Chances

atBrenthor
Jul 27, 2017 · 17 min read

Marta was never one to avoid mirrors but she tried her best not to take inventory. It always struck her as maddeningly bereft of reason that being naked with herself was so much more vulnerable than it was to be naked with someone else. She supposed that when you’re naked and with someone it’s more of a team sport. She stood now in front of her full length mirror with its gaudy, gold, baroque-style frame made from styrofoam, pitted and scarred from her countless moves. Her grandmother had gotten it for her when she was twenty years old after visiting her first apartment, a musty studio in the north end of Halifax, and being horrified that she didn’t have a proper mirror. They’d piled into her gramma’s Honda Civic and gone to Winner’s. She smiled at the memory, bitter and sweet but not quite bittersweet, if that makes sense. Her grandmother was in a nursing home now with Alzheimer’s, and if her parents were to be believed, not long for the world. She’d always been close to her grandmother before work and school took her away from Nova Scotia, first to Ontario, then Montreal, than Norway and Sweden. Grandma Jean was a tiny furnace of energy that always burned hot and manic. She’d promised her once, six years previous, that she wouldn’t visit her in the nursing home, a fairly new and by all accounts quite lovely complex in Bayer’s Lake. “My mind’s going for real,” she’d told her during one the last conversations they’d spoken. “I had to call your father yesterday to come get me from Sobeys because I couldn’t remember what car I drove or how to get home.” She’d said this plainly with a smattering of grim humor that was her way. “I go to the doctor Monday and I’m going to get put on a list for a nursing home. Don’t tell your father.” Marta had cried then, of course, thinking about her Nan locked away and going insane behind a beige door with a keypad on the inside to keep her locked in. “Cut that out,” Grandma Jean had told her. Marta’d just gotten a latte from the Starbucks on Dundas St in Toronto and drooled it over herself while taking a sip, the warm milk salted with fiery tears as she fought down sobs.

“I’ll get a flight home,” Marta’d told her, even though they both knew she couldn’t afford it.

“You will not,” said Gramma Jean laconically.

They stayed on the phone for an hour or so and Gramma Jean asked her if she wanted anything from the house (no), and made her promise through tears never to come visit her, never to call, once she was locked in her ward. She’d told her that memories are like paint on the walls and it was too gol-damned easy to paint them over and she didn’t want her room painted over with Alzheimer’s like her sister, Murial’s was. She said she could hardly remember Murial as she’d been, only what she became, and she wouldn’t abide that. Marta promised.

She’d kept it, too, but the mirror, when it caught her eye in just the right way, brought back Gramma Jean’s perfumed hugs and her caustic, lively wit. She sometimes caught herself rubbing a thumb over the whorls on the frame, especially if she was on the phone to her parents.

That conversation had been about five years ago, and still the old woman clung to life. “Somedays I think she’ll outlive us,” her father would say in that fatalistic, humorless way people sometimes acquire when they’re forced to face the mortality of a loved one’s slow death.

She was thirty-one now, living in Sweden, finishing her doctorate in bio-science, genomes and the like. She took stock of herself in her brightly lit room, gauging herself, trying measure the changes, imagining the countless nude impressions that colored the love-haunted glass over the past decade. Maybe the mirror remembered what she’d looked like at twenty years old. She couldn’t. She was heavier now, for sure, and was equal parts delighted and horrified to watch her body transform into that of a full-fledged adult. The lines on her face were deeper, but she felt, more-or-less, that everything looked about right and in its proper place. Maybe not quite as tight as it all had been but no worse off for that. Of course, it was 6AM, and tonight was pizza night. She cupped her love-handles, squeezed the small paunch that seemed to hang around no matter how often she ran or lifted weights. She sat on her bed, letting it bunch up beneath her boobs, and sighed. Maybe a little worse off for that.

