Ricochet
When Tiffany X’d out the 31st of July on her calendar, it wasn’t a feeling of pride she felt, because she also felt guilt. On some level she knew that depriving herself of a type of food for a month, even if it was sugar, when she was already so skinny, wasn’t right. What she did feel, though, was a sense of accomplishment and enterprise. She had put herself to the task and she had succeeded. She felt so satisfied, in fact, that she had already decided to try another month – this time without bread.
After the calendar, she relocated to her bathroom to brush her teeth and hair, two minutes each. By her bed, she realigned her moisturizer, alarm clock, phone. She placed her earrings in her jewelry box. It snapped shut with a magnetic click, a sound of precision and orderliness as pleasing to her now as when her dad gave her the case as a gift on her 10th birthday.
She arranged her sheet flat over herself with the blanket folded accordion style at the foot of the bed so that when she would inevitably get cold overnight, despite the heat wave, she could pull it up directly, no fuss. At precisely 10 p.m., she shut the light and tucked herself in to quietly cry herself to sleep, only to wake exactly eight hours later.
The next morning, after throwing out the rest of her loaf of bread and having granola and yogurt for breakfast instead, Tiffany went down to the street to wait for her bus. The morning heat was already radiating off her Montreal Plateau city street, making it look like it had been painted over with silver-hued varnish. Her head felt as groggy as the day was smoggy. She sat, bleary-eyed, to wait the 5 minutes until the 24 bus would pass. She’d have to transfer and then walk, whereas if she took the metro, it was a straight shot. But even going against the flow of commuters, there were too many people in the metro cars to her liking. This would have been the case even if they weren’t just emerging from a year and a half of pandemic.
She stared ahead, absentmindedly at first, but slowly her thoughts coalesced on her line of sight. A triangular case came into focus. It was tucked snuggly in the angle created by the seat tube and the crossbar of a run-of-the-mill road bike sloppily locked to a street sign. As she gazed at it, its perfect fit became more and more mesmerizing. Sheepishly, she crouched down and saw that the supports were cloth-lined concave plastic, exactly the curve of the bike tubing. It was as if the bag cupped the bike stays in a loving embrace. At each end was a Velcro cinch strap, pulled just to, so easy to put on. And so easy to take off.
From the corner of her eye, she spotted the bus trundling down Sherbrooke Street toward her. Without a thought, she released the straps, slipped the bike pouch into her shoulder bag with her breadless lunch, and boarded the bus. Anyone watching her from the bus would have thought she was removing it from her own bike. But still, Tiffany looked guiltily around her as she took a seat. She had never stolen anything before in her life. And she hadn’t been on a bike since she was a teenager. What had possessed her? The abruptness and thoughtlessness of the gesture is what appalled her the most. It was as if she didn’t have the slightest control over what she had just done. As if the object’s raw appeal had taken over.
The inside of the bag wasn’t much bigger than the triangle she could make when she brought her pointer fingers and thumbs together. She turned the four objects she found inside, all foreign to her, over and over again and admired their economy of space. Some L-shaped bars attached by a key chain. Then, some screwdriver heads spouted from a yellow plastic centre like a sunburst. Third, she found three identical blue plastic objects that resembled a simple can opener, all nested perfectly one into the next. Finally, an ever-so-small plastic box held a miniscule piece of sandpaper and a patch that looked like the Band-Aids she applied after administering a vaccination.
At Tiffany’s stop, she took in how much the sun had risen. The expanse of road did its best to annihilate the cooling effect of the maple trees lining the boulevard, giving the heat a metallic tinge that made it all the more unbearable. Her first client lived on Rue Baldwin in the Tétreaultville neighbourhood of Montréal East. M Lalonde. Gaston Lalonde. The first thing she usually did when she got to his house was to throw the drapes wide open and crack a window. But today, in this heat, she knew she’d better leave the curtains drawn.
“Bon matin, M Lalonde. Êtes-vous bien dormi?”
“Bonjour, Madamoiselle, Tu sais, I never sleep well in this blasted heat,” he griped back, in a heavy Quebecois accent.
M Lalonde was a curmudgeonly old man. All six of his children lived in Québec, and some resided in Montréal, but none had offered to keep an eye on him, so they hired her, a registered nurse, to check in on him, administer his medications, make sure he ate and was washed.
She had enrolled in her nursing certification after high school, at 17 years old. The next summer, she was already working basic hospital jobs. By the time she was 19, she had graduated, and in handing her her diploma, they implied that she could be in charge of other people’s lives. She felt like a pinball ricocheting off the bumpers to the out hole faster than she could control with the flippers. The thought terrified her, paralyzed her. She sometimes felt that way when she drove a car, which wasn’t very often. She would be driving along and suddenly, she would think, “Who let me be in charge of so much speed, weight, energy, potential?” In those moments she didn’t feel like it was her driving the car at all. She couldn’t imagine having all that power over someone’s destiny. The thought of devolving into an absentee driver in an emergency where someone’s life depended on her made her stomach lurch. As a Personal Support Worker she helped elderly people still living at home, not on death’s doorstep, as patients in hospital often are.
Tiffany had been coming to work with M Lalonde for about a year now. She had started here just about the time her dad died, which made it easy to track the time. Her dad went into hospital because of a minor issue with his diabetes and contracted Covid there. Never came out. Tiffany had cried every night since.
M Lalonde was hard to warm to. And he didn’t take a liking to people quickly either. He would bark and bellow. The only thing he commended her on was her French. He was ready to dislike her because she was an anglophone, but her French was so good that he couldn’t say much against it. She was about ready to give up on befriending M Lalonde when she glimpsed a well-used Scrabble game in his closet. When she asked him about it, he begrudgingly confessed that he played every night with his wife for nearly 50 years. She promptly fetched the step stool and brought down the game, dusting it off swiftly with one deft swipe of her hand. She hadn’t played much in French, but it was by far her favorite game. At the outset, they played silently; he was a man of few words. But as time went on, they learned to appreciate each other’s gift for finding the perfect word and began to chat about the gems, accordingly. “Comment tu connais ce mot-là?” And in answering how they knew the words, they opened little windows unto themselves.
Like the time she played the word insoumis. Of course, he asked about that one and she replied, “My dad was a draft-dodger himself.” He had come from the US in 1972. He worked odd jobs out west until he met Tiffany’s mother, much later. Usually, she hid the fact that she herself was American, by virtue of being her dad’s daughter, and had surprised herself to be telling the story so freely then.
But not so surprised as when M Lalonde began telling his story of dodging the draft – the Canadian draft into WWII. She had heard about the phenomenon and its scale, of course, but never firsthand. M Lalonde had been living on the future site of the Olympic Stadium with his family at the time (the expropriation was another story she was privy too via the word emprise). He had gotten wind of the Canadian Army coming to the neighbourhood to recruit, packed some bare essentials into a satchel, and went to hide on Boucherville Island, now a National Park. He wouldn’t say much more about it than that, but Tiffany sensed that it brought back strong, if not punitive, memories, and, also, that her father’s conscientious objector status heightened his interest in, and, just maybe, his admiration of her.
