Читать книгу The Restoration of Emily - Kim Moritsugu - Страница 6

I drive out to the airport on Sunday evening to pick up Jesse from his New York trip, and when I see him waiting at our agreed-upon curbside spot — his hair messy, his jeans baggy, his eyebrows knit in a poor imitation of nonchalance — my heart does its usual salmon-spawning leap. The primal mother in me will always be relieved to find him safe, uninjured, and not crying after we’ve been apart, even when he’s thirty, I should live that long.

In the car, I take his hand and hold it for a moment, and the old, sweet, affectionate Jesse squeezes back. The newer, more independent Jesse ejects the Brandenburg Concertos CD from the car stereo and says, “How can you stand hearing this same old classical shit over and over?”

“It has a certain mathematical precision that I find soothing.”

He isn’t listening, meant his question to be rhetorical. He inserts his own CD in the player, turns up the volume, and does not fasten his seatbelt until I remind him to five minutes later.

“How was the flight?”

“Okay.”

“Did you get something to eat?”

“I had a Caesar salad at La Guardia, only I forgot to ask for no croutons so I had to pick them out, but don’t worry, I didn’t eat any crumbs.”

“Have you had any cramps?”

“Relax, I’m fine.”

Jesse’s celiac disease — a lifelong allergy to the gluten in wheat, barley, and rye — has weighed on me since he was diagnosed with it at the age of eighteen months, but I am not otherwise unrelaxed. I watch the road (I must get some new eyeglasses for distance), listen to him rap along in his tuneless voice to the music, and wait a verse’s length of time before saying, “How’s your dad?” It’s difficult not to modify the word dad with an adjective like pompous or puffed-up, but I manage.

“He’s okay. He’s put on some weight.”

“Bryony isn’t watching what he eats?” Bryony is a size zero, eats only fruit and lettuce, I’m convinced, and runs twenty miles every morning on a treadmill at seven o’clock with a trainer while the au pair minds the kids and Henry reads his first five newspapers of the day.

“She tries to get him to eat healthy, but he does what he wants.”

Henry always has.

There are doubtless more fascinating details Jesse could tell me about his weekend, like that he saw a NBA player up close at a game and how cool that was, or that one or both of his half-brothers was an out-of-control brat. But he will dole out tidbits of information later, when he’s in the mood — or not.

He says, “How was your weekend?” as if reading a line from a play spoken by a character more well-mannered than he.

“I did that chaperoning thing at your school dance.”

His archness drops. “Shit, I forgot about that. How’d it go? Tell me you didn’t do anything I’ll be hearing about on Monday at school, like say one word to my friends.”

I see again the cocky look on Spencer’s face by the gym doors and feel him touching me. Since I neglected to tell Spencer to keep our encounter — too grand a term for what transpired — confidential, and I didn’t swear the girls to silence either, the story may be all over the school population by now, courtesy of instant messaging. “Actually, there was an incident.” How to present this to minimize Jesse’s disapproval? “Nothing major.”

He covers his face with his hands. “Fucked for life, that’s what I am. Fucked for life, because my mom had to go and volunteer at the dance.”

“Calm down. All that happened was that I told Spencer McKay to hide when I found him in the girls’ washroom dealing dope and Mr. Harkness was around the corner.” Much as I want it to, this summary does not sound like a description of nothing.

“Are you kidding me? What do you mean that’s all that happened? What more could have happened?”

I could have beckoned Harkness over is what, and said, “I think we’ve got a live one here,” Spencer could have been suspended and/or handed over to the police along with tough cookie Jill, parents could have been called, and endless earnest discussions about drug use could have ensued, and I had prevented all that, more credit to me. I say, “You’ve still never smoked dope?”

“It’s called weed, Em. And no, I haven’t. I don’t drink, either.”

We drive on a minute in silence. “Why not?”

“Shut up.”

“No, really. If everyone else is doing it, why don’t you?”

“You know why — because I’m an athlete.”

I should be happy that Jesse’s dedication to athleticism has given him a reason not to drink and smoke, but how long can he resist what I think of as the inevitable rites of teenage passage? Rites I underwent repeatedly at his age.

He says, “I’d better stay home from school tomorrow, so I don’t have to see anyone who was at the dance.”

“You’re overreacting. I’m sure it’s all forgotten now. And would you prefer that I’d ratted him out?”

