The small bird hit the window with a smack. It probably died instantly, a broken neck. Katrina rushed to snatch up the sparrow before Bailey could grab it. The dog had a penchant for dead things. Pulling on gardening gloves, she grabbed a shovel, scooped the broken bird and marched to the edge of her garden. Bailey joined in the procession, wagging his tail. As she buried the bird, Bailey spotted a squirrel and ran after it. Katrina returned to moving boxes from the boat to the porch.
Three generations shared the split log cabin over the years. Situated on a jut of rock dipping into Lake Huron, it made for a solid retreat, resting on a sharp-edged and defiant promontory, pointing westward into the water. Face to the wind, weathered, but still standing after a century alongside a stand of wind-whipped pine.
Would all this silence be screaming in her ears in a couple months? Early retirement had chosen her rather than the other way around. Downsizing and payouts. Jump off the ledge or get pushed.
Katrina leapt and reflexively chose to land at the family cottage.
No turning back. David was long gone. As the end of work loomed, they came to see they were on different paths. Katrina announced her retirement. David toasted Katrina and left the party with his blonde protégé, evidently he was interested in more than promoting her career.
Katrina signed divorce papers the next day.
The same day, she decided to head north. The townhouse sold in a week. What she couldn’t cart along by boat, she packed into storage. There was time to decide if this move was permanent, to decide what came next.
Her neighbour, Miriam, accused her of stepping out of the current. Maybe she was. Why winter in such a place? Why be holed up in a Lincoln log hut like a recluse? By spring, you’ll be nuttier than a squirrel. Promise me you’ll call. Was there even a cell tower close?
The scent of multiple seasons of must and mothballs sent Katrina into a coughing fit as she crossed the threshold. This was it, the ultimate way to prove your self-sufficiency –going off grid. The solar panels were installed, the gas tank for the generator was full, wood pile stacked high. As the water pump primed, Katrina gave a cheer. It echoed through the trees and over the water. A couple of ducks took flight from the lake at her proclamation. Bailey looked up at her from an enthusiastic tussle with a ball, oblivious to the significance of running water in the house.
The cabin sat as her mother left it when she took ill. After sitting empty for two summers, Katrina expected dust and maybe a mouse or two to scatter when she opened the door. She wasn’t expecting to be haunted.
Her parents followed each other, one after the other to the grave. The doctor called it broken heart syndrome, Dad couldn’t live without Mom. His heart just stopped. Thirty-eight years of marriage, thirty-eight years of orbiting each other.
The stuffed fish mounted over the fireplace was her father’s edition to the décor. A banal detail in a hunting cabin, but maybe a mandatory one. Every year, as they opened the cottage, her father would recount the hard-fought battle to reel in his prized pike.
When she was five, she asked her Dad, ‘Do fish have eyelids?’
Her father, so large in that moment, answered, ‘They don’t need em, when you’re underwater, your eyes don’t dry out.’
Ghosts, she was going to lodge with ghosts all winter.
As she ran the feather duster along its faded scales, she could hear his voice. Her father wiped down Blinky’s scales right along with her. Blinky just stared with an empty wide-eyed gaze. What a stupid name for a fish, but it left Katrina tearing up.
Sweeping down rough walls, chasing out spiders and dust, Katrina carried on cleaning. She pulled the dust covers from the furniture and folded them. Kind of like removing vestiges of an old life, like shaking out the curtains. This space was solely hers to redecorate later.
A mishmash of furniture hand-me-downs gave the room a far-flung eclectic look. The love seat, a threadbare red plaid, was the sole survivor of a three-piece set from Aunt Marg’s house. Aunt Marg became a Steinman when she married Uncle Fred. They were gone too, leaving Katrina, the last in the line of Wainwrights.
As Katrina began to unpack boxes, she still hadn’t come across the coffee grounds. She wouldn’t make it a week, not without caffeine. It was in the second last box. As she set a can on the counter, there was a scurrying of tiny feet through the cupboards below. Katrina was housemates with a whole community of mice. She should adopt a cat. She smiled. David hated cats.
There was a time, she’d imagined a boy with David’s golden curls and sometimes with her hazel eyes, definitely not her nose. Her father would have swung a puffy red lifejacket over his head, tying the twill tape ties tight and herded him down to the water just like he'd done with her all those years ago. They’d float out in his rowboat with a lunch pail full of peanut butter sandwiches, sliding grimy earthworms onto a hook and drop a line in the water. It was never about the fish, Katrina knew that now.