On that scorching day, neither of them was able to come up with grandiloquent words and both chalked it up to the heat. They left the game open on the foldable card table and Tiffany set M Lalonde up in front of a fan, wishing she could do more to offer him respite from the heat. Her other clients were also sweltering in their apartments and modest houses, especially on the streets where the sun had a field day ricocheting off asphalt to car hoods, from tarmac roofs to concreted-over front “yards,” with little to rein in its tyranny.
At the end of the day, she felt like a limp dishrag, all the life-giving fluid drained out of her and nothing but a sticky residue left over. She had closed the windows of her apartment and drawn the shades before leaving to trap in the cooler night air. A centenary crab apple tree blocked the sun’s rays from hitting directly on her only front-facing window. In the back, neighbours had greenified the alleyway about ten years ago. The trees they planted were beginning to be of some help in residents’ increasing need to combat 33-degree-plus temperatures in an adapting city where most lodgings had no air conditioning.
She had little energy to make supper, and without bread, a sandwich was out, so she poured herself another bowl of granola and collapsed in the armchair, eating automatically, mind empty. At least the milk was soothing as it slid down her throat. The glossy paper of her puppy-themed calendar had undulated in the humid air and her pencil marks hardly showed up as she X’d out another day. She finished her bedtime routine and was waiting until the outdoor temperature was as cool as indoors so that she could open the windows. She picked up some beach glass she and her dad had collected and fiddled with it. It was surprisingly cool. Around ten o’clock the windows became openable, and she lay down with the now-warm glass still curled in her fingers, hot tears streaming down her cheeks.
The next day was Tiffany’s day off. She had no plans, no ambitions. After a bowl of granola, she grabbed her bag and set out for a second coffee, an ice coffee. Feeling lonely and hungry, she fidgeted in her purse and brushed her hand across the bike bag she had pilfered the day before. At first, a feeling of horror fell over her – what does this say about me? But it was quickly replaced by an idea. What if she found the perfect bike to fit the bag? She knew it was supposed to be the other way around, but she couldn’t bear to see this accessory in her apartment on a shelf. It belonged on a bike, and its legitimate carrier was lost to the city. She used her phone to find the nearest bike shop. As she walked there, she fingered the bike bag, memorizing its exact shape. She knew she would look crazy if she seemed to be shopping for a bike to fit an inexpensive doodad.
The store was small and reminded her of a sailboat in that every space was optimally used. She avoided eye contact with the guy behind the counter and began lightly touching the cool frames of the different bikes. Most would accommodate the bike bag perfectly, although some had frames that were clearly too thick. She homed in on a black bike that had appeal to her because it was modest. The others looked like giants next to her 5’2” and she feared she would never be able to scale them.
“Bon choix,” announced the man as he approached, “Most of the other bikes in here are too big for you. These narrow handlebars, they fit your petite shoulders perfectly.” Tiffany was not used to her appearance being commented on. She thought of herself as mousey: thin whisps of dull, dirty-blond hair swirled around her pale face, nothing distinguishing about her features, thin as a rail, no curves. She didn’t know what to think about the attention, so thought about the bike instead. “I’ll take it,” she answered, partly because it was the bike that caught her attention first. But also, to make the man leave her alone.
She walked all the way up to Parc Lahaie where she could at least lean the bike on a tree and revel in the satisfaction of affixing the bike bag. She was hoping that the old adage “you never forget how to ride a bike” was true. Sure enough, once she overcame her trepidation of falling flat on her face - thereby making a fool of herself - and climbed on the bike, she rode right off like she was 16 again. She hadn’t gone far along a calm, one-way street when she saw the ominous storm clouds hovering over the mountain to the west and heard the far-off rumble of thunder announcing the end of the heat wave. Despite the bike being small, Tiffany struggled getting it up the spiral outdoor stairwell, banging in on her knobbly knees more than once. Just as she latched the door to the second stairwell, the downpour began. She leaned her forehead heavily on the wavy pane of glass, rain sliding down it in sheets, while she caught her breath. At least the heat would break with this jolting rupture in the weather, and she wouldn’t have to worry about her clients stuck in their airless apartments.
The next morning, she woke up early and biked to work, realizing that cycling was, in fact, quicker than the bus, even for someone as unathletic as her. The temperature had dropped, but this summer the heat waves were back-to-back. On the news, forest fires out west, record temperatures – 49 degrees in Lytton, BC – power outages in the States, nothing but heat. Commentators could no longer escape the link with the climate crisis. Mid-week, it was as bad as it could get again. As Tiffany biked, she could feel the pockets of fresh, cool air when she passed under the canopy of urban trees. Conversely, she was literally hit by the torrid hotness when she crossed areas with nothing but concrete. It gave her an idea – she would bring M Lalonde to the park but a block from his house. He would grumble, but she would insist.
And grumble he did. In fact, he griped the whole way there. About everything. “I’ve lived on this damned street my whole adult life. Imagine. Rue Baldwin. What a name! Baldwin. Can’t even say it right, feels so foreign in my mouth still after all these years,” he complained. “Comment as-tu si bien appris le français, d’ailleurs?” he inquired.
“Since my dad was American and my mom’s from out west, I didn’t have a certificate to go to school in English here in Québec. There are few things in life that I am as grateful for as loi 101,” explained Tiffany about her highly proficient French – in French, of course.
Next complaint: “What is it with people these days? Letting their yards go to pot. In my day, we didn’t have all this vegetation, it just creates a mess.”
“Je sais pas, M Lalonde…” intoned Tiffany, dreamily trailing off. After a pause she added, “What I like about trees is that you can’t control them. They write their own destiny. It’s inspiring. And this walk is going to do you some good. You’ll see, it’s cooler in the forest. It’ll be good for your blood pressure. I promise,” Tiffany defended her outing on professional grounds.
It was significantly cooler in the park, as promised. The going was rough on the dirt paths with M Lalonde in the wheelchair, but she managed, and he didn’t complain about that part anyway. She took this as the first sign that his mood was improving, but that was very unscientific of her she knew.