I wish I’d used a different expression, one that sounds less like Edward G. Robinson issue, but he doesn’t mock me for it or complain. Instead, he ejects his CD from the car stereo player, says, “You can put your classical shit back on,” places his CD into his Discman, plugs his headphones in, and turns up the volume, shuts me out.

A few minutes later, I reach inside my jacket pocket for a tissue, touch something unexpected, examine it with my fingers inside the pocket, mutter, “What’s this?” Luckily, Jesse’s music is playing too loud for him to hear me, so I don’t have to explain that what I’m touching feels like a foil packet about two inches long and one wide. Luckily, I have the presence of mind to leave the mystery packet in my pocket. If it’s what I think it is, it can only have been placed there by Spencer.

The packet burns a hole in my mind all the way home and is still giving off heat when we go inside the house. Jesse heads up to his room right away, and when I can hear his music playing and know he’s settled in at his computer, I deke into the kitchen with my jacket still on, pull out the packet, unwrap the foil, count three thin, neatly rolled joints, and wrap them back up. I hide them in a deep green ceramic vase that has stood untouched on a high shelf for months. I could flush the contraband down a toilet or bury it deep inside a garbage bag, but my subconscious murmurs that the painkilling effects of weed might one day be of help with my frozen shoulder. And my immediate objective is to keep from Jesse any reminder of my collusion with Spencer.

Soon after, Jesse forgives me for the dance incident; that is, he forgives me after he chats online with friends and finds out that the main gossip story of the night did not involve my actions or inactions but was about two boys who had a fistfight, during which wannabe thug x had metaphorically kicked wannabe thug y’s ass by bloodying his nose. According to eye-witness accounts, Harkness, ever ready to face conflict and terror, stepped into the fray and his shirttails became untucked, and oh, the drama.

The threat of social ostracism due to my parenting removed for the moment, Jesse resumes his normal behaviour. He drops his clothes and belongings all over the house, is appreciative of the chicken cacciatore I made him for dinner, and spends two hours on his computer doing thirty minutes’ worth of math to the accompaniment of loud hip hop music. At one point, he entreats me to enter his room and listen to a song when I pass by in the hall, and he hugs me — payment for my servitude — when I bring him the fresh pineapple and cut-up apple he requests as a post-dinner snack.

At ten-thirty, when I remind him it’s bedtime, he’s watching television. He tells me to chill and let him watch one more play — always one more play, one more possession, one more batter, one more pitch, to the end of the quarter, there’s less than a minute left, see? — and when we’ve watched the one more together, he gets up, brushes his teeth, goes to his room, dives into bed, and waits for me to come say good night like I’ve done every night since he was a baby.

I stand in his doorway and lift my bad arm, reach up and stretch it in the doorframe, try to breathe through the ache. “Did you get all your homework done?”

“Most of it. I can finish my reading for English at lunch tomorrow. Or in my history class. The history teacher’s boring as shit, anyway.”

“That’s an excellent plan. Maybe you can save more time by eating your breakfast in the shower. Or sleeping there.”

“There’s no need for sarcasm, Em.”

“What do you have left to do?”

“Read another chapter of The Catcher in the Rye. I read some of it on the plane.”

“How are you liking it so far?”

“I can’t stand the guy. What a boring wuss.”

Such is parenthood: a favourite, formative novel from my youth, one of the few books I read in an English class that I liked, is to Jesse boring, its hero weak.

I don’t know why I bother, but I say, “Holden Caulfield is considered to be one of the truest voices in American literature.”

“True to who? Weird loners everywhere?”

Well, yes.

I wasn’t always a loner. In high school I had a set of equally alienated friends to get stoned with on weekend nights, in university I found fellow students who shared my disregard for modern architecture, and when I was a newly minted young professional, I had work friends to grouse about the office with, over drinks or at brunch. In the year or so that Henry and I were together before Jesse was born, in the first, self-sacrificial stage of our relationship, we socialized like mad: we went to and gave dinner parties for his writer/artist/journalist friends, we attended book launches, theatre performances, and art gallery openings, we heard jazz musicians play in smoky clubs, we behaved like the other couples of our circle.

Jesse’s squalling, demanding infant presence put an end to any inessential adult outings on my part for a few years, but by the time he could be left with a babysitter for more than two hours without either of us breaking down (not until about age three), I’d lost interest in arts talk, political talk, most talk. Spend time with the same people, I find, and topics, points of view, and anecdotes tend to repeat. Spend time with the same people and the radical ways in which I differ from them — in opinions, attitudes, and tolerance for repetition — become apparent. The many ways in which they irritate me crystallize into clarity too, and sooner or later (lately sooner), I express that irritation, say something obnoxious or critical, regret my words, and want to crawl under a rock afterwards and never come out in public again.

