Hellgoing Stories Part 12

"Hart," said Kim. "As far as I'm concerned, you have every right not to get over what happened to you. Not to speak to him again."

"But that would be wrong," said Hart. "That wouldn't be the right thing to do."

"It's not -"

"Just one second, honey," said Hart. His lips whitened, mashed together in concentration as he negotiated the idiotic car around the latest in what felt to Kim like an endless series of terrifying turns. The road rose and fell and twisted through miles of hilly, outsized forest, and whenever Kim dared to look out her window there was more often than not just a sheer drop into a maw of cl.u.s.tered spruce beneath her.

The road did not even out for a long time. Hart concentrated and Kim forgot what she wanted to say.

After another hour of driving, she remembered.

"It's not a question of right or wrong," she said. "It's a question of what's best for you."

Hart drove in silence with his mouth moving. He was trying to remember where they left off.

"What I mean by right," he said at last, "is the same as what you mean by best. What's best for me and what's right for me is to not lose touch with my family."

"Is he even a member of your family anymore? I mean after what he's done, does he even have a right to call himself -"

"It's weird how we keep talking about rights," interrupted Hart. "Like it's a legal matter."

Kim could not stop herself from pouncing on this. "Well - yeah - that's a whole other -"

"Honey, no," said Hart.

She sat back. He had told her, very firmly, on the ferry that police had never been an option. That he had chosen "a different path."

"It's not an issue of our rights," said Hart, actually laughing a little at the word. "I have every right to hate him; he has no right to be in my life anymore - to be a part of the family. I said that kind of stuff to myself for years. It didn't resolve anything. It didn't help me to be okay."

It didn't help me to be okay - Kim was starting to recognize Hart's therapy-language. She didn't know if he was trotting it out more than usual, or if he'd always used it and she just hadn't noticed - had thought of it as his own unique vernacular.

They were driving along the ocean now. It was blinding and as big as the sky.

"Everything is too big on this coast," said Kim. "Too much."

THEN THEY JUST did yoga for two straight days.

Everything is stupid here, thought Kim in Downward Dog. She allowed herself to think whatever she wanted as she moved through the postures, didn't censor the worst of herself. Bunch of idiots, she thought in Reverse Warrior, gazing into the mirror at the roomful of knotted bodies of which she was one. Waste of time, she thought in Dancer's Pose. Her family would be appalled to know what she was doing this weekend.

But that was the kind of thing Kim did, after all, her family would have joked to one another - had been joking to themselves for years. Pay good money to stand around on one foot and tell herself she's better off for the experience, healed by all the pointless exertion and suffering. By the live drummer, s.h.i.+rtless and ecstatic in the corner. By the stink of contorted men on every side.

Because Kim was the kind of person who moved to the west coast to go to art school in the most expensive city in the country.

Because Kim was the kind of person who took a job in a copy shop so she could concentrate on music as the years pa.s.sed and she grew less young. Who lived with a depressed person for eleven years and somehow convinced herself his pa.s.sivity meant he couldn't live without her. Who deliberately straddled the poverty line, who chose bas.e.m.e.nt apartments of her own free will. Who dated people like herself - people with too many guitars and not enough square footage. As the charm of it trickled away.

And what did she spend her meagre earnings on? What sort of recreations? With what manner of man?

Kim stared at herself in the mirror, balanced in Eagle Pose, a twisted, one-legged malformation.

ON THE SECOND day, something s.h.i.+fted. She felt the clump of rage she'd swallowed in the car nudge its way upward from her stomach, lodge centre-chest and pop like a blister. She sank into Child's Pose and placed her forehead against the mat, losing track of her breathing. The instructor knelt beside her and placed a hand against her sacrum.

"This happens sometimes," he told her, warmth radiating from his palm. "Everyone else," he called to the room, "please take a vinyasa."

A person couldn't nurse a rage-clump through two days of non-stop yoga, she later understood. The body would not have it. At some point in all the stretching and breathing and releasing the ultimate release had to be undergone.

She felt so much better, felt she had reached a new level; worked through her inbred negativity and come out the other end to take honest stock of the glory that surrounded her. She was lucky; she was blessed. She played music for a living. She was in one of the most beautiful places on earth, eating great food, exercising her body, accompanied by a man unlike any she had ever met - a man who wanted only happiness, who courted it the way other men she'd dated courted the opposite: reflexive pessimism and bogus outrage and - most tedious of all - irony. Hart was the most un-ironic person in the world. He had come through the kind of life that a guy like the Tom Waits imitator from Point Grey, for example, could never comprehend. Hart had experienced enough honest-to-goodness suffering in his life - he didn't indulge the affected kind. He chose light over dark, wellness over addiction, exuberance over cool - he told her that he loved her on the hour.

EVEN AFTER THE eight hours of talking in the car, going over and over everything, Hart never told her what Wilf had done exactly. He wanted to spare her, he said, the "gory details."

