The Martlet

We made a sand castle at the edge of the water. Sara played architect in a dollar store red swimsuit before raining sand into my hair. We used coke cups to shape the spires, plastic spoons to dig the moat, credit cards to etch windows and a drawbridge. We gave it a peak so high, the royal couple could peer out over the forest of kelp and seaweed that lined the beach. Sara stuck a cocktail umbrella up top to be their flag. She’s an artist.

The water rose up and Sara started back toward the car. I asked her to help me wrap kelp around the castle to keep it safe from the advancing water, if only for a little longer.

She kept walking. “Let the tide eat it.”

A week ago, we said hello in the last wake of daylight. Wasn’t the first time we’d met, but it felt new. Sara pulled up in a yellow Honda Civic, faded with a desperate need for rain.

I set my backpack in the trunk, then sat in beside her.

“I thought we’d need my car.”

Sara’s hair hung down freely, dark mahogany curls, a tapestry of eyelets caressing her shoulders. Thimbles of thigh skin peeked through holes in her jeans. She leaned into the road with a red eyeliner stare.

“Nah, I borrowed Joe’s.”

The roads this side of Richmond are themed with the trees that line them. We passed through maples, oaks, blossoms, pines, until I stopped staring out the windshield altogether. Dust slept in the air.

“We should go to Harrison,” she said as we pulled out of the city, serious as a eulogy.

She grinned. “You in?”

She’d phoned me up earlier that day, around noon, and asked if I had vacation time. I was planning a week at the end of August.

“How about now?”

She had my number from that day in April at the art gallery, the day she turned me down. I had waited right up until closing, until the gallery was empty, just her and I, and given her my business card.

Turned out, she’d had a boyfriend. The guy really loved her, she said. Sara seemed surprised at that. His name was Joe.

Sara made and sold paintings. Well, she tried, at least — mottled swashes of reds and blues with the silhouettes of hollow people dripping through. She brought them into the co-op gallery at the end of February, two new pieces every week. She’d step in with the paintings under her arm, with open sandals, stained orange capris, brown braids and an array of tank tops and cardigans. Dropping her new paintings at the counter, she’d march straight to her older submissions, stare at them, ankles wide, total silence, a good five minutes per piece of art. Her body would tense as she forced herself through some internal process, trying to understand why they wouldn’t sell.

I kept one of her paintings in a dark corner, away from the skylights. The entire canvas, almost my height, was drenched in a wash of inky blacks and cavern blues, real oil paints swirling in a determined, dark precision. The paint held every chill in the air and shadow in your soul. And floating in the middle of the abyss was a silhouette of a man in a suit and bowler hat, dusk-orange, like a cutout the colour of instant macaroni. He had fat dollops of red for eyes and a circle of graffiti arrows pointing inward around his belly.

That one, I bought.

We left Richmond for Ladner, then Ladner for Harrsion Hot Springs, where Sara finally slowed down to sleep. She refused to let me drive; it was something she “had to do.” We parked by the beach under a giant windsock, reclined the seats, covered ourselves with our blankets and coats.

Sara’s eyes flickered madly as she slept. I quietly opened my car door and went for a walk, stepped up the cobblestone path from the parking spots to the beach. The air felt wet, the water looming out like a great void. Marinas and resort homes etched light into its perimeter, but the water itself felt like a terrifying hole at the centre of the world, like so many others.

Sara had put on some J-pop music along the way, pretended to sing along to it, had me convinced she knew Japanese. “God, you’re dense.”

We had bonded on our apathy for sports teams, on our dislike of local celebrity artists. We had talked about everything under the sun except why we had left.

Her cellphone woke me up — the theme to Denver the Last Dinosaur. The sun sizzled through the windshield. I answered the call. “Hello?”

Sara came to with a sudden lurch and snatched the phone, rolled out of the car and walked a dozen paces along the rocks. Her body clenched, like in the gallery. Shut the phone. “Time to move on,” she said.

“What about breakfast? There’s a café across the street selling strawberry wedge pancakes.”

“Take the box of granola bars on the back seat. That’ll do for now.”

Her whole body shook.

I stroked her arm. “I’m sorry if — ”

She shrunk back. “Don’t. It’s not you.”

We later filled up on gasoline and burgers as we passed by Hope. An endless fence of pine trees penned in the road on either side.

Every day, Joe called her. Every day, she stopped the car, crinkled like tinfoil, and then announced our next destination. Every day, she drove faster, farther. She never looked sad when she returned from talking with Joe, just determined. “We’re going to Nicola Lake,” she’d say. Kamloops. Clearwater. Blue River.

At our stop in Blue River, we picked up a couple of mickeys to keep us warm. Sara rolled past the stick-shift, onto to my side, onto me.

“D’you mind if we cuddle?” It was a fit, the both of us on one seat, legs and arms bent around each other, filling the other’s empty spaces. Her hair still smelled of acrylics.

