Shannon runs her fingers over her upper lip and chin, her way to tell when two weeks have passed. With the esthetician closed in Queen Charlotte, she wonders how long she’ll last before she will pluck her chin hairs, one at a time. Only a select few friends know what grows below her mask. The same is true for her red tunic-like sweater. Daily meetups with recipe books and the refrigerator haven’t only added to her cooking skills but also an inch to her waistline. She squeezes her legs into her pants, feels the pinch of the jeans’ button.

The phone rings and it’s Roz, one of Shannon’s few in-person contacts. Twelve years her senior, Roz is fearless when it comes to sharing her opinions, most of them well-founded. So, when Roz asks Shannon to come over, Shannon looks forward to tea and conversation, but doesn’t expect to hear: My freezer quit working.

Shannon grabs her license and her raincoat and goes to her car. Empty spruce cones squish below her soles; the squirrels have been busy all winter. When she turns the key in the ignition, she gets the same warning as a few days before. The cooling fluid is almost empty, although she filled it just yesterday. The heater isn’t working, but the radiator might be overheating. She calls the auto repair shop, but they are all backed up, and her car will have to wait for a month. William, one of the owners, says he’ll swing by on his way tomorrow to help Shannon bring it to the parking lot. Best not to have the car stall midway between hers and Roz’s house, so she decides to walk the mile along the highway by the inlet.

Raindrops pelt her nose and cheeks. She lowers her head, pulls the hood’s drawstring closer, her eyes focused a few metres ahead. Spray from oncoming traffic lands on her jeans, grey-brown speckles on dark blue: lingcod colours. No one will offer her a lift, masked or unmasked. Five years ago, she would have run to Roz’s in all kinds of weather. Some aches and pains now take longer to heal.

Rivulets of rain stream from her hood when she knocks on Roz’s door. She fishes for her mask that is now all damp and ineffective. The door is unlocked and she shouts “hello” but no one answers. Shannon walks around the house to the well-insulated basement. She finds Roz bent over; it looks like the freezer might swallow her up. Boxes and totes are piled up by her side. When Roz lifts her torso carefully, strands of hair that are usually tied up in a neat bun look like an assemblage of bull kelp washed up on a basalt shore, the colour of her undereye circles.

Roz fixes her stare at the freezer until Shannon says, “Let me help you,” and lifts out two large turkeys, deer meat, and fish. Shannon has never seen Roz waffling about a decision, becoming immobile. Roz finally says, “My neighbour inspected it, he thought I could try to order a new capacitor and starter relay, but what if that isn’t going to work?” Roz stares down at the freezer.

“I can store most of the meat in my freezer. All you need is to call one more friend.” Shannon carries the half-full totes up to the house, suspecting that Roz’s arthritis may be bothering her today. Then Roz tells Shannon that Annie already agreed to take some of the frozen food.

Shannon says, “But I walked here.”

Roz reaches for her purse, pulls out a set of keys, and hands them to Shannon. “Take my car.”

When Shannon returns from her freezer run to Annie’s, she notices two more totes of fish that will need to be re-homed. Roz has done up her hair again and served lunch from a casserole of Greek pastitsio that Shannon eats with gusto.

“I phoned Kiebert’s, but they don’t have a freezer in store, and shipping one from Prince Rupert will take more than a month.” Roz looks at her lap. “Unless there is a storm.”

“At least we’re used to that,” Shannon says. Groceries in winter may not arrive on Monday, everyone’s shopping day. That is why putting away deer, fish, and fowl is still so important.

Shannon scans Roz’s living room and kitchen. A statue from one of Roz’s African trips sits on a counter, woven hats line the walls with paintings and prints from Southeast Asia. Shannon herself has seen three provinces and travelled once to Mexico before the kids left home. Unlike zipping off a wax strip from her chin, Shannon was slow to remove herself from two relationships, resulting in protracted pain as well as substantial legal fees. Even so, Shannon doesn’t believe that marriage contains a planned obsolescence; Sylvia, her oldest daughter, talks about the institution of marriage in those terms. Take Roz and Ben, Shannon loves to tell her, a couple who met in their twenties are still together in their seventies.

“How is Ben doing?” Shannon asks.

“Okay, he has taken on a lot of his father’s personal care. He’ll stay in Kingston for now.” Roz pours Shannon some more jasmine tea.

“Remember last summer when we were talking about smoking and canning fish?” Shannon says. “We didn’t want to bother with flies so sipping wine on your deck won the day.” Shannon had moved her smoker and canner to Roz’s place in anticipation of a work-bee.

“Good idea,” Roz says.

“Glad you’re in.”