I sometimes fantasize about living alone, in the wild, where I would see no one and I could drop all pretence of conforming to societal normalcy. I could let my hair grow out long and grey and wear it in braids. My eyebrows could get scraggly, I could wear shapeless clothes — the same ones every day — and no makeup, and talk to myself out loud, and eat and gain weight and not care, and keep whatever irregular sleeping and waking hours I chose, and never worry about opening my mouth and saying the wrong thing, because there’d be no one to hear me act the fool, or be rude, or reveal the gaps in my education, or blurt out my prejudices.

The loner in me enjoys entertaining that fantasy, but the pragmatist that I also am knows it’s a crock of implausibility. I hate the wilderness, and where would I get the food that would make me fat, and I’d bore myself to death with no company but my crazed own, and braids would give me a headache, and I’d need some human connection, at least for short periods between restful bouts of solitude.

If only I didn’t find most of those connections so awkward and irksome.

On our next Wednesday morning walk, Sylvia says, “So I think Ben’s started drinking now, for sure.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I went to unpack his bag from the soccer tournament and I found a can of beer wrapped up in one of his soccer socks, inside his shin pads.”

“That’s a clever way of hiding it.”

Sylvia glares.

“I meant, maybe he was carrying it for someone.”

“Or maybe it was the one left over after he drank five others in his hotel room with those punks on the soccer team.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“I left it there and told him to unpack his bag, waited until he had, and searched his room the next day and couldn’t find it anywhere.”

“You see — he was carrying it for someone.”

“What would you do if this happened with Jesse?”

“Jesse can’t drink beer. He’s allergic to the gluten in malt.”

“What if he was drinking vodka, then?”

“I guess I’d think it was quasi-normal teenage behaviour but be worried to death every time he went out.”

“What I can’t get over is that Ben had a whole scheme worked out in advance for hiding the beer so the cans wouldn’t clank around. This from the kid who’s incapable of doing a homework assignment at any minute but the last.”

“Why are you so surprised? What were you doing at his age?”

“Harbouring unrequited crushes and feeling insecure, of course. Weren’t you?”

“Yes, but if we didn’t start acting out until we were sixteen or so, that’s only because time moved slower then, back in the Chaucerian era.”

“So I told Ed we needed to sit down and have a talk with Ben about drinking and partying and whether he wants to throw his life away or succeed.”

Sylvia is a big proponent of the kind of heart-to-heart talks featured on sappy family television dramas. My equally ineffective approach with Jesse when issues arise is to employ the one- or two-minute whiny plead tactic.

“And the worst thing,” Sylvia says, “was that when I talked to Ed, he chuckled and said, ‘That’s my boy!’ and asked me if Ben was dating anyone yet.”

Ed is a good provider — he’s a dentist — but he’s also a hearty, bad-joke-telling bore. I don’t know why Sylvia married him, but I invariably fail to see the appeal of my friends’ mates.

“Lately,” Sylvia says, “Ed’s been making Steve Sutherland look more and more attractive.”

“You call Mr. Sutherland by his first name now?”

She waits until a woman with a dog walks by us before she says, sotto voce, “I’m thinking of calling and asking him out for a drink or a coffee the next time Ed goes away to one of his conferences.”

“Why am I afraid you’re not joking?”

“Because I’m not. Ed is so — Why this weekend, he — I — Okay, listen to this: he insists on reading aloud to me from the Sunday newspaper when I’m trying to have my morning coffee. Twenty years we’ve been together, he knows I hate being read to, he knows I hate being talked to at all in the morning, and still he does it.”

“That would piss me off, too.” It would.

“Whereas Steve doesn’t seem to have a single unattractive trait. And he was pretty heavily coming on to me the other night at the dance.“

“So, you’d have coffee with Mr. Sutherland and then what?”

She flushes. “A little necking in a car might be nice, some making out. Don’t you think?”

In the four years since Henry left, I have tried not to think about necking, making out, or any other form of sexual contact, and have been fairly successful at suppressing and denying any urges of that nature. But why Sylvia, who already has a live-in sex provider, wants to tangle with someone else, I don’t understand.

