Jena Webb

 
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke with a throbbing migraine. It traveled up my right nostril and over my brow. It penetrated deep back into my skull and emanated out from this shaft. It was both persistent and stabbing.

I went downstairs perforce for a glass of water to wash down my Advil, though they never even take the edge off the pain. Carmen was in the kitchen having a coffee with my brother. I peeked in and the only word for her was resplendent. A word from my technicolour childhood, trying to surface through the layers of calcification and the fog of a hangover. I hung back to avoid being seen. You will despise me, but the last thing I felt I could do at that moment was interact with Carmen. I then peeped out the bay window of the kitchen nook at the Witness Tree and silently supplicated, “Please let me survive this day. Give me strength.”

I heard my mom rustling in the study and dutifully, yet reluctantly, went over to see her. She was folding wrapping paper that was still good for another year. It didn’t excuse the Styrofoam, but it was a signal that she was making some sort of effort, because it wasn’t her reflex to pose that sort of environmental gesture. Even the soft crinkling sounds cut through the bones of my forehead. You would think I couldn’t bear it, but I was used to functioning through a migraine. Ok, maybe not functioning, but managing, let’s just say. I crouched down with a wince and began helping her wordlessly. After a few layers were tucked away for safe keeping she suddenly said, “You’ve met your match, Bridget,” the sudden noise peaking the sear of migraine.

My eyes rose from their task wearily and sought hers with the faintest hint of a question mark I could muster. She elaborated, “Carmen. You’ve finally found a woman as determined and stubborn as you.” It had been fifteen years since the worst of it, but our mutual distaste for each other in my teen years was so virulent that it had left echoes through our adult mother-daughter relationship. I realized that I had forgotten that my mother also loved me. The last time she outwardly praised me was at a silly pageant when I was eleven – also the last time I had worn anything with frills. And there she was, both admiring me, in a way, and wishing the best for me, in one breath.

It was also one of those moments in which my perceptions went “chink.” They were lifted up, rattled around and when they were let go, they settled into place just next to where they had been. I had considered Carmen out of my league, but my mom had considered my previous string of frumpy and sullen girlfriends to be “settling.”

Just then, my dad appeared. He shifted his slippered feet and adjusted his large hand several times along the doorframe, darting his eyes around the mess. He took in the scene with a deep breath and said, “Bridget, my brother…well, I’m just sorry.” It wasn’t much, but it was enough, for now. He’d troubled himself to do it. He came to help with the wrapping paper, which was even more surprising than my mom having taken the initiative. We worked in silence, mercifully. When we were done, he rose and said, “You know, Bridget, characters and a setting do not a story make,” and left the room. As my brows drew together in incomprehension, I felt a vein of pain spring out from the furrows and travel along my forehead to the top of my skull. Time for a coffee. 

My brother and Carmen were deep into a conversation about her work over a fresh brew. I poured myself an oversized mug and tried to join in, but the migraine and the glow of resentment kept me on the outside. I resisted sinking the perfectly convex ceramic mug into the concave equivalent of my eye socket for its warmth lest I look pathetic, which I know you’re thinking, I already do. Once my coffee had time to start working its miracles, I waited for a lull in the conversation and invited Carmen for a walk, knowing that the only thing that would further alleviate the migraine was fresh air. By looking up at the Witness Tree’s branches I could tell that the temperature had dropped substantially over night. They were as still as if they had been painted there on a crystal blue canvas.

The overflowing recycling bins, lined up like school children at attention during assembly (that is to say, haphazardly), looked like angry, blue Oscar the grouches with their Amazon boxes and plastic strapping exploding in a riot of wicked, irate hair.

It was bitter cold. I could do up to -20. That morning it was -27°C and with the windchill it was minus a fucking gazillion. Holy shit. After just ten minutes, my thighs felt like someone – maybe myself in a self-harm craze – had twanged a rubber band, one of the thick ones for broccoli stems, all up and down my thighs. Only the thighs. Why not the shins? Was it the fat that reacts to the cold? At any rate, the word frost bite was on the tip of my tongue.

