Come Full Circle

EXCERPT

Come Full Circle

EXCERPT

It’s true what they say about mirrors.
If you stare long enough and hard enough, they become unflinching. You find the truth you seek.

Come Full Circle Excerpt

It’s true what they say about mirrors.
If you stare long enough and hard enough, they become unflinching.
You find the truth you seek.

Come Full Circle Excerpt

LOOK INSIDE ↓

Come Full Circle starts in 1995 and is set in three main locations: British Columbia, the east coast of Canada (Montreal and Newfoundland) and Sydney Australia.

This final novel in The Iceberg Trilogy is told from three characters’ points of view — Rebecca Dalton, her daughter, Gene, who now goes by the name Eva, and Rebecca’s granddaughter, Lindsay. In this first excerpt we meet Eva.

It’s true what they say about mirrors. If you stare long enough and hard enough, they become unflinching. You find the truth you seek.

Excerpt 1

CHAPTER 1

Touching the Void

In one short page she tries to bridge the silence of twenty-five years:

Dear Jonathan

I trust this note finds you in good health. I am well. British Columbia is now my home, education, ironically, my profession.

A gifted young lad I know shows great interest in ornithology. He is considering: Zoology at the University of British Columbia; Biology at the University of Western Ontario; and – surprise, surprise – The Avian Science and Conservation Centre at McGill.

I was wondering if you or your contacts have any advice or opinions one way or the other as to scholarships, reputation of various faculties, their facilities, and employment prospects post study. He comes from a small coastal community. Any of these options will be of significant change.

I hope everyone is well.

She asks after no one. After all this time, after everything, she’s lost that right. Her closing salutation:

You know what you mean to me.

And then her full name in an illegible scrawl:

Evangeline

It seems obscure, impersonal this note of hers. Something that has taken her five days to write that should have taken only five minutes. It would have been far easier to have called, for she had located the number through the exchange as a means of finding Jonathan’s current address. Which was just as well. He had moved. But she never had any intention of calling. Initially she had tried Victoria Hospital, hoping to send the letter there. But as she had suspected, her seventy-seven year-old brother had long retired. It was 1995 after all.

She doesn’t call because…she who rejected them, now fears being rejected in return? She doesn’t call because…she will be impelled to ask after people she most likely can’t cope hearing about…or doesn’t care? She would rather remember them the way she remembers them.

But why does she make contact in the first place? Sitting in front of her dressing table mirror she asks herself this question. Her searching eyes, green-blue pools of intensity; her face, not pale like many women her age, but seasoned, wind-worn; her head, clad in a faded white wimple and veil, an aging bride of Christ. Other women who wear such coverings shy away from mirrors. But not Eva. In her mirror she can have a conversation. With herself. Just herself. But never aloud. God forbid that someone might hear and think her mad. No, there is not a person on earth privy to her inner thoughts.

It’s true what they say about mirrors. If you stare long enough and hard enough, they become unflinching. You find the truth you seek. She is reaching out because she is letting go. Once, she was all alone in the world, but that was of her choosing. This time, it is of another. She craves her solitude, yet she yearns to hold the hand of another who has also let go. Or is there something else? That this young man should know he is not alone in the world. That she should know the same. Eva exhales then shudders.

She wanted to drive two hours north and post the letter at Prince Rupert and mark her return address care of Poste Restante. But she knows she can never do that. She is asking something of her brother, and in return she must offer something of herself. A word. The name of a town. That is all she will provide. And a post office box number.

On the main road, at the start of their drive, there is no letterbox signifying a dwelling. Yet the house is there all right, at the end of a pot-holed, two-kilometre gravel road. It is submerged in a never-ending forest of yellow and red cedar, western hemlock, and Sitka spruce. Two yellow-leaved, now bare-leaved, silver birches in the front of the house, planted years ago as a nod to her childhood, the only exceptions.

Her room is on the second floor of the unpainted A-frame wooden house. She overlooks the driveway so she can see the seldom comings and goings, but, in any event, their dog, Axel, warns of any intruder well before any uncertain knock.

Behind the house is a narrow trail that leads to a rocky outcrop overlooking the Pacific. Nearly another kilometre north is a beach of fine pale sand, strewn with tired driftwood, beyond that, tidal pools and more headlands, the meandering path eventually winding up in Kitisak.

If ever she has reason to go to town, she rarely drives, preferring to stride down the road and the eight kilometres of highway into town, then return via the coastal path. The fewer people seeing her walk out their gravel road the better. For some inexplicable reason, Eva always senses she is being followed. It haunts and infuriates her. She is forever glancing over her shoulder yet sights no one. Still, she never stops walking. It is one of her few necessities in life. As is her wimple.

