Every Day We Disappear Read online

  The last few weeks of the summer contract hadn’t been much fun. First the giardia outbreak caused by water from a contaminated stream the foreman decided to pump into camp, then the replants ordered by the “checker from hell” who measured every millimetre of space between the seedlings we’d spent days planting, then the hours long journey by rolligon (a tank-like vehicle nicknamed the “Slimer”) into a clear-cut where a swamp stank like a septic tank and it was light nearly twenty-four hours a day. All this for ten cents, or less, per tree. First the highballers went on strike. Then, one by one, they quit.

  “That’s enough,” Michel had said. “Let’s get out of here.” By that point, Michel had moved into my more spacious tent. It didn’t take much for me to agree to quit too. I would have left in April if I hadn’t been so in love, enduring the daily misery for the excitement that awaited every night in the glow of our red tent.

  I unclipped my pack and set it beside his.

  “Okay, Ang. Stick out your thumb so they can see you well in advance.”

  I’d never hitched before. Where I came from, hitching was reserved for vagabonds, prostitutes, and drug addicts, or so my mother had told me every time we passed one by. Michel had hitched across Canada twice, from Mexico to Montréal once. I stood with my arm slack by my side. I was shy. Ashamed.

  “Now, Ang, now,” Michel encouraged.

  For a second, I caught the driver’s eye, then looked away. The car drove past, the only car we’d seen for the past hour.

  “That’s okay, we’re in no hurry,” he said and kissed me.

  It felt like hours before I was given another chance. This time I looked into the driver’s eyes as though we’d always known one another and planned to meet here, on the side of this road, when the sun began to set and the mosquitoes began to bite. I raised my arm. Stuck my thumb high into the air as though I was from the big wide world instead of little ol’ Oshawa.

  “You remind me of my daughter,” the elderly gentleman said as I climbed into the cab of his truck and Michel threw our packs in the back. “Couldn’t leave my daughter standing out there, could I?”

  The American

  The American shook a coconut beside his ear: “Gotta make sure you can hear the juice swish.” He wore sandals with rubber-tire soles, just like the locals. He spoke Spanish with a southern drawl and called the vendors by name.

  Soon Michel would buy the exact same sandals. For now he looked into the blue eyes of this man with the long white hair and matching beard like he’d found a long-lost relative. We’d spent too long in the hippy haven of Mexico’s Zipolite for Michel’s liking. After two months of making love in the Pacific, on the beach, in our cabana, on a hammock (challenging), activities which caused an embarrassing vaginal infection the local doctor attributed to sand, we’d decided to take what little money we had left and head to an even cheaper country, one that I’d never even heard of: Guatemala. It was time for some serious travel, Michel had said.

  Salvador, the coconut seller, shaved off a thin swath of husk, like a barber shaving a balloon. Swift stroke of machete, quick poke of straw through meat.

  “First jugo de cocό?” the American asked.

  Sì. My first coconut juice. My first everything. First time south of Florida, first time speaking Spanish, first time seeing children beg in a restaurant, and a body lying on the road, spooning the curve. “Bus accident,” they’d told me.

  I sipped. Tepid. Sweet. A piece of flesh caught in the straw.

  “Bus accident?” The American smiled. His name was David. He’d been in Guatemala a while. “I sought asylum here from the insanity of the U. S. of A. in 1987,” he told us over glasses of freshly pressed sugar cane juice at the thatched hut he shared with Elena, his Mayan wife.

  David took Michel and me under his wing. He ran Cocina Para Los Niños – a soup kitchen in touristy Panajachel he’d started for street kids from villages surrounding Lake Atitlán who’d been orphaned during the civil war.

  “Civil war?” I asked.

  “It’s best not to talk about it,” he warned. “Especially here.” He pointed to the vendors watching us from the perimeter of the market. “You never know who could be listening.”

  Instead the three of us talked at Cocina Para Los Niños, chopping carrots for the soup, thinning corn syrup with water to drizzle on the pancakes.

  David claimed to have done everything from owning a chain of Italian restaurants to becoming a millionaire (twice) to living on a commune in Arizona to running a furniture business.

