The Rest is Silence (6 page)

Small explosions in the wood stove punctuate the quiet in the room. I had intended to be home by now, but I find myself watching the thick clouds sail over the sea toward New Brunswick and soon enough it is dark. I eat supper at Art's table, not talking. His story is still rolling over us like the wake from their ship washing the beach. He must be thinking of Emmett, and my mind is elsewhere. I'm remembering my dad, my mom, the people I knew in New York. You'd think it would be silence they left behind, but there's a chatter in my head, voices insisting on being heard.

When I rise to go home, the wind has picked up, but the rain has stopped.

“You sure you wanna bike home in this weather?” he says.

I do. I need the wind to clear my head. “Can I borrow a flashlight?”

He pulls one off the shelf by the door and hands it to me. He smiles and I see the man that his wife must have fallen in love with.

“I knew someone named Mosher when I lived in New York,” I say. “Sometime I'll tell you her story.”

“Fair enough. You must be tired of hearing an old man crow.”

“Art?”

“What?”

“You did the right thing.”

“I tell you, if I could do it over, I'd pull that trigger. Too bad we're not given second chances in this life.”

As I leave the driveway, the flashlight I grip to the handlebar shines on his mailbox. “Arthur Mosher,” hand painted in the same green as the trim of his house. I must have been distracted when Lucy came barking at me. I begin the ride up the back side of the mountain. All I want is to be in my sleeping bag in my tent. The wind is loud and the flashlight casts crazy shadows off the leaves and small branches that litter the pavement, as if things are lunging at me from the bushes lining the ditch.

I lie sleepless on the ground that night with the tent flap open. The treetops swirl against the black sky as if they are trying to get away from the wind chasing them. I can't get Benny out of my head. She is responsible for this loss of plastic. I don't know how to tell the story to Art.

A long way from here
, I could start,
there's a graduate school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There are no tall trees on those streets, no cattle lowing in a valley below.

Art was born within a rifle shot of the house he currently lives in, has spent much of his life in the woods, married an Acadian woman from Pointe-de-l'Église down the shore, and except for that war experience, has travelled no farther than Halifax. I don't know if I can tell him at all.

Raindrops patter against my tent. I zip the vents closed. Soon it is raining hard again. I feel no better protected than the birds that are somewhere out in that storm. Gusts of wind slap the tent walls, pressing moisture through the canvas onto my face, as if some imp is outside intermittently throwing buckets of water against the tent. Any time I float off, I am startled by the pop of canvas and a spray of water on my face. At some point the wind dies down a bit and I fall asleep.

5

New York City

The calendar said that summer had ended, but waves of heat rose from the pavement of York Avenue anyway, enveloping Benny as she walked home from her grad school lab. It was late on a Friday afternoon in September. Voices echoed into the air-conditioned lobby of her building on East 70th Street from a room at the back. She made her way through the dim light and cool air toward the ground-floor lounge. It was an open room, with vinyl tiles and orange plastic chairs. Bottles of beer, gin, and scotch and two-litre bottles of cola, ginger ale, and tonic water sat on a table beside cups and bags of chips. The first-year med students had a cocktail party every Friday afternoon during their first term, paid for out of their student fees.

A thin man leaned against the door jamb in front of Benny, watching a short woman with dirty-blond hair and bangs cut straight across her forehead. She was in conversation with two other freshmen students, tall and clean-cut men who were undoubtedly from Harvard or Yale or Princeton, like most of the college grads who made up the med class. They were peppering her with questions. When one of the men went to get her a drink, she looked over toward the door, rolled her eyes at the man in front of Benny, and smirked.

“Is that your girlfriend?” Benny said.

“I wish,” he said.

“Be careful what you wish for, Leroy.” Benny passed her arm through his. “Let's sit down.”

She led him to two chairs by the drinks table and turned them to face each other. She poured ginger ale into the porcelain mug she'd brought from her room. Leroy reached for the bottle of gin and poured another drink into his plastic cup.

“This one's a little more g and a lot less t,” he said.

Benny took a sip of her soda as Leroy sat down.

“Next week, if you want, I'll bring you a glass from my room so you don't have to drink out of that plastic shit.”

“Saves washing it.”

She shrugged. Leroy looked over her shoulder, probably searching for his would-be girlfriend. Benny turned to follow his gaze. The woman had moved across the room and was in another animated conversation, this time with a woman.

“She's cute.”

He nodded and took a sip.

“Now you know why I'm here with all these med students. What's your excuse?”

“I heard the noise on my way home. Then I saw you.” She paused. “I hope I didn't offend you when I came into your room.”

“How?”

“My rant about clubbing seals.”

Leroy laughed.

“Want to know why I'm really here?”

“Happy Hour?”

She shook her head. “Grad school.”

“Sure. Then let's go out for dinner.”

“What about the cute doctor?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “What are you studying?”

“I came to this school to learn how to rid the planet of plastic,” Benny said. “When our grandparents were kids there were no plastic bags. No yogourt containers, no six-pack rings. Nothing.”

“They were plastic virgins, eh?”

She smiled. “There were some synthetic resins produced back then. Bakelite pot handles and telephones. But that was like holding hands for plastic virgins.”

“They had yet to be screwed by plastic.”