In two days time she was headed back to Halifax to give a talk at Dalhousie, her alum, then down to Yarmouth to see her folks. She’d booked a red-eye to Toronto, then a 6:55 flight back to the city she was born, but wasn’t hers. It had been, maybe, but then it had belonged to her and Jacob, and then she left it to him. Now it, like the mirror, was haunted. She hadn’t been back in five years or more. There was no need. Her parents had moved to little bungalow outside of Yarmouth and whatever friends she’d had growing up had faded away. Halifax now held only ghosts of a past she didn’t regret leaving behind. The loudest among them was Jacob, her first adult love. They’d been together for six and a half years before she left for Ontario when she was twenty-six. She still thought about him, mostly because she hadn’t bothered to find a replacement in the five years since, instead devoting herself to her work, which was equally fulfilling in its way. There had been men after him, of course. Several, in fact, but nothing close to what she’d had back in the grimy streets of Halifax. Salt air, calloused hands, flashing blue eyes, strawberry Boon’s and bong hits. Starlight camping under clouded skies, fleeing to the back of his Jeep to keep dry. He’d loved her like no one else had. She’d be terrified if anyone tried. He was a man of unerring excess and whatever he did he did with his whole heart, and that included loving her. Sometimes she’d think back on it and he would be too dependent on her, too fierce in what could only be called his devotion to her, but then other times she could see that’s just who he was and now his loved burned just as hot for someone else. It must. He wasn’t one to half ass things.

She remember the exact moment she decided she loved him. They’d been driving down to the South Shore to visit with friends and they stopped at the liquor store to stock up. He loaded the booze into the back of the car, got into the driver’s seat of his beat up Jeep, brow furrowed, looking at the receipt. “They didn’t charge me for the shandies,” he’d said. “Bonus,” she’d told him, but his face stayed crossed. “I better go back in,” he’d said, and he did. When he came back out she asked him why the hell he’d passed up on free booze. They hadn’t had a lot of money back then. He told her that he was worried about the cash registers coming up short at the end of the day and he’d heard tell of companies garnishing the difference from the employees, said it wouldn’t be free then. He told her that one of his favorite things in the world was talking shit about assholes but he didn’t get to do it if he was one, too. She’d found that very charming, especially because he hadn’t said it to be clever or funny.

She’d messaged him on Facebook the night before. “Hey, Jacob, I’ll be in town for a few days next week. Did you maybe want to grab coffee?” There hadn’t been a response yet. His Facebook didn’t look like it had been updated in a while. He was married now to a woman named Cheryl. Marta had creeped her Facebook, which was much more active than his was. Jacob had always insisted he didn’t have a type, but she wasn’t surprised to see that like herself, Cheryl had a slight build and a big ass, only she was white, not brown like Marta, her mother being Guatemalan. She was pretty and she looked happy, like everyone on Facebook did. No one posts pictures when they’re sad once they graduate from their teens and early twenties. It didn’t look like they had kids. Jacob had never wanted any. Neither had Marta. She’d only stayed on Cheryl’s Facebook for a few minutes, feeling guilty in a way that was hard to define. Just long enough to get a sense of the woman and look through a few pictures. She rode horses, or kept horses, maybe? She seemed to hate Donald Trump(clown) and Justin Trudeau(liar) in equal measure. She had lots of pictures of Jacob. He had put on weight since she’d seen him last but he carried it well. He’d always been big. The lines in his face, always serious, except when he grinned like a wolf, had deepened but his eyes were still bright, clear blue. She used to love his eyes in the morning. They were the same color as the only bedspread they’d had and seemed to brighten to cyan with the sunrise. She’d sometimes wake to him looking at her, tickling her nose, flicking her ear, then he’d kiss her. He’d always kissed her, she’d rarely kissed him. She never realized that until after they broke up when he’d mentioned it, not in a mean or spiteful way, just honestly. He said it never bothered him because he’d never seen her parents kiss or touch, really, and he figured that was probably why. He said she’d kissed him with her eyes pretty often and smiled, and that was so corny and sweet they’d both cried amidst the boxed up pieces of their lives, moving truck rumbling in the front yard. He hadn’t touched her once after they broke up and so even though she’d wanted a hug she didn’t try for one.

