Yasmeen Read online

  She watched him approach Claire who scowled and announced, batting her eyes, that she was driving, thank you very much. It didn’t surprise Yasmeen. The two were always locking horns over one thing or another. Yasmeen had developed an instant dislike for her when Finn asked at an early information session whether the houses up north were equipped with real bathrooms and she’d snapped, “T’es-tu sérieux, bonhomme? It’s 1983, not 1938.” Claire spoke a brash Shediac French and looked more like a wrestler than a teacher, in Yasmeen’s opinion.

  The music got switched off and everyone began to gather around Professor Caldwell who kept clearing his throat as though he had a breadcrumb stuck in it. Used to seeing him in a suit and tie every day, Yasmeen quite liked him in casual clothes, trousers and loafers and a cable-knit cardigan with patched leather elbows. They matched his gentle blue eyes and receding hairline.

  He began his speech. They were to stop calling him professor. “From now on it’s Frank,” he said, wearing the moment on his face. He looked long and hard at each of them as though they were on the cusp of a profound change in their lives. Yasmeen was convinced he was feeling nostalgic about his own evaporated youth. He raised his cup to them, eyes dewy. “To the seven of you.” His smile broadened, emphasizing the age lines around his eyes. “You’ve all worked hard for this opportunity.”

  “And a toast to you, Frank,” said Finn. “A huge thanks for getting us this far.” Claire grimaced.

  “Don’t thank me until you all come home safe and sound.” Frank chuckled at his awkward attempt to be funny.

  They broke off into nervous giggles, clinking cups across the circle.

  He rolled down the projection screen and invited everyone to find a seat. “And now for my final lecture,” he said. Claire rushed to his side to plug in the slide projector. The lights dimmed.

  Yasmeen nestled into Finn’s lap and they hugged one another like strangers who bond after a terrible tragedy. It made her think about serendipity, the luck and circumstance of being born and turning up in certain people’s lives.

  Frank pulled a spiral pad of handwritten notes from his back pocket. He jiggled open a pair of reading glasses and adjusted them on his nose. He had the serious, no-nonsense look of Polonius lecturing his son on the proper way to conduct himself in the world.

  “Twin Otters are not the planes you’re accustomed to,” he said, advancing to the first slide. “For one thing, they’re really small and the wind bounces them around a lot. Try to remain calm if it’s a shaky flight. Remember, there are no johns aboard, so plan accordingly. Bring along a kit of toiletries and a good supply of trail mix in case your bags don’t arrive with you. Also, a good sleeping bag in the event the plane has to make an emergency landing and you’re forced to spend the night outdoors. You can’t count on the weather, even at this time of year.” While he paused to clear his throat, Finn cracked a joke about sleeping with a herd of caribou to keep warm. Everyone laughed except Claire.

  “Imbécile,” she muttered.

  Frank pressed on. “Finally, and this is critical. No matter how well you adapt, no matter what strides you think you’ve made, you will always be a Qallunaaq to them. Don’t try to be more Eskimo than the Eskimos.”

  His use of “Eskimo,” the old name given to them, a pejorative by modern standards, startled Yasmeen. It sounded hollow in her ears now that Inuit had become the more acceptable word and serious efforts were underway to reinstate Inuktitut place names in the North.

  Perhaps she was reading too much into it. Perhaps she was being a little too earnest, as Morgan often criticized. Before she knew it, Frank changed the subject. He covered some technical protocols related to administration and record keeping, but she wasn’t paying much attention. She watched his face in the glow of the slide projector.

  He looked drained, as though preparing and passing on these final notes had emptied him. He tucked the pad in his back pocket and signalled for someone to switch on the lights. “I think we should call it a night. Some of you have planes to catch. And for the rest of you, it won’t be long now. Only a couple more days.”

  As the party broke up, he slipped a personal note to each of them. To be read later, he said. They thanked Sayard and clomped down the corkscrew staircase, issuing their teary goodbyes on the sidewalk before fanning out in different directions. Yasmeen hugged Finn and Finn hugged back. He kissed her on the cheek and left. The street was quiet again.