  “Luckily I saw the light one day,” he said, “walking downtown New York. A stranger comes up to me. She says, ‘Go to India and meet Sai Baba’ then hands me an envelope stuffed with cash.”

  “Sai Baba?” I asked.

  “Oh, honey. We gotta lot of catching up to do.”

  Luckily, David loved to talk. It was David who told us to read Diet for a New America and Noam Chomsky. He taught us how to make furniture from avocado wood, and the perfect guacamole. He was a self-taught expert in orchid cultivation, wheat grass, Mayan weaving. He called Michel “brother” and I became “sister.” He found us a tin-roofed shack near Lake Atitlán beside a mango tree.

  And I dreamed of Sai Baba. I saw the orange robes and black Afro of the photo David had taped to the wall of his hut. I heard music.

  “Is this the music you heard?” David asked, and played a cassette. It was. “Promise me you’ll go to India someday, sister.”

  The English School

  1. Greetings

  It’s nine o’clock in the morning. The sun inches above the lime trees of Panajachel. Beyond the gates of the English school, the highlands turn a brighter shade of green.

  “Hello. My name is Angela. What’s your name?”

  I look towards the man with the threadbare shirt so perfectly pressed. He says, “Your name is Miguel.”

  Heat rises from the underbelly of the dirt floor. Sweat rings bloom on my blouse. “My name is Angela. I am from Canada. Where are you from?”

  I look towards the woman sitting by the window, the woman with glossy hair so perfectly braided. One front tooth black with rot. She says, “My name is Canada.”

  I turn to the blackboard, pick up a piece of chalk. Even this is hot, difficult to grasp. I write: Hello, my name is Angela. I turn and begin again.

  2. The Interrogative

  The avocadoes drop like bombs on the tin roof. “Repeat after me,” I say. “When, when did the killings start?” An avocado drops like a bomb. Mateo ducks beneath the desk for cover. They are large, as big as grapefruits. A squeeze of lemon, a sprinkle of salt. Quickly, I crawl onto the roof. The ants are already there. “Repeat after me,” I say. “Who, who are the soldiers in the trucks?”

  Their flesh is a creamy jade. Green butter. There is no time to smear it on bread or crackers, you have to scoop it out, quickly, with your fingers, before the next bomb falls.

  3. The Time

  “What time is it?” I ask, pointing to my watch, noticing the students’ bare wrists.

  Miguel examines shadows cast by the orange trees. “Almost twelve o’clock,” he says.

  “Yes, noon,” I say. “It’s almost noon.”

  It’s almost time for class to end, for Miguel to pick up his machete, for Maria to go home to her tin-roofed shack, for Rigo to pull closed the shutters of his shop.

  “What time is it?” I ask, drawing a clock on the blackboard, two hands meeting at the top, a crescent of moon, a smattering of stars.

  “Twelve o’clock,” says Maria.

  “Yes, midnight,” I say.

  Midnight, almost time for the cantina to close, for the music to stop and the men to stagger along dirt paths and sleep where they fall. “Midnight,” I say, thinking of those men, how they are still there at quarter past, at half past, at every hour upon the hour, their calloused feet, w
eather-worn skin, stench of fermented maize, how they curl into the Earth like unwanted fetuses.

  A Familiar Face

  It arrived during Montréal’s cold snap of 1994. A yellow envelope. A franked U.S. stamp. If I’d recognized the return address, maybe I would have waited for a different moment to open it. A solitary moment in a quiet place. On this day, I opened it how I usually opened letters back then, with a careless rip en route from the front door to the living room where our two roommates, the film students, sat watching movies all day.

  I can’t remember what they were watching, or whether they noticed the expression on my face. I remember going into my frigid bedroom and sitting on the futon. I put the letter down and looked out the window at the icy-white sky for a long, long time.

  At some point I picked up the letter again. “Call me collect,” she wrote. There was a phone number. A name signed with a flourish: Patricia Gallagher. My mother. The mother who’d given me up for adoption when I was a baby. Gallagher. I tried the name on. I said it aloud. I stared out the window, watching the sky turn a pale rose.