About ten minutes into their expedition, Tiffany noticed a squirrel convulsing in the underbrush off to the side of the path. It was heaving as if it was going to throw up or choke on a hair ball like a cat. She parked M Lalonde, who made a snide comment about having to wait, and for a squirrel no less. Tiffany held her breath, got right down on her knees, sticks poking through her thin skin, and slowly, ever so gently, reached a hand toward the grey critter. It paid no heed. Just as tentatively, she began to stroke its back. Again, it seemed oblivious. She had no idea if her nursing skills could be transferred to the animal kingdom, but she felt compelled to try, nonetheless. She wrapped her hands around its tiny body, her thumbs along its spine and her four fingers on its fuzzy underbelly. Softly, at first, and then gradually more vigorously, she massaged the squirrel, getting a feel for its rodent anatomy. After a moment she thought she could feel the abdomen and began to perform an improvised squirrel Heimlich maneuver. As if she had magic in her fingers, the squirrel hacked up a cherry pit, left behind by a feckless picnicker. The squirrel took no longer than a split second to regain its sang-froid and scurry off to its drey, without so much as a look over its shoulder in thanks. M Lalonde was decidedly deferential for the rest of the stroll. Tiffany took this as another sign that the fresh, cool air had mollified him.
The week progressed according to this new routine – biking to her clients’ neighbourhood, attending to their needs, including a walk in the park with M Lalonde, cycling back, inventing quick, uncooked meals that did not include bread and drawing a perfect X in a square box.
After a few days, M Lalonde commented as she walked in that her bike seat was too low. He’d been spying through the closed curtains! He also shared with her that one of his first jobs was repairing bikes and he still had some tools in the shed. Before their walk he insisted that she get him a wrench and, alas, some Allen keys, which he described to her when he saw her quizzical look. He raised the seat for her, all from the safety of his wheelchair, and with a satisfied pat said, “Voilà.” On her ride home, she felt the increased speed that the higher seat afforded her as more air flowing over her sweaty skin. Her eyes even smarted with it. A week had never passed so swiftly, and she had never looked so forward to the weekend.
Her next destination was to go see her mom. She had bought herself a new outfit for biking because she was tired of washing out the one she had cobbled together in the sink and hanging it to dry in the heat created by the tubes behind the fridge each night. It was in the most subdued colours she could find but still brighter – and much tighter – than what she was used to wearing.
The heat had broken again. It was an idyllic summer day. The wind was coming in off the water and as the branches swayed, the cottonwood leaves summersaulted so Tiffany could see their silver underbelly – the very epitome of the height of summer. She was pleased to see all the cyclists out, but also disconcerted. How have I missed this side of the city all these years? She knew these people must have been out doing their thing all this time. She must have seen them, but she hadn’t noticed them. It shook her sense of reality to realize how constructed it is: based on what she surrounded herself with, a thing of her own making.
Her mom, hefty in her wholesomeness, scooped her up when she arrived. After a barrage of questions about her day-to-day, her mom brought her to the garage where she showed her her dad’s biking things. “I haven’t had the heart to go through these things yet, honey. He had been so enthusiastic about his retirement pastime. So earnest. He would be happy to see you getting into something. He would want you to have them,” Tiffany’s mom coaxed. A brand-new pair of saddle bags and other bike paraphernalia were laid out on the workbench.
At lunch, she knew her mom would serve baguette in a small basket with a cloth napkin – something brightly coloured – and butter. She had toyed with saying that she thought she might have celiac disease but knew that would entail way too much follow-up about how she was reacting to or avoiding gluten. So, she just said that she didn’t like to bike after eating too much. Her mom looked at her sidelong, but since she ate a hearty meal otherwise, didn’t insist to the breaking point.
After lunch and a swim in the inground pool, her mom finally broached a topic that must have been weighing on her. “Honey, you’ve been working at this job for five years now, don’t you think it’s time you considered applying to hospitals again? You’ve gotten so much experience and you are so good at what you do. There’s no need to be afraid. Just look how you won over M Lalonde. The public system needs you, especially now.”
There was the crux of it. Her parents were socialist hippies. They had put aside their convictions to help her feel more comfortable with her chosen profession, thinking the work with private clients was short-term. Her mom hadn’t said it, but Tiffany knew all the same that it irritated and disappointed her mother to see her working for the parallel, private system that her mom and dad had so opposed when it was allowed to come into being in the 2000s. Tiffany was not offended by her mother’s comment. It was delivered with all of her characteristic gentleness and genuine concern. And her mother was not wrong either. The public health care system desperately needed more nurses, this year especially. But the Covid crisis had only shone a spotlight on a problem that was already there. She hugged her mom extra-long: this was one of the first hugs they had indulged in in over a year, the day of her dad’s passing being the exception.
Tiffany was reading on a bench when she happened to look up between chapters to see a man, his legs astride his bike, looking around conspicuously for a place to sit. She slid over and he lowered himself with a sigh, removed his helmet and squirted water from his bottle over his head. The water trickled over his high cheekbones in rivulets just to get caught up in his well-trimmed beard. The droplets hung there like tiny diamonds glistening in the sun. His one-shade-shy of black, curly hair was pulled back in a man bun. Tiffany took note that a low ponytail works with a helmet. He was that bike courier mix between hippy and sporty. No matter how you looked at it, healthy. Her mouth watered as he took a bagel sandwich out of his bag.
“Qu’est-ce que tu lis?” he asked.
Ouff. How to describe Bear, by Marian Engel, to a stranger? It’s actually a novel about a woman who falls in love with and is intimate with a bear. But what would that say about her?
“Euh…it’s about a woman who goes to live in the woods,” she remained true to the storyline but left out the intrigue and incrimination.
“Are you planning to go live in the woods?” he probed, all in French.
Tiffany hadn’t been, but said like that, it didn’t sound like a bad idea. A trip at least. That a conversation that had hardly gotten started with an interloper could plant an idea in her head made her leer.
“Quoi? Did I say something wrong?” he asked defensively.
“Maybe, just maybe, I am,” she replied coyly.
To this he nodded and seemed to size her up. Tiffany was used to being overlooked. Wearing scrubs, traveling on the bus early with all the other tired workers, mostly immigrant women returning from their nightshift cleaning jobs. There wasn’t much to check out and there weren’t many takers.
Then he turned his attention to her bike. He stood with a hop to admire it. Oh no, she thought, what if the stolen bike bag is his! But it couldn’t be, he wouldn’t have a town bike like the one I stole the bag from, would he? He squatted to look at some bike parts Tiffany had never noticed. She had bought the bike on a whim and didn’t understand its worth or uniqueness. She certainly had no intention of using it to swerve through gridlock on a downtown street. But he appreciated its merits and she tried to pretend that she did too. His fingers brushed over the tool case as he said, “Nice,” and she released her breath. After an awkward pause, in which he seemed to grasp that she was an imposter and in which the depth of her attraction to him became undeniable, he asked, “Où vas-tu ?”
“I’m heading back to Montréal,” replied Tiffany, regaining some composure, “Toi?”
“Me too,” he afforded with a look at his hands. They were broad and stocky and very tanned from the second knuckle to the wrist, but pale and silky from the second through the first knuckle and to his fingertips. She registered that this pattern was from gripping handlebars.
