counter. She’d likely know what to do about the goose outside. And about the cupboards and the cake-stand and all the photographs and books. She’d negotiate presence and absence all right. She’d cry and swear and find a way to be practical, too. And, apart from everything else, she’d know the house inside out. She’d know where to begin.
When Mateo and I had moved into our apartment on Cartier Street, she’d been full of suggestions. Shelves and rugs and paint for the window frames. I had to explain to her that it was a rental and that we weren’t planning to stay. Mateo had always wanted to buy something new,