"But if I'm going to meet this man," she said. "If you are expecting me to sit across a table from him, to shake his hand."

"That's why I want to spare you," he said.

"But, Hart, that's not -"

"Two times," said Hart. "Only two. It was not - it was just two times. And both times drugs were involved. Never when he was straight. If it had been ongoing, if it had been systematic - we wouldn't have a relations.h.i.+p right now. It's important to understand my family has been torn apart by substance abuse, honey. I mean even before Wilf - going back to my grandparents and beyond. We're all broken vessels."

Hart told her his father had been clean for seventeen years. What Kim needed to understand was that Hart and Wilf had gone through everything already - confession, counselling, tears, apologies. The "journey," as he called it. But Kim was starting at the beginning, he explained; that's what made it hard for her. It was a journey Kim had just begun to undertake.

She wanted to say, But maybe I haven't yet, though, Hart.

"When we get back home," said Hart, "I would love it if you'd come to counselling with me, honey."

THEY WOULD CAMP at Ucluelet and they would surf and the next day they'd see Wilf.

There was no time for conversation the day of their surfing lesson, an experience that was somehow exhilarating and tedious all at once. When Hart first proposed it, she'd imagined the California stereotype, soaring atop the waves in a bikini, but the water was apparently never warm on this coast, not even at the height of summer. She and Hart were zipped from head to toe in two-inch-thick elephant-skins of neoprene - they even had the option to wear hoods, an option Kim accepted. She pulled it over her head and faced the ocean, feeling weirdly safe, like a swaddled baby must - all tucked in.

"Body condom," exclaimed Hart, pulling out his phone to take a picture.

Once the instructor had taught them the basics, the whole day was paddling out past the breakers and waiting for a wave, then catching the wave and trying to stand up on the board, which Hart achieved immediately and Kim did not do once. But the ride itself was thrilling, even lying flat, and here was another cliche that broke over her with sudden, vivid reality - catching a wave. Catch a wave, and you're sitting on top of the world. It was true - it was a rush. Aging, adulthood, it was all about the eventual comprehension that people repeated what seemed like tired bulls.h.i.+t at you over and over again in life until it finally sunk in.

After a while Kim kept getting sloshed off her surfboard. She was trying to get out past the breakers as before, but a swell would always rise up and slosh her into the water, where she'd roll around like a crab before yanking the board back to her with the tether around her ankle and managing to hoist herself up onto it again. She couldn't figure out what was happening, what had changed, until the instructor shouted to her and pointed at the sh.o.r.e. Getting there seemed to take forever. She'd been paddling around in the waves for over two hours, she realized - just mindlessly paddling to get out past the breakers and waiting for a wave, then doing it all over again, countless times, one wave after another. She was exhausted and hadn't known.

THEY MURMURED TO each other in their sleeping bags. Kim almost wished they weren't camping so close to the ocean. After the surfing, all she could see when she closed her eyes were waves rus.h.i.+ng forward from the horizon. She could still feel them beneath her, moving, and she braced instinctively as she lay there, engaged her core muscles the way the instructor had taught. The same thing was happening to Hart. As they'd start to doze, the motion of the waves would jerk them awake. On top of all that, there was the sound of the ocean, the actual ocean as opposed to the hallucinatory one, constant in their ears.

"Guh!" said Hart, jerking awake beside her. "Did you feel that?"

Kim started to giggle, punchy with fatigue. "Go to sleep, Hart."

"I'm so tired, and they keep waking me up."

"I know."

"I'm getting seasick."

"I know."

"We didn't even have s.e.x today!" Hart moaned. Then fell asleep with a soft gasp.

They had not had s.e.x that day because there was no time to have s.e.x, there was no time to talk, there had been no time to do anything but surf, and once the surfing was over they were spent.

Addicts are manipulators, she remembered Hart saying about Wilf.

Drifting off as she dodged the imaginary waves, it occurred to Kim that Hart would have known the effect the yoga retreat would have on her too - he'd been on it himself several times before. The gentle way her knot of rage came loose - he would have predicted it. Hart had taught yoga himself for a while, and Lionel, the instructor at the retreat, was a close, personal friend. Like practically everyone who came into contact with Hart became a close, personal friend.

Hart had been busy keeping her busy this whole time, keeping her loose and flexible, spending all her energy so that there would be nothing left to fuel her outrage and disgust on the day she met his father.

At the yoga retreat, as she crouched with her head against the mat, she had visualized - at the suggestion of Lionel - her heart opening up like a flower. Now she visualized it closing up again.