“You wanna head back together?” he ventured, their eyes meeting and then darting just as quickly back to his hands.
As she tagged along behind him, she thought about this surprising turn of events. She hadn’t been picked up, well, ever. And nothing had changed about her appearance, really. She was still the same bland, skinny girl she had always been. Tiffany realized that what was appealing to this stranger must be the idea of a lifestyle, a common interest, nothing physical really. It was the first time she had considered that looks are simply a glimpse into something more profound, a Morris code to the soul.
Toward the end of the bike path, as they stood against a railing, both looking out over the placid water (the wind had died down as it often does in the evening), he gently placed his hand on her opposite hip, his arm resting neatly in the small of her back. His sinewy and athletic hand, so used to griping the handlebars firmly, pulling and pushing with each peddle stroke, was so light laying there, communicating the incredible discipline and potential it processed. An electric pulse surged through her spine up and down and up again. It penetrated deep into that spot that was so perfectly countered by her bike saddle. She didn’t reciprocate, but her body eased toward him, in a signal that she hoped he registered as consent.
She spent that whole last stretch agonizing over how that was going to play out. Alexandre, slowed to a stop and signaled for her to come up alongside him. “J’aimerais te laisser mon numéro, si c’est correct,” he offered. They were only bold enough for the customary French double kiss by way of parting, but either this one was much more intimate than usual, or she had become completely unaccustomed to human touch throughout the pandemic, because never had she felt so electrified by the convention before. She had a giddy ride home in the penumbra of dusk.
Back in her three and a half, Tiffany glanced ahead to the empty quadrates as she X’d out the day. So empty. She dropped into her sofa and lay there, motionless, that part of her back where Alexandre’s arm had rested felt full as it was cupped by the worn cushion of her childhood couch. But the rest felt empty. She watched as the room became completely dark. As visuals faded, she became aware of a solitary cricket chirping in her apple tree. Her ears could not discern a response, but she desperately hoped that his serenade was reciprocated, somewhere. She fell asleep there, crying. Crying for all of it, her dad, her mom, herself, the lonesome cricket and his unrequited love.
What was that quote? “Ideas come in pairs, and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection” (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1961). It was like fission: the ricochet of a neutron against an atom splitting the atom in two with an enormous release of energy. That Sunday, Tiffany threw herself into an application to work at the CHSLD around the corner from M Lalonde’s house. Once her application was in, she prepared her resignation letter. Then, with butterflies in her stomach, she set about planning a bike-camping trip.
She tried not to be sentimental and weepy during her last week of work. M Lalonde was somehow both mordant and stoic about her leaving. She had left herself a week between her last shift and her departure for the Petit train du nord, a former train track to the North turned bike path. She had material to buy – the stolen kit and her dad’s accessories would do for her bike – but she had no camping gear. She had food to think about – bread, she would eat lots of bread. And she had lots to learn. Like, what were those four tools in her purloined bike bag for? She thought about calling Alexandre to ask (in fact she thought about calling him all the time) but didn’t want to feel like she was using him, felt embarrassed about not knowing and her feminist side bristled at the idea. She turned to YouTube instead. She struggled with it all, especially the back wheel, but eventually felt comfortable enough with what it would take to fix a flat tire and some other basic repairs.
About mid-week, the phone rang. Her heart jumped at the thought that it might be Alexandre, but then she remembered that she hadn’t given him her phone number. Tiffany answered, hesitantly. She had already been accepted for the nursing job. She wasn’t expecting any calls. An unknown voice asked for Tiffany Stevens.
“I am M Lalonde’s son. My father passed away yesterday. The doctors say it was heatstroke.” M Lalonde’s son informed Tiffany in thickly accented English. “I’m just looking through his things and I found a piece of paper indicating that he wished for you to have his Scrabble game when he passed away. And a bag of tools?” There was an audible question mark on the end of this last statement. “Can I bring them to you?”
“Bien sûr,” Tiffany barely managed to squeak out. “Of course.”
Tiffany recited her address mechanically, expressed her condolences and thanked the man. Before the thought of M Lalonde in duress and the enormity of it all had the time to crush her chest, she grabbed her helmet and keys and rode off. She had no idea where she was going. She just kept riding, riding, riding, faster than she ever had. She traced a path through the city based on traffic lights. Green, go straight; red, turn right. She focused on her legs, on her breath, on the traffic, on her bike, its noises, how it carried her and responded to her.
She managed to keep her larger-than-life feelings at bay, until her attention was captured by the sun, that blasted sun at mid-day. Making her sweat, making people overheat, making them die. Making them die, but being the basis for all food, all life, too. No, it wasn’t the sun that killed M Lalonde. It was humans, humans creating systems without friction. No friction for the sun to get caught up in. No friction to slow down urban sprawl. She had been there with him for a short period to soften the hard world of efficiency that threatened to swallow M Lalonde of Baldwin Street whole. She had offered him friendship and company and he, despite his generally bleak outlook on life, had accepted it. No, she wouldn’t feel guilty about not having been there to take M Lalonde on his walk.
The entire week went by without her working up the courage to call Alexandre. Finally, on the last day, she was compelled to call him out of simple politeness. She apologized for not calling sooner and told him about her trip. He christened her a purist and she didn’t contradict him although she still distinctly felt like a novice. They promised to get together after her trip.
It was mid-August when she left. She had hours of suburbs to get through. The scenery was nothing spectacular, but as a dedicated bike path, it was full of what she was coming to see as comrades. Beaming at her as their bubbles imploded into each other for a passing second. Bikers of all types, ardent and focused, ecstatic and dreamy.
After an 8-hour day she arrived at her campsite. She wasn’t into the wilderness yet, but she was in the outdoors. She set up camp, unstrapped the bike bag, Velcro noise cleaving the thick air, and tucked it safely into her tent. Then she fed herself a carb heavy meal that responded to her body’s necessities, not her mind’s need for control. She made herself a fire and watched the flames lap out ideas that only she could string together. Above her she registered the quivering of leaves high in the canopy. The heat from the fire was creating a column of air disturbance. Perhaps people accustomed to living outside would have been able to detect camps from far away by seeing subtle rustling of leaves in isolated spots on calm days. Perhaps someone on a ridge was wondering who she was. For one of the first times though, she herself was not wondering.
When her eyes began closing of their own accord, she slid into her sleeping bag and allowed the darkness to wash over her. The place was oddly quiet – devoid of the jolting mechanical noises she was so accustomed to in the city – and loud at the same time. In contrast to her forlorn little patch of green, housing a lone cricket, this meadow harboured a choir of crickets. Their chirping blurred together into one unending chorus. The distant insects made a unified high-pitched drone, and the closer individuals articulated their song as distinct notes. As she slid into sleep, without crying for the first time in over a year, it was pride she felt.
