Real Life by Sharon Butala

Author:Sharon Butala [Butala, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-443-40213-2
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2002-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

The next morning, after kissing Hannah goodbye, she takes a cab to the airport an hour before she needs to. Now all she wants to do is get out of this city. But as soon as she makes her way onto her plane and settles into her seat she feels her spirits plummeting back into that mood the city always induces. She’s brooding, morose, sullen; she is, she thinks ironically, completely herself again.

As the plane lifts off the runway she finds herself wondering if she’d told Bella the truth, and if she hadn’t, as she suspects, what the truth might be. She thinks, I am simply a coward, afraid to speak up against two men; she thinks, I don’t know enough about literature to be on a jury. She knows that she has far too much pride to admit either of these—whether true or not—to anyone. Anyway, she tells herself, it’s worse than that. Surprised at herself, she struggles to put into words this amorphous sense of guilt and shame that she feels, that nothing she’s so far thought of has managed to dispel.

Although it was raining and foggy when they left Toronto, here, high above the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, they’re flying in pale fall sunshine. Below them the Great Plains glisten white, and then, as the sun sinks and they approach Regina, they glow a deep, resonant blue. She is coming home again, to the place where she was born, with its miles of open, grassy plains, its fields of crops, its thick northern forests, its multitude of lakes and rivers, even its sand dunes, river rapids, and its waterfalls.

Gazing down, she thinks, I know its secrets, I know what matters about this place, I know what it is—or, at least, I can keep searching for that, I can keep trying to say it—

To take responsibility for what I know, she thinks, that’s what I haven’t wanted to do. And she realizes that when she denied Bella Griffin, she also denied herself. It seems to her that at some level she’s always known this, and has refused it, craving instead a world she can’t have. But now they’re rushing downward for a landing, the plane quivering and whining against the air’s resistance, its power pushing her back against her seat. As they plunge downward through layers of resonant blue toward the vast, mysterious plains below, she feels an unexpected answering surge of emotion, visceral and powerful, and after a second, she recognizes it as the purest joy.

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