It was a rare sunny day and she was taking her lunch break on the beach, a hand on the dog's belly while it squirmed on its back, mouth open, eyes closed, when a bearded man stopped at Melissa's feet and stood there, smiling. “Hi,” Melissa said, squinting hard, thinking it a bit strange the way he'd approached.
“Hey,” he replied, at which point the dog, recognizing his voice, spun around and sprung to its feet, giving him an excitable and long-awaited greeting. “See you found an interim owner again, eh pup?” While he patted her, he looked up at Melissa to speak. He had cold-green eyes and a thick leather string tied around his neck, the knot acting as the ornament, a pendulum keeping time over his clavicle. “She's probably âlost' for about a week a month, on average. Though it's worse in the summer, when the people she adopts aren't locals and don't know she's mine. Takes a bit longer to find her. Hey, Lolita?” He thumped the drum of her rib cage. “Hmm? You unloyal little floozy.” After this, having given a more than adequate conciliation dance, Lolita's ears cupped with attention at the waves where a group of plovers had landed on the shore. She was obliged to lope out and investigate, leaving Melissa and Jim (she would learn his name was) to talk idly about Lolita, the plight of the migratory birds that she ceaselessly accosted, and finally where each of them were from, what they were doing in Tofino for the summer. He was a surfer first and foremost, making ends meet by guiding sea kayak excursions through the tourist season. He lived off a logging road that was a bit of a drive from town, the main reason he was losing Lolita all the time, who would find a promising flock of birds while he was out surfing and then become a black dot in the fog-bank distance, eventually disappearing. Jim's home was apparently a shack he'd constructed himself, mostly out of salvaged lumber that he'd found in various places, including the beach he lived on, a rocky shoreline that had a good set of waves over the winter, with plenty of tidal pools and wildlife around. Actually, he'd said, if she ever wanted to come out and see it for herself, she was welcome to. Sensing her hesitation he added that she could bring a few friends, make a day trip out of it, see something new in the area.
Melissa thought it over, following Lolita as she traversed the beach in a wiry sprint, pivoting in an about-turn, and bounding back the same way she'd come. A child unexpectedly broke away from his parents to chase wildly after her. “Yeah. Sure, why not?”
It was the morning of Melissa's next day off, with three of the other campground workers, when they all piled into his corroded Datsun pickup. Jim collected another friend and some beer in town along the way, everyone settling into their places for the ride, in either the cab or the box, seat-belted in or balancing on the wheel wells. Melissa was in the back, where the wind whipped her hair so hard against her face that it stung and she had to duck down out of it, easing onto her back in the bed of the truck, hands behind her head, ankles crossed. Above the truck on the highway, a daytime moon was gliding between the trees, half full and following them, a crooked Cheshire-cat smile. They turned onto a gravel logging road where the leaves on the roadsides were frosted over with dust, the logging-truck tires kicking up clouds, coating the heavy leaves, smudging them like the skin of plums.
Lolita met them at the beach, the bustle of people hopping out of the back, scattering out along the rocks, throwing sticks that the dog couldn't have cared less about, Lolita curiously eyeing the pieces of wood as they bounded off the stones, then a quick bemused glance at the thrower. Melissa and Jim drank beer on a log overlooking the water, moss climbing the trees at their backs. She'd seen his simple shack that smelled of cedar, driftwood table chainsawed flat, a two-burner camp stove, foam bed, two jugs of water with plastic valves placed over a sink that he'd salvaged from a demolition site. He spoke with quiet satisfaction about his own resourcefulness and innovation. And before the end of the day, he'd leaned in and kissed her, inviting her to come back whenever she wanted. Like the next day she had off, he proposed, shrugging the potential in her direction. Melissa had smiled, given a nod. “Sure. I'd be into that.”