  Yasmeen looked up at the tremulous gnats in the halo of a streetlamp. She would have preferred rain or heavy wind or a hailstorm, something dramatic to mark her departure, but it was a perfect night. One or two stars were visible. Still buzzing from the champagne, she decided to skip the long bus-and-metro ride and splurge on a cab. Why not treat myself, she thought, on my last night in town.

  Climbing into the cab she was hit with a waft of cologne and smoke that reminded her of the Skala, her favourite souvlaki joint on Park Avenue where she and her friends sometimes went after a movie. The place was usually packed with loud Greek men wreathed in cigarette smoke and reeking of a similar bad cologne.

  The driver wore a gaudy gold ring on each pinkie and seemed to be inspecting her with his dark eyes. She caught a slice of his bushy brows through the rear-view mirror. Her mother’s warning echoed through her. You never know. Better safe than sorry. Yasmeen checked the information on the cabbie ID. She’d figured right about the nationality. Costas Papadakos. The guy looked like he was itching to talk.

  “Please, is okay I smoke?”

  She wanted to say no but the cigarette was already between his lips and he was pressing the lighter on the dashboard.

  “You live far. Is good you take taxi. Not safe for nice young girl. I take you fast home ….” He sped up, then braked suddenly. “Malaka pousti! Sorry. Detour. Many detour. Montreal is always detour. French doesn’t know how to build good roads. In my country, we build roads many centuries ago and still good … Here, complain, complain but never do nothing. All they know is drink beer and play hockey. They want to have own country but can’t even fix roads. My country give the world civilization, democracy, philosophy and even baklava. French, they give separatists, hot dog and poutine.”

  Yasmeen remained silent. She didn’t want to encourage him. She didn’t want to get sidetracked into a whole debate about Quebec politics. Any other night she would have. She would have challenged him. She would have said, in a diplomatic sort of way, if he thought Quebec was so bad, why didn’t he go back to his wonderful country and drive donkey carts? It bugged her, immigrants who came here, made a good living and then trashed it every chance they got. It had been a great night up until now. Why was she letting him spoil it? She closed her eyes to shut him out.

  •

  As far as great nights went, sex with Harrison ranked right up there. It was her first time. Even though technically they never made it past third base, Yasmeen always counted it as sex. It was the rain that stopped them. If it hadn’t rained, they would have gone all the way, she was pretty sure of that. Harrison was her first cousin on her father’s side. And her favourite. One time when he was visiting, her parents arranged a sleepover for them in the backyard. That’s how everything started. The adults didn’t twig to it maybe not being the brightest idea, she being thirteen and he, sixteen.

  “I like your pillowy mouth,” he used to tell Yasmeen whenever they saw each other at family events—weddings and funerals, mainly. He liked to touch it and she liked it when he did even though she pretended she didn’t. Her crush deepened into something more the year he grew his hair out and started wearing long, loose shirts and striped bell-bottoms, the summer he brought her his scratched up copy of Dark Side of the Moon.

  Harrison’s fingers felt for the elastic waist of her pyjama bottoms and eased them down. It flustered her but she didn’t stop him. The night was so quiet she could hear the neighbours in their houses, laughing, playing pian
o, running the water for their evening baths. The heat issuing from his hand felt like the full sun on her pale, winter skin. She looked away from him, beads of sweat collecting along her hairline and in her elbow creases and behind her knees. She closed her eyes and dug her nails into his wrist as a part of him touched a part of her. Her innermost regions tingled. She hated it. She loved it. It was like crossing over into something larger than herself, larger than Harrison too, like entering a cordoned-off place she shouldn’t be, so good and so bad she couldn’t decide which it was. Floating in its pleasant torpor, she snuck a look at him. He smiled.

  They were vaguely aware of an acid-white flicker in the sky, but they weren’t about to stop what they were doing. Surely it would pass over, she thought, surely it wouldn’t … but it did. First came a crack of ear-splitting piano thunder. They bolted upright. Then the sheeting rain washed down.

