Free In the Land of Birdfishes by Rebecca Silver Slayter Page A

creaking of the steps under her feet and then I heard the front door close.
    I tried to sleep again but felt smothered by the hot, airless room. “Are we that far north that it would be too many goddamn miles to drag a goddamn air conditioner?” I said out loud. The walls were so thin I thought maybe down at the front desk they would hear me.
    At last, I threw on the lightest shirt I had and the only jeans I’d brought and left the hotel. I stopped at a restaurant on the way, but it was even warmer inside, so I took my sandwich to go and headed down to the river again. I passed where Angel and the others had gathered hours before, but they were gone now. The bank settled into rock and then to river. It was not such a steep walk down to the blue moving water. It looked so cool and fresh. I slipped my shoes off and stepped carefully down the rocks. I reached a foot into the river.
    I’d never felt anything so cold in my life. It burned through me and I burst out laughing. I could hardly feel my foot and would not have been surprised to see it bobbing out to sea. I felt awake.
    It was astonishing how swiftly my whole body was cooled by a moment’s submersion of one part of it in the chill water. Now I felt more sure that the sun was lower than it had been and that the air was loosening its hold on the day’s heat. I crouched down onto the rock and then spread both legs out and plunged each foot into the water.
    Again I laughed.
    And then I reached my hands into the water, so that I nearly fell in.
    I was no longer young. I was, I supposed, middle-aged.And I’d been an only child for six years and had not known it. And now I knew.
    My hands burned and my feet burned and I thought my heart would stop. Stepping out of the water, I rubbed my hands and feet till the blood flow returned to them. Then I put on my shoes and walked back up the hill. Mara was so frightened of water. In that moment I could remember as closely as if my sister’s damp, relentless hand was still in mine, how she had cried when our father taught us to swim.
    I wasn’t surprised when I saw Angel sitting there, beside the road, watching me and playing her guitar.
    “You followed me again?” I asked.
    “It was Jason who—”
    “I know,” I said, and she went back to her song. I couldn’t figure out how I hadn’t been able to hear her singing all the time, her voice was so clear now. I told her I was sorry and she nodded.
    “We’re late,” she said, putting her guitar away and it made a soft thrum of sound, knocking against the case.
    The bar was called The Pit and it was a good name. It was a good name for a place that felt like a basement but wasn’t. It was the sort of bar I would have avoided back in Nova Scotia.
    Angel and I took a place at a table along the back wall. I wondered why bars like this were compelled to line their walls with rusted bits of trash and kitsch. Why did they want this refuse to speak of the kind of place this was and what was kept in it?
    The waitress was pretty and young and all wrong in this place. She was polite enough and brought us two pints that Angel ordered. It was the type of bad draft beer that tastes toosweet and then leaves its sour fingerprints in your mouth for hours afterwards. I drank it fast so I wouldn’t taste it. I didn’t see Jason anywhere.
    “Maybe he didn’t believe me that you would come,” Angel said quietly.
    “Maybe,” I said, “he just didn’t give a shit.”
    Angel turned her chair so she could see the door, and she watched it like a dog with its eye on a bone. I was grateful she didn’t want to attempt some sham of a conversation, but it made me nervous to watch her in profile, staring steadily ahead and hardly blinking.
    The waitress came and asked me what I wanted. I looked down and saw my glass was empty. “Another,” I said. “Something in a bottle.”
    He hadn’t left a phone number for me. I didn’t know where he was staying, if he was even still in Toronto.