Free The Shore Girl by Fran Kimmel Page B

continued. “The bureaucrats have clumped the kiddies together, stuck them in a Petri dish. It’s the teacher type’s job to stir up the mix, watch what festers. An unhygienic process, don’t you think? Bad for the immune system.”
    She leaned back on her elbows, legs bent at the knees, her head tilted back. I imagined her at age sixty, sitting that way. She would be limber, sturdy, her beautiful neck stretched back, greying hair flowing past her shoulders.
    â€œThen why do it? Why teach?” she stared up at the speckled ceiling like it was an open sky, where clouds in imaginative shapes wing by.
    â€œI don’t know.” And I didn’t really. “You get up in the morning, hard-wired to squeeze the toothpaste with the same pressure you used yesterday. Step out to wander through a day like any other.”
    She was still focused on the ceiling, but I could tell she was listening. “But then you press up against something that defies explanation. A man you don’t recognize but already know. A woman who’s drowning, so she learns to stop breathing. There is something inexplicable in the discovery. Not the discovery itself, but your connection to it. Your neural circuitry shorts out. You cross over recklessly, and in an instant, re-author yourself, start a new path. It can’t be reversed.”
    Elizabeth laughed. I felt buoyed by the sound, its weightlessness, as though she had risen from the murky depths and floated to the surface with me. She poured herself more wine.
    â€œIt’s a bullshit explanation,” she said.
    Her choice of words discouraged me, but I forged ahead anyway. “Can you do any better?”
    â€œYou don’t like typing. You want summers off. Maybe you like kids.”
    â€œI meant you. Can you do any better? Explain how you got here? Why you’re sitting on this floor, in this town, with this teacher?”
    â€œI’m sitting with the teacher because she barged through my doorway. She assumes the word ‘no’ doesn’t apply to her.” She was not stingy with her affection. It was merely inaccessible, like a box of chocolates on a shelf too high.
    â€œBut you opened the door. And it doesn’t explain the rest. How you and Rebee got to this place. The moments that led you to here. You can trace them back, you know. Try it.” She crossed her legs again, straightening her spine.
    â€œYour one particular moment of discovery,” I added. “That one connection greater than the rest.”
    Drops of red spread over her cheeks like food colour in water. She took another drink.
    â€œAren’t you even going to try?”
    â€œHow I got here? The Number 2 highway, then the 55 , I think. No great connections. No big moment of truth. I got tired of driving.”
    â€œSo you stop when you’re tired? Pick up again when you get your juice back?”
    â€œThat’s about it.”
    â€œBullshit. I don’t believe it.”
    â€œI don’t really care.” She smiled when she said this. She looked right at me.
    We sat in the fog, cross-legged, and had the rest of our picnic in silence. I emptied the last of the wine into our cups. Dregs clotted in the bottle, something the boy didn’t mention. Elizabeth’s eyes were shiny. She stared at the blanket.
    â€œI’m going to live in Tuktoyaktuk,” I said, trying to sound bright. We had finished our plates and I busied myself by clearing up the debris. I folded the rest of the salmon back to its bag, covered the French loaf with its plastic wrapping, carried the leftovers to the kitchen and placed them on the top shelf of the near empty fridge. We’d eaten all the olives. I threw the empty bags in the garbage and crammed them on top of the withered spinach and rotting paper. “There’s enough for a snack later,” I called back to her. “It’s all in the fridge.”
    Elizabeth stood, cup in hand, and