  When Michel came home from work, I could barely speak I was so overwhelmed. “She wrote,” was all I could say. But he knew who I was talking about. I showed him the letter.

  “Call her,” he said.

  I’d waited for this moment for so many years that, as I picked up the phone and stared at the numbers on the console, I couldn’t bring myself to press them. Every number seemed to represent a different year of my life. Years when she hadn’t been there.

  I held the receiver away from me. How could a person who used such bright yellow stationery abandon her baby? Had she been living it up in Arizona all this time? I put the phone down. Slammed it a little.

  Michel came back into the room. He gave me a long, hard look. “Call her, Angie,” he said. “You don’t know her story.”

  Maybe it was too late in Arizona to call, I reasoned. What was the time zone there anyway? Maybe it was best to wait until Sunday. Sunday afternoon when our roommates would be at Cinéma du Parc. Michel kept looking at me. I took a deep breath and dialled.

  ~

  Even though my adoptive parents had done their best to make me feel like part of the family, I, a pale-skinned, blonde-headed wisp of a girl, might as well have been beamed down from Mars as picked up from a hospital ward in Ottawa. They and their two naturally-born sons were a merry, olive-toned, large-boned bunch. Naturally, whenever the family appeared in public, strangers had wondered where I’d come from. “Where’d she get that blonde hair?” they’d ask. “Oh, her father was blond when he was young,” answered my mother, who had never lied otherwise.

  This little white lie had never failed to make me wonder: What were they hiding? I began to feel like adoption was a dirty word. It was our little secret. My parents must have told me before I could talk; maybe they’d sung it to me in a lullaby. But they hadn’t told me when I was old enough to know what it meant.

  I’d learned what it meant in the schoolyard. It was something no one wanted to be. “You’re adopted!” was a popular insult of the time. Being adopted was a fact I’d hidden on family tree day, drawing branches leading from one fictitious name to another. It had never occurred to me to learn of my adopted family’s ancestry. I must have figured it was better to lie than pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

  And who was I? I’d convinced myself the answer to this question lay in the discovery of my birth mother. I looked for her, at the grocery store, the library, the mall.

  Eventually I’d been forced to acknowledge I already had a mother, someone who taught me things like how to draw leaves and make grilled cheese sandwiches. At the time I didn’t recognize my childhood as whimsical. I was too busy exploring meadows and putting on puppet plays. I’d had little reason to feel sorry for myself. But still, I’d been curious.

  I was twenty-two before I did anything to satisfy this curiosity. My efforts were sparked by an encounter with a woman I met in French class during a brief stint at Ottawa’s Carleton University when I was twenty. She too was adopted. She’d gone through the process of finding her birth mother, and discovered she was the child of a rape. “But it didn’t matter,” she told me. She told me about instant bonds, about the pieces of her life falling into place.

  I couldn’t wait for the pieces of my life to fall into place. Since Guatemala, I’d ridden the bus from Panajachel to Vancouver. Collected welfare. Been employed as a dishwasher, tree planter, waitress, cook, telemarketer. I’d stopped shaving my legs. I’d tried to sell woven bracelets, painted flower pots, papier mâché mirror frames. Michel had split up with me while canoeing down the Rio Petén on Guatemala’s east coast, while hiking from village to village around Lake Atitlán, while cycling to Victoria, B.C.’s Gordon Head. He’d begged my forgiveness in hotel rooms, dirt-floored huts, VW vans, Montréal pubs.

  After our latest reconciliation and my move into Michel’s and the film students’ rue Berri apartment, I called the Ontario Adoption Registry. They told me forms would arrive soon. They asked: “Do you know if your name has been changed? Do you know your birth-registration number?”

  Next, I called my adoptive mother. “What?” she asked, surprised.

  “Please don’t take this personally,” I said. Silence. “I just want to know my medical history and that kind of stuff,” I lied.

  I lied because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. How could I have told her I wanted to see someone who looked like me? How could I have told her I wanted an instant bond?