She says, “For years now, I’ve thought I was happy enough with Ed, that his good points outweighed his bad, and I never thought about cheating. But now it’s like I’ve become enveloped in a cloud of fairy lust. All I can think about is how sexy Steve is, and what I’d like to do to him, in graphic detail.”

“Graphic detail that you’ll spare me, I hope.”

“You’re such a prude sometimes, Emily, honestly. But do you know what I mean? Has this ever happened to you?”

What did she call it? Fairy lust? How immature. “No, I can’t say that it has.” Not that I would admit, anyway.

I’m standing inside my door at 8:38 a.m., dressed and ready to go. I try not to tap my foot while I wait for Jesse to finish wandering around the house the way he does every morning, picking up his various items for school. If he were me, he would pack up the night before, but he’s not me.

“Have you got your phone and your wallet?” I ask this every morning. It’s part of our scripted routine. “And your lunch and your bus tickets?”

He says yeah and yeah, then, “Wait. Is it Thursday?”

“Yes, and can you please get going? I’m in a hurry.”

“It is Thursday? Fuck. Basketball tryouts are today after school.” He runs upstairs. “Do you know where my Jordans are? And my sports bag?”

I set down my briefcase, walk to the mudroom at the back of the house, and retrieve his basketball shoes and sports bag from the built-in cupboard designated for this purpose, the cupboard Jesse can never bring himself to use. I meet him in the front hall, where he throws a T-shirt, shorts, and his ankle brace into the bag, shrugs on his jacket, and says, “What? I’m ready. Are you?”

“Let’s just go.”

In the car, he says, “Where are you rushing off to this morning, anyway, that you’re so freaked out about the time? Going for a walk with Sylvia?”

I’m dressed in my business-type clothes and I have my briefcase. “Do I look like I’m going walking to you?”

“Forget it.” He turns on the car radio and switches the channel to his station.

“I’m teaching today,” I say, above the music. “In Leo Antonelli’s class. Remember, I did it last week?”

“Then where are your slides?”

“I packed them in the trunk earlier, when you were still asleep. After I read the newspaper and had my coffee and before I took my shower and made your lunch and breakfast.”

“Are you done talking now? Because I’d like to listen to this song.”

I want to ask him about the basketball tryouts — if this is the first or has he missed one, and when is the next, and what time should I expect him home, and is it the same coach as last year. I need to know if I should worry about this aspect of his life. But the moment isn’t right. And I can always interrogate him tonight, when he comes home for dinner, turns on the television to watch while he eats, and will be even less inclined to talk.

I pull up in front of the school at three minutes to the bell. Jesse opens the car door, shrugs on his knapsack, turns around, and looks in the back seat. “Oh shit,” he says, more sheepish than angry.

“What?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

“What?”

“I left my sports bag at home.”

“For fuck’s sake, Jesse.”

“Can you bring it at lunch? Please? I get out at 11:45.”

If I hustle, I can make it home and back to school after my lecture by noon. I don’t want to, but I can.

He says, “Can you?”

“I could meet you at 12:05, not earlier.”

He hops out of the car. “Thanks, Em, you’re a doll. I’ll meet you at 12:05, right here.”

Leo Antonelli made his name young, designing homes in the Post-Modernist idiom — he’s known for a handful of steel-framed, glass-walled, flat-roofed residences built in locations that afford panoramic views. In the mid-seventies, he took up a teaching position at the university’s faculty of architecture, where he still lectures, wears striped bowties and suits of English tailoring, and sports the startling, out-to-there eyebrows some men of his generation affect.

When I was a student, he took a kindly interest in me. He admired my spunk (his word) and called me a spitfire, which I’ve always considered a euphemism for a woman who’s energetic in an off-putting, mannish way, but he meant it as praise. After I graduated, he encouraged me to keep in touch and he followed my career progress. When I left the big firm, started Harada Restorations, and was struggling to make a go of it, he invited me, one term, to give a few guest lectures, for pay, to his students, about nineteenth-century Canadian architecture and the challenges of restoring it. When the lectures went well, he charitably suggested I repeat the series of three one-hour talks each term thereafter.

I’m nervous every time I go in, but I’ve come to enjoy standing up in Leo’s classroom on an infrequent basis. For all my avowals that solitude is my preferred and natural state, that I would rather hide alone in my study making drawings than have to interact with clients, contractors, or any people other than Jesse, I do become more alive than usual, more peppy and performance-high, when I stand up in front of the students. It helps that the room is dark when I speak, the faces of the students obscured.

