Each month, her mother sent her a small package of famous B.C. smoked salmon and a long, descriptive letter, filled with stories. Gail’s father, she wrote at one point, had started a community garden in Strathcona. Every Sunday, children clustered around him, each one wearing tiny rubber boots, holding tight to a miniature spade. Business in the restaurant was steady, she said, and her father had decided to come on as a part owner. He is well, though he misses you. We both do. Gail went home only once each year, at Christmas time. It was the most she could afford, and she did not want to rely on her parents for money. “Too stubborn,” her mother would say, holding her at the airport when she left. “Too independent.” But the words, Gail thought, were filled with pride, too, that they had raised her to be so free, so fearless in the world.
In Prague one morning, Glyn had woken her at 4:00 a.m., holding a cassette recorder and a microphone. “Join me,” she had said, her voice low and robotic, leaning over Gail’s bed, eyes shining in the darkness.
“What is this? Star Wars? Spaceballs?”
“Let’s go. We’re late.”
They loaded their bicycles into Glyn’s van, then drove two hours east. Through the countryside, a Thermos of coffee between them, they watched the sun rise over the fading hills. In Brno, thousands of runners were gathered for a marathon. Glyn wired her to a cassette recorder, placed a microphone in her hand and headphones over her ears. The starting gun went off, and Gail, flustered, immediately dropped the recorder on the ground. On the tape, afterwards, she could hear Glyn laughing. But when she replaced the headphones, Gail heard details that she had never heard in life. Whispered conversations, the rhythm of hundreds of shoes striking cobblestone.
She hurriedly unlocked her bicycle and began pedalling after the runners. On the tape, later on, she heard the bicycle bell ringing ever so slightly as the wheels rattled over the stones. She heard runners drinking as they went, dropping the plastic cups on the road, and the light jaggedness, like cut glass, of their breathing.
That was the moment of revelation. Her degree fell by the wayside, and Glyn found her a job at Radio Netherlands, which had a small outpost there in Prague. They worked side by side each afternoon, pulling tape. Switching from grease pencil to razor blade, the reel of tape sliding back and forth, her right foot maneuvering the pedals. A swift diagonal cut, then a thumbprint of splicing tape to bind the pieces together. She laid the outtakes over her right shoulder, and then her left, in a carefully ordered fringe. Afterwards, they would eat dinner in the studio, potato dumplings soaked in gravy, washed down by bitter black coffee. Among her reels of tape, she has a recording Glyn made in 1989, in Wenceslas Square, when hundreds of thousands of people, laughing and crying, jingled their keys in unison to symbolize the fall of the Soviet regime and the opening of the door to democracy.
Somewhere in that decade, she had fallen in love with a print journalist, a goat herder and an art collector. The print journalist had been the last, while Gail was in the Arctic. That was much later, after Glyn had moved to London and Gail was on assignment for Deutsche Welle’s English radio service, recording a feature about the beluga whales trapped in the ice-jammed waters of the Chukchi Peninsula, near the Bering Strait. The three thousand whales were slowly suffocating. Chukchi fishermen set out each morning, axes on their backs, attempting to open patches of ice. Up above, Russian helicopters circled like clumsy birds. They poured fish down from the sky.
For three weeks, Gail did not see her own body naked in its entirety; she was a walking bundle of fur and fleece. Swaddled, she carried her portable DAT recorder in an insulated bag. When she held her microphone out over the water, she could hear the whales themselves; they formed an endless line as they took turns breathing, one by one, at the air holes. A whistle of sound, a breath like water being swallowed. Sometimes, the whales allowed a seal to push into line, rising up, finding oxygen. She could not distinguish the sky from the ice, the snow from horizon.
The Chukchi gathered at her microphone to tell their stories. Before the waters were divided up, they said, before lines were drawn in the sea by Washington and Moscow, they used to cross the Bering Strait in skin boats. Once upon a time, their people lived nomadic lives; back then, the herds of reindeer had been thirty thousand strong. When she looked up from her recorder, Gail saw a group of young boys pirouetting their bicycles on the snow, their shadows, thin and graceful, reaching into the distance.
Eventually, a Soviet icebreaker arrived to clear a path for the whales. The icebreaker played Beethoven, and it thundered from the speakers. The whales, entranced, followed the Ninth Symphony back to open water.
Afterwards, Gail caught a flight to Fairbanks, and then on to Vancouver. Home to the house on Keefer Street, the wild, luxuriant garden that her father kept, the trellises bursting with roses, perfuming the air. She had been living in Europe for almost a decade. When they sat down to dinner, she felt as if she and her parents were travelling across a vast field, coming to meet one another. Her father, who had worked all his life in a restaurant, set down dish after dish, and each one was her favourite. They were so tentative with one another, as if circling in a room where the lights have gone out, trying to find their way by intuition, by memory alone.
After dinner, washing up in the kitchen, she had seen a letter lying on the countertop. The envelope was addressed to her father, and the stamps, she was surprised to see, were from the Netherlands. “What’s this?” she had asked, picking the letter up.
He had taken the envelope from her, turning towards her mother. His expression is vivid in her mind, even now, and the way her mother had looked at him, the lightest touch against his arm. “Someone I knew once, in Sandakan,” her father had said, seeming to search for the words. “She died recently. Her husband wrote to tell us.”
“During the war,” her mother said, “they were children together.” Her father clutched the envelope in his hand, lost, unsure where to set it down.
Gail had busied herself with the dishes. When she turned back, the envelope had disappeared, and her father was hanging the dish cloth to dry, smoothing the creases away with his hands.
Standing up from her desk, she turns the lights off and climbs the stairs to their bedroom. Ansel has left the reading light on for her, and he is fast asleep. She slips into bed beside him. For a long time, she gazes up through the skylight at the stars. She connects the invisible lines between them, Lyra, Cassiopeia, Perseus, as she used to do when she was a child.
Beside her, Ansel sighs in his sleep, he rests his body against hers. Her feelings have not changed, though she no longer knows how to make them palpable, certain. Gail thinks of something he told her long ago, how the pattern of the wave is one of the most common in nature. Sound, light, X-rays. The revelatory pictures of an MRI scan, a machine that throws light on the shadows of the mind. And what does it see? The work of thousands of synapses. The chemical traces of memory and love. If it could peer into Gail’s mind in a moment when she thinks of Ansel, how many patterns would it see awakened? The incoming tide, wave after wave of memory. The accelerated heartbeat, the charge Gail feels in his presence, none of this has changed. But for him? If she could see into the darkness, would she find in him what she hopes for? An echo of her own desire, as strong and sure as it was in the beginning, before something between them faltered and lost hope.