Shannon goes to fetch the totes full of vacuum-sealed fish and cuts them open. She admires the intense crimson of sockeye. Then she carries the two canners up from the basement, one matte-grey like the sky, one a shiny aluminum, and finds canning jars. When the fish has defrosted, she starts a brine. She checks out the smoker on the deck, gives it a quick wipe down. She inhales the faint smell of smoke and salmon—a smell she loves, and one that will ooze from her skin over the next couple of days. At least her fingers won’t be covered in fish scales; that part belongs to last summer’s cleaning and gutting.

Roz winces as she settles into her armchair.

“How is your shoulder?” Shannon asks.

“Some days worse, some days the usual. Thanks for taking the food to Annie’s. I couldn’t have done it.”

“No problem,” Shannon says. “Did they give you a date for the specialist yet?” She immediately regrets her question. So many appointments have been postponed: flights from Sandspit to Vancouver have been cancelled and flights out of Masset are touch and go.

Roz says, “No, everything is on hold,” and she turns her face and pulls up the blanket she got from her last trip off-island. Even a hospital stay would have meant that Roz could connect with her city friends.

Roz suggests a movie, but the download is slow. The twirling symbol reminds Shannon of squirrels chasing their tails. Everyone is zooming and streaming, resulting in low bandwidth. Roz switches to the news and they see a Brazilian woman looking upon a row of dug graves. Roz covers her face briefly then says, “We are so fortunate here.”

Shannon doesn’t respond but goes to put the fish in the smoker; she guesses that Roz is embarrassed over her helplessness. Little by little the old Roz reappears: the Roz who until three years ago caught all the fish herself, who is a skilled cook and makes entertaining look easy. Roz is now on social media, sending pictures to her family, discussing the best lox recipes, best restaurant meals. Roz scrolls through her phone and says, “Martha Brown passed away. She had an aneurysm.”

“This is so hard with only one person allowed in,” Shannon says and thinks about the family-sized palliative care room at the hospital, how no one will go over to sit with the family before the funeral, how numbers for burials will be restricted to the immediate family, and how there won’t be a tea at the community hall with Haida women bringing out plate after plate of salmon salad sandwiches on homemade bread, along with three kinds of chowder and pies.

Still, Roz makes a few calls and announces that this evening there will be a drive-by procession: people can gather by the roadside to show their respect for Martha and their support for the living. Roz places her phone on the counter. Shannon watches as Roz cuts the fish, adds salt and oil, and stuffs them into the jars. “Just like when you’re catching them: a pinch and a wiggle,” Roz says. Shannon laughs and laughs and Roz chimes in.

Listen to Astrid Egger read “A Pinch and a Wiggle.”

 

When Clara was eight, her mother asked her if she ought to leave her father. She did not say that Clara would go with her, though they both assumed it.

“We could live in the country. The little cottage at Deep Pool Bridge. We had fun there, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Clara said, not fully committing.

“Can Daddy come?”

Her mother said no. If Daddy was involved, they wouldn’t be going. They’d be stuck in this miserable apartment forever.

The apartment was miserable, full of dark corners and walls in the wrong places. There were gloomy cupboards that Clara would rush past, singing loudly, and a room she would not sit in unless the cat did too. Her mother peeled the curtains away from the windows as far as she could, but it was never bright enough for her to paint and, she said, her work suffered.

They had visited Deep Pool House that winter. It was not a little cottage in Clara’s memory, but an imposing grey stone and slate house, set in a valley of skeletal beech trees. A river rushed past at the bottom of the garden and poured away under a hump-backed granite bridge. Her father drove too fast over the bridge, with a bounce that made Clara squeal.

When she had taken her rain boots off in the large farmhouse kitchen, her toes curled against the cold of the flagstones. There was a glass conservatory that looked out over the river and would make a perfect artist’s studio, her mother said. The couple who lived there were going away for a year because the woman had a job in America.

They went to look at the river. The man said there was a deep spot under the bridge and you could jump off when the water was high. Clara said she’d like to try, but the man said it was the wrong time of year and everyone laughed. She hadn’t been serious about jumping and wished she hadn’t said anything.

There had been arguments after that day and then, a few months on, the question. The marriage had run its course, her mother said, but everyone still loved everyone and no one was angry.

Aunty Val drove them. She came and went from the apartment a few times before they left. After each visit, the rooms got barer. Clara barked and squeaked to hear the sound bouncing off the walls until her mother told her she was being annoying.

Eventually, on the last trip, they piled into Aunty Val’s car. Daddy was at work and there wasn’t time to wait for him to get back. Clara had already said goodbye, her mother insisted. That was goodnight not goodbye, Clara tried to explain, but her mother was putting on lipstick in the visor mirror with sharp, jerky movements. Clara feared there might be a row, and in the end there was. About the cat. Her mother said Marlow would come with them, but it turned out he wasn’t.

