We Came From Away, page 11
The Ocean Point Motel looked to be a single-story building where the doors to the rooms opened directly out into the parking lot. Outside each room was one of those ubiquitous basket chairs, except now they were plastic in myriad primary colours. I remembered sitting in them as a child and getting up with the indentations of the slats on my bare legs.
We all then moved in the same direction that Gordie had gone, presumably into the lobby. As I stepped inside, I would have to say that the word lobby might be a bit grand and more than a bit overstated to describe what we were now experiencing. It was like a tiny storefront with two hideous upholstered wingback chairs and a table like the ones at church basement bazaars. On the table were brochures about everything from the ferry to Labrador, which evidently sailed from a pier very close by to rock climbing in the national park. The reception “desk” looked like the place where they brought prisoners when someone came to visit. I only know this from watching television—evidently far too much. Gordie was leaning on the counter, his head up against the glass, chatting amiably with the receptionist.
The motel may have looked from the front as if it were a single story, but now I could see steps down to a lower level and a ramp that seemed to go up to another one. Beside the reception desk was an enclave with shelves holding drinks, snacks, and an array of T-shirts and sweatshirts, all of which seemed to be adorned with Newfoundland flags and sayings. I shivered in spite of the heat. The heat—I had just noticed how hot it was in the lobby. I began to get a sense of foreboding.
Gordie finally saluted the receptionist and then turned to the rest of us, who were waiting like little lemmings to be led off the cliff.
“Well, everyone, I have good news and bad news and perhaps even two bits of bad news. I’m going with the worst news first. You may have noted the excessive heat in the lobby.” Gordie looked at me, presumably because I had started fanning myself with a brochure I picked up from the table. “Well, sorry to say that’s the way it is. I may have neglected to mention that Ocean Point has no AC—not that they ever really need it. It’s usually ten degrees colder this time of year. Anyway, the other bad news, which, if you look at it a different way, could be good news, is that there’s a bus tour on board today, meaning we all have to double up.”
“Double up? As in share rooms?” I said, hardly able to think. I was still back on his first bad news—no air conditioning.
“I do, indeed, ma’am,” he said. He cleared his throat. “And I suppose now might be a good time to remind you that you’ll all be sharing rooms for the rest of the trip. Angela might not have been as clear as she might have.”
“Oh, Eliza, sharing a room with your sister can’t be construed as bad news, can it?” Aunt Maureen said.
“I suppose not,” I said, looking at Emma, who was sitting in one of the two hideous chairs upholstered in faded floral print. I only hoped she wasn’t picking up bed bugs as she sat. The dreamy half-smile on her face said, “I don’t care about anything.” What in the world had come over her?
“And the good news, Gordie?” Aunt Maureen said, sounding more optimistic than I felt.
“Ah, that’s the great part. All the rooms overlook the water.” Gordie smiled and handed out our keys. Yes, they were actual brass keys again. “And a bit more good news—there are fans in each room.”
I rolled my eyes. I could not help myself.
“Dinner in the dining room at six,” he said. “Don’t be late. There’s a treat in store.”
“Is there a bar?” Phillip said.
Gordie smiled from ear to ear. “Sure is, my boy. Right through there.” He pointed to a door just past the reception booth.
“Good stuff, my man,” Phillip said. “Good stuff.” Then he looked around. “Anyone care to join me? I’m buying. Half an hour.”
EMMA AND I MANAGED to find our room up the ramp I’d seen earlier, and yes, it was facing the water—which you could see if you looked past the enormous tour bus parked behind outside the door to another building that took up the rear. I could see a line of brightly coloured Adirondack chairs facing the view and briefly wondered if I might be able to catch a breeze out there. I was going to have a great deal of difficulty sleeping in this heat.