  I prepared for the wait. I’d been advised the hiatus could last anywhere from months to years to infinity. I had to wait because a reunion could take place only if my birth mother also consented to be contacted. Someday, they told me, if all the pieces were found, a letter might arrive. Or a phone call.

  ~

  The phone rang. Someone picked it up after the first ring, as though they’d been waiting. At first, I thought I was hearing my voice echo. “Hello?” I repeated. There was no sense asking the woman on the end of the other line if she was Patricia Gallagher.

  “Hello?” she asked with the same soft voice I’ve been told I possess, a voice well suited for phone sex or hypnotherapy.

  “Angela?” she asked, just to make sure.

  “Just call me Angie,” I said.

  “Just call me Pat,” she said. We laughed.

  When Michel left the room, I couldn’t hold in my emotion any longer. Tears that had waited far too long to fall blurred my view of the Montréal sky. Suddenly it didn’t make sense to try to make conversation.

  But Pat sat there with me, three time zones away. She sat wherever she was sitting, staring out at whatever she stared out at – A cactus? A canyon? She wasn’t going anywhere this time.

  After a while I sensed the temperature had dropped outside. There was a stillness out there, of a cold where snow doesn’t crunch beneath footsteps, where branches seize, where people barricade themselves indoors ferreting out warmth. I stopped crying.

  “Maybe it’s better if we meet in person,” Pat said.

  ~

  The airport in Albuquerque was a four-hour drive from Pat’s home in Arizona’s White Mountains. She had told me she’d meet me at the airport with her husband and son. There was a husband. A son. I slung on my backpack and began to walk in the direction of the arrivals lounge until my nerves got the better of me.

  The entire journey had been a battle against nerves. Bouts of diarrhea and nausea. Sweaty palms and nonsensical conversation with fellow passengers and airline staff. At every checkpoint I’d debated turning back and calling it a day.

  On the way to the arrivals lounge, I stopped in front of a Mexican restaurant. It was happy hour. I decided to delay reality a little longer. I ordered a margarita and ate tortilla chips with salsa. Spicy salsa with fresh cilantro. I convinced myself I was on a holiday. Just a simple holiday. I wa
sn’t here to meet the woman who was my birth mother and her twelve-year old son who, I realized with a start, was actually my half brother.

  I knew they were waiting out there, but I couldn’t move from the rattan seat. I admired the palm trees jutting towards the airport skylights and the southern accent of my waiter.

  And then I saw her, rounding the bend near the magazine stand. She was with a skinny boy who looked even more nervous than me. She looked like a mid-forties version of me. Long, grey hair. Slightly frizzy. No make-up. Slight frame. She was wearing tight jeans and a sweatshirt printed with a wolf padding along the top of a mesa.

  It was disconcerting to watch my older self scan the corridor leading to the baggage carousels with such a look of worry. The boy looked in the direction of the restaurant. Quickly, I settled the bill.

  The moment I stepped out into the main corridor, my birth mother zoned in on me. She looked at me like you’d look at a glass of water after a long day in the desert. That look scared me so much that I focused on the skylights again. The sky was darkening. Then I fiddled industriously with the straps on my backpack until she got so close I was forced to acknowledge her presence.

  “Angie?” she asked, as if I could be anyone else. She had a similar version of my backpack slung over the same shoulder. I managed a nod. “I thought you’d decided not to come,” she said.

  It was time for the awkward moment then. The moment I’d spent years dreaming about. I’d imagined many things: running into one another’s arms; a frenzied embrace; copious tears. I hadn’t imagined a wide-eyed boy sizing me up, or the smell of tequila on my breath.

  The right moment wasn’t here in the Albuquerque airport with Texans in cowboy hats looking on from the restaurant. The right time wasn’t accompanied by announcements for departures to Salt Lake City.

  We embraced. Quickly. I turned to her son, my brother, and we smiled at one another. “This is Lee,” Pat said.

  He gazed at me like you’d only gaze at your long-lost-big-sister fresh from the North. “Hi,” he said quickly and looked away, towards the magazine stand. The husband, Jimmy, hung back at a respectful distance, waving at me. He too had long grey hair, a beard and moustache so overgrown I couldn’t tell if he smiled.