Falling From Grace by Ann Eriksson

Author:Ann Eriksson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781897142844
Publisher: Brindle and Glass
Published: 2011-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

16

We reached the house well after dark. The headlights illuminated the steep, winding driveway through the trees to the house, which sat on a hill on the upland side of the east coast highway, the intermittent view of the Coast Mountains across the Strait of Georgia obscured by night. I helped Grace put out food and arrange towels and beds for the motley crew: Mary with a sleeping Cedar in her arms and a dirty-faced Rainbow in the guest room; Marcel on the couch in the family room. Mel, an early riser, was already in bed.

I showed Bryan to Steve’s old room upstairs.

“I’m sorry about all this,” I said. I handed him a folded towel and washcloth. “I can’t spend any time with you. I need to leave for Victoria in the morning. My assistant’s in the hospital.”

“I understand,” he said. “After all, you didn’t know I was coming,” but a flash of disappointment crossed his face and I felt a sting of remorse at the way I had used him. I couldn’t deny a pull, a curiosity to know more than the name of his dog, his passion for rocks, his love affair with flat land.

“Well.” He hesitated, and then turned away. “Good night.” He reached up for the doorknob and the familiar gesture startled me. Up. Always up.

“How about a walk on the beach in the morning?” I said quickly.

“Love to,” he answered. He gave a small wave and closed the door behind him. I lingered in the hallway, heart and mind a tangled web of confusion, and stared at the empty dwarf-shaped space he’d left behind.

My childhood room hadn’t changed in the fourteen years since I’d moved out. Grace had hoarded all my childhood belongings: my wildlife posters, my fishing rod, the saxophone that I’d never mastered, and the rows of altered and handmade clothes in the closet. I peered out the window and into the dark yard where I could make out the white bars of the rusted old swing set and the leaf-laden limbs of the apple tree. I wished Patrick and Steve were home, my stalwart knights, my guardian angels. The three of us had played for hours at a time in the yard, Patrick pushing me tirelessly on the swing, Steve coaching me in the fine art of monkey bar gymnastics. They taught me to catch a baseball, spit a metre, and whistle through my fingers. I cried the day they left, both the same fall, Patrick for university, Steve for a construction job near Port Hardy. I didn’t see them much anymore. The occasional Christmas. Patrick taught college English in Manitoba, Steve was a building contractor in Powell River and the father of two boys.

The plywood and two-by-four platform they had built me in the apple tree appeared, in the dark, as a translucent skeleton in among the branches, my favourite retreat in my years alone with my parents. I wished I could hide out high in the branches now, avoid the

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