The room was just what I would have expected of a motel—wooden headboards on twin beds, quilted bedspreads festooned with faded pink and blue flowers and drapes that matched. There was, indeed, a fan in the corner. Suddenly, I had a brain wave. I had seen an ice machine along the corridor. We’d get some ice and point the airflow over it. That should do it. I plugged in the fan and turned it on. It started chugging, and for the briefest of moments, I thought it was going to die. I held my breath. But it perked up and started spinning. I breathed out. I sat on the side of the bed, exhausted from the thought of two nights here.
“I’m going to meet everyone in the bar,” Emma said. “You coming?”
I told her I’d be along momentarily and continued to sit there on the side of the bed after she left, wondering if I could turn over the mattress to check for bedbugs. I sighed. That just seemed like too much trouble. Suddenly, my quiet was shattered by the loud ringing of my phone.
I leaned over to where my tote bag sat on the other side of the bed and retrieved my phone from its depths. It was Jake.
“You have to come home!”
“Hello to you, too, Jake. What the hell are you going on about?”
“Where have you been? Why weren’t you answering your phone?”
“Calm down, Jake. I was touring. Service is spotty. You remember where I am, don’t you?” I suspected he was simply having trouble dealing with the household on his own. We did have help. He could just ask our housekeeper to do some extra cooking.
“Eliza,” he said, “I mean it. You have to come home. Now.” I could hear his rapid breathing.
“Unless someone died, Jake, I’m not coming. And maybe not even then, depending on who it is. You’re the one who told me I should come. Family is family. Remember?”
“This is an emergency. I can’t cope by myself.”
I was getting exasperated. “Are you going to tell me what precipitated this meltdown?”
“It’s Izzy,” he said. “She’s here.”
“Here as in our home?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
I felt a heavy blanket of anxiety begin to descend on my shoulders. There was no way I was going home now.
Twelve
Erica
MOM AND I WERE SHARING a room, and Phillip was bunking in with Uncle Fred. As we dragged our small suitcases along the faded corridor carpeting, I could feel the heat closing in around us.
“Dear heavens,” Mom said. “I don’t suppose anyone around here is used to this kind of weather.”
“Did you see Eliza’s face, Mom? I thought she was going to explode when Gordie told us there was no air conditioning. It’s almost worth the heat just to see her like that.”
“She can be amusing,” Mom said, “although she is not the only one among us who likes her creature comforts.”
Of course, Mom was right. We were all a bit spoiled. Then we opened the door of our room, and a wall of heat hit us squarely in the face.
“Dear god, Erica, open a window, will you?” Mom said as she fanned herself with a brochure she’d picked up in the lobby. I had seen Eliza with one and now wished I had one as well. “This is going to be challenging.”
We settled our things, and I asked Mom if she was going to join us in the bar. “I’ll be along, but you go ahead, Erica. Phillip will be waiting, and the two of you can cook up some more childishness.”
I was happy to see she said it with a smile.
When I arrived at the bar, Phillip was already there. Emma was standing beside a pool table, holding a pool cue in her hand and giggling at her father, a strange situation if ever I saw one. Uncle Fred had never been known for his wit.
I slid into a tall wooden bar chair beside Phillip, and he ordered us both rum and coke. It wasn’t my drink of choice, but it went with the territory.
When the older woman who was tending the bar placed the ice-filled glass in front of me, I lifted it, holding it against my temple for a moment to try to cool down a bit. “So, Phillip, what did you give Emma to help her seasickness?”
Before he could answer, Eliza swept into the bar, saw us sitting there and said to the bartender, “I’ll have what they’re having—but a double.” There seemed to be trouble in paradise.
Eliza had always taken great pains to make sure everyone around her noted her perfect life. Her perfect house, her perfect clothes, her perfect husband, her perfect—I seemed to have forgotten to ask. “Eliza, how is Izzy? You haven’t mentioned her. Isn’t she in medical school?”