She laid flat on her back on the ruined mess of her bed and sighed. It had been a long time since she’d re-visited her memories of him and she wasn’t surprised to feel blood coursing in her veins as her heart tumbled and shook, trying to make heads or tails of the joyous melancholy reverberating through it. She thought then of his hands. Beautiful, wonderful hands. The best hands she’d ever seen. They were rough, huge, calloused, strong, but gentle when they needed to be. She could feel, even now, the tingling whisper of his touch on her lower back, his favourite spot, where he would trace out words and patterns so lightly she would shiver. When she had hard days he’d do that until she fell asleep. On good days he would go lower, spreading her thighs and smoothing his hands into her vulva, moving slowly around, pressing into her thighs and labia, then back up her body, along the backs of her arms, and then finally, inside her. She’d tilt her ass up into him and depending on the mood he’d grab her hair, kiss the back of her neck, clamp his hand over her mouth. When she came, if she did, she’d turn and he’d have the goofiest, most self-satisfied smile on his face she’d ever seen. Sometimes she still thought of that face when she came, even now. Lopsided grin, eyes bright, a little bashful.

She considered masturbating, rejected it, and got dressed instead. As she did so her phone bleeped in the way it bleeped when she got a Facebook message and she checked it. Jacob. She sat down to read.

Jacob: hey marta been a long time

Marta: Yes, it has. I’m giving a lecture at Dal next week. Thought I’d see if you wanted to meet up maybe.

Jacob: (A long pause, where she could see the small words “Jacob is typing”) im married so it depends on what meetup menas

Jacob: means*

Marta: Just coffee. It’s been so long and I don’t really know anyone else in Halifax. I thought we could just catch up.

Jacob: ok lemme know your schedule. i gotta runit by cheryl but she wont care

Marta: Monday at lunch, if you’re not working?

Jacob: i am but thats fine. can we do 2 instead? i got meetings all morning then i gotta check up on the guys in bedford. Tim’s ok?

Marta: Haha no! (She hated Tim Hortons) How about the Second Cup on Spring Garden, if it’s still there?

Jacob: (another long pause, long enough that she thought maybe he wouldn’t reply at all, then) it is. ok 2pm ill see yoy there

Jacob: 902 456 1298 is my # just text me

Jacob: safe flihgt

Jacob: flight*

Marta: Thanks. See you next week :)

Marta put her phone down and put her sneakers on, feeling very suddenly like taking a run instead of pecking away at her research paper. It only occurred to her later, panting, exhausted, that the Second Cup on Spring Garden Road had been where they’d had their very first date. Shit. She hoped to god this wasn’t some subconscious bullshit her mind was throwing at her. She had no regrets. There’d be time for family and all that stuff once she was done her grad program and settled into a career. She’d made the right decision. Still, seeing him happy and with someone chafed something in her that she resented. He’d been hers but now he wasn’t.

Her plane had touched down in the Halifax Airport through the fog, shaking slightly as the Atlantic winds buffeted the fuselage. She deplaned and waited around at Avis for her rental car, which was apparently running a bit late. She sagged into one of the ubiquitous plastic chairs that pepper every airport around the world and seemed to be designed to keep you from getting comfortable. She texted her mother to say she landed, texted her old prof at Dal to confirm her itinerary, and then checked Twitter for the latest and greatest installment of the shit-show that was 2017 American politics.

Finally she was called over to the counter and informed that they had no intermediate level cars left but they could upgrade her to full sized at no extra charge. That was fine, she told them, leaning over the counter as the clerk processed the forms. “All I have right now is a Jeep,” he said, holding out the key fob. He was telling her that she only had to fill it to half when she brought it back because it was bigger than the Chevy Cruz she was supposed to get. She barely heard him. Of course it would be a Jeep. The universe was funny that way, kind of a cocksucker sometimes.