She never leaves her bedroom without it. Never. A pair of jeans is her other de rigueur. Today, she pulls a fleece vest on over her skivvy and zips it up. Downstairs, she will add her down jacket, gloves and her sorrels. It is late February, the days are lengthening and the temperatures just above freezing. Still, snow is everywhere. The sky is grey, the sun feeble as it tries to poke through. It is a normal west coast winter’s day in every respect, except for the letter she carries with her.

In the second excerpt, we meet Rebecca, going strong at 96 years of age, except for her eyesight.

What she sees in the early grey light of morn is less clear than what she has seen in her sleep.

Excerpt 2

CHAPTER 2

Abiding Memories

Rebecca awakes and opens her eyes. What she sees in the early grey light of morn is less clear than what she has seen in her sleep.

She could not pinpoint exactly when her vision started to change but in the last few months her world had become so clouded she felt every day was spring in Newfoundland, where if you left the door open the fog would crawl into your house like a left-over ghost from Christmas and stay for an hour till it suddenly vanished.

Today, all that would change. The cataracts were coming out and new artificial lenses were going in. They would be made of plastic and it was that fact that had long deterred her. In his most placating voice, Jonathan had said, ‘Mother you have fillings, metal in your body, what’s a little bit of plastic?’ So today was the day. No doubt tomorrow she would belong to the throng of post-operative patients who claimed, ‘I should have had it done years ago.’

Once recovered, she would be quick to pick up a paintbrush and maybe go back to reading books. Lately she’d listened to audio books. For Christmas Morton had sent her A River Runs Through It and recordings of some of Gary Paulsen’s stories: Hatchet, Dogsong, and Dogteam. How she had enjoyed those. Meant for children and young adults, but really anyone who was a canine lover would be enthralled. Did-you-did-you-did-you-did-you-did-you-did-you want it to go on forever? Yes, she howled like a husky, I did. I do. She smiled. That book was her son’s life.

Soon, she would once more clearly see their street of maples, verdant in their new season growth, and hear the return of the warbling vireo, but while spring brought many birthings to the world – from the delicate bud of the first larch leaf to the wobbly life of baby foals and the pure innocence of new-born seals – it was those illustrious icebergs calved in the arctic north that delighted Rebecca the most. They were the ultimate outpouring of nature’s strength and might as it brought new life into the world.

She was unlikely to be seeing any of them in Montreal when they removed her eye patches, but, God-willing, this summer she’d go back to Newfoundland and once again see sparkling majestic shapes that painted the seascape with their truly unique form. For now, she would have to settle for the excitement of being able to watch vivid images on the Discovery channel, being able to see the face of her eldest son, not just touch it, and being able to read the newspaper, and any letters that wound their way to her. Yesterday, Jonathan had to read to her Gene’s letter, such as it was.

She wondered what he made of matters. They hadn’t spoken of Gene in years. They never wondered any more. She was certain Jonathan had given her up for dead. But Rebecca had long felt in one small ventricle of her weary heart that her daughter was still alive.

There was a part of her that wished they had never received Gene’s letter. To receive such an impersonal note after all these years was more galling than silence. Rebecca always hoped she would see her daughter again under happy circumstances. She always hoped that as the years progressed her daughter would have cut her aging mother some slack. That Gene would have remembered she had lost enough children along the way and that it was hurtful for her to add to the tally with her prolonged absence.

That Gene did not, only seemed to confirm what Rebecca had long feared – her daughter’s mental health was and would always be variable. How she managed to hold down a teaching job confounded her. Once Rebecca got to that unavoidable conclusion she could set aside her hurt and feel pity for her daughter’s untameable demons and her unhinged life. She could say: it was of comfort to hear from her.

And now they had an address. She wondered if she should send on to her the small stash of letters she had of hers, boxed away in her bottom drawer. Ones written between Gene and Sonny back in the early fifties and again in the sixties. She had her own box of letters written during the Great War. Odd the way she had ended up minding Gene’s, the way her mother had minded her letters from Samuel.

When they packed up that house in Winnipeg, Gene and Sonny’s letters were the only items she said she would take. Did she sense then that she would be a caretaker? She read some of them once. After three years. Like hers, there was nothing remarkable about them unless falling in love was remarkable these days. Most outpourings of love only fluttered the hearts of those directly involved. Hers had certainly fluttered. More than fluttered. And so it should have. Falling in love was the privilege of youth like innocence was the privilege of childhood. Though these days, when she looked at the young, it seemed sex came easier than love. In her day it was the opposite.

Last night, in her dreams Samuel and Sonny visited. Their presence mingled with recessed thoughts stirred by that letter they had just received. She dreamed of the first time they had gone to Lake Temagami, Samuel and her, their daughter Abigail, then an excited three-year old, and Jonathan, twelve. On the first night after the children had gone to bed she and Samuel had stripped off, wrapped themselves in towels and run down to the lake for a moonlight swim, dodging the little black flies and insects that buzzed around them. Every so often they had to dunk their heads under the water to lose them.