Isabel was Eliza’s twenty-something daughter—I couldn’t remember her exact age. She had gone to the best kindergarten, the best primary school, the best private girls’ school, and Harvard undergrad. The last I’d heard, she had a scholarship to attend medical school at Columbia or Johns Hopkins. Gaggingly impressive. And Eliza had always made sure we all knew. Perhaps I’d forgotten to ask about her because I didn’t want to hear any more about the perfection of the American way of life.
Eliza lifted her glass and downed it. She didn’t even bother with the straw. She turned to the bartender and asked for another one. “The same,” she said, then turned to me. “Izzy? I suppose Izzy is as she has always been.”
I shrugged and figured we were moving on to other topics. Eliza wasn't finished.
“Izzy has arrived home. Jake just called me.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “She must be on a school break.”
“I wish,” Eliza said so softly that I almost missed it.
“What’s up, Eliza?” Phillip said. “You seem a bit off. Is it the heat?”
“That too,” she said, downing her second double rum and coke. I wanted to suggest she slow down, but this was getting good.
Eliza ordered a third drink. “Let me tell you about Isabel Rebecca Cohen, daddy’s princess, grama’s darling, and her mother’s nightmare.”
I was shocked. Nightmare? As far as all of us knew, Isabel Cohen was the apple of her mother’s eye.
Then the floodgates opened, and slightly drunken Eliza Houlihan Cohen told us about her daughter. According to the story, as she told it, Izzy had become something of a rebel when she was in high school, always getting into trouble to the point where she had come close to being kicked out of her exclusive school for a variety of transgressions, including underage drinking and smoking. Jake and his family were able to assuage the school’s administration, though, with a sizable donation. It seemed money could accomplish a lot, but perhaps not everything.
“Izzy was always the top of her class, though,” Eliza said. “That made Jake very happy, but I could see the rising anger in her. I suppose all daughters have difficulties with their mothers. I know I did.” I kept my mouth shut because, up until then, I hadn’t had any problems with Maddie. Perhaps they were yet to come, but I hoped not. She continued. “All that money. Her father and grandmother gave her everything. I wanted to be on board with that, but I guess my small-town Canadian upbringing hadn’t been completely erased.”
Izzy had gone to Harvard and had been granted early acceptance to medical school. In fact, she was supposed to be going into her second year now. But she had decided that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to do her own thing. A year or so earlier, she had left New York for California, taken an online yoga teachers’ course and seemed to be teaching yoga as far as Eliza knew.
“We haven’t seen her in over a year,” Eliza said, looking more miserable than I’d ever seen her. “Now it seems she’s arrived home, and Jake can't cope.’
“Are you going home now?” Phillip said. “Leaving us?”
Eliza looked up from her drink. “No, Phillip, I don’t think I am. I think I’m going to stay right here with everyone in my family.”
Phillip raised his hand for a high-five. Eliza looked confused for a moment before realizing what he was doing. She gave him an awkward high-five and then said, “On another note, I want to know what you gave Emma for her seasickness. I want some of that.”
Phillip’s eyes twinkled, and we both laughed as he said, “Later, Eliza. Later.”
IT WAS TIME FOR DINNER. We knew this because Gordie came into the bar and herded us all out and into the wood-panelled dining room.
Once we were seated around another round table, Gordie announced, “No menus tonight. Traditional fish and chips all around.” He looked at Emma. “And something special for you, love.”
Gordie had arranged everything. When he gave the nod, two servers brought out litre-sized carafes of unnamed white wine and put bottles of dark malt vinegar and pitchers of gravy on the table. I wondered what the gravy was for. They went back into the kitchen and returned with plates of fish and chips.
After all of us except Emma had been served, one of the women returned with a small tray. She placed a plate and a glass of something milky in front of Emma. “Gordie here told me about your affliction. I have a daughter who’s sickly as well and can’t eat so much, so I’ve prepared your beans just for you. Used a pair of tweezers—clean ones, mind you—to take out the scrunchions, so you can enjoy. And a glass of almond milk should do it.” Emma smiled as though she had been offered a feast.