The Halifax Airport is twenty minutes outside of the city itself and the drive in was pleasant. She’d booked a week’s worth of nights at the Delta Barrington downtown. As she pulled into the underground parking and made her way to the desk to check in her mind wondered at the existential implications of impermanent living quarters in a city that had once been home. There was poignancy about it that seemed fitting for a Mountain Goats song. Maybe there was one already. Her room was a hotel room. Impersonal and drab by design, but comfortable in a way that all hotels are comfortable, like a Big Mac after a night of drinking. You knew what you were getting before you got it then wondered why you’d bothered hoping for more than it was afterwards. She unpacked her things and put them in the pressed wood dresser, idly wondering how many pairs of socks and underwear had passed through it over the years.

She took a shower. She always took a shower after a flight. She’d read in a medical journal years ago that an airplane was one of the most unsanitary environments in the world. The taps and fixtures appeared new, but in typical hotel fashion, there was only a small fraction of an inch where the water temperature was bearable. The slightest turn to the left or right brought ice cold or burning hot water screaming from the showerhead. She imagined the boilers in the basement churning and growling, the flames flaring in their iron bellies.

Dressed casually in hiking pants and a blue cotton top she piled back into her Jeep and drove around the city. In her mind she knew, of course, that the city would froth and roil and change in her absence, as any city does, but in her heart she was hurt that things hadn’t remained static while she’d been gone. She drove to the south end, to Fenwick Tower, where she and Jacob had rented their first apartment together. It had been an eight hundred square foot single bedroom affair on the 29th floor. The floors were worn linoleum, the walls plaster, pitted and creased where trowels had smoothed out the mud. There was a drab, concrete balcony surrounded by mesh, “to keep the birds out” the building manager had told them, though she and Jacob had always suspected it was to keep the many students that inhabited the building from leaping from the ramparts in times of feverish stress that seemed unique to university life. Fenwick Tower was one of the tallest buildings in the city, maybe the tallest. It was a hideous brown concrete thing that jutted up from the ground and lorded over the south end, visible for miles. Jacob had once, drunkenly, referred to it as The Obelisk in comically dark tones, and in the two years that followed they had developed a cheeky lore about its origins and purpose. “The Creator,” Jacob had intoned, “Born of a She-Wolf, with hair like fire” had constructed it to appease his baleful Mesopotamian gods. It had gone on like that for years, and as their created mythos spread it enveloped the other tenants, the maintenance workers, and anyone else who entered the dingy beige stone hallways.

She hadn’t meant to come here, but nevertheless she was parked outside the monolith, relieved in a way to see it unchanged. She considered going inside but instead shifted into Drive and continued on, letting her hands and feet guide her as her mind wandered into the alleys and buildings of her youth. The blue house on South Street, now painted a dull vanilla white. The Vietnamese restaurant that had introduced her to pho in her last year of high school, now closed and replaced with a Pita Pit. The Commons, in the centre of the city, grass a vibrant green, seeming to claw and struggle for purchase in the still chilly April air, peppered with students, runners, and dogs. The Cunard Centre where she’d seen Bif Naked live when she was 18 and got fingered during the show by a boy whose name she couldn’t remember, but had had red, curly hair and cold lips. The old Seahorse on Argyle Street, now closed and gone, where she and Jacob had seen what seemed like hundreds of punk and indie shows, moshing and drinking, smoking outside, soaked with sweat and steaming in the cold winter air.

At some point in her drive she had begun to cry and she let the tears flow, grateful to let the emotion bleed out of her, chagrined that she felt so terribly overwhelmed and lost in a place that she’d known so intimately. Jacob was everywhere, in every corner, in every bar, and so she drove to Bayer’s Lake and stepped into a Jack Astor’s for lunch. It hadn’t been there when she’d left and so it contained no memories or ghosts. It was a joyless corporate place that tried it’s best to appeal to the frat crowd while simultaneously offering what it considered to be artisan level pub food. She got calamari and a Greek salad with no black olives. Her face burned as the tears came and went. Once, she would have been embarrassed by them, but now she just smiled when the waitress, whose nametag said Jackie, offered her the drink menu. “Long day,” Marta said, and Jackie put a hand on her shoulder. “White wine, coming up, on the house,” she said with a squeeze. White wine combined with the salt air that was somehow different than Nordic salt air, of course, reminded her of Jacob. She retreated to the washroom and gave herself a slap in the face hard enough to startle herself. She was acting like some lovesick seventeen year old and that was enough of that.