Thinking of this made me immediately ache for Carmen’s hips, those curves that I had not yet had the permission or pleasure of fully exploring in their nakedness. Only clothed teasing – occasionally. And watching, studying how the pocket of flesh just under the hip in the back was created and erased with each step.

A wall loomed between us like a third presence, despite our mittened hands swaying side-by-side. Today, this familiar barrier looked different, not a monolithic construction of Carmen’s alone. My side was a petrified layer of cynicism, hers was…invisible through mine, but palpable.

Instinctively, I scooped up her hand and tugged a bit to the right. “Viens.”

“On va où?” she asked.

“You’ll see.” After a few years with masks, I figured she could see the mischievous smile in my eyes despite the scarf brushing against the bottom rim of my glasses.

We walked in silence across an empty lot adjacent to ours to the back of the Witness Tree. I knew that the paths were a landmine of seemingly frozen over puddles. All winter long they froze and thawed, and you never could tell in what state they were. I was studying the ground for darker yellow spots of fermenting muck seeping through the snow, black pools of open water, and particularly flat stretches that might indicate a poorly frozen-over puddle vs. rougher solid ground. When I stopped, Carmen bumped into me; she had also been carefully watching the ground. I brought my index finger to my mouth, but all she would have seen would have been the whole mitten. She got the message though and squinted to see what lay ahead.

In a whisper, my scarf millimetres from her tuque, I began, “See, up there? Perched up higher in the trunks? See the bench?” My mitten traced the line of the “bench,” finely made out of a light-coloured wood – a massive fallen branch, polished to a shine, having lost its bark long ago, caught horizontally in the crux of two main trunks of the Witness Tree.

Carmen cocked her head to the side, hesitated and finally nodded.

“See the forest fairy sitting there?” I asked.

Again, a silent nod.

I continued painting a picture of one of my childhood fancies, “She’s wearing a Cossack in rusted, fallen oak leaf colour. Layers of velour garments in natural hues are piled one on top of the other like leaf litter. She looks like a mushroom.” Carmen was no longer looking in the direction of the fallen log. She was looking directly at me. “Her legs are splayed out in front of her with just her feet dangling off the edge. Her walking stick, made of a knobby oak branch, is resting against the leg of the bench, at the ready for when she’ll spirit away. That’s why we must be quiet.”

Carmen turned back in the direction of the fairy. She squinted again and her neck extended forward. “Her face reminds me of an Arcimboldo portrait. Her features are made of fruits and vegetables,” she added.

I took up her mitten again and we lifted our boots high, laying our feet down ever so quietly. In an instant, though, the fairy had grabbed her cane and disappeared in a flourish of ochre. We clambered up into the crux of the tree to the “bench” and our legs hung off the edge like the forest fairy’s. I had never been up there before. At the time I thought it was to not disturb the fairy, but I realized at that moment that it would have been much too high for me back when I was a child, without the support of a carefully constructed treehouse. I sat there with my legs hanging off the edge, the weight of my boots pulling them down. I could feel the blood rush into my feet, pounding there. From up there I began to contemplate the woods of the empty lot. It was scraggly, littered, untended and sorely underappreciated, but its mere existence, despite the odds, its tenacious survival, lent it a sort of staunch beauty.

A tenuous peace fell over me. It was as if everything in that abandoned plot was just right, without even trying. It was messy, chaotic, but at the same time everything had its place, perfect right where it was. You can guess that the peace didn’t last long. And wouldn’t you know that it was humans that broke it? I was messy and chaotic, but in my case, things did not seem ‘just right.’ How could they be when there are Steve-Uncles in this world? I felt humbled, but also hardened. You’ll recognize my usual caustic adult self. The structure of the bare Witness Tree branches on the pale, sepia sky stood out like the negative of a photograph. It came to me that that is how I see the world, in the negative.

