Read More: A brief Q&A with Colette Langlois
In the town where I grew up there’s a twelve story condo tower in an ‘80s shade of pink that’s built on ashes. I know this because for months after my sixth birthday, on my way to the library or the grocery store my mother would sometimes send me to for eggs or milk, I walked past the charred remains of the little house where my friend Mandy Sinclair died under her bed. Sometime before I turned seven, the bulldozers came to clear it away, along with debris from a few old mining company houses demolished over a couple of days. By summer the concrete mixers had arrived, and stacks of rebar covered what had been Mandy’s front yard.
I’m in number 806 of that haunted tower now, trying to bring Clark back to life. He’s a handsome, big-boned man, with dark hair and dimples; a leaner, scruffier version of Clark Gable. Once, not so long ago, I imagined us a daughter with his pale eyes and easy laugh. When I told him, he reached across the bench seat of his old pick-up and squeezed my hand hard.
Someone else is driving that truck now, and Clark doesn’t laugh much these days.
Outside it’s a sunny April afternoon with water dripping from rooftops and unshoveled decks, but this side of the tower only gets morning light, and the living room is dim. The feature wall, if you can call it that, is a diamond ice blue. The previous owner chose it to match one of the tones in a perfectly-sized-for-the-space arctic sunset and sled-dogs painting she bought when she moved in. The painting went with her to Antwerp, the rest of the walls are a nondescript off-white, and Clark hasn’t put up any pictures. Even with the heat turned way up, even in mid-morning when the sun shines right on the Ikea sectional she left behind, it feels cold.
“Do you still have your snowshoes?” I ask him.
“Nope. Yard sale.”
“Really?” I say, even though I’m not at all surprised.
He shrugs. “Keeping it simple.” It’s the same damn mantra he’s been using ever since last August when he started his downsizing project.
“Too bad. Lily needs a good run, I thought we could both take her.”
He looks out the window. “How is Lily?”
Why don’t you get the hell out of here and come find out for yourself, I want to yell.
“She’s great.”
Lily’s a rescue mutt from somewhere in the Delta, part husky like all the other dogs around here, but I’d guess some Lab too from the way she loved to swim behind Clark’s canoe last summer. Her owner wasn’t mean, he just died, and no one else wanted to keep her afterward. I’ve had her on the trails with me all spring. She never steps on my skis, or chases snowmobiles, or barks at ptarmigan waddling along the track. There’s only the sound of her light panting and the ice crystals scraping off the wax as we glide through the bush. Sometimes a gentle nudge with her nose on the back of my hand to tell me she wants to pass in places the trail is narrow. At home in my trailer she sleeps beside the woodstove, shifting to follow the patches of sunlight, her big tail thumping on the floor while I read or knit.
The door to his room is ajar, and Clark’s bed is made up, tidy as always. No socks on the floor, no change or keys on the night table. I miss lying in that bed with him, the way no matter how close I crept to my edge he would throw a leg over me and breathe into the back of my neck. How he would hold me tighter the times I woke up sad or scared. How he never once laughed when I told him about the little girl ghost in a worn-out nightie, who sometimes hovered on the edge of my sleep, in closet door mirrors and twilit corners.
Is she any less real because I’m the only one who’s seen her?
I might be the only person who’s seen Clark since he moved in here last fall. At first I thought he was joking when he told me he had sold his single-wide and bought a one bedroom condo in the high-rise. Not the place a restless six foot two man, born in a cabin on his father’s trapline in the Mackenzie Delta, ought to walk into and never leave again.
I wonder what he would do if I took off all my clothes now and climbed under the covers. I’ve never seen him cry before, but I have a strange feeling that’s what would happen.
Instead I unwrap the egg salad sandwiches I made this morning — his favourite — and put them on one of his two remaining plates. Clark opens a beer and joins me at the table. He barely looks at me or speaks, and I ask myself if this will be the day he finally downsizes me out of his life too and tells me not to come back anymore. As soon as we’ve eaten, I grab my purse from the kitchen counter and slide open the closet to get my coat.
“Wait, do you need to go?” He reaches for my arm, then pulls his hand back at the last moment. Like he’s afraid I have some contagious skin disease. His pale eyes are sad.
“I guess I could stay a little longer.”