After the calendar, she relocated to her bathroom to brush her teeth and hair, two minutes each. By her bed, she realigned her moisturizer, alarm clock, phone. She placed her earrings in her jewelry box. It snapped shut with a magnetic click, a sound of precision and orderliness as pleasing to her now as when her dad gave her the case as a gift on her 10th birthday.
She arranged her sheet flat over herself with the blanket folded accordion style at the foot of the bed so that when she would inevitably get cold overnight, despite the heat wave, she could pull it up directly, no fuss. At precisely 10 p.m., she shut the light and tucked herself in to quietly cry herself to sleep, only to wake exactly eight hours later.
The next morning, after throwing out the rest of her loaf of bread and having granola and yogurt for breakfast instead, Tiffany went down to the street to wait for her bus. The morning heat was already radiating off her Montreal Plateau city street, making it look like it had been painted over with silver-hued varnish. Her head felt as groggy as the day was smoggy. She sat, bleary-eyed, to wait the 5 minutes until the 24 bus would pass. She’d have to transfer and then walk, whereas if she took the metro, it was a straight shot. But even going against the flow of commuters, there were too many people in the metro cars to her liking. This would have been the case even if they weren’t just emerging from a year and a half of pandemic.
She stared ahead, absentmindedly at first, but slowly her thoughts coalesced on her line of sight. A triangular case came into focus. It was tucked snuggly in the angle created by the seat tube and the crossbar of a run-of-the-mill road bike sloppily locked to a street sign. As she gazed at it, its perfect fit became more and more mesmerizing. Sheepishly, she crouched down and saw that the supports were cloth-lined concave plastic, exactly the curve of the bike tubing. It was as if the bag cupped the bike stays in a loving embrace. At each end was a Velcro cinch strap, pulled just to, so easy to put on. And so easy to take off.
From the corner of her eye, she spotted the bus trundling down Sherbrooke Street toward her. Without a thought, she released the straps, slipped the bike pouch into her shoulder bag with her breadless lunch, and boarded the bus. Anyone watching her from the bus would have thought she was removing it from her own bike. But still, Tiffany looked guiltily around her as she took a seat. She had never stolen anything before in her life. And she hadn’t been on a bike since she was a teenager. What had possessed her? The abruptness and thoughtlessness of the gesture is what appalled her the most. It was as if she didn’t have the slightest control over what she had just done. As if the object’s raw appeal had taken over.
The inside of the bag wasn’t much bigger than the triangle she could make when she brought her pointer fingers and thumbs together. She turned the four objects she found inside, all foreign to her, over and over again and admired their economy of space. Some L-shaped bars attached by a key chain. Then, some screwdriver heads spouted from a yellow plastic centre like a sunburst. Third, she found three identical blue plastic objects that resembled a simple can opener, all nested perfectly one into the next. Finally, an ever-so-small plastic box held a miniscule piece of sandpaper and a patch that looked like the Band-Aids she applied after administering a vaccination.
At Tiffany’s stop, she took in how much the sun had risen. The expanse of road did its best to annihilate the cooling effect of the maple trees lining the boulevard, giving the heat a metallic tinge that made it all the more unbearable. Her first client lived on Rue Baldwin in the Tétreaultville neighbourhood of Montréal East. M Lalonde. Gaston Lalonde. The first thing she usually did when she got to his house was to throw the drapes wide open and crack a window. But today, in this heat, she knew she’d better leave the curtains drawn.
“Bon matin, M Lalonde. Êtes-vous bien dormi?”
“Bonjour, Madamoiselle, Tu sais, I never sleep well in this blasted heat,” he griped back, in a heavy Quebecois accent.
M Lalonde was a curmudgeonly old man. All six of his children lived in Québec, and some resided in Montréal, but none had offered to keep an eye on him, so they hired her, a registered nurse, to check in on him, administer his medications, make sure he ate and was washed.
She had enrolled in her nursing certification after high school, at 17 years old. The next summer, she was already working basic hospital jobs. By the time she was 19, she had graduated, and in handing her her diploma, they implied that she could be in charge of other people’s lives. She felt like a pinball ricocheting off the bumpers to the out hole faster than she could control with the flippers. The thought terrified her, paralyzed her. She sometimes felt that way when she drove a car, which wasn’t very often. She would be driving along and suddenly, she would think, “Who let me be in charge of so much speed, weight, energy, potential?” In those moments she didn’t feel like it was her driving the car at all. She couldn’t imagine having all that power over someone’s destiny. The thought of devolving into an absentee driver in an emergency where someone’s life depended on her made her stomach lurch. As a Personal Support Worker she helped elderly people still living at home, not on death’s doorstep, as patients in hospital often are.
Tiffany had been coming to work with M Lalonde for about a year now. She had started here just about the time her dad died, which made it easy to track the time. Her dad went into hospital because of a minor issue with his diabetes and contracted Covid there. Never came out. Tiffany had cried every night since.
M Lalonde was hard to warm to. And he didn’t take a liking to people quickly either. He would bark and bellow. The only thing he commended her on was her French. He was ready to dislike her because she was an anglophone, but her French was so good that he couldn’t say much against it. She was about ready to give up on befriending M Lalonde when she glimpsed a well-used Scrabble game in his closet. When she asked him about it, he begrudgingly confessed that he played every night with his wife for nearly 50 years. She promptly fetched the step stool and brought down the game, dusting it off swiftly with one deft swipe of her hand. She hadn’t played much in French, but it was by far her favorite game. At the outset, they played silently; he was a man of few words. But as time went on, they learned to appreciate each other’s gift for finding the perfect word and began to chat about the gems, accordingly. “Comment tu connais ce mot-là?” And in answering how they knew the words, they opened little windows unto themselves.
Like the time she played the word insoumis. Of course, he asked about that one and she replied, “My dad was a draft-dodger himself.” He had come from the US in 1972. He worked odd jobs out west until he met Tiffany’s mother, much later. Usually, she hid the fact that she herself was American, by virtue of being her dad’s daughter, and had surprised herself to be telling the story so freely then.
But not so surprised as when M Lalonde began telling his story of dodging the draft – the Canadian draft into WWII. She had heard about the phenomenon and its scale, of course, but never firsthand. M Lalonde had been living on the future site of the Olympic Stadium with his family at the time (the expropriation was another story she was privy too via the word emprise). He had gotten wind of the Canadian Army coming to the neighbourhood to recruit, packed some bare essentials into a satchel, and went to hide on Boucherville Island, now a National Park. He wouldn’t say much more about it than that, but Tiffany sensed that it brought back strong, if not punitive, memories, and, also, that her father’s conscientious objector status heightened his interest in, and, just maybe, his admiration of her.