  Yasmeen fumbled for her pyjama bottoms. She yanked them up and bunched the sleeping bag under her arm, racing barefoot up the porch steps through the screen door, slamming it behind her. She smelled a dank whiff of herself like the mushroom vapours of earth. She prayed her parents wouldn’t smell it on her too. The door hinges squeaked as Harrison let himself in behind her.

  The house bloomed with light. Her mother appeared on the upstairs landing with a handful of fresh towels. Moments later, her father emerged bleary-eyed from the bedroom in a bathrobe and brown knee socks.

  Harrison shook the rain from his hair while Yasmeen dropped her sleeping bag on the living room carpet. Her bangs clung to her forehead and something was rumbling through her like a herd of buffaloes migrating to lower ground. She ran to the bathroom to assess the damage. She was pretty sure of what she’d find in the crotch of her bottoms. But it was a brownish smear, not the vivid red she expected. Its stain had crept across both sides of the seam, soaking into the floral pattern of the pyjama where Harrison’s finger had entered.

  In the harsh bathroom light, everything looked different. Her face was glowing the way it did when she spiked a fever, only it was a robust glow. She had anticipated this day, ever since health class when the school nurse distributed the small green booklets with diagrams and flow charts of a woman’s secret passages, long dark hallways that released golden eggs. When your bloods come, she explained to the girls, you’ve officially crossed the threshold into womanhood.

  The following day Yasmeen told Morgan everything but swore she would kill her if she breathed a word to anyone. Morgan’s mother had a big mouth, always on the phone blabbing to a neighbour about somebody else’s business if she wasn’t shrieking at the girls to quit prancing across her flowerbeds, pretending to be Lipizzaners. Cut that out, you’re almost teenagers! You’re embarrassing yourselves—and me along with it! Yasmeen’s mother never had a good word to say about Morgan’s mother. “It’s a shame that woman feels so compelled to keep up with the Joneses,” she’d scoff. Despite their mothers, Yasmeen and Morgan remained inseparable.

  •

  The car thumped. Yasmeen’s eyes shot open. The cab driver cursed again.

  “Sorry. Hole in road. They make holes too, for to take more money from my taxes to do nothing.” He pronounced nothing “nutting.”

  She stared vacantly into the night as he detoured through Old Montreal, past the bedraggled port, the flashing Five Roses sign that was as much of a landmark as the thirty-foot steel cross on the nipple of Mount Royal. He accelerated through Mill Street’s derelict stretch of mesh fences and concrete silos, rattled across the rusty Victoria Bridge into the tranquil, tree-lined suburb of Ste-Marie-de-Constance. He lurched to a stop in front of her house. She tipped him a little less than the customary 15 percent and said good night in French.

  “You live in nice place. Maybe I buy house here for my children. Good night, lady. I wait until you are safe in house.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  “Is no problem.”

  She waved him off. Outside the door as she fumbled for her keys she felt Frank’s note tucked into her pocket. She read it in the dim glow of the porch light, four words hastily scrawled: Search for the beauty. She couldn’t imagine a more enticing message.

  Her mother was still up when she walked through the door. The lights were off except for the flickering blue pulse of the TV, and Samiyah was sitting round-backed in her usual spot on the couch, dozy head slumped forward. In her quilted bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, a crocheted blanket folded over her knees, she reminded Yasmeen of a caterpillar in its cocoon casing.

  Yasmeen tapped her on the shoulder. “Go to bed, Mum.”

  Samiyah jerked awake, disoriented, rheumy eyes darting everywhere.

  “I’m home now, go to bed.”

  Samiyah nodded, shoving away the afghan. She stood up, wobbly on her feet, and pecked her daughter on the forehead. Yasmeen went to help her, but she insisted, shuffling toward the staircase, that she was fine on her own. She turned and said, “The kids are asleep.” By kids she meant Yasmeen’s nineteen-year-old brother, Tarek, and her sixteen-year-old sister, Rose.