The sun had set by the time she was in the elevator back to her room and she felt equal parts exhausted and manic. She snapped on the TV, let it fill the space with colourless noise, and pulled out her phone, checking, but not reading emails. Coming back here was probably a mistake but keeping in touch with her old profs and doing the talks she was scheduled for was a good career move. Seeing Jacob again was probably the exact opposite of anything good but he was the anchor that had taken this place from her, dragging it away from her into the black depths of tender nostalgia. She needed to, she decided, see him just to hate him, or just to feel ambivalence, or just to feel something that might quiet the ache in her heart that had lurched from its grave, a horrible undead parody of star-crossed love, when the wheels had left the tarmac in Oslo. She knew, wholeheartedly, that she’d made the right choice. Nova Scotia was a dead end for her once she’d graduated from Dalhousie. Jacob had known it, too, and their breakup had been soft and slow, filled with gentle understanding and hot waves of grief.

Monday roared in, usurping the transient uneasiness of Sunday night and brought with it clear skies and hot spring sunshine. She went to Dalhousie, spoke with her profs, toured the campuses that she’d spent so many long hours in. These places, too, were filled with sweet sadness, but not with Jacob. He had never gone to university and had instead gone right to work out of high school, working his way up to the head of the Maintenance Department at the nursing home by the Commons. She wondered if he was still there, would be surprised if he weren’t. He would never leave Nova Scotia.

The clock-arms clamored inexorably towards two o’clock and she decided to walk from the campus down to the Second Cup, realizing it would make her a few minutes late, but smiling ruefully because she always was. She stilled a trembling that started in her chest and worked into her arms, down to her manicured fingers, and opened the door to the coffee shop, which seemed to be the only unchanged thing she’d came across so far. She peered around, letting her eyes adjust to the lack of gleaming sunshine, and saw Jacob seated at table in the back corner, the table directly beside the one where they’d spent their first nervous date. He had a coffee, black, unless he’d changed, and there was a second sitting at the chair across from him. He stood up as she approached, smiled a smile she didn’t recognize, and unsteadily, awkwardly, reached his arms around her shoulders in a hug that started out businesslike and grew warm and familiar in the few seconds it lasted. He had put on maybe thirty pounds around his chest and midsection but his arms were still burly and round. His face was older, but still boyish, and his hair was thinning, which he must have been self-conscious about because there was a green military cap hanging from one end of his chair. He’d never worn hats when she knew him, but wasn’t surprised he’d taken it off when entering the building. He’d always been old fashioned in a way she’d found slightly charming and endlessly irritating.

He sat down and motioned to the coffee on her side of the table. “One cream, half sugar?” he asked, voice quiet, much quieter than she remembered.

“I cut out the cream a few years ago. Now just black with sugar,” she said, adding quickly “But this is fine, thank you.” He nodded, smiled, looked away. She looked down at the beige mixture, breathed it into her nose, and took a sip. It was good. Her face started to burn and she tried to force it away even as her eyes began to well with unwelcome tears.

After a moment she looked up cautiously, aware that there was no hiding the emotion on her face, and wasn’t surprised, but was nevertheless relieved, to see him wiping at his own face with his large rough hands. “Funny,” he said, water rimming blue eyes, “How quick it all comes back, eh?”

“Yes,” she breathed, smiling.

He reached out, took her small brown hand in his large, ruddy white one, “It’s nice seeing you again, Marty,” He sighed, “Hard though. Harder than it has any right being.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “Harder than it has any right being.”

They stayed like that for a span of minutes that existed outside and beyond the limits of time. Neither one of them said anything. There was nothing at all to say.

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