On that scorching day, neither of them was able to come up with grandiloquent words and both chalked it up to the heat. They left the game open on the foldable card table and Tiffany set M Lalonde up in front of a fan, wishing she could do more to offer him respite from the heat. Her other clients were also sweltering in their apartments and modest houses, especially on the streets where the sun had a field day ricocheting off asphalt to car hoods, from tarmac roofs to concreted-over front “yards,” with little to rein in its tyranny.
At the end of the day, she felt like a limp dishrag, all the life-giving fluid drained out of her and nothing but a sticky residue left over. She had closed the windows of her apartment and drawn the shades before leaving to trap in the cooler night air. A centenary crab apple tree blocked the sun’s rays from hitting directly on her only front-facing window. In the back, neighbours had greenified the alleyway about ten years ago. The trees they planted were beginning to be of some help in residents’ increasing need to combat 33-degree-plus temperatures in an adapting city where most lodgings had no air conditioning.
She had little energy to make supper, and without bread, a sandwich was out, so she poured herself another bowl of granola and collapsed in the armchair, eating automatically, mind empty. At least the milk was soothing as it slid down her throat. The glossy paper of her puppy-themed calendar had undulated in the humid air and her pencil marks hardly showed up as she X’d out another day. She finished her bedtime routine and was waiting until the outdoor temperature was as cool as indoors so that she could open the windows. She picked up some beach glass she and her dad had collected and fiddled with it. It was surprisingly cool. Around ten o’clock the windows became openable, and she lay down with the now-warm glass still curled in her fingers, hot tears streaming down her cheeks.
The next day was Tiffany’s day off. She had no plans, no ambitions. After a bowl of granola, she grabbed her bag and set out for a second coffee, an ice coffee. Feeling lonely and hungry, she fidgeted in her purse and brushed her hand across the bike bag she had pilfered the day before. At first, a feeling of horror fell over her – what does this say about me? But it was quickly replaced by an idea. What if she found the perfect bike to fit the bag? She knew it was supposed to be the other way around, but she couldn’t bear to see this accessory in her apartment on a shelf. It belonged on a bike, and its legitimate carrier was lost to the city. She used her phone to find the nearest bike shop. As she walked there, she fingered the bike bag, memorizing its exact shape. She knew she would look crazy if she seemed to be shopping for a bike to fit an inexpensive doodad.
The store was small and reminded her of a sailboat in that every space was optimally used. She avoided eye contact with the guy behind the counter and began lightly touching the cool frames of the different bikes. Most would accommodate the bike bag perfectly, although some had frames that were clearly too thick. She homed in on a black bike that had appeal to her because it was modest. The others looked like giants next to her 5’2” and she feared she would never be able to scale them.
“Bon choix,” announced the man as he approached, “Most of the other bikes in here are too big for you. These narrow handlebars, they fit your petite shoulders perfectly.” Tiffany was not used to her appearance being commented on. She thought of herself as mousey: thin whisps of dull, dirty-blond hair swirled around her pale face, nothing distinguishing about her features, thin as a rail, no curves. She didn’t know what to think about the attention, so thought about the bike instead. “I’ll take it,” she answered, partly because it was the bike that caught her attention first. But also, to make the man leave her alone.
She walked all the way up to Parc Lahaie where she could at least lean the bike on a tree and revel in the satisfaction of affixing the bike bag. She was hoping that the old adage “you never forget how to ride a bike” was true. Sure enough, once she overcame her trepidation of falling flat on her face - thereby making a fool of herself - and climbed on the bike, she rode right off like she was 16 again. She hadn’t gone far along a calm, one-way street when she saw the ominous storm clouds hovering over the mountain to the west and heard the far-off rumble of thunder announcing the end of the heat wave. Despite the bike being small, Tiffany struggled getting it up the spiral outdoor stairwell, banging in on her knobbly knees more than once. Just as she latched the door to the second stairwell, the downpour began. She leaned her forehead heavily on the wavy pane of glass, rain sliding down it in sheets, while she caught her breath. At least the heat would break with this jolting rupture in the weather, and she wouldn’t have to worry about her clients stuck in their airless apartments.
The next morning, she woke up early and biked to work, realizing that cycling was, in fact, quicker than the bus, even for someone as unathletic as her. The temperature had dropped, but this summer the heat waves were back-to-back. On the news, forest fires out west, record temperatures – 49 degrees in Lytton, BC – power outages in the States, nothing but heat. Commentators could no longer escape the link with the climate crisis. Mid-week, it was as bad as it could get again. As Tiffany biked, she could feel the pockets of fresh, cool air when she passed under the canopy of urban trees. Conversely, she was literally hit by the torrid hotness when she crossed areas with nothing but concrete. It gave her an idea – she would bring M Lalonde to the park but a block from his house. He would grumble, but she would insist.
And grumble he did. In fact, he griped the whole way there. About everything. “I’ve lived on this damned street my whole adult life. Imagine. Rue Baldwin. What a name! Baldwin. Can’t even say it right, feels so foreign in my mouth still after all these years,” he complained. “Comment as-tu si bien appris le français, d’ailleurs?” he inquired.
“Since my dad was American and my mom’s from out west, I didn’t have a certificate to go to school in English here in Québec. There are few things in life that I am as grateful for as loi 101,” explained Tiffany about her highly proficient French – in French, of course.
Next complaint: “What is it with people these days? Letting their yards go to pot. In my day, we didn’t have all this vegetation, it just creates a mess.”
“Je sais pas, M Lalonde…” intoned Tiffany, dreamily trailing off. After a pause she added, “What I like about trees is that you can’t control them. They write their own destiny. It’s inspiring. And this walk is going to do you some good. You’ll see, it’s cooler in the forest. It’ll be good for your blood pressure. I promise,” Tiffany defended her outing on professional grounds.
It was significantly cooler in the park, as promised. The going was rough on the dirt paths with M Lalonde in the wheelchair, but she managed, and he didn’t complain about that part anyway. She took this as the first sign that his mood was improving, but that was very unscientific of her she knew.
About ten minutes into their expedition, Tiffany noticed a squirrel convulsing in the underbrush off to the side of the path. It was heaving as if it was going to throw up or choke on a hair ball like a cat. She parked M Lalonde, who made a snide comment about having to wait, and for a squirrel no less. Tiffany held her breath, got right down on her knees, sticks poking through her thin skin, and slowly, ever so gently, reached a hand toward the grey critter. It paid no heed. Just as tentatively, she began to stroke its back. Again, it seemed oblivious. She had no idea if her nursing skills could be transferred to the animal kingdom, but she felt compelled to try, nonetheless. She wrapped her hands around its tiny body, her thumbs along its spine and her four fingers on its fuzzy underbelly. Softly, at first, and then gradually more vigorously, she massaged the squirrel, getting a feel for its rodent anatomy. After a moment she thought she could feel the abdomen and began to perform an improvised squirrel Heimlich maneuver. As if she had magic in her fingers, the squirrel hacked up a cherry pit, left behind by a feckless picnicker. The squirrel took no longer than a split second to regain its sang-froid and scurry off to its drey, without so much as a look over its shoulder in thanks. M Lalonde was decidedly deferential for the rest of the stroll. Tiffany took this as another sign that the fresh, cool air had mollified him.
