had escaped extinction might have seemed bizarre, but it did the trick. Despite ourselves, we were diverted. My mind went into free fall, stopping at a memory from twenty years before. Mieka’s grade-two class had held a career morning. My daughter, always a foot-dragger when it came to school projects, had been too late to sign up for a visit to one of the glamour-job sites like the courtroom or the pizzeria. She and the rest of the stragglers had been stuck with visiting the offices of Drew Warren’s investment firm, and I had been the parent-volunteer. Drew had tried hard to engage the children. He asked them how much allowance they were given and pointed out that, by depositing even the smallest sum each week, they could make their money grow. He had shown them how to make images of their hands on his photocopier. He even brought out Monopoly money and some outdated stock certificates to let the kids build their own stock portfolios. Nothing worked. The children were eye-rollingly bored. Crestfallen, Drew walked us to the elevator. Then inspiration hit. He ran back into his office and returned with booty: two pencils and a stenographer’s notepad for each child.
Drew’s discourse upon eagles on the day of his daughter’s burial might have struck a stranger as insensitive, but it came from the same impulse as his last-minute gift of pencils and a notepad twenty years before. He was what my son Angus characterized as a pleaser – a person driven by an almost pathological need to avoid wounding others. “First, do no harm.” Apparently, the chromosome for stunning blond good looks hadn’t been the only inheritance passed from father to daughter.
Eager to put an end to another awkward silence, Gert jumped up and slapped her right hand against her thigh. “Come on. Let’s walk off those sandwiches. May’s a pretty time for the island. The new moss is soft as a baby’s bum. And who knows? We might see another eagle. They’re always on the lookout for easy fishing and a nice air current.” She leaned towards Molly and lowered her voice. “You’ll want to see the rock paintings today.”
Molly nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll want to see the rock paintings today.” She pulled herself to her feet, bent and picked up the box that contained her daughter’s ashes. Quick as a recruit in an honour guard, Fraser retrieved the cloth, folded it the way flags are folded at military funerals, and handed it to Molly. She looked at him levelly. “I’m glad Ariel found you,” she said.
Drew led us single file along a trail that bore the marks of nature’s effort to reclaim it over the winter. The path was blocked by rocks and fallen tree branches, and melting snow had eroded the line separating trail and wilderness. New moss was everywhere. Idly, I wondered what Blake, who had seen “a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower,” would make of vegetation which, flowerless and rootless, still managed to carpet the harsh terrain of a northern island in a green of surpassing tenderness.
To see the paintings, we had to scramble down an embankment and walk back along the shoreline. The lake was high, so most of the beach was underwater. As I leaned back to look up at the rock face, I could feel the water seeping into my boots, but a soaker was a small price to pay for seeing the rock paintings.
There were three of them. One was of a thunderbird holding a bolt of lightning; one was a circle that appeared to hold clouds and an animal, perhaps a bear; the third was on a part of the rock that had been cleft. The circle that framed the picture inside was broken, the drawing inside beyond interpretation.
“How long have they been here?” I asked.
Gert adjusted her ball cap. “Nobody knows for sure – a thousand, maybe two thousand years.” She laughed. “Those old ones, they knew how to make paint.”
“What did they use?” Solange asked.
“Ochre,” Gert said, “mixed in with whatever oil they could find. It was before the days of Home Hardware.”
Fraser stepped out into the water to get a better look. “You can feel the power.”
Gert chuckled softly. “It depends on who’s doing the looking.”
No one spoke, but I sensed we all felt a link to the people who had mixed red ochre with the oils of animals and fish. Their paintings were evidence that, like us, they had grappled with the questions that came in the small hours: what does it all mean, and where do I fit in? Molly Warren was beside me. Cradling the pine box and midnight-blue cloth in her arms, she wore her grief like an amulet. As she stared up at the rock paintings, she seemed mesmerized.
Finally, Drew walked over and took his wife’s arm. “Time to leave,” he said. “Time to do what we came here to do.”
