“It was time to clean the place up,” Sally said. “I had to help, after what they did to Noelle.”
So she’d heard the truth at last. Siena was glad, but she didn’t make a big deal out of it. After weeks of burning and recycling and land-filling garbage, there was a creek. It was still a little murky, so they planted cattails along the edges. By early fall it ran crystal clear, and there were little brown trout in it, and geese flying in screaming Vs overhead. At first they weren’t very good at it, their Vs misshapen; it reminded Siena of when her son had first learned to drive. She missed him terribly and started to cry all over again, even though the creek cleanup had distracted her all summer, the youngsters and their bonfires and tea had kept her warm. So many of them had found love, and all, they insisted, although Siena still wasn’t sure, because of her magic spider webs. They brought glue guns and glued the walls of her hut together, so it would be less drafty in the coming winter. Peter brought a little window to set into the side.
But Siena cried, missing her husband. She’d always called him her husband even though they’d never married in a church, but the witch figured God wouldn’t have noticed the difference; what he’d have noticed instead, if he’d been looking or cared, which was doubtful, was how she’d poured everything into her family—scrubbing and cleaning and working and growing vegetables and cooking and canning and washing and hanging clothes until she was so exhausted she couldn’t even remember what her own dreams had been for herself, or if she’d ever even had any. She hadn’t minded; she’d loved them all so much. It had been worth it. And while the family was on the poor side and complained a lot because of it, they were largely happier and more content than they knew. Isn’t it always so? Although there were days Siena had noticed how lucky they were, that a tiny bit of heaven had come unglued from the sky to land at their feet, astonishing them, allowing them to live in it. It was like a secret, and she’d taken the best care of it she knew how. Remembering her lost happiness, Siena began to shake her head then, and muttered, “I tried not to talk about it too much, lest someone notice and try and take it away. They were always doing that, weren’t they?” She dug first haphazardly and then with more frenzy in her pockets where she thought she’d once put away a little string.
But a hand touched her shoulder then, and made her turn and take a cup of tea, and said, “Maybe they’ll return one day, as geese. Remember that story? They’ll land and shed their feathers and put on clothes,” and again Siena wondered whether Liz might be a witch, whether one could be born into it, and not just trained by one’s own mother.
“Why would they do that?” Siena asked.
“Well, if we found Noelle they’d have no reason to stay away,” Liz said, and with a sudden abstracted look on her face got up and wandered away.
“I know you won’t make them anymore, but you brought so much love into the world making spider webs for her and giving them away,” Peter said. “Maybe Noelle’s supposed to just be the patron saint of love.”
“You can’t say that to a mother,” Sally Fish said, and again Siena wondered what had happened to the minister’s wife. One day she’d have to ask.
“Come here!” Liz called, “I found the most amazing feet!” Peter got up, and when he and Siena got to the creek where Liz was pointing he put his arm around the girl and she smiled, a cat in pyjamas, suddenly.
There were two dead trees lying across the creek, too big and heavy to move. But beneath them in the now sparkling clear water, there were two elegant feet. And the toes, it was undeniable, were wiggling not just with the current but with life. Siena stepped into the shallows at the edge and leaned over to peer under the tree. A young woman was lying on the soft sand at the bottom of the creek, her arms folded across her chest, a fraying daughter catcher held over her heart. Her eyes were closed. Siena reached in and stroked Noelle’s feet.
“How do we get her out?” Siena asked the gathered teenagers. “So she can be loved too and not just always create it in other’s people’s lives?”
“By teaching her to love herself, like you did for us,” Liz said.
“I didn’t know that’s what I did,” Siena said.
No Woman Is an Island
KAREN. I’VE BARELY DARED think of her, thought today of the skirt I gave her years ago. I suddenly realized it was a going away present. A goodbye present: I only saw her once more after that. But which of us was going away?
And now I can’t not think of her, back on Salt Spring after ten years, in this little cabin where we stayed—a sleeping loft, a little cook stove, and, amazingly, the same even more faded blue print curtain on the window.
Karen’s son was named Moon. What was Moon’s father called? I feel I could retrieve his name, if it was important enough. But it’s not.
Homes. What are they made of? After squatting in this cabin and others, working and camping all over British Columbia for years alone, I met Karen and Moon. We hit it off and in the end they lived with me here for almost a year, and then we forged a life plan together. We’d work, buy land, make a family of ourselves. I thought Toronto, my home town, and not Vancouver or Victoria. We didn’t even tell Moon’s father—Karen had stopped forwarding their address or lack of it after what happened the last time he took his son for a weekend. Finding the child uncontrollable, he’d returned Moon to Karen’s doorstep at midnight, not even staying to make sure she was home.
We had little money and hitchhiked, the three of us, with backpacks and rolled tents. It was September. Moon was nine, I was twenty, Karen was twenty-nine. Moon thought it high adventure to sleep in ditches when we weren’t let off near a campground at night; to coax a flame from damp kindling; to strike the tent himself some mornings; to eat beans and scrambled eggs cooked in a pan over a fire. I remember Karen even offered to demonstrate how to skin and cook a roadkill porcupine. “Gross,” Moon told me, “but quite edible with onions.”
“Must you?” I declined. Now I think it a shame I didn’t take the chance to learn this extra life skill.
Enzo had woken from a dream in which their daughter Katie’s fort had red gaillardias woven through the dishevelled pile of kids’ sleeping bags, signifying, he knew even in the dream, limitless joy. Ending in a disastrous mood as often as not, but still, he’d had such a great time with Katie and her friends, had been even somewhat lax about nutritious meals and bedtime and teeth brushing but perhaps that was the point. If one stopped obsessing over propriety for a sweet short moment sometimes lasting an entire weekend about their hair their baths their laundry their three square, they let you into their incredible secret, more: would teach you how to participate in infinite joy.
But the next morning, their daughter’s amusing nine-year-old friends gone home, Enzo worried again. Right at this moment Azalea might be kayaking in the cold and wet. He was surprised to find no anger in himself at her leaving, ditching him with the kid. He just wanted her home safe. Badly.
I remember Karen and I walking in the railway lands at the foot of Bathurst Street, a break from job-and-apartment hunting. We came upon an empty old boxcar and found a plastic bag of toiletries and other small items, a sleeping bag, a comic lying open beside it. “Let’s sit and read the comic,” I said, completely charmed.