Karen replied, “It’s their home; it would be rude to go in without being invited,” and I was humbled, feeling as always she saw more than me. I so desperately wanted to wear that home as my own, just for a few minutes. I would trespass for the sake of my fantasy, not even seeing how fragile this tiny home was, how doubly important to respect its ephemeral boundaries.
Living in a city again I needed to work so I could pay for rent and food; knew already how hard it would be to save a down payment, not spend it in bars and restaurants, on clothes, anything to wash the feel of eight hours of shift work away. On Salt Spring we’d been able to live rent free in our borrowed cabin, eat off the land, at least to an extent. I loved it. It was Karen who grumbled. She already had a child, even then almost ten years old. He’d be a young adult now. For how long was I oblivious, as she hardened herself against the disapproving gaze?
The cabin is on Crown Land. My old friend Elm pays a pittance for his lease. “What is public land for if people can’t make homes on it,” Karen used to say, and with what fervent desire I wanted her to be right.
Why didn’t Azalea write or call? It had been more than a week. Enzo read her computer journal, for herself alone. He began at the beginning. Azalea wrote, five years before:
I bought Karen a skirt. I don’t know why. We’ve never felt the need to make showy gifts to one another. We had such dreams, Karen and I. I remember how, after we came east, two months into city life I hated walls already. I missed tents badly; just enough of a roof to keep the rain off. Karen and I worked in clubs at night, and soon all the peace of the forest had gone to noise. But not quite all; so often as I hustled tables, I was kayaking along a forested coast in my mind, watching for whales.
And now Enzo and I have a house full of appliances. Why? So that our daughter won’t grow up to be like Karen. We live as if we believed machines could protect us. Yet Karen grew up surrounded by appliances too, and they didn’t protect her. Even more than Karen, I wonder what Moon’s doing now.
Before it came back to him Enzo briefly wondered who Karen was. He wondered who his own friends were. Scrolling through pages he saw that Azalea wrote about Karen more than she wrote about him—he could think of no one who took up as much space in his life. Except, of course, for her. Azalea herself.
Who were his friends? His mother, his daughter. Azalea, Enzo had thought, but now he wasn’t so sure. Did friends walk away from one another? Was that sometimes a necessary part of friendship? And the question begged asking: abandon one another to what?
And which of them had abandoned the other?
There were old friends from high school and university he talked to once or twice a year. They seemed so far away from his life now, a distance too large to be breached. They wouldn’t be able to offer comfort if he called, because he wouldn’t tell. Tell them what?
Azalea’s gone.
And Karen? She was a single mother, a few years older than Azalea. The two women had travelled the west coast before they came to Ontario, where Azalea met Enzo, did the married thing. Went back to school. They had a child.
But what happened to Karen? And what happened to Azalea, to make her leave?
I phoned Enzo to tell him I’m not coming home yet, to dependably shop for school clothes, set the alarm, pack lunches for the big day. He didn’t tell me I was cruel or neglectful, just told me Katie was fine and asked me when I’d come. Not sure, I said. I felt selfish, yet what about his cruelty? How impassively he sat by while I lost myself in years of laundry and cooking and scrubbed floors and isolation, so often alone with the child. The baby drove me crazy in love and towards desperation in equal measures. I wrote papers for school in the wee hours and broke into occasional sobs of exhaustion Enzo found unaccountable.
I suppose I’m having a bit of a nervous breakdown, leaving as I so suddenly did but without crying jags, temper tantrums, or an inability to get out of bed. This time I just bought a plane ticket instead, without warning Enzo. Looking for some peace, wanting to be alone. And now I am alone, yet not feeling isolated at all. Funny, that.
Enzo began a journal, after Labour Day weekend came and went, after Katie chirped through Cheerios and scrambled eggs, onto the school bus.
8 September: The man who lent her the cabin then still lives in the same house in Victoria; she called him, asked if she could use it again. Was happy he remembered her. He works in broadcasting now, calls himself Elmer again.
Perhaps, right now, Azalea sits at the wooden table, writes by kerosene lamp, for (I imagine) it’s a heavy overcast day. She listens, awed by how happy she is, to the surf on the stones outside the window. Yesterday, kayaking, she saw orcas.
It was his first journal entry, ever. Suddenly, he was like Azalea. And Karen too, he’d bet twenty bucks; he suddenly remembered the two women talking: how soothing they found their journals. Azalea gone, no longer reminding him where his car keys were, his memory quickened. Funny how that worked.
Why is this the only place I can talk about God, even to myself—far from any neighbours, not even a road, only a kayak to go coastwise around to the village? Because my life here is so potentially dangerous I need one. As are all our lives, every day, but we hide behind machines so we don’t have to look. Dangerous, yet beautiful, and most importantly what seemed necessary: the right to make a small home out of small things. Wash each night one cup one spoon one pan.
My computer is an appliance that doesn’t wash dishes or clothes; instead, it rinses my soul. I wonder whether Enzo has booted up my journal at home—it’s not password protected. If he was away, and he kept one, would I be able to resist? It terrifies me to be possibly so exposed, even to my husband. Enough complaints in there about him to be sure, gentle as he is. And perhaps better there than spoken aloud always—for I’m no paragon myself. Yet part of me is relieved by the possibility: at last he’d know all.
I remember the night Karen and I traded journals, read our way through one another’s lives and minds by lamplight. It was the next morning we decided we could buy land together.
By early October, Azalea still wasn’t home, although she’d called twice more from the village, so Enzo knew at least she was alive. He worried alone now over the list of possible calamities as they usually did together at the beginning of each cold season: chimney fires, power failures, frozen pipes. So much for calling themselves suburban; they were still technically in the country, at the edge of the little town north of Toronto. The faceless minivan shame of living in suburbia, without even the town services that made it worthwhile. Continuing with his snooping, he read an entry near the end of Azalea’s first year’s diary:
Reading back through the whole year on New Year’s Day it strikes me this journal literally saved my life. Must remember to tell that to the next suicidal person I talk to. For, sigh, there will be one as surely as there will be another winter. And Karen? I hope she’s well. I haven’t seen her in months. She didn’t seem well when we saw her last.
Karen again.
Enzo felt terribly guilty for reading, but couldn’t stop. Reading her journals was like eating soup made out of Azalea.