Molly shook him off and turned to address the rest of us. “Drew and I have decided on the place for Ariel – not here, although she loved this spot, but closer to our cabin in this clearing that looks out on the water.”
We walked back to the cabin in silence. Gert undid the padlock on a small toolshed and took out a shovel. Drew walked to a spot under a spruce tree and, in a lonely act of love, began to dig. After a few minutes, Fraser took the shovel from him and continued. Each of us took our turn. It was surprisingly hard work, but we managed, and when the hole was deep enough, Molly knelt and put in the box. Gert dropped to her knees, took a cigarette from the package in her breast pocket, broke it open, and placed the tobacco beside the pine box. “It’s tradition to give something back,” she said simply.
After that, it was over quickly. We handed the shovel around, replaced the earth, and knelt in a circle. Molly Warren smoothed the dirt and covered it with the midnight-blue cloth. “I’ve been trying all morning to think of the right words,” she said. She held out her hands, palms out, empty. “Does anyone have any?”
The sun picked up the gold- and silver-lame appliques of the moon and the stars, blossoms, flowers, fruit, fish, animals. Against the midnight blue, the figures that Ariel had cut out seemed to pulse with independent life.
“There’s a line from Dante,” I said. “ ‘Oh, the experience of this sweet life.’ ”
Every face in our circle betrayed a tightening of the throat, but the silence was absolute. We were enveloped in a moment as fragile and self-contained as a teardrop. And then – horribly – the sound of a plane’s motor sliced the silent air.
Mr. Birkbeck howled. Solange breathed a curse and a single name. “Naama.”
That was the name on my lips, too. As I watched the small plane descend and its pontoons slap the surface of the lake, I remembered Naama’s fury in Livia Brook’s office. You can’t keep us away. Ariel was a Red Riding Hood. We have every right to be there. We have every right to avenge her. As I waited for the plane’s door to open, I knew I had no resources left to deal with Naama and her unquenchable rage. Neither did anyone else. Faced with this new challenge, we stumbled to our feet. We were all running on empty.
Not surprisingly, it was Gert who made the first move. She snapped her fingers, brought Mr. Birkbeck to heel, and the two of them set off to meet the plane taxiing towards the old dock. When the motors cut, the door opened and a short, grey-haired man emerged. He and Gert pumped hands, then turned towards the open plane door. I steeled myself, waiting for the assault of Naama and her cohorts. But the passengers who stepped onto the dock were even more of a nightmare than Naama would have been.
Howard Dowhanuik and his son were both in full mourning: black suits, white shirts, dark ties. They looked like the Blues Brothers on vacation. Shocked, I almost laughed, but as they came closer the anguish on Charlie’s face killed the laugh in my throat.
It didn’t take Charlie long to read the situation. His eyes passed over the mourners and rested on the gravesite, then he went straight to Molly and Drew. “You can’t leave her there,” he said simply. “She shouldn’t be in the dark. Let me take the canoe out on the lake. I’ll scatter her ashes.”
Molly’s face was bloodless, her lips a line thin as a surgical scar. “It’s a bad idea, Charlie. Ashes from a human body are dense. If you try to scatter them, they get under your fingernails, into your skin. You can’t get them out.”
“I don’t want to get them out,” Charlie said.
Solange’s pupils were pinpoints of loathing. “Are you hoping her ashes will cover her blood?” she said.
“You were the one she was afraid of,” he said.
Solange’s mouth shaped itself into a cartoon-like O. “Never,” she said. “I never would have hurt her.”
Howard grabbed his son and pulled him away from Solange. “Coming here was a mistake, Charlie. Let’s just get back on the plane and go home.”
“Your father’s right.” Fraser Jackson’s voice was powerful and assured. “This has been a terrible day for all of us. None of us should do anything to make it worse.”
Charlie looked at Fraser without comprehension. “What are you doing here?”
Fraser didn’t flinch. “Like everyone here, I just came to say goodbye. It’s time to let Ariel rest in peace,
