Her memory shot through every age, simultaneously, back to front and front to back, the eternal through the heart of the ephemeral.
Andrew Steinmetz, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre
1.
Alberta had a moment when she remembered everything: she remembered the smoke in her hair, she remembered the smell of his skin. It was as though she’d been startled from a deep sleep of decades, suddenly realizing where she actually was.
The slight fragrance of moisture through the kitchen window, slightly ajar. The fresh April air pushing out the last remnants of winter.
Petrichor. After a droplet of rain strikes dry earth, the scent that releases. In part, from the Greek ichor, a fluid that flows in the veins of the gods. Rain. The smell, reducing her down to near zero. The quality of dust in the city nowhere near that of home. Alberta is immediately home.
Scent is the strongest trigger to memory. Alberta is nearly knocked over.
2.
Alberta wrote novels as naturally as others drew maps, and with as much precision, each sentence as clear as lines sketched by James Cook, Samuel de Champlain or Simon Fraser.
Alberta compared herself to an explorer, writing to clarify the unknown.
She had enjoyed a fair amount of success, with multiple jaunts on the festival circuit with each title, including book clubs and foreign tours, and even a shortlist or two.
She still hadn’t forgiven David Thompson for mapping the forty-ninth parallel, the four days he lost track of which side of the border he stood on. The mistake made her distrust him in everything.
She poured through his journals, felt for his wife, and scoffed at his editorializing.
3.
The fourth time around, the cancer had spread to his bones. Graham wore a blue handkerchief to cover his modesty, and she’s sleeping with one of the neighbours.
Alberta suspects there are no worse betrayals.
Suspects, but not enough to stop.
In her life so far, Alberta can’t decide if everything happened too fast, or if the whole story is set in slow motion.
Thick-headed, willful. She shakes cobwebs loose. She shakes loose excuses that rain torrents around her, filling the kitchen, the office, the dining room.
Excuses, enough she could drown in.
When Graham’s diagnosis looked terminal, he had given her permission and she had denied him, denied it, said no, no, never. Something quiet, he suggested, in that way he had. Saying all he needed by speaking less.
A woman has needs. A kindness. She said no. Not long after, she did. He gave her permission and in return, she lied.
Lied, lied down. She did lay.
4.
Emily descends school bus steps, walks the half block home with her small group of friends. Sometimes, Alberta suspects, this group of girls share little but age and geographic circumstance. Is that enough? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. These girls with her Emily, each as foreign and confusing to her as her own daughter. All squealing, high-pitched. As though they had each emerged from separate species, on either side of human. There is far too much pink for her liking, far too much talk of princess dresses and reality television, gossip surrounding useless pop stars and their crises.
Alberta flies off the handle, regularly. So much so to Emily, it seems that her mother might never land. Perpetually in mid-air. Hovering.
When Alberta explodes, Graham responds by speaking Alberta’s name. The tone of his voice a slow and gentle anchor.
Emily enters the house with a step heavier than her small form might suggest, the pounding weight of each foot.
In her bedroom cocoon, Emily absentmindedly tears fingernails across her left forearm, constructing a scar out of something smaller, neither of which even existed, the day before.
Emily is carving out holes in the air.
5.
When she first discovered him, Graham had the most luxurious brown hair. To Alberta, he was himself like the mythical Greeks: immortal, chiseled and passionate. She fell for his beauty, and remained for his kindness. He had such a rich, inner warmth that his attractiveness nearly fell away. Nearly, but not.
And for a long time, she knew she was blessed.
She knows: she drifted because she was a coward. Afraid to watch her husband die, instead falling further, into another man’s arms.
Another man, who might barely be that. The occasional love poem appears in her in-box, heartbreakingly earnest, and painfully mediocre. All that keeps her: the fact that she stopped reading them.
6.
Their Emily, first born. Named for the books her mother had loved. For that exotic girl on the opposite coast. Tales from an island. Named, and hating it. Emily wished to be self-created, rise herself up from the earth, fully-formed.
She wished for neither father nor mother.
She arranges her dolls and stuffed animals in her bedroom into a precise pecking order. Brown bear behind stuffed white rabbit beside velveteen replica. Every thing in its place.
Still. There was something restless in her that she couldn’t explain. The irony of what Emily didn’t know, had her mother recognized, Alberta could not only have explained, but have named it.
The same name she’d given to hers.
7.
Alberta stepped into the water. The pool held no surprises, a routine of quick dip and rinse after thrice-weekly workout. She stepped and slipped in, allowing cool chlorinated water to engulf her. Her wet, crinkled feet webbed at the poolside. Alberta immersed, she pushed off from one side, propelling her body, an arrow down deep to the lower depths.
Alberta: a knife through clear water.
Below the surface, there was no smell of her lover’s dark skin or her in his hair, or her husband’s disease, his dark pallor. Already the smell of death rose up from the bowels of the house itself, and left traces on everything, including her clothes and her fingertips, her papers and books, every morsel of food.
During his chemotherapy sessions, she had taken to eating in the deli down at the corner, far away from the infection of so much decay.
Once there, she would eat untainted food, and then pull out her notebook, spend an hour or three spinning her wheels. She couldn’t gain traction.
No matter what words she wrote, she couldn’t touch ground.