delicately laced with lavender perfume. For a half-second, until Morris noticed her weak arches, her feet took his breath away.
Karen had feet like that when he first met her — slender and smooth, the nails tiny translucent crescents topping perfect alabaster toes. Impeccable cuticles cupped nail bed to toe. The ankles were slim and strong, the heels uncracked, the creamy skin flawless, soft, and cool as satin.
Usually, even the best feet suffer some flaw, some minor imperfection. The big toes sprout a few hairs, or a thick vein protrudes on the ankle bone. Toes can look like squat sausages, not in proportion to the length of the foot, or like thin, groping fingers. Something always mars the foot’s elegance.
So although Penny Edmonds’s weak arches are only a minor flaw, Morris’s connoisseur eye noticed them instantly. As he drives, a pang shoots through him and, wistfully, he remembers the first time he saw Karen’s feet.
Lying on Ambleside Beach, baring his lean, student-white frame to a lukewarm sun, eyes safely shielded beneath his Hawaii Five-O sunglasses, Morris was studying the myriad of feet walking by him. He was stretched out on his belly, of course — so many exposed feet in a constant dizzy parade provoked an impertinent bulge in his blue Speedo bathing suit.
Then they passed him: naked, dusted with sand, a thin band of gold around the right ankle — the perfect feet. He gaped, he became dizzy, a strangled cry escaped his throat. As the feet walked away, he scrabbled from his beach towel and stumbled after them.
Above the smell of hot dogs, coconut oil, and vinegar-doused french fries, the smell of lavender perfume drifted, coming from the owner of those wondrous feet. Like a drunken man, Morris introduced himself, ignoring the fact that the girl was at least ten years younger than himself. He was immune to the derision on the faces of her friends. All he cared about was her feet.
Morris shifts on the cracked vinyl seat of his car, restless from the memory. He carefully applies the brakes as he approaches the corner of Mountain Highway and Lynn Valley Road and admonishes himself to concentrate. This area is rife with hazards, positively rife. Bicyclists cluster around the Starbucks coffee shop to his right, attracted to the heavy, cloying aroma of roasted java beans like hummingbirds to nectar. That’s what they always remind Morris of, those cyclists — gaily coloured, spandex-sheathed hummingbirds. And the bicycles are hummingbird wheelchairs.
To his left, smelling of gasoline and grape bubblegum, stands a 7-Eleven convenience store made hazardous by the horde of teenagers lurking outside, dressed in their immensely baggy pants, ski toques, and brand-name sweatshirts. More than once Morris has witnessed an accident between a cyclist, a teenager, and a car at this busy junction. And Morris hates accidents. Getting Karen pregnant was an accident.
He frowns and turns the corner onto Lynn Valley Road a little too sharply.
Morris would have eventually married Karen even if she hadn’t ... if he hadn’t ... if the Accident hadn’t occurred, because as well as her feet, he was infatuated with everything else about her — her bubble-filled laugh, her bizarre religious background, her clumsiness, her attention to his needs, her wildly frizzy hair, her industriousness, her loyalty, her willingness to try anything. This last was his undoing, since it provoked the Accident.
Never once did she flinch, hesitate, sneer, or display shock at his attraction to her feet. Not even the first exquisite time he placed her feet sole to sole and slid his penis into the wonderful, smooth hole her two marblelike arches made. Whether he suggested inserting one of his own immaculate big toes into her, or masturbating himself while she lovingly cradled his feet between her lush breasts, Karen was willing to try anything.
And so when she shyly suggested that perhaps, if he didn’t mind so much, they might actually try intercourse...well, he felt obligated to perform.
Of course, he enjoyed it immensely — he was still able to feel her exquisite feet sliding up and down the backs of his calves as he pumped away. But being a fool, he assumed she was protected. A mistake, that. An accident.
Morris turns — again, a trifle too sharply — onto Peters Road and thinks: It shouldn’t have happened. The odds were against it.
He recalls something from the biology classes he was required to take to get his podiatry degree, something about a woman being fertile for only twenty-four hours once a month, and out of the twenty million sperm the average man ejaculates into a vagina, only fifty reach the egg alive. The odds of Karen falling pregnant that first time were entirely against it. But, nonetheless, it happened.
Morris’s fingers whiten on the steering wheel, and the pleasure of the whole memory vanishes, chased away by self-recrimination. He turns too quickly onto his gravel driveway, tires splashing through potholes and kicking pebbles into the street.
No, he can’t forgive himself for his oversight, for not ensuring Karen was on the Pill before so glibly agreeing to have intercourse with her. Because pregnancy altered her. Specifically, it changed her feet. Where once smooth, slim ankles existed, stouter ankles marred by small, permanent folds now lived. Curvaceous arches were exchanged for slightly flattened ones; two perfect size 7AA feet were transformed into two size eights. During her pregnancy, calluses rudely took up residence on either side of her big toes, and even to this day, they refuse to leave. In a word: ruined. Morris ruined the only pair of perfect feet he’s ever encountered.
Wearily, he climbs out of his Tercel and trudges through the rain to the back door, wondering how Karen can possibly love him after what he did to her.
Andy has fallen into the habit of visiting the suspension bridge every evening as dusk descends. How this compulsion started, he doesn’t remember; he’s not even conscious that it is a compulsion, that within him ticks some clock that guides him to the creaking, slimy planks of the hanging bridge at precisely the same hour each day.
After he finishes his homework, or practises his trumpet, or helps his mother chop broccoli/carrots/ eggplant for dinner, he slips into his jacket and shoes and races to the bridge. Every dusk. His mother warns him not to be late for dinner.
If it’s raining, he runs, rubber boots splashing through the puddles that pock the gravel road of the park; if it’s sunny, he also runs, sucking in swift, deep breaths of moss-and-cedar-scented air. No, he doesn’t run; he flies. Occasionally, he flaps his arms, glasses bouncing up and down on his nose and turning his vision staccato and trembly.
In the fall and winter, dusk comes early, almost as soon as he arrives home from school, and the park is silent save for the roar of the creek. Sometimes a dog walker passes him; he knows a few of the dogs by name. There is Bear, the barrel-size black Labrador with ropes of drool hanging from his mouth, and there is Grizzly, the exuberant malamute who stinks like a mildewy raincoat.
But the summer is different; the parking lot is packed with cars and buses. Tourists crowd the park’s single, paint-flaking totem pole, attempting to take pictures of one another. The German tourists wear big bellies, big cameras, and big voices. The Asian tourists swarm around their guides like bees around their queen. From the concession stand wafts the smells of Pine-Sol disinfectant, hamburger grease, and spilled orange soda.
No matter the season, Andy’s little form is ignored. He expects this invisibility because he is of the canyon, while the tourists are not. They no more see him than they do the purple periwinkle that grows by the roadside in the spring, or the orange lichen that grows like tiny inverted suction cups on the north side of fallen logs in the fall. The tourists are only interested in the bridge that swings above the creek, in satiating their lust for awe. They visit each headstone in the park, they pore over the dangers graphically displayed on the billboard, they jump up and down