In the morning, I rolled from under Sara’s soft shoulder, out the passenger side door. I stumbled to the nearest grass and keeled at my waist. I was sober now, but the butterflies in my stomach still felt drunk.

She fed me licorice drinks at Burn’s Lake, at a bar filled with fishermen. We sat out on the small wooden patio. Across the street stood The Bucket of Blood, an old fur-trading post, operating room, and gambling den.

She bought us shot after shot, until my knees could barely keep me standing. Sara laughed, put my arm around her shoulders, and pulled me to the men’s room like a set of crutches.

“Never had Jager, I see,” she whispered into my ear. When I returned to the patio, I stole one of her hands and grinned wild and rabid, pulled her to her feet, launched us into a drunken lurchdance- tango. We collapsed into our chairs with a heap of laughs and snorts.

Sara leaned her elbows over the table. “At the gallery, you always seemed so stuffy, but in a fake way, like you were doing your best impression of a 60-year-old man.”

She tipped over an empty shot glass with the side of her arm. “It’s — it’s nice to know that you drink, And — and dance — if that was really dancing.” She reached over and held my hands. “You’re a really terrible dancer.”

I smirked. “And you’re a terrible driver.”

She let out a drunken giggle.

I leaned back in my chair. “I’m just saying that it’s common courtesy to stop at stop signs every once in —”

That’s when I leaned back too far, landed flat on the wooden planks of the raised patio floor. Month-old pretzels poked against my nose. Sara cackled, staggered around the table, and held out an arm. I pulled her down on top of me, and her face an inch-and-a-half above my own. Her hair draped in tangled clumps.

I broke the moment.

“You do realize we’re crazy, right? I mean, you phone me up one day and we’re off, and now....” I examined her perfect green eyes. “Why did you bring me?”

“You just seemed so... non-committal, so... no pressure. I didn’t really know you, so you weren’t — real.”

We stayed down there on that beer-stained patio floor, an inch-and-a-half from her nose to mine, an inch-and-a-half-as good as miles, an impassable desert, an oasis mirage in the distance. Her lips.

We sat atop the hood of Joe’s Civic as our sand castle fell to ruins. The tide swelled the castle’s moat, melted its bastions, flattened its spires. The cocktail umbrella flag fell last before being inhaled by the waves, until our castle was an empty plain, like every other inch of the shore.

Sara leaned back in her fleece sweater, her arms bent like a gosling’s wings. She soaked in the starlight, exposed her ruby swimsuit bottom and a flight of goosebump legs.

“So you’re the one who bought my painting, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Figures. What did you see in it, anyway?”

“Well I — ”

“It’s just a Magritte rip-off. Bowler hats and silhouettes.”

I turned to her. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“You’re not Magritte. Magritte’s paintings were meant to evoke mystery, but to mean nothing. But you? Your paintings mean something, Sara. Emptiness. Storms. Hunger.”

Sara opened her lips and breathed in, about to respond, then swallowed herself. “I forgot you were a gallery person.”

She pulled her legs back under her sweater, and spoke to the stars. “Maybe Magritte was right. Maybe great works should mean nothing.”

I thought about home, about my rental house, the apple tree and the pleasant, suburbanite neighbours. About my long-dead plants, my bookshelves, about whether I had enough cash to catch a bus-ride home.

Sara took my hand in hers. “Mind you, I don’t know how anyone could paint without their work meaning something.”

Among the twilight and the distant sounds of birds, I squeezed back.

Thirty kilometers outside of the town of Stewart, a great glacier dies. Truck-size shards of blue ice tear from its cliffs and tumble down a lifeless blue tongue into the lake below.

I’m supposed to be at the gallery, buttering up customers and praising artists. I’m supposed to be polishing framed landscapes, dusting sculpted lives.

The town has rows upon rows of squatting houses half-torn by weather, with dark, warpedwood walls. They’re like open dollhouses, with cascades of snow peering out like ghosts from the bedrooms.

A few decades ago, Stewart was home to 10,000 people. Less than 500 now.

“What made them leave?” Sara asked a local woman at the diner, while taking a bite of breakfast sausage.

The woman wiped her hands on her apron. “People go where the work needs them.”

We’ve spent an entire day here, in a tiny, onestory inn. We held staring competitions and watched terrible TV. After an attack of tickles, we ended up lying down, me atop her, an inch-and- a-half mile separating her nose from mine.

I leaned in, but she flinched, pushed me off, grabbed a hunk of bread, bit, and smiled.

I’ve caught her staring at the phone in the room, but she hasn’t picked up the receiver yet.

Me, I’ve almost maxed out my visa, and Sara can’t have much left. We can sleep in the car tomorrow. For now, Sara splashes about in a hot bath, a door away. Tonight, we’ll cuddle close and fall asleep at each other’s elbows. Tomorrow, I don’t know. I don’t want to think that far ahead.

We’ll need to leave here soon.