“Thanks,” he says, takes my purse from my hand, and runs his fingers over the red leather and down the zipper before he puts it back on the counter.
It’s June and the air is thick with smoke from forest fires, the noon sun a gloomy disc hovering above brown clouds. In these dry years a change of wind usually brings a few days of clear air from Hudson’s Bay or the Arctic islands. This summer we’re surrounded and the only difference the wind direction makes is whether the air also carries flakes of ash. When it comes, it drifts in like a powdery grey snowstorm from the northeast where the fires are closest to town.
There’s ash between my toes and under my heels, and my footsteps are haunted.
How many times all those years ago did I walk past that pile of shattered glass, charred planks, broken concrete, whispering something nice to God about Him and about Mandy so He wouldn’t make me die in the night too? Now, as I walk from the elevator down the hall to Clark’s, eight floors above whatever ashes are left from Mandy’s house, acid rises in my throat and I quicken my steps.
Did she ever realize in those last few moments that she could save herself? The fire started at the back of the house in the kitchen, cooking grease or something. She was scared and crawled under her bed with her dog. It was the smoke inhalation that killed her. She didn’t have to die. There was a long time, possibly a few minutes, when she could have climbed out her ground-floor bedroom window, or even walked out the front door and waited for help in the weeds of her front yard.
Just like Clark could walk out the front door of his tower.
I drop the painting supplies Clark sent me out to buy on his kitchen floor. He’s looking out the window, toward the house I grew up in. From the back I notice his hair is long, almost enough for a ponytail. I want so badly to hug him, but it’s been months since he let me do that, and weeks since he last held my hand.
“You need to wash your truck.” Clark turns around. He’s wearing a tight black T-shirt. Even after all this time without setting foot outside he’s still in shape.
“Your hair’s getting long,” I say. “I could cut it for you.”
“No!”
His voice is so loud it startles me. What the hell, Clark?! What did I ever do to deserve this?! “All right, leave it then,” I say.
He starts to hold out a hand to me, but grasps the counter instead, something like terror in his eyes. “Sweetheart, I didn’t mean –”
“I suppose it’s kind of sexy like that, in a scruffy sort of way.”
He winces.
“We might as well get started.” I nudge the paint cans with my toe. I’ve convinced him to change one of the walls to something more cheerful, and he’s picked a colour he says reminds him of the mangos from one of our picnics last summer.
It feels good to be making something nice together, even if it’s just a wall. I try to enjoy this one small victory, instead of wishing back those June days in his old canoe, drifting down the river past four billion year old rocks and drunken taiga forest. I know those times are in the past, but if I close my eyes, it’s like it’s all happening again.
A year ago, or yesterday, or now, does it matter? Is a memory lived any less real than the moment that made it?
I start taping the moulding along the floor. Near the middle of the wall, I have to stop because Clark is in my way, admiring a few brush strokes he’s made to check the colour. He notices me, gets that terrified expression again, and in a sudden movement he steps back, his right foot barely missing the full paint tray. He climbs over the side of the sectional and reaches over to open the balcony door.
“Need to let some air in.” He clears his throat, and behind him a little girl’s laughter blows up from the street or across from another balcony.
I lean over the sectional and hand him the tape. “Here, can you finish this? I’ll start up there.” I nod toward the left corner where the ceiling and cabinet meet, and I climb the stepladder.
It might be the paint fumes, or the smoke wafting in through the balcony door, or the double shot of rye I drank earlier that afternoon to calm my nerves, or just because I’m twisting and leaning over a little too far, but my hands are suddenly clammy, my ears are ringing, my vision is going black and I can feel myself falling, my temple headed straight for the minimalist padding of the sectional corner.
“Sweetheart, no!” I hear Clark shout, and something breaks my fall, something that for a second is like arms, yet not arms, intact, strong, but somehow liquid. A jolt of intense heat makes me cry out, and him too I think, and I’m landing on my back on the carpet in front of the bathroom door, the wind knocked out of me.
I open my eyes, and Clark is sitting with knees pulled up on the floor beside his leather chair. He’s ashen and trembling, and there are beads of sweat on his forehead.
“Clark,” I say. “What the hell just happened?”