  Yasmeen switched off the TV. She made the rounds the way her father used to, checking that all the doors were locked, detouring into the kitchen to tighten the drippy faucet that he had never had time to fix while he was alive.

  Late as it was, Yasmeen couldn’t think of sleeping. She wanted to pick up the phone to call Morgan, fill her ears with all her excitement about going, but it was long past midnight. Morgan was probably asleep. She decided instead she would write her a long letter after she settled in up north.

  A blush of moonlight slipped through her bedroom window, just enough to see by. She stood at the commode, examining herself in the mirror. It seemed impossible not to take inventory of her defects—her medium wiry frame, less-than-average height. She had never considered them defects until now. In one of her lectures on why she shouldn’t go, her mother warned her she had neither the build nor stamina to survive the kind of cold up there, the kind that kills in an instant. The longer she stared at herself, the more she saw her mother’s mocking reflection glaring back at her.

  The bright headlights of a passing car swept across the ceiling, illumining the glow-in-the-dark stars she had always refused to let her mother take down. They had stayed through every bedroom makeover. She missed her father. He, at least, had recognized her spark, and from an early age. He was the one who took time with her at night, holding her small hand by the open window while she waved and said good night to Mister Moon. He would have been proud to see her go.

  She reached for the down-filled coat on her bed with its tunnel hood, its price still dangling from the sleeve. For extreme sub-zero temperatures, the clerk had said. She snipped off the tags and wriggled into it, inhaling its virgin newness. Her heart did a double flip. It cartwheeled and stag-leapt and sprinted to the ends of the earth and back. It released its big bouquet of balloons to the sky. She imagined Neil Armstrong’s butterflies as he prepared to plant his small foot on the cratered moon, his giant step for mankind. She pictured his pure, unfettered joy.

  TWO

  Breakfast was repeating on her. Her mother was of course to blame, refusing to let her fly on an empty stomach. Up a whole hour before Yasmeen’s alarm went off, she laid out a hearty banquet: a medley of citrus, porridge made with steel-cut oats, bacon and eggs, toast smeared with honey. “It’s got to stick to your ribs, God knows when you’ll eat again.” She shoved a spoon of cod-liver oil into Yasmeen’s mouth as though she were still a child. Yasmeen swallowed it obediently. She ate everything on her plate.

  Now it was all a churning, undefined mass in her belly. Pure sludge. Through the small window, a dizzying avalanche of cloud and sea advanced and receded. She could hardly tell whether they were flying right side up or upside down. For all she knew, the sky was the raging sea and they were heading straight for it. She imagined the icy water closing around her, pulling her down.
r />   Don’t look, she thought. Close your eyes.

  She had had the exact opposite reaction earlier in the flight as she watched the dwindling network of roads, the stalwart trees dwarfing into shrub and sedge before disappearing altogether into a scrolling plain of rock and sea. Piece of cake, she had thought. I can handle this.

  Now as the plane was in full descent and her stomach was flip-flopping, all she could smell were the nauseating releases of her co-passengers in the snug plane, coffee breath and sulphurous farts, intermittent whiffs of dirty socks and armpit odour. She cupped her palms over her nose. No matter what, she wouldn’t be caught dead ralphing into the vomit bag.

  “Breathe,” came a voice from the window seat beside her.

  She glanced over at the man with whom she had barely exchanged ten words since takeoff. He was focused on the book in his lap.

  “Air pockets. Not to worry.”

  He had the manner of an army drill sergeant, curt, disciplined, but he also had the look: short hair, dark trim moustache. Even his boots had a military sheen. She adjusted her theory when she noticed the striped golf shirt under his windbreaker.

  He turned the book face down, stretched and yawned and checked his watch like someone who’d done the trip a thousand times. It was a Rolex, though she doubted its authenticity. What would someone who could afford a Rolex be doing in the North? She leaned back into the headrest and closed her eyes.

  “You needn’t worry,” the man repeated for emphasis. “We’re flying with some of the most experienced pilots in the world.”

  “So they say.” She opened her eyes.

  “Just keep swallowing.” He turned and extended his hand. “I’m Elliot, by the way.”