Perhaps she and David might have made it with a child. ‘But babies don’t work well to patch what needs mended. Truth be told, it only tears holes bigger with the strain.’ Her mother whispered in her memories.
All the hustling and sweating just to sink into a Muskoka chair at the end of the dock with a coffee. At least that was the way Katrina pictured it all those years while she put in long hours to pay for a city escape. One more client. One more payment to purchase solitude. David never stayed long when he came, didn't care for still life in primitive. Forget the wild fauvist colour of a sunset.
Bears, or was it Bulls, can gore away the better part of a life’s work in one run of the market. It had been a mistake to leave business to David. His moods rose with tidal crests and sank with its fall. Reading signs and omens between lines on newsprint loaded with a powder keg of pomp and spectacle. As David’s realm crumbled when the recession hit, he sought out long shot stocks even harder to recover his loss. That was when Katrina really lost him.
Outside under the stars it was so clear.
No point wishing for what could have been. Bailey scratched at the door. Katrina threw on her coat, heading out the door after Bailey into the twilight.
Katrina threw a stick for Bailey to fetch. He splashed into the lake, breaking up the reflected sky. A crisp clear sky spilled over with ink and peppered with stars while she had cleaned. A vast expanse of nothingness made visible with the disappearance of the sun.
‘Got to rest sometime.’ She heard her dad say, ‘Halley’s comet only comes into view every three-quarters of a century. Get your nose out of that book and come outside a spell and marvel at the universe.’
She watched her breath puff into clouds.
Her phone lay silent on the desk inside. Nothing pressing anyways. Well, she longed for silence. Now she had it. One hundred calls a day tending towards insanity down to none.
Mosquitos buzzed about her ears. A constant rush of the wind through the cedars joined with the pounding of her pulse in her ears. Both steady, somnolent and significant as autumn’s exit. A world tending towards sleep, time enough for it.
Bailey pushed his soft head into her hands. Katrina ruffled his ears. Bailey nudged in closer.
In the absence of city light, the stars glowed like beacons, the milky way a dense spattering spill dividing the black ink of the sky. Katrina could almost imagine them being poured out, their light streaming towards the earth. Hoary hosts shining and spiraling like Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Nightwith a consoling crescent moon overhead.
A slice of the heavens painted in an asylum, Van Gogh sketched studies of the sky from his own wilderness of sorts.
Things seen in the heavens, stars, distant swirling galaxies, already spent and burnt out like her efforts to reach this same point, days, months and years ago. Reaching earth, a picture of what was, like the photo of her and David on her nightstand. Old light from moments before. Who knew if they were still shining somewhere up there now? Uncertainty being certain in almost every sphere. To walk abreast another a blessing no matter how brief, for you weren’t walking alone. You never know how close you step towards threshold to eternity.
A meteor shower sprinkled light across the black sky like sparks. Katrina’s hair grew out silver waiting to leave the city. Now here in the void, she wondered if she would last. A tiny corpuscle lost in a vast, wild array.
Small bodies wandering through independent systems, doing their duties until they were needed no more, floating freely through the void, colliding as they will and interacting in predictable ways. Remnants of exploding stars forever falling until they hit bottom. Wildly winging moths flirting with disaster by the porch light.
David was always on a different trajectory than hers. She loved him once, she loved him still. He hadn’t reached his pinnacle yet. One day he’d be ready to plummet back to earth. Pity that those who soar the highest often arch back down so sharply to fall the farthest. Part of her wished she’d be there for the spectacle. It had been a rush to be part of his sphere. The noise, the play by play of economies as titans chose whether they took sugar in their coffee. All the smaller stars emulate those on top.
Katrina took her perfunctory bow and left the room. Her moment had passed.
She read somewhere that the largest star in Van Gogh’s painting was actually Venus. A planet named for goddess of love and beauty rotating contrary to the other orbs, rising to face the sun in the west and bedding into darkness in the east. A slow kiss to the waking in passing trajectories. Lovers turn away.
As she stared at the heavens, the only star Katrina could pick out was Polaris, the north star, shining bright like the point of a stellar compass. Sailors navigated by the stars, so did explorers. Katrina knew which way was north.
True north, fixed and unchanging, and then there was magnetic north, ever migrating as the magnetic molten heart of the earth stirred. Her compass point shifted from David. Katrina, explorer of the stars, adjusting her inclinations, searching for her true north.