Today, when I finish my lecture, I turn on the lights and pack up my things. As the students disperse, Leo strolls into the room from the hallway — he retreats to his office when I come in to speak — and thanks me. “How did it go?” he says. “Did the students hang on to your every word, as usual?”

“Actually, the room felt a little sleepy today. As if some of these kids were having trouble seeing the relevance of old houses to their careers as the next Frank Gehry.”

“Were there any difficult questions?”

“No. Why?”

“I have a few feisty students this term, a few who like to question long-held principles simply because they are long-held. One young woman reminds me of you, years ago. But if Autumn didn’t make her presence felt today, well and good.”

“Your student’s name is Autumn?”

“Yes, as in the current season.”

“And you say it with such a straight face.”

“I learned long ago not to question or remark on anyone’s name. Down that path lies accusations of prejudice.”

“Also fallen leaves. Big piles of wet, slippery ones, I imagine.”

His smile is uncertain. What the hell am I talking about? He says, “Do you have time for lunch at the faculty club?”

“I don’t, I’m afraid. I have to drop something off at my son’s school.”

“Until next week, then. Oh, and you can expect an invitation in the mail to a small party in my honour that’s being held in a few weeks’ time. I’ve won some kind of award, it seems.”

“You have? Congratulations. Which one?”

He names a prestigious lifetime achievement award given by the national architects’ association, I congratulate him, and I promise to attend the party, whenever it is.

Public speaking makes me hungry, but I have no time to stop for food; I race home, throw Jesse’s bag into the car, and drive up to Westdale. It’s 12:04 when I find a parking spot in front, turn off the car, and try to pick out Jesse’s black sweatshirt among the lunchtime hordes that flow on and around the sidewalk and lawn in front of the school.

In the grey light of the overcast day, the Westdale student body glows far less than it did at the dance. Many of the faces that pass by my car window are pale and acne-ridden, and some are badly in need of a shave. Several boys who look to be Jesse’s age are smoking cigarettes with all the mannerisms of veteran smokers.

A Goth girl in dark makeup, clothes, and hair trudges past on six-inch-high platform shoes. How much time does it take to layer on her look each morning, how much effort to make her angry/sad, I’m-different-damn-you style statement? As much time and effort is probably required to turn two ordinary, fresh-faced girls into the pink-lipsticked, whorish, dyed blondes who walk by next, in shrunken jackets worn open to reveal their low-cut tops, and jeans so tight the seams must leave deep, detailed imprints on their legs.

How happy I am not to be young at this moment, how relieved to have found my weird loner place in life, to be cloistered away in my late middle age.

Jesse looms up beside the car, opens the passenger door, reaches for his bag, says, “Hey, Em, thanks a million. Gotta run.” Behind him is Sylvia’s son, Ben, someone I didn’t think Jesse lunched with. Ben says hi, Jesse closes the door, and they turn away and walk up the street, are swallowed by the pale and pimply masses. Leaving me to shake off the cloying mist of teen angst that has seeped inside the car and drive home.

After lunch and a nap, I sit down at my desk with my tea and square of chocolate, turn on my computer, and open an email from a name I don’t recognize — a Thomas Denby. I am about to delete it until I realize that this person is not selling prescription drugs or counterfeit Rolex watches. He knows me.

The message reads:

Dear Ms. Harada,

I’m looking for the Emily Harada who worked on rescue archeology excavations in Earith, Cambridgeshire, and North Cave, Yorkshire, during the summer of 1975. Are you by chance that person? I obtained your email address from a website about Canadian architects, but no picture or age was given there, so I’m rather taking a shot in the dark.

If you are that Emily Harada, or if you know how to reach her, please advise. I lived in Manchester thirty years ago, but am now an urban planner in Leeds and am on a committee charged with organizing a diggers’ reunion in Earith in a few weeks’ time.

Yours truly,

Thomas Denby

I am that Emily Harada, and at the age of twenty I had the good fortune to get a summer job in England. A childhood friend of my mother’s lived in London and knew someone who knew someone who helped arrange for me to be a “subsistence volunteer” on a rescue archeology dig, which meant that for four weeks I slept in a tent pitched in a field in the fens of Cambridgeshire, used a chemical toilet, and bathed only on Saturdays, when we bused into town and paid fifty pence to use the public baths.