‘What did I tell you all those years ago?’ Samuel had said. ‘And this is not as bad as it gets. In spring they are like a black mist.’

‘I can put up with a few black flies for this,’ she had said, wrapping her wet naked body around Samuel’s.

‘Me too. But we are going to have to keep that screen door closed and we are going to have to cover ourselves all over with insect repellant during the day.’

‘All over?’ she said with a laugh.

‘You’ll have insect bites on your private bits before this holiday is over. Mark my words. They are incessant. They are ceaseless. They are insidious.’

‘Like you used to be,’ she murmurred.

‘Yes,’ he drawled. He waited, his mood somber. ‘The love making has continued.’

‘But not how it was before. Or how it was after Abby was born.’

‘I know.’ His voice sad. ‘I’m sorry. I can be that way again. It can be that way again. I want to. I just thought you needed some time before you could move on. Every time I made love to you, you would end up crying. I didn’t think it was helping.’

It has been seven months since their beautiful son Henry had been born, lived for one day and then died. She kissed Samuel’s neck then rested her head on his shoulder. ‘I know. I’m sorry. But I’m hoping here I won’t cry and here it can be like it used to be. Remember Boston when we got so caught up in each other we forgot that we were trying to make a baby.’

‘I remember.’

‘I want it be like that again. Can we try on this holiday to get back to those two people we were in Boston?’

‘Yes,’ said Samuel, thickly, ‘God, yes. Starting right now.’

They made love in the lake then he danced with Rebecca on the small jetty while he sang Cole Porter’s ‘You do something to me’ and they draped towels around each other like Algonquin shawls. After, he carried her into the house where they made robust love in a solid bed hewn from native timbers and the only cries from Rebecca were breathless ones to the night sky meant for his ears only.

These were the random memories that sometimes came to a nonagenarian lying in the folds of sleep. Thank God she still had her memory. Memories, memories – secrets that no one could touch.

Thinking of Lake Temagami reminded her of a conversation she’d once had with her son-in-law. Sonny had rung a few months before he disappeared asking after the place they had once vacationed at when her kids were young. He’d said Gene had mentioned it to him way back in 1950 when they first met, but she had not remembered the name, a cabin on a lake in the middle of Ontario somewhere. Did she recall the place? She did. Sonny had said, one day if ever he was over that way he might check it out. She wrote providing him with the details but told him she didn’t know if it was still there, still available for holiday rentals, let alone how to book it. The last time she had been there was in 1938. So much could have changed. So much did.

When she and Wyatt had gone through all of Sonny’s paperwork, they had never found that letter. It wasn’t something that had clicked at the time. Only now.

In the third excerpt, several months later, we meet 33-year old Lindsay who lives in Sydney, Australia.

When it rains, she will cry. Her own emotional weather vane tells her so.

Excerpt 3

CHAPTER 4

Storms in Sydney

When it rains, she will cry. Her own emotional weather vane tells her so. When the rumbling, tumbling deluge comes pummelling down she will stare out at the heavy drops splattering on King Street and realise it has come to this.

Right now, Lindsay’s inability to cry is adding to her anguish. That she, two years ago, could be so blissfully engaged and now so blithely un-engaged of her own making and not bitterly upset makes her primary emotion one of anger – at herself – that she could have let a dead-end situation continue for so long – as if all along she knew the outcome.

It is five o’clock in the afternoon, the height of a Sydney summer. Yet today no daylight has been saved. She is sitting on a bar stool in the Forum Hotel, her back to patrons, idly staring at the road. The concertina windows are wide open. The wind is bringing the storm with it on its wings. An empty chip packet skitters along the footpath, dry leaves twirl in tiny whirlwinds, her cosmopolitan sweats in the warm breeze.

The sweltering summer day is refusing to tolerate any more. Just like her. She knows when the rain hits the road it will rise in steamy vapours. It’s that very change she’s looking for, wanting for herself. To have the crying, the grieving over with. To move on to another state.

Her thoughts are being punctuated by the tragic and the euphoric; the great pendulum swings of her life. The 16th August 1976, the day they officially gave her father up for dead after weeks of searching. One year to the day that Elvis Presley died. There was bitter sweetness in that. Her father being such an Elvis fan.

The 26th September 1983, actually the 27th September on this side of the world. She’d only been in Australia a few days after finishing university and backpacking through South East Asia, landing in Sydney just as Alan Bond’s syndicate wrested the famed America’s Cup away from the USA for the first time in 132 years.