“You’ll see Marlow when you visit Daddy,” Aunty Val said, leaning round and thrusting a handful of Werther’s toffees into her lap.

It wasn’t just Marlow. Daddy was even ground. Clara wasn’t sure what would happen without him there to moor them, to shore them up and tie them down. Deep Pool was a long way out of town and her mother didn’t drive. Aunty Val promised she would be there nearly every day, though her mother had grimaced at that.

Their things were scattered through the house when they arrived, but there were not enough of them and it felt like they were living in someone else’s house, with her toys and her mother’s pictures and ceramics plopped in.

Over the summer, her mother painted in the glass extension. Clara swam in the river when Aunty Val was there, but she wasn’t allowed to jump off the bridge. Once, she dared herself to wade out to the deep spot to see if she could touch the bottom. Water shadows licked the underside of the bridge and a roaring sound bellowed off the granite bricks, so loud it hurt her ears.

The pool was still, as if darkness had sunk to the depths like rocks, and all the sparkling, rippling water was flowing carefully around it. Aunty Val sat on the bank with two glasses of lemonade and Clara pretended she couldn’t hear her calls to come back. Aunty Val worried too much about everything, her mother said. Suddenly, the gravel bed fell away, and Clara bobbed down over her head. Cold, peaty water rushed into her nostrils and she was flying, kicking out into nothing. Breathing out fast, as Daddy had taught her to stop her nose stinging, she imagined hungry eels snapping at her toes. She shoved at the current with her arms wide and scrambled back to the safety of the gravel.

Aunty Val was running along the bank now, shouting. Clara waded back as if nothing had happened but when she tried to call, her breath stuck in her throat, so she waved instead.

Her mother was happy. She spent her time painting in the glass room and when Clara went in, she was dreamy and sweet, in a far-off kind of way that made Clara feel that nothing she could do would upset her. When she visited her father and Marlow, she asked when they would come to Deep Pool House: “We’ll see.”

In the autumn, Clara was to be sent to a local school. She cried when she found out and it was this, she believed, that shattered her mother’s peace. She heard arguing downstairs in the big kitchen. “Of course she’s upset. She won’t know anyone,” Aunty Val said. They often talked about her. Clara knew from the sh-sh sound of She this—, She that—. Like a flurry of ripples breaking against the bank, sometimes building to waves. Aunty Val was shouting, which was unusual. “Alright, alright,” she said, but her mother was too angry by then and screamed at her never to come back. Clara watched from the window upstairs as Aunty Val drove away. She wanted to run after the car so badly it hurt, like something thorny clasped tight around her chest.

When Clara went into the glass room, she was interrupting. Screwed-up papers spread across the floor like a fall of rocks. The light was bad now the sun was lower, her mother said, and there were too many trees. She had painted them at first but now they got in the way and the paper rocks kept tumbling.

Clara walked alone to the school bus stop. She always lingered on the humpy stone bridge. Sometimes the river glistened like spun gold, at others it was dull and made a whispering noise that shivered against the trees. The deep spot was almost black, with crumpled leaves spinning slowly. She was scared to jump from the bridge now, though she had wanted to all summer. Clara didn’t like being scared and the more she thought about it, the more she felt she had to, or would go on all winter with this breathless, prickly feeling. She imagined jumping every time she crossed the bridge until one day, when the water was particularly sparkly and golden, she dared herself.

She put her bare feet in the river at the bottom of the garden first. It wasn’t too cold, so she took off her coat and sweater and went back to the bridge. The big splash would frighten any eels away, she reasoned. She clambered up onto the low block wall and jumped quickly, like Daddy had taught her, before she changed her mind.

Clara curled herself cannonball-tight and hit the water with a satisfying smack. But plunging down through the surface, she felt something sharp, something crack. She thought she’d jumped straight into the teeth of a lurking eel and everything went red and black.

Cold water crashed in, not just to her nose and ears, but into her mouth, like she was being swallowed. There was no bottom, just sinking, but then stones came up fast and thumped into her back. Clara’s eyes opened and to her surprise, she saw light. The pool was not black and eel-ridden. It was clear as day and when she looked up, she saw a shimmering mosaic of trees and leaves and sky.

Aunty Val came. They drove to the hospital in silence. When Clara came out, with a big cast on her foot, her dad was there. Her mother was quiet and said, “Yes, yes.” She and Aunty Val drove back to Deep Pool and Clara went home with Daddy. Marlow wound around her legs as if trying to trip her up. Daddy said, “You can’t break it again,” but Clara knew she could. She knew how easily things broke by then.

 
Listen to Louise Dumayne read “Deep Pool Bridge.”