IN THE MORNING Hart had his guitar out - Kim could just make out "Blackbird" above the surf. Hart once said it was his favourite Beatles song because it took him forever, when he was a teenager, to get the hang of the weird chord progression - so learning it had been a triumph. (Kim had the same experience with "Blackbird" growing up-practically everyone who played guitar did-but she didn't say this to Hart.) During the retreat, Kim had made Hart hide the guitar in the trunk of the Cube because she couldn't bear the prospect of being cajoled into all-night campfire singalongs with the other yogis. She loved singing with Hart but she hated the kind of songs that normal people liked - the kind where everybody knew the words. That whiny, condescending Cat Stevens song, for example. I'll always remember you like a child, girl. People sitting around firepits could never get enough of it. And she didn't like it when people who didn't know how to sing sang. This seemed like madness to Hart, who was always looking for a gig-paid or unpaid-because "you never know who's in the audience, honey." Hart played for anyone, anytime. He prided himself on knowing every campfire favourite and would often say he "hadn't got the job done" if people didn't sing along.

She crawled out of the tent and said, "Can't do it, Hart," when he looked up at her. He pulled the strap over his head and put the guitar aside.

"It won't even be a meal. It's just a couple of hours for tea, honey."

"I can't be in the same room with him."

"He's my dad, honey."

"I mean, it makes me sick, Hart."

Hart caved in like he had a cramp. He just sat like that and it took Kim a few minutes to understand how much she'd hurt his feelings.

SHE SHOOK HIS hand. She sat across the table from him.

His girlfriend was only one year older than Kim.

They drank tea, herbal, and the girlfriend served gluten-free cookies sweetened with agave syrup, which Hart nonetheless declined.

Wilf had clean, s.h.a.ggy hair, silvery blond, and looked to be in incredible shape for a man his age. He had moved to Ucluelet for the surfing, he told her. He worked as a chef at the resort in Tofino before retiring just a couple of years ago. He had met his girlfriend, Cedar, there, where she still worked, managing the restaurant.

"Do you like storms?" Cedar asked Kim.

"Do I like storms?" Kim repeated.

"Watching storms? The dining room at the inn is the best place to watch storms on the entire coast. You guys should stop in for a drink if the weather takes a turn." Kim wondered if Cedar was being diplomatic about their finances in suggesting they go to the restaurant for a drink and not dinner.

Wilf had all his guitars mounted on one wall of the living room. As his ex-wife had plants, so Wilf had guitars.

Eight hours north, in cougar-stalked Port Alice, Kim had thought that Brenda and Arlo resembled Hart - that they were stunted versions of him, shrunken by their terrible, terrified lives.

But it turned out she had imagined that. Hart resembled his father or no one. When Wilf crossed the room for an embrace, no one's head ended up in anyone's chest - they were precisely the same height, with the same ropey, over-toned limbs. The same shameless rooster's chest.

She went to use the bathroom just as everyone was moving outside onto the patio. Cedar stayed in the kitchen to clear away the cups. The window was open in the bathroom, and Hart and his father stood almost directly beneath it.

"Have a seat," she heard Wilf say to Hart.

Now they are alone together, thought Kim. Now they are going to say something alone together.

But they talked about her instead.

"Nice girl," said Wilf.

"She really is."

"A bit older, eh?"

"A few years."

"What's that like?"

"It's what I need right now," said Hart.

Kim sat holding a wad of tissue in one fist. The fist was in the air, like she was showing it to someone.

"But it's going well?" said Wilf after a moment or two.

"Yes, Wilf. It's going really well. That's why we're here."

"Well, I just worry about you," said Wilf. "I would hate to see you get hurt."

THEY DROVE BACK to the campground after stopping at the grocery store for dinner supplies, and then they had s.e.x in the parking lot, in the Nissan Cube. Then they carried the groceries to their campsite, set everything up to cook, but instead went into the tent and had s.e.x again. After dinner they went for a walk and after twenty minutes Hart pulled her onto the sand.

"Jesus Christ, Hart," said Kim.

He giggled into the waistband of her pants.

At one point during all this, Kim was thinking, What are you trying to make up for?

And she was thinking, He knows what I heard today.

And she was thinking, Distraction.

And at another point she thought, Fine; whatever. Whatever I can get.

Just before they went to sleep, Hart said, "I would like it if you went off the pill."

Kim said, "If something like that ever happened to one of my brothers? They'd kill him. They'd just get a gun and they'd f.u.c.king kill him, Hart."

Hart didn't move. Kim had blindsided him, and she was happy. He believed he had wrung this sort of thing - this att.i.tude - out of her with healthy activity and s.e.x, suns.h.i.+ne and ocean air. He thought he could cure her and she was showing him he hadn't.

IN THE MORNING, he was up ahead of her again, making coffee. She heard him tuning the guitar and decided to sleep in and make him wait. Eventually he began to sing, and the longer she lay in her sleeping bag, the louder he got. He began dedicating all the songs to her.

Wake up, little Kimmie, wake up!

Soul of a Kimmie was created below!

Kiiiiimieee. You're breakin my heart!