It was how she spent every one of her days off for the rest of the summer. He would pick her up in the evening after work, and if it wasn't raining, they would wile their hours away in front of his fire pit; if it was, they would cook in his shack, the eaves trickling with long silver threads outside, while inside, the one window dripped with steam from his dented cooking pots. Among the pinecone artefacts and faded rocks on the windowsill was a small prism that he'd found, separating what it could of the feeble light that filtered through the rain clouds and the sweat of the glass, dealing out the dimmest hues onto the wood in front of it, the colours of a nighttime rainbow. They would prepare shellfish that they'd dug up themselves, Melissa setting his too-low table with plates and utensils that didn't have a single matching pair among them. During the meal, she would often ask him about surfing, never losing her fascination with how elusive he was about it. You just knew, he would sayâyou
knew
. When you started off surfing, it might take weeks before you actually stood up on your board. But once you did, after that first time, there was something you caught a glimpse of, there, during that brief moment when you were connected toâwhen you were actually a part ofâan ocean swell rolling in. And it was something you couldn't see or learn or study anywhere else, it was just a sudden knowledge, a divinity; you
knew
that this was what living was all about. After listening to this, Melissa would look out the window, through the beaded curtain of droplets streaking the glass, and wonder what, for her, living was all about. Most of the time she thought she knew. Most of the time, she was pretty sure she had her own version of catching that glimpse.
They made love with an intensity and frequency that varied a great deal. Sometimes with a carnal fervour, rushed and impatient, pieces of clothing still left on, or the stitches strained to a slight ripping sound as they were being pulled off. Or they would take their time, often following a frigid evening swim, after which beads of seawater would seep from his beard for hours, globules sidling through the knots of its dense hair, shifting through the bristles like mercury. The only thing constant in their sex was a peculiarity of his, the way he would slide down afterwards, in the post-coital calm, and with his face near her breasts, run his fingers lightly around them, exploring their surface and touch as if it were a first-time experience, running his lips over them as if trying to find a word to describe their taste. Once, he fell asleep with her nipple in his mouth, and she cradled his head like a child, stroking the side of his beard. She thought then about how much things had changed since the first time she'd had sex, in her parents' basement at seventeen.
It had been with Nathan (who she still hung out with at times), with his nervous and hyperactive gestures. It was over within seconds, hurt, and ended with his falling asleep a few minutes later, facing her, his mouth open, teeth hanging, bad breath. She remembers how outrageously far it was from what she'd always been sure it was going to be. This act that had been such a taboo all her life, that had been seen as a rite of passage for so long, guarded by so many hurdles that she'd had to, not jump, but fumblingly knock down along the way, lifting the veil of guilt, of unshakeable societal views on purity and women; it was the one act and urge that was bolstered with enough trimmings and hype to give it centre stage (or at least an unacknowledged main role) in almost everything that people ever did; and there she was, lying on her parents' couch, having learned that, after all the buildup and anticipation, in reality, the act was justâutterlyâlacking. An insight that felt overwhelming at the time, almost revolting. She'd eased off the couch, collected her clothes, and went up to her room where she slid open the drawer she kept her spiral-bound notebooks in, some empty, some full, and wrote the thing that she needed most to write.
How different it was now. How sustaining, enjoyable. It was understood between her and Jim that their relationship would be limited to a summer affair, and nothing more. Which, strangely, was what allowed her to be as involved as she was in it, as open, as present. Now when she eased away from the warmth under the sheets, it was only ever to put on her sandals and walk to the toilet outside, into a night that was wild and roiling and black, void of any artificial light. On the way she would think about the two bears she'd seen in the area before, foraging along the shore near the outhouse, eating seaweed and sending the scavenging ravens into flight; ravens with their moulted wings leaving spaces between their feathers like fronds of bracken, slats of grey sky sieving through before they landed in one of the arbutus trees nearby; those trees with their strange bark unfurling, illicitly peeling themselves back to naked ochre skins. And once she was there at the outhouse, she wouldn't close the door, having learned to appreciate even this, squatting over the toilet seat that Jim had carved, listening to the cedars tower, with their croaks and whispers, releasing volleys of collected raindrops every now and then, while below, the soaking wind would comb through the ferns and horsetail, their leaves dark and palaeozoic, where she imagined animals, crustaceans, and slugs, hidden and probing the busy shadows with their tentacles and whiskers. Walking back through these nights, slipping into a bed that was as warm as childhood.