With my dig mates, I spent nine-hour days in the blazing sun wielding pickaxe, wheelbarrow, and trowel, digging up the remains of a Roman villa that had been unearthed by a backhoe at a gravel quarry. (The pit men stood by, waiting for our crew to finish excavating and recording the site, so that they could, er, quarry on.) In the evenings, we walked for half an hour across pastures, over stiles, and down country roads to the village and its one pub.

I did not think that doing menial labour — ditch-digging, basically — for pennies per hour under primitive living conditions was debilitating, depressing work. I was young and on my first trip abroad — I thought I was living a heady adventure.

My fellow subsistence volunteers were a mix of English and Irish and Scottish students who devoted their summers to the rescue excavation circuit. The dig director was a graduate student from the London Institute of Archeology, a lanky man named Clive, long of leg and charm, a gifted gabber with twinkly eyes, handsome smile lines around his mouth, and defined biceps revealed for my viewing pleasure when he occasionally dropped his supervisory clipboard to shovel dirt alongside the volunteers.

I developed a mad crush on Clive within about a day of meeting him, uncaring that he had a young wife at home and a roving eye that did not rove over me. Such was my devotion that soon before the dig ended, when he mentioned during a tea break that he was driving up to Yorkshire next to do a quick survey of a late Neolithic hut circle site that had come to light when a farmer plowed his field, and did anyone want to join him, he could take and pay three diggers for a few days, I shouted out yes before he’d completed his sentence, like an overeager game show contestant jumping the buzzer.

A smelly but cheery young teenager named Tom, from Manchester, who relished the outdoorsy, camping aspect of archeology, also signed on. So did an Oxford student named Mary, a milkmaidish girl — busty and apple-cheeked and sweet of countenance. Neither a maker nor appreciator of acerbic remarks was she, and therefore, to me, not friend material. Having her along would make the tent-sharing arrangements equitable, though — Tom and Clive would tent together, and so would Mary and I.

The Yorkshire site was remotely situated, the nearest village a cluster of houses grouped around a church and a combination grocery store and post office. Heavy machinery sent on ahead had excavated the field down a few metres prior to our arrival and exposed, on the dusty plain below, five or six round darkened rings of soil that indicated the location of postholes for the posts that had held up the huts of the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age people who had lived in the area a few thousand years before.

Other Bronze Age sites in the area had revealed large earth-works and funeral barrows filled with artifacts, including pottery indicative of the Beaker Culture that emerged in England during that time. There were remains of henges, elsewhere, but our Blasted Heath, as Clive dubbed it, was a dud. The sand flew into one’s eyes whenever the wind blew, gradations in soil colour were the only signs of ancient inhabitants (there was nary a pot shard), our toilet was the massive spoil tip of earth piled up at the end of the football field–sized site, Tom smelled, Mary giggled too much, I grew bored of holding the surveyor’s staff, and Clive was businesslike with me, did not twinkle an eye or crease a laugh line in my direction.

He twinkled and creased around Mary, though, especially in the closest (ten kilometres away) pub, when we drove over on our last night and startled the locals with our out-of-town presence. (And where lucky me got the chance to explain that despite my look and name, I wasn’t from Japan but from Canada. Yes, born there, if you can imagine, of a father who was born there too and a mother who was not Asian but Irish! They couldn’t imagine.) A few hours of heavy drinking later, Clive asked a more sober than he Tom to drive home from the pub and stepped up from twinkling at Mary to fondling her in the back seat of the van. The fondling elicited from her a series of delighted giggles and chortles, and from me a stabbed heart and a grim face. In the front seat next to Tom, I stared out the window into the deep rural darkness and turned on the car stereo, though the tape was one of makeout music, so “Stairway to Heaven” blared out, a song I have despised ever since.

Young though I was, I should have known better than to go after the top dog male of any group. I’d been spurned by such golden boys in high school and university, had settled instead, on more than one occasion, and for solid stints of time, for the boyfriend who is cute once you get to know him, versus the godlike quarterback prom king. I should have known better, but I didn’t, and the passing-over hurt as much as if I’d never felt it before. More.

I stared out the window, died a few times, tried not to let fall any self-pitying tears, and resolved that if I were asked to bunk in for the night with Tom so that Clive and Mary could fuck their brains out in the women’s tent, I would refuse, no matter how churlish and unsportswomanlike that decision would make me seem.

Clive and Mary fucked their brains out all right, but in the back of the van, which had convenient fold-down seats for the purpose. Tom and I slept alone in our separate, newly roomy tents on the sandy soil floor. Or Tom slept — I heard him snore — and I lay awake most of the night, wrapped in a blanket knit of sadness and humiliation.