Eliza, drunk or not, was always the cookbook author and had to ask about her fish and chips. “Are those scrunchions on the fries?” she said.
The server smiled brightly. “Specialty of the house, ma’am. And the gravy is to die for on them, too.”
Eliza smiled and dug in. I turned to her and said, “Eliza, you do know what scrunchions are, don’t you?”
She finished chewing before answering. “I’m not a vegan,” she said.
“I know, but you are Jewish. They’re pure pork fat.”
Eliza looked at me, then at her plate, raised another forkful of fries with scrunchions and gravy and shrugged.
Thirteen
Eliza
I COULDN’T REMEMBER when I’d had a more delicious dinner. Jake and I frequented so many of New York’s finest restaurants. We travelled to the cosmopolitan capitals of the world. We dined at Michelin-starred restaurants. But I had never felt as comforted by food as I did that evening, stuffing myself with what at another time and place I would have called a heart-attack-on-a-plate.
Each time I bit into a piece of the golden-coated fish, I could hear the crunch of the perfectly fried batter, and I wondered what they used to make it so delectably crisp. Then, beneath the blanket of crispy delectation, there was the tender, flaky cod, exuding the delicate aroma of the sea. The fries were beyond perfection—flawlessly seasoned with salt, scrunchions and the malt vinegar that I thought I would avoid. I was so glad I didn’t. It added just that touch of acidity to counteract the saltiness. I was thinking about finding the cook so that I could pry the recipe from her (or him, perhaps?). When I was down to the last mouthful, I stopped a moment to let the flavours dance on my palate, leaving me longing for an ocean breeze and the smell of fish stalls with seagulls soaring overhead. Then I shook myself and looked around. I was, indeed, still on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, not in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and that was suddenly fine with me. Perhaps the rum appetizer had prepped the palate.
WHEN DINNER WAS OVER, Emma and I headed back to our room. Emma was still acting slightly odd, with her constant smiling and air kissing everyone. It was so not her.
I had replenished the ice we had in a plastic ice bucket on a chair in front of the fan because, of course, the ice had long since melted, and I despaired of getting even a breath of air. I lay down on the bed as Emma emerged from the bathroom wearing what appeared to be a new T-shirt—a T-shirt that in no way resembled her usual boho vibe.
“Nice shirt,” I said. She was unlikely to perceive the irony. It was large and red and had the words “always high” emblazoned across the chest in large white letters.
Emma smiled as she got into bed. “It’s great, isn’t it? Phillip bought it for me at the tuck shop in the lobby.”
Always high? I turned off the light and lay back on the flat pillow, my hands under my head. Before long, I could hear Emma’s slow breathing, as if she might have drifted off already. Suddenly, I heard a sound like a foghorn, except it seemed to be emanating from Emma.
She turned over, and I could feel my nose twitching.
“Emma! What the hell?”
Emma sat up while I fanned my hand in front of my nose. “Geezus, Eliza. Haven’t you ever heard a fart? I feel so much better now,” she said. “I might have another one, though.”
“Emma, that’s disgusting,” I said.
Emma stared at me. “Disgusting? Eliza, there’s nothing disgusting about normal bodily functions. I just farted.”
“Stop saying that,” I said.
“Fart, fart, fart,” she said, giggling harder by the minute. It was a word my mother had strictly forbidden us from saying when we were kids. “Say it with me, Eliza. Fart, fart, fart.”
“I give up. Fart. But that smell, Emma. I cannot believe it came from my little sister.”
I could see her smiling brightly in the ambient light from outside the building to the rear. “Ah, the beauty of beans for dinner!” she said. Then she slid down and was fast asleep before I knew it.
I got out of bed and walked over to the window where I thought I might be able to catch a breeze. As I stood there, I thought I could see someone—perhaps more than one someone—outside near or on the Adirondack chairs. Was that a flash of a lighter I saw? Was someone smoking? Then I heard voices. Erica and Phillip.
Fourteen
Erica