Later, when my breath is regular again and the burn of that sudden heat has faded, I sit up against the bathroom doorjamb. Clark’s still huddled by the chair, but he seems to have stopped shaking.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I think so. What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know. I can touch myself and nothing happens. Same with things, like clothes, food, furniture. But if I try to touch another person –”
“It burns.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry. Did it hurt?”
“Only for a second. Clark – what? When?”
“At first it was only my feet. Last spring. Later it started moving up my legs.”
A jumble of memories fall into place. Little shocks when our toes touched that I thought came from static in the blankets or running across my laminate floors in one of our races down the hall to see who could get under the sheets first.
“You started wearing socks to bed.”
“Clothes used to be enough to stop it. Like insulation. Until it got up – higher.” He touched his chest lightly.
I’m thinking back to all that weird sex in September, just before he shut it off altogether. Both of us topless, so far so good, him yanking down his jeans and mine enough so he could bend me over the counter or table and shove himself inside me from behind. Squeezing my wrists in his big hands, snarling “no” if I went to grab a belt loop to get either of us more naked, kicking my foot away if I tried to snake a toe up under a hem to stroke a bare calf. Not entirely satisfying, I remember thinking at the time, but exciting in its own way. A phase, we’d move on to something else soon enough. I’d assumed his unlikely excuses for why he couldn’t sleep over or I had to go home were the usual masculine dance to and fro with intimacy when things started turning serious. Only a few months earlier he’d been dropping hints about getting married. I’d guessed he’d scared himself, needed to pull back.
“Until it got up to your heart,” I say.
“Yeah. After that it was way stronger.” His voice catches in his throat. “Now I’m scared I could kill someone just by shaking their hand or accidentally bumping into them or something.”
“That’s why you sold your house. And you stopped going outside.”
He nods and his face crumples a little. “Like, what if a friend came up behind and slapped me on the back, or a little kid ran into me?”
“Or I tried to hug you.”
“Exactly.” He takes a few deep breaths. “Now you know.”
I’m frowning, trying to match up all the timelines. The things he was selling, the move to the condo. The maps of touching / not touching.
“You’re not mad, are you?” His pale eyes are worried.
“No, I’m trying to understand. It’s a lot to take in.”
“I know.”
“How could you tell it was moving up your body?”
“There’s a warning, a kind of tingling in the dangerous places that gets stronger right before something bad happens.”
“God, Clark.”
He flinches. “Can you go clean up now? I can’t stand seeing you like that.”
I look down at myself. On my skin and clothes there are dark smears in the places our bodies made contact. I trace a finger over a palm-shaped print on my bare arm and the residue comes off soft and powdery, black with fine silvery particles. Like creosote.
“Clark, why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Because it’s so fucking crazy!” he yells. “Think about it!”
He glares at me for a few seconds, but he’s never been able to stay angry for long. Pretty soon my mouth is twitching, then his.
“Yeah, I see your point,” I manage to say, before we both burst out laughing. “I was starting to think you didn’t want me around anymore. I even wondered if you started seeing someone else.”
He half grins. “Selfishly, I’m kind of glad you were jealous.”
“I wasn’t jealous.” I toss a roll of toilet paper at his chest.
I wash up, and he hands me one of his T shirts to change into. It’s soft and smells of him, birchsmoke and a hint of lemon or some other citrus.
He looks so sad, and I wish I could wrap my arms around him, and I can’t. Something else occurs to me though. “Clark, where is it now? How high has it got, this thing?”
With his finger he draws a line across his chest, below his shoulders.
“So we could still kiss?” I say. “If we were really careful?”
And we do. Awkward and cautious at first, bodies that ache to press against one other angled away. Baby kisses to start, on eyelids, throats, the soft places behind earlobes. Then long, deep, tugging kisses. We shift positions; this is too dangerous now, we’re both breathing hard and our limbs can’t be trusted. Clark pulls away.
“What’s the matter?” I ask. I don’t want to stop.
“Take off your clothes,” he says. […]
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Colette Langlois holds a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Colette’s short story “The Emigrants” won the 2016 Writers Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stuart Journey Prize, and was a finalist in the 2016 Lascaux Short Fiction Prize contest. Other work has previously appeared in Prism International, Junto Magazine and The Lamp.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Colette Langlois