The next morning, at around six, I pulled on jeans and a shirt over my T-shirt and underwear, stepped into my construction boots, went out to pee behind the spoil tip, and walked back to the tent, my face and head aching from fatigue, all vans and people and farm animals in the vicinity quiet, save for a few very loud birds, including a cuckoo.

When I caught a glimpse of something not sand-coloured on the ground, I crouched down for a closer look. The object was round and ring-like and made of a crusty, heavy, dark metal — bronze. It was a bracelet, perhaps, or a buckle. I picked it up, thereby breaking a cardinal rule of archeology — that finds must be considered in context, in situ. I squatted there for a few seconds longer and thought about putting it back, placing it into the impression left in the dusty soil. I could have taken off my belt and used it to mark the spot, then roused Tom or, if I had to, Clive and Mary, and shown them the object, and properly documented the find according to its coordinates on the field. But I didn’t. I swept away the faint circular outline on the surface of the sandy soil with the tips of my fingers, stood up, clasped the ring in my palm, crept back to my tent, slipped inside, and closed the tent flaps.

No one stirred until eight o’clock, by which time I had examined my find closely, turned it over and enjoyed the heft of it, run my finger across its roughened surface, and arrived at two rationalizations: first, that Clive, contemptible and indiscriminate if only because he’d fallen for a simple package of tits and giggles, did not deserve to be handed this gift; and second, that in the world of archeological objects, the armlet, bracelet, ring, or whatever it was, was insignificant, not close to museum-quality, an everyday sort of trinket that would eventually be catalogued by a bored clerk, lumped into a drawer or a box in a storage facility somewhere, and forgotten about.

I wrapped the object in a bandana, hid it in a zippered pocket inside my knapsack, and said nothing about it when the others awoke and we began the process of striking camp.

Tom and I were both quiet that morning, he presumably due to embarrassment about Clive and Mary’s roll in the van — Tom was younger than the rest of us, still in high school. I was preoccupied with thoughts of my hidden treasure and with convincing myself that since artifacts unearthed in archeological excavations are referred to as “finds,” the finders-keepers rule can be applied to them.

Clive and Mary acted abashed about their illicit coupling, which they blamed on drunkenness, as if they’d become lovers because they were drunk, rather than gotten drunk so they could become lovers. I was already not caring so much and had my eyes and mind directed toward home. After packing up, we hit the road, drove away from the Blasted Heath, and when Clive dropped me at the train station in York, from where I would proceed to London and a youth hostel and, a few days later, home to Toronto, we were all relieved to part company and say goodbye.

The bronze object was smuggled into Canada without incident and was collected in a shoebox full of souvenirs that I kept of my English sojourn. My journal was placed in there, with a few English coins, some train schedules, my youth hostel passport, an envelope stuffed with black and white photographs, my trusty digging trowel, and, in a square lacquer box, the armlet, as I’d decided to term it, because I liked the sound of the word and the connotations of weaponry and strength it came with.

For all my imagining of the armlet’s neglected future without me, it didn’t fare much better under my custodian-ship. The shoebox was moved from my communal student house to my first solo apartment once I began working full-time, then to the two-bedroom I shared for eight years with a boyfriend named Sam, someone I lived with when I was too young to consider marriage but, for reasons that now escape me, thought I wanted to be part of a couple. The shoebox stayed with me when I broke up with Sam and lived alone again, and it was moved to the small house Henry and I shared before we were married.

I didn’t gaze upon the armlet again until Henry and I split up. In the course of separating his junk from mine, I came across the shoebox, then some twenty-odd years old, and opened it, and cringed when I read the childish observations I’d kept in the journal of that bittersweet summer. I looked in disbelief at the photos of my slim, young self, hair down to my waist, cigarette in insouciant hand, eyes bigger because the skin around them was tauter. I studied a picture of Clive, Tom, Mary, and me that I’d taken with the camera on timer on our last day at the dig, before the pub night, and, with the objectivity that only years can bring, saw that Mary was wholesomely pretty, that I fell into the interesting-looking category of young womanhood, and that the camera had captured the rogue light in Clive’s eyes.

The armlet was still inside the lacquer box, unaffected by two decades of careless storage and basement humidity, and was as dark and crusty as the day I’d picked it up off the ground. The simplicity of its shape, its rustic finish, and its heavy weight all still pleased me, so I brought it upstairs, in its box, and set it on the corner of my desk. I play with the armlet still, sometimes, during long phone calls.