She liked that. “Then, before World War II, the Germans invented polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride. DuPont followed with nylon. Then acrylics, polyethylene, polyurethane. During the war the British made polyethylene terephthalate. It's used to make these.” She tapped the back of a fingernail on the ginger ale bottle on the table. “Now we have polypropylene underwear and fleece jackets made out of recycled bottles. Our birthright is seventy pounds of plastic garbage, hanging around our necks. We drink water poisoned with effluent, breathe noxious fumes from incineration, and little boys are growing tits from bisphenol A poisoning.”

Leroy looked at his chest.

“You're a strange bird, Benny,” he said.

“I do my best.”

“Is there anything else you're passionate about?”

“Did you just wink at me?”

“I was trying for coy.”

“Talk to me about passion when you're sober.”

As he fiddled with the empty cup in his lap, she wondered why she had to be like that. He was good-looking and seemed to like her, and here she was blowing it.

They had met a few days earlier. Benny was at the desk in her room on the fifteenth floor, looking south, on the evening before Labour Day, ostensibly reading a paper on oncogenes for a course. Her reading lamp cast a cone of light onto the paper in front of her. Beyond that light was darkness. It was still muggy, though the sun was long gone, and she couldn't read. What she would have liked to do was go for a swim.

The city's thick, sweet air pushed its way into the room and surrounded her. The smell of that breeze reminded her of time spent at the lake near her house. The photo above her desk was taken by that lake when she was a little girl. Her father was wearing shorts and no shirt, laughing as he held her over the water. She was squealing, trusting his strong arms to keep her suspended above the danger.

She got up from her chair and left her apartment. The door to the apartment across the hall was propped open. A fellow student sat by the open window reading a journal paper of his own. She knocked.

“Studying?”

“Daydreaming, actually. Come in.”

She strode over to his desk with her left hand outstretched.

“I'm Benny.”

He was staring when he reached across to shake her hand, stood partially, and struck his knee on the corner of the desk.

“Shit!” he said, plopping back down in the wooden chair.

He was bent over with his right hand on his left knee. For some reason he continued to hold her hand as though they were playing Twister. He was grimacing.

“You look like a pretzel. Here, have your hand back.”

She let go and he put his hand on top of the one that was already on his knee.

“I'm Leroy.”

Shadows cast by the light on his desk hid his eyes but emphasized the pronounced cheekbones jutting below them. He was trying to smile.

“You look so tall hovering over me,” he said.

“Well, I am, Leroy. Five-ten and a bit, to be exact. Where are you from?”

“Toronto.”

“A Canadian among us. How exotic.”

He said nothing.

“The land of lakes and trees and snow.”

He smiled.

“Clubbing baby seals, hunting moose in the backwoods.”

Shut up, she told herself, shut up while he's still smiling.

“Not a lot of seals in Toronto,” he said. “Are you a med student?”

“Nope. Grad student, like you.” She bit her lower lip.

“What makes you think I'm a grad student?”

“The hair, Nature Boy.” She pointed at her own hair and raised her eyebrows. “We don't need to look respectable.”

He laughed. The drone of traffic came through the open window, regularly interrupted by taxi horns and sirens heading down 70th to the hospital's emergency department. They heard shouting on the street and Benny went to the window to look out. Leroy joined her and they stuck their heads out the screenless window, side by side, fifteen floors above the street. A homeless man was berating an invisible passerby. When they brought their heads back into the room, they faced each other.

“Where'd you get the scar?” he asked.

She had a strong nose and a sharp chin and thought they made her face harsh. Someone once told her that her face was saved by her smile. They also said that the inch-long scar under her right eye made her look vulnerable.

“Bashed my face on the side of a pool when I was a kid. You?”

He hesitated. She reached up to touch his forehead.

“Oh, that one. I fell on cement stairs at a rink when I was watching my mom play hockey.”

Benny smiled. She knew she was wrong about the seals and the moose, but this was wonderful: a hockey-playing mother! “It's been a pleasure chatting with you. I'd love to shake your hand again, but we seem to be accident-prone. I'll leave you to your daydreaming.” She bowed instead, turned, and walked toward the door.

“Benny.” She turned. “One day you and I will be living in Canada,” he said. “With our children.”

She gave him a look, half smile, half question mark. Sometimes she was stunned by the things people could say.

“Nice image, Nature Boy,” she said. “But far from possible.”

“You don't want children?” He was grinning.

She hesitated, then laughed. “I can't imagine living in Canada. Good night, Leroy.” Then she turned again and left.

—

The crowd in the lounge was starting to disperse, leaving in groups to go out for dinner. Benny would have to leave soon too if she wanted to get a run in before going back to the lab.

“Turn it over,” Benny said.

Leroy was picking at the rim of his plastic cup.

“What?”

“Look at the bottom.” She grasped his hands and guided them to turn the cup upside down. A drop of his drink landed on the thigh of his pants. “See that? Six. Polystyrene. It'll disappear. And this bottle —” She reached over to the table, grabbed the bottle of ginger ale, and turned it over. “One. PETE. Polyethylene terephthalate. It'll be the first to go.”

“How?”

“There are bacteria that eat plastic.”

She told him of the Japanese researchers who found
Pseudomonas
downstream of a nylon manufacturing plant that was dumping its waste into the river. The bacteria were using by-products from the plant as their only source of carbon and nitrogen. They had adapted to survive on the waste from the plant.