How could any Canadian not be overjoyed at that? What a victory! She became an Australian the day Bob Hawke announced, “Any employer who sacks a worker for not coming in today is a bum.” Did she go to work that day? Nope, she didn’t have to, but even so, she went to the pub and fortune smiled on the brave. There she struck up a friendship with Kristen, K, who became her first real friend from down-under, her dearest friend whom any minute would be arriving to help strike the death knell.

Next was Australia’s Bicentenary, when her sister Shane on her first Australian visit, on the night of 26th January, 1988, announced she too wanted to move to Australia. This country that made them both feel they could start their lives anew. And then that ominous date, which dear friends we will all soon gather to mourn the passing, the 23rd September 1993. The night Sydney won the 2000 Olympic Games bid, triumphing over Beijing. The champagne flowed, Darling Harbour went off, the Greenwood pumped, and the breakfast queues at Maisy’s were outside and around the corner. There was singing. There was dancing in the street. There was dancing on tables. And in the tipsy teetering, while they were giddily swaying to ‘Throw your arms around me’, he said, ‘Marry me. Marry me, Lindsay. We’ll never forget this night.”

Nope, even now we will never forget it. Today, there’s no shouting. And blue has a different meaning. What a way to mark the eve of her thirty-third birthday.

As a teenager, Lindsay always thought she would be a mother by the time she was thirty. That day had long sailed past. But two years ago she did have high hopes that by this birthday she would at least be on her way. How bizarre that she had been.

A year after his inspired proposal Lindsay started trying to get Martin to commit to a wedding date. But the words “wedding”, “babies” and “a suitable home” became increasingly taboo. Invariably they would end up fighting. You would have thought she was the one who had first suggested getting married – not the other way around.

Three months ago they had gone up the coast to Port Stephens for a long weekend determined to have a happy time like they’d had in their earlier days. And what had happened? She had left her pill packet behind. A fact she didn’t discover till the morning after. What was she going to do, buy condoms for the rest of the weekend? Wouldn’t that go down well! So to avoid a scene she said nothing and did nothing. She came home and took the pill every 12 hours to catch up, ignoring the instructions in sixteen different languages.

But then when she was meant to bleed she barely bled, only the faintest watered-down smear. For three weeks she tried to ignore the fact, to not think or feel anything. To have wanted to be a mum for so long, yet to not be living her image of domestic bliss was something she could not face. Eventually she bought a pregnancy kit and left it in her drawer for a week. She always thought the day she peed on that stick would be one of awed delight and thrilling anticipation. Reality couldn’t be further from the dream. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him.

Two weeks later she woke in the middle of the night with a pain so intense Martin had to rush her to the Royal North Shore hospital. He assumed it was her appendix. She wasn’t about to correct him. After all, it could very well have been.

In Emergency the young doctor asked her was it possible she could be pregnant. ‘Yes,’ she gasped between stabbing pains. ‘I’m in a relationship. I have sex. Anything is possible.’

‘Lindsay’s on the pill,’ Martin explained for the doctor’s benefit.

The doctor’s buzzer went off. He glanced at Martin before walking out of their curtained cubicle. ‘Oral contraceptive is not 100% reliable,’ he said over his shoulder.

Martin had thrown Lindsay a grave look, which the attending nurse didn’t miss. ‘You know,’ said Nurse Searle, checking Lindsay’s vitals, ‘pregnancy often happen for a good reason.’

Lindsay looked at the nurse who no doubt had seen it all. Vaguely she was aware of her squeezing her wrist. They took blood tests, protein samples, urine tests; administered morphine. Martin had gone home and gone to work by the time the results came back. She was pregnant all right. ‘I had my suspicions,’ Lindsay admitted.

‘Well, you wouldn’t have suspected this,’ said a new doctor. ‘It’s an ectopic pregnancy.’

That would be right, thought Lindsay, as if that was her punishment for her small act of deception. Coming out of herself she asked, ‘What do we do about that?’

‘I’m afraid we have to remove the fetus. The longer it stays the more you risk losing the whole fallopian tube. In extreme cases you could lose your life.’

This doctor was full of good news today. Lindsay swallowed. ‘So when do you operate?’

‘Soon. I want to monitor you for another six hours – your pain suggests your body is already taking matters into in own hands.’

In mild protest Lindsay said, ‘but there’s no sign of bleeding.’

Five hours later she was cramping and bleeding like she never had before. Her sister Shane was with her by this stage, wiping her brow.

Martin turned up with a dozen yellow roses. Shane updated him. Lindsay was focusing inwards yet she still managed a glimpse of his initial expression before he managed to hide it. ‘You look relieved,’ she mumbled.

‘I am relieved,’ he said smiling for her benefit. ‘That you are okay, will be okay. That we caught this in time.’ It sounded like she had had a malignant lump removed.

Yep, she had gotten pregnant for a reason all right. As it transpired, it was one of the best decisions she had ever made. How long would her untenable life have dragged on otherwise?