At the end of that August in 1999, she packed her clothes and a jar of seashells that she'd collected over the summer into the back of Annette's car, gave Jim a tight hug and Lolita a pat (which the dog hardly noticed), and drove away. She hadn't exchanged an address or phone number with him, or even, it occurred to her on the ferry back to the mainland, learned what his last name was. Melissa, leaning on an upper-deck railing, watching the mossy islands slide past, knowingâwith a kind of sudden knowledgeâthat if she were to do it all again, she wouldn't change a thing.
As Annette and Melissa threaded their way back through the mountains of British Columbia, they found themselves more at ease in each other's company, their silences more natural, less stiff. They'd taken the southern route again, where the foreranges were less extensive and the Rockies collapsed abruptly into the wide mat of the prairies, the evergreens dissolving into grass over only a few kilometres. When it happened, they'd changed the tape in the cassette player, turned the volume up, filling their immediate space, while the scenery emptied it.
They'd counted backwards from their first day of classes and figured out that they had two days to spare, which they planned on spending with worthy detours and extra sights. Annette offered once again to check out the town where Melissa was born, where it even sounded like she might have some familyâon her dad's side anyway. But with the mention of her father, Melissa found herself feeling more drawn away from the place than to it and had bent over the map to find something else of interest nearby. (It was amazing to her how even the allusion to the
existence
of her father could change her mood for the worse, find her clenching her teeth and sighing, shaking her head in silence.) She soon found something of greater interest only an hour away, a provincial park with the attention-grabbing name of Writing-on-Stone, just along the American border.
They turned onto the network of secondary highways and township roads, Melissa fixated on the landscape again. Cows stepping amid their respective bevy of cowbirds (who skittered as attentive as underlings in wait at their beck and call), bovines chewing cud with a boredom that spoke of either pompous royalty or an exhaustive dimwittedness. The Mormon church spires spearing into the sky from every cluster of buildings big enough to name itself on the map, their pinnacles pointing up at the cirrus clouds, prairie plumes trailing a comb of white like ancient eyelashes dragging across a firmament iris, the dome of which was always stretching wider, more awake, attentive, scrutinizing the oil pumps in the abandoned distance below, those oblivious mule heads nodding sleepily at the ground, metronomes keeping time just to forget the hours they were leaving behind.
It was an impressive park, a small canyon of sandstone hoodoos that created a maze of statues and figures, all carved out into an archetypal spaghetti western backdrop. The sandstone that made up the canyon was so soft you could etch into it with your fingernail, a conclusion that Melissa and Annette weren't the first to draw. The walls were patterned dense with carvings, icons, names, and graffiti, dating as far back as before horses had arrived to enter into the aboriginal petroglyphs, to the declaration of teenaged crushes that had been scraped into the rock only a week earlier. They explored the warren of chasms and runnels, Annette talking about the next semester of courses that they had coming up. Melissa listened, her stomach strangely knotted, feeling like school was still so far away. Too far even, out of her reach, out of her plans. At the same time, she felt like her ideals were changing, shifting, stretching, thinning, and she wasn't sure where she would find herself once they settled into place. As they made their way back to the campground, she also realized that her father was, again, invading her thoughts more than he should. She found herself thinking about the decisions he must have made, to end up where he was, who he was. At least she could be sure that, whatever her path ended up being, it would look nothing like his.
The next day they backtracked to fill up with gas in the town of Milk River. While Melissa paid, Annette stood at a phone booth, needing to call some people in Toronto to secure a room in someone's apartment for the coming year. Melissa waited for her while leaning against the car, looking around at the people filling up their tanks and squeegeeing their windshields, watching them too closely, inspiring self-consciousness. An older boat-sized car with a First Nations family inside, every seat occupied, pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. Melissa, staring at them curiously, wondered if there was a reservation nearby, as well as wondering, for a moment at least, what life might be like on it. A young boy in the back knelt on the seat and waved at her through the rear window, and kept waving, his eyes dark, smile bright, shrinking as the vehicle receded down the road.