The Year of Broken Glass Read online

  We try the door, but it won’t open. The framing is buckled so I slam my body into it. Still it won’t budge, wedged tight in its jamb. Instead I go to the bedroom with one of the dining room chairs and smash a hole in the drywall. Then I smash a few more and tear the sheathing away, then the insulation, then kick between the studs and break through the drywall on the other side. I keep kicking till I’ve made a large enough hole for us to slip through, and we do, out into the darkened hallway. Jin Su flicks a little flashlight on and we walk swiftly to the fire escape door, which opens, then we descend the concrete stairs, turning down and down, twelve flights to the ground floor.

  In the lobby there’s an old woman with tempered glass in her hair and clothes. Her face and arms are bleeding and she’s just sitting stunned and huddled in a corner. Jin Su starts toward her. “We’ve got to get out, away from the building Jin Su,” I say, thinking that if the aftershocks come, if the building isn’t sound…

  “Just give me a minute with her,” she says, and turns to the old lady. “Mrs. Maven, it’s Jin Su.” She takes her by the glass-gouged arm and lifts her from sitting. “Where is your husband Mrs. Maven?” Mrs. Maven is gasping and choking on her own attempts to breathe, in shock, unable to answer Jin Su’s question.

  Beyond the lobby, out on the street, a massive shower of glass falls to the sidewalk. I’m not sure whether it’s safer inside the building or out now, so I tell Jin Su to wait in the lobby and step out and up onto the heaps of glass, the most recent shower of which was kicked out by a cluster of elderly people and a young woman who seem to be trapped in an apartment on the fourth floor, calling out for help to the few people standing below them. I start walking down and across the street, to its opposite side, to where I think I saw the gleam of my float’s iridescent blue from high above. There are branches and wires down and it’s nearly impossible to walk, the glass is everywhere and it shifts and cracks underfoot. There’s a building fire raging up the block and black smoke is starting to billow toward me, obscuring the sky.

  Then I see it. It shines at me. Shrouded beneath a tree branch I catch its opaline swirl in my peripheral vision, just a tinge of it. I’m nearly on top of it, and reach down and lift it from amongst the oak leaves. With my shirt sleeve I brush some flecks of dirt and glass from its surface.

  A water main has burst and everything is wet. There’s a river running beneath the wire, glass and steel in the street. I don’t know enough about the grid to be sure, but it occurs to me that this quantity of fallen high voltage wire and water seems questionable. Some of the glass is starting to slide on the flood and it feels altogether unstable and frightening beneath my feet.

  I tuck the float under my arm and make my way back toward the lobby. People are scrambling from the building now, and I’m struggling against them, against their panic, within my own, trying to get back to Emily and Jin Su. Then they emerge from the crowd, Jin Su takes my hand and we start down the street, away from the fire and the flooding waterline. Saying nothing, we just walk, toward another building in flames further down, and another, through a city strewn with glass and rubble, wire fallen everywhere, and people, some wailing, some starting on the looting, as the choppers begin to circle overhead, their blades thumping the smoke filled air—we walk toward the only place I can think to. We walk together down to the sea.

  Forty blocks through the smoke and clamour, glass everywhere underfoot, and Emily, poor thing, falls asleep against her mother’s chest. Every so often another explosion splits through the din of screams and sirens, another cracked gas line flaming. We get to the bottom of Main then head west on Second Avenue to Fir Street. There’s a ragtag of fishboats and scuzzy live-aboards tied to the floats at Fisherman’s Pier. I’m going to, if I can, commandeer one of these things and get us out of here.

  Jin Su waits on the dock while I jump aboard a little shrimp trawler. It’s unlocked and I go in, but there’s nothing to it, gutted of everything but its engine. I scramble off the bow to the stern of the next boat along, an old fifty-foot wooden troller. The cabin door is padlocked so I smash the captain’s window out and squeeze through. Inside, the boat reeks of rats and rot, a damp winter untended. There’s no key in the ignition. I try the start button anyway, but nothing turns over or clicks. So I throw my body at the cabin door, bust the latch clean from its screws, and tumble to the deck. I lie on my back for a few seconds looking up at the sun, a hazy ball of dark orange above the burning city, ash drifting like snow through the air.

  Jin Su peeks over the bulwarks from the dock. “Are you okay?” she asks, and climbs aboard as I start laughing. I can’t help it: she’s standing above me on this shitty boat in the middle of a whole city of pandemonium, holding my stupid fishing float below the lump of our sleeping daughter tied to her chest, somehow calm. Sensible. Anna would be through the fucking roof. Emily starts to stir, then screams. “I’ve got to feed her,” Jin Su says, handing me the float. She unties the mei tai and sits down on the hatch coaming to nurse.

  “Give me your flashlight,” I say, and Jin Su digs it out from her jeans pocket. I turn it on and climb into the cabin, down into the fo’c’sle, then crouch into the engine room in the bowel of the boat. There’s a single battery hooked to a Constavolt charger with a single wire coming off it, to drive a bilge pump no doubt, but the rest of the battery bank is gone. I swing the beam of light over to the engine and look it over. It’s an old pre-war Perkins. I remember Svend telling me about these motors, how they can be started by hand, one cylinder at a time, but I’ve never done it or seen it done.

  First I open the fuel lines from the two huge steel tanks port and starboard, then I open the drain on the inline fuel filter to make sure there’s fuel flowing through. I turn my light back to the Perkins and think. It’s been my saving grace countless times at sea that I’m able to work out mechanical solutions on the fly. I’ve got a natural aptitude, most likely come down through my mother from my Opa Hein. He was always fixing or inventing something on the farm and I’ve gotten through most of my fishing career thus far in the same fashion, creating makeshift gaskets of underwear elastic and sections of gumboot, helm wheels of vice grips and screwdrivers.

  There’s a valve on the head of the first cylinder, which I figure must be a compression release, so I open it wide and hand-crank the cylinder till it sputters to life. I release the compression on the other three till each is fired, then climb back up and out of the dark, the Perkins chug-chugging away with its good-old-reliable diesel sound. It gives me confidence when Jin Su asks if it’s going to be okay. I have to wonder exactly how much fuel might be left in the tanks, but it’s a short haul to Halfmoon Bay, maybe six or eight hours up the shoreline.

  “We’ll be fine,” I tell her. Although I know I’m hedging my bets (as any seaman knows he is whenever he sets out on the water, even in the best of conditions and with the most proven, well-maintained equipment) I look at this woman I love, and at my daughter drunk on good milk grinning her big smile, and I believe it will be, the glass float set on the hatch coaming beside them like some good luck talisman keeping us safe from all the surrounding chaos and destruction.

  I reach down and kiss Jin Su, then take the float and carry it off the boat