When Jesse asked me about it, I told him the armlet was very old and had a storied history, but I glossed over the finders-keepers aspect in my explanation of how it came to be in my possession. I said I found it in the spoil tip on the last day of the dig and asked and obtained permission from an indifferent Clive to take the worthless piece home. That the piece is of little monetary value is true — I’ve seen a similar object for sale on an Internet auction site with a price of fifteen English pounds. The part about Clive’s indifference was true also. So I didn’t lie, or not about anything that mattered.

Thomas Denby of the email must be — is — the same Tom who snored in his tent in North Cave while I fretted in mine that long summer night thirty years ago. I read his email again, pick up the box on my desk, and remove the armlet, hold it in my right palm, lift it, do a few bicep curls with it in my grasp. Tom would no longer be young, and likely not smelly, is probably a respectable and married-with-kids kind of urban planner. I run an Internet search on him, but his name is not sufficiently unique to deliver any meaningful results, and I find no picture.

I spend the next few hours working at my desk, when I’m not looking up and staring into time. Reunions have no appeal for me — I have, in recent years, avoided nostalgic gatherings organized by all of my former elementary school, high school, and graduating university classes. I have no need to revisit the past, but with the armlet in my hand I’m taken back to that summer in England, to the sunny blue and green days, the rolling countryside, the rosy sunsets, the starry night skies. And to memories of the itchiness of being unwashed, the army of earwigs that invaded the tent, and the way a dinner from the chip shop would coat the inside of my mouth with such pervasive grease that only a gin and tonic or two in the pub afterwards could cut it.

In those days, I ate fish and chips, with pineapple fritters on the side, chased by alcohol and cigarettes, a few times a week, and I didn’t gain weight. I also flung my long hair around in an obnoxious fashion, and when I spoke, I tried to attract attention, to amuse, to stand out, and as a result said many regrettable things.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, I compose this reply:

Tom,

I am indeed the Emily Harada who dug alongside you in Earith and North Cave for a few weeks in 1975, though my memories of that summer are sketchy (I’m surprised you remembered my name, as I can’t recall hardly anyone’s). So much has happened in the intervening years that that period seems very far away now.

As you’ve gathered, I’m an architect, living in Toronto. I don’t have much of an appetite for reunions as a rule, but do say hello to whoever might know me when you go, and I’m glad to hear you’re doing well with the urban planning and so on.

Cheers,

Emily

Could I be more cold? Yes — I could not answer at all. Will poor unoffending Tom pick up on the little jabs meant for Clive and Mary — the bit about not remembering anyone’s names and the implication that my life has been so goddamned glamourous and action-packed since 1975 that I’ve forgotten all about North Cave? Likely not.

The reply is petty, sly, and was fun to compose. Before my better, wiser instincts can prevail, I send it off, shut down my computer, and go into the kitchen to cook dinner.

In a commercial break between the hip hop music videos Jesse watches while he eats, I say, “So I got an email today from a guy I did archeology with in England thirty years ago. A guy from the place where I found the armlet that I keep in my office.”

His eyes stay on the TV, but he says, “What did he want?”

“To know what I was up to, so he could tell people at a reunion in England.”

“What kind of reunion?”

“A reunion of archeologists.”

He says, “Remember when you told me that old bracelet thing had magical powers?”

“That old bracelet thing, as you call it, is a genuine Bronze Age artifact. And you were much younger when I told you it had powers.”

“I believed in dream catchers in those days, too. I was so gullible.”

He scoffs at his own naïveté, but all I remember is how every few nights, for months after Henry left, I woke up at two or three or four a.m. and found ten-year-old Jesse standing by my bedside, looking down at me. “What is it, honey?” I’d say, my mind clouded with its own anxious images.

“I had a bad dream.”

I’d take his hand, and walk with him back to his room, and crawl into his double bed with him, and fall back asleep until I woke up an hour or two later, groggy and stiff, underneath the ineffectual dream catchers, surrounded by the dull gleam of the sports trophies on his shelves.

Now, I say, “How do you know the armlet doesn’t really have magical powers? Maybe it’s the reason I ended up with a lovely son like you.”

“Yeah, sure.” He turns up the TV volume with the remote. “Hey, this video is sick. You have to watch it.”

He’s right. The video is sick.