“C’était le fun, ça. You surprised me,” Carmen said as she interlaced her arm with mine. I let my head fall to her shoulder.

Upon coming in the house, the reaction on my thighs was immediate. Soft-drink bubbles popped all over the skin. A stinging penetrated my fascia. I was so focused on the sensation at first that I could not move. In the bathroom, I pulled my pants down a bit further than necessary to appraise the damage. My thighs were a patchwork of pink and blue-white islands. As I looked at them, they seemed as though they belonged to another. There was little recognition as I slid my palm over the surface. Only their own intense tingling was making it through the neurons.

The rest of the afternoon progressed at an excruciatingly slow pace, each sound, each bright light, a dagger through my eye. My brother and his family left around mid-day, so at least the toddler screeches were subtracted from the equation. For the remainder of the day, we each did our own thing. At the end of it, as we were turning in for the night, Carmen shared with me that my mom, my father and my brother had all, in their own way, expressed their dismay and regret at my uncle’s behaviour the night before. She seemed appreciative.

The next day was as slow and painful as boxing day was. But the following day I woke, enveloped within a post-migraine glow of appreciation. I could feel exactly where the migraine had been and instead of feeling pain there, I felt gratitude. Gratitude in my forehead instead of the hit from the dull end of an ax.

We were planning our departure the following day, when the edict came in. The government was imposing a lockdown due to the omicron variant. We had instantaneously become a bubble – the four of us. Whatever we might have thought possible for New Year’s Eve this deep into the pandemic was probably a pipe dream anyway. You wouldn’t think me capable of it and it also amazed me that with my brittle, bitter, fractured mind hope was in my repertoire. I guess hope manufactures itself in some cases.

But all that blew up like the champagne cork we wouldn’t be popping with friends for New Year’s. Our possibilities became: go back to our respective apartments and spend New Year’s alone or stay at my parents’. I genuinely had a hard time deciding which was worse. But for Carmen it was clear – being alone was worse. She seemed to be getting on nicely here. So that settled that. And while my chances of making it further with her here were slim, with me sleeping on the floor, they were nil if we were in separate parts of a lonely city under police surveillance.

So, it was decided that we would go cross country skiing the next day, New Year’s Eve. Carmen would take my mom’s skis and mine were still in the garage, as my urban life didn’t accommodate winter sports.

I had been skiing since before I could remember so I probably didn’t have much sympathy or even comprehension as to how it could be so difficult. But Carmen, thoroughly city raised, by parents who had themselves been raised in the Mediterranean climate of Santiago, had never cross country skied in her life. She couldn’t even stand still on the skis at first, let alone move forward. My two-year old niece would do better than my 34-year-old girlfriend.

Carmen is self-righteous, in a good kind of way, if that is possible, or maybe I’m thinking of another word, but anyway, she’s principled and politically correct (she would say “woke” but as a White, settler I couldn’t credibly, with any decency, use that term). It was startling and, admittedly, a little pleasing, to see her out of her element. Don’t judge me. 

She had mastered the standing still part and we were now working on moving forward on flat land. Granted, the conditions were a little slippery, but the trails were well kept. As I helped her up for the umpteenth time, I saw that her initial good humour at her ineptitude was wearing thin. Carmen was embarrassed. In the six months we’d been dating and the year or so I’d known her before that I had never seen Carmen Antonia Rodriguez Paredes embarrassed. I felt a flood of compassion replace the exasperation that had been welling up in me.

Many skiers were out that day – it was the only thing to do, really – adding to Carmen’s humiliation. A child was having a full melt down, flat on her back, and her mother was having nothing of it. A smartly attired couple, she absurdly pregnant and he dashing, were strolling on the walking path. Another pair of new parents were toeing along their progeny in one of those fancy strollers with skis. An elderly couple were making progress with interlaced fingers, a single ski pole in their free hands.

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