The week progressed according to this new routine – biking to her clients’ neighbourhood, attending to their needs, including a walk in the park with M Lalonde, cycling back, inventing quick, uncooked meals that did not include bread and drawing a perfect X in a square box.
After a few days, M Lalonde commented as she walked in that her bike seat was too low. He’d been spying through the closed curtains! He also shared with her that one of his first jobs was repairing bikes and he still had some tools in the shed. Before their walk he insisted that she get him a wrench and, alas, some Allen keys, which he described to her when he saw her quizzical look. He raised the seat for her, all from the safety of his wheelchair, and with a satisfied pat said, “Voilà.” On her ride home, she felt the increased speed that the higher seat afforded her as more air flowing over her sweaty skin. Her eyes even smarted with it. A week had never passed so swiftly, and she had never looked so forward to the weekend.
Her next destination was to go see her mom. She had bought herself a new outfit for biking because she was tired of washing out the one she had cobbled together in the sink and hanging it to dry in the heat created by the tubes behind the fridge each night. It was in the most subdued colours she could find but still brighter – and much tighter – than what she was used to wearing.
The heat had broken again. It was an idyllic summer day. The wind was coming in off the water and as the branches swayed, the cottonwood leaves summersaulted so Tiffany could see their silver underbelly – the very epitome of the height of summer. She was pleased to see all the cyclists out, but also disconcerted. How have I missed this side of the city all these years? She knew these people must have been out doing their thing all this time. She must have seen them, but she hadn’t noticed them. It shook her sense of reality to realize how constructed it is: based on what she surrounded herself with, a thing of her own making.
Her mom, hefty in her wholesomeness, scooped her up when she arrived. After a barrage of questions about her day-to-day, her mom brought her to the garage where she showed her her dad’s biking things. “I haven’t had the heart to go through these things yet, honey. He had been so enthusiastic about his retirement pastime. So earnest. He would be happy to see you getting into something. He would want you to have them,” Tiffany’s mom coaxed. A brand-new pair of saddle bags and other bike paraphernalia were laid out on the workbench.
At lunch, she knew her mom would serve baguette in a small basket with a cloth napkin – something brightly coloured – and butter. She had toyed with saying that she thought she might have celiac disease but knew that would entail way too much follow-up about how she was reacting to or avoiding gluten. So, she just said that she didn’t like to bike after eating too much. Her mom looked at her sidelong, but since she ate a hearty meal otherwise, didn’t insist to the breaking point.
After lunch and a swim in the inground pool, her mom finally broached a topic that must have been weighing on her. “Honey, you’ve been working at this job for five years now, don’t you think it’s time you considered applying to hospitals again? You’ve gotten so much experience and you are so good at what you do. There’s no need to be afraid. Just look how you won over M Lalonde. The public system needs you, especially now.”
There was the crux of it. Her parents were socialist hippies. They had put aside their convictions to help her feel more comfortable with her chosen profession, thinking the work with private clients was short-term. Her mom hadn’t said it, but Tiffany knew all the same that it irritated and disappointed her mother to see her working for the parallel, private system that her mom and dad had so opposed when it was allowed to come into being in the 2000s. Tiffany was not offended by her mother’s comment. It was delivered with all of her characteristic gentleness and genuine concern. And her mother was not wrong either. The public health care system desperately needed more nurses, this year especially. But the Covid crisis had only shone a spotlight on a problem that was already there. She hugged her mom extra-long: this was one of the first hugs they had indulged in in over a year, the day of her dad’s passing being the exception.
Tiffany was reading on a bench when she happened to look up between chapters to see a man, his legs astride his bike, looking around conspicuously for a place to sit. She slid over and he lowered himself with a sigh, removed his helmet and squirted water from his bottle over his head. The water trickled over his high cheekbones in rivulets just to get caught up in his well-trimmed beard. The droplets hung there like tiny diamonds glistening in the sun. His one-shade-shy of black, curly hair was pulled back in a man bun. Tiffany took note that a low ponytail works with a helmet. He was that bike courier mix between hippy and sporty. No matter how you looked at it, healthy. Her mouth watered as he took a bagel sandwich out of his bag.
“Qu’est-ce que tu lis?” he asked.
Ouff. How to describe Bear, by Marian Engel, to a stranger? It’s actually a novel about a woman who falls in love with and is intimate with a bear. But what would that say about her?
“Euh…it’s about a woman who goes to live in the woods,” she remained true to the storyline but left out the intrigue and incrimination.
“Are you planning to go live in the woods?” he probed, all in French.
Tiffany hadn’t been, but said like that, it didn’t sound like a bad idea. A trip at least. That a conversation that had hardly gotten started with an interloper could plant an idea in her head made her leer.
“Quoi? Did I say something wrong?” he asked defensively.
“Maybe, just maybe, I am,” she replied coyly.
To this he nodded and seemed to size her up. Tiffany was used to being overlooked. Wearing scrubs, traveling on the bus early with all the other tired workers, mostly immigrant women returning from their nightshift cleaning jobs. There wasn’t much to check out and there weren’t many takers.
Then he turned his attention to her bike. He stood with a hop to admire it. Oh no, she thought, what if the stolen bike bag is his! But it couldn’t be, he wouldn’t have a town bike like the one I stole the bag from, would he? He squatted to look at some bike parts Tiffany had never noticed. She had bought the bike on a whim and didn’t understand its worth or uniqueness. She certainly had no intention of using it to swerve through gridlock on a downtown street. But he appreciated its merits and she tried to pretend that she did too. His fingers brushed over the tool case as he said, “Nice,” and she released her breath. After an awkward pause, in which he seemed to grasp that she was an imposter and in which the depth of her attraction to him became undeniable, he asked, “Où vas-tu ?”
“I’m heading back to Montréal,” replied Tiffany, regaining some composure, “Toi?”
“Me too,” he afforded with a look at his hands. They were broad and stocky and very tanned from the second knuckle to the wrist, but pale and silky from the second through the first knuckle and to his fingertips. She registered that this pattern was from gripping handlebars.
“You wanna head back together?” he ventured, their eyes meeting and then darting just as quickly back to his hands.
As she tagged along behind him, she thought about this surprising turn of events. She hadn’t been picked up, well, ever. And nothing had changed about her appearance, really. She was still the same bland, skinny girl she had always been. Tiffany realized that what was appealing to this stranger must be the idea of a lifestyle, a common interest, nothing physical really. It was the first time she had considered that looks are simply a glimpse into something more profound, a Morris code to the soul.
Toward the end of the bike path, as they stood against a railing, both looking out over the placid water (the wind had died down as it often does in the evening), he gently placed his hand on her opposite hip, his arm resting neatly in the small of her back. His sinewy and athletic hand, so used to griping the handlebars firmly, pulling and pushing with each peddle stroke, was so light laying there, communicating the incredible discipline and potential it processed. An electric pulse surged through her spine up and down and up again. It penetrated deep into that spot that was so perfectly countered by her bike saddle. She didn’t reciprocate, but her body eased toward him, in a signal that she hoped he registered as consent.
She spent that whole last stretch agonizing over how that was going to play out. Alexandre, slowed to a stop and signaled for her to come up alongside him. “J’aimerais te laisser mon numéro, si c’est correct,” he offered. They were only bold enough for the customary French double kiss by way of parting, but either this one was much more intimate than usual, or she had become completely unaccustomed to human touch throughout the pandemic, because never had she felt so electrified by the convention before. She had a giddy ride home in the penumbra of dusk.
Back in her three and a half, Tiffany glanced ahead to the empty quadrates as she X’d out the day. So empty. She dropped into her sofa and lay there, motionless, that part of her back where Alexandre’s arm had rested felt full as it was cupped by the worn cushion of her childhood couch. But the rest felt empty. She watched as the room became completely dark. As visuals faded, she became aware of a solitary cricket chirping in her apple tree. Her ears could not discern a response, but she desperately hoped that his serenade was reciprocated, somewhere. She fell asleep there, crying. Crying for all of it, her dad, her mom, herself, the lonesome cricket and his unrequited love.
What was that quote? “Ideas come in pairs, and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection” (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1961). It was like fission: the ricochet of a neutron against an atom splitting the atom in two with an enormous release of energy. That Sunday, Tiffany threw herself into an application to work at the CHSLD around the corner from M Lalonde’s house. Once her application was in, she prepared her resignation letter. Then, with butterflies in her stomach, she set about planning a bike-camping trip.
She tried not to be sentimental and weepy during her last week of work. M Lalonde was somehow both mordant and stoic about her leaving. She had left herself a week between her last shift and her departure for the Petit train du nord, a former train track to the North turned bike path. She had material to buy – the stolen kit and her dad’s accessories would do for her bike – but she had no camping gear. She had food to think about – bread, she would eat lots of bread. And she had lots to learn. Like, what were those four tools in her purloined bike bag for? She thought about calling Alexandre to ask (in fact she thought about calling him all the time) but didn’t want to feel like she was using him, felt embarrassed about not knowing and her feminist side bristled at the idea. She turned to YouTube instead. She struggled with it all, especially the back wheel, but eventually felt comfortable enough with what it would take to fix a flat tire and some other basic repairs.
About mid-week, the phone rang. Her heart jumped at the thought that it might be Alexandre, but then she remembered that she hadn’t given him her phone number. Tiffany answered, hesitantly. She had already been accepted for the nursing job. She wasn’t expecting any calls. An unknown voice asked for Tiffany Stevens.
“I am M Lalonde’s son. My father passed away yesterday. The doctors say it was heatstroke.” M Lalonde’s son informed Tiffany in thickly accented English. “I’m just looking through his things and I found a piece of paper indicating that he wished for you to have his Scrabble game when he passed away. And a bag of tools?” There was an audible question mark on the end of this last statement. “Can I bring them to you?”
“Bien sûr,” Tiffany barely managed to squeak out. “Of course.”
Tiffany recited her address mechanically, expressed her condolences and thanked the man. Before the thought of M Lalonde in duress and the enormity of it all had the time to crush her chest, she grabbed her helmet and keys and rode off. She had no idea where she was going. She just kept riding, riding, riding, faster than she ever had. She traced a path through the city based on traffic lights. Green, go straight; red, turn right. She focused on her legs, on her breath, on the traffic, on her bike, its noises, how it carried her and responded to her.
She managed to keep her larger-than-life feelings at bay, until her attention was captured by the sun, that blasted sun at mid-day. Making her sweat, making people overheat, making them die. Making them die, but being the basis for all food, all life, too. No, it wasn’t the sun that killed M Lalonde. It was humans, humans creating systems without friction. No friction for the sun to get caught up in. No friction to slow down urban sprawl. She had been there with him for a short period to soften the hard world of efficiency that threatened to swallow M Lalonde of Baldwin Street whole. She had offered him friendship and company and he, despite his generally bleak outlook on life, had accepted it. No, she wouldn’t feel guilty about not having been there to take M Lalonde on his walk.
The entire week went by without her working up the courage to call Alexandre. Finally, on the last day, she was compelled to call him out of simple politeness. She apologized for not calling sooner and told him about her trip. He christened her a purist and she didn’t contradict him although she still distinctly felt like a novice. They promised to get together after her trip.
It was mid-August when she left. She had hours of suburbs to get through. The scenery was nothing spectacular, but as a dedicated bike path, it was full of what she was coming to see as comrades. Beaming at her as their bubbles imploded into each other for a passing second. Bikers of all types, ardent and focused, ecstatic and dreamy.
After an 8-hour day she arrived at her campsite. She wasn’t into the wilderness yet, but she was in the outdoors. She set up camp, unstrapped the bike bag, Velcro noise cleaving the thick air, and tucked it safely into her tent. Then she fed herself a carb heavy meal that responded to her body’s necessities, not her mind’s need for control. She made herself a fire and watched the flames lap out ideas that only she could string together. Above her she registered the quivering of leaves high in the canopy. The heat from the fire was creating a column of air disturbance. Perhaps people accustomed to living outside would have been able to detect camps from far away by seeing subtle rustling of leaves in isolated spots on calm days. Perhaps someone on a ridge was wondering who she was. For one of the first times though, she herself was not wondering.
When her eyes began closing of their own accord, she slid into her sleeping bag and allowed the darkness to wash over her. The place was oddly quiet – devoid of the jolting mechanical noises she was so accustomed to in the city – and loud at the same time. In contrast to her forlorn little patch of green, housing a lone cricket, this meadow harboured a choir of crickets. Their chirping blurred together into one unending chorus. The distant insects made a unified high-pitched drone, and the closer individuals articulated their song as distinct notes. As she slid into sleep, without crying for the first time in over a year, it was pride she felt.
Jena Webb has a PhD in Geography from McGill University and a background in Biology. She is director of programmes at the Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Health and a research professional at l’Université du Québec à Montréal where her research and teaching specializes in the links between health and the environment. She is currently working on research projects looking at the impact of the mental load, especially the “green” mental load, on women’s health and adolescent’s exposure to carcinogens. Her literary interests are in stories that connect nature and health into blueprints for more harmonious relationships. She lives just north of Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) with her partner and three children where she volunteers for the environmental group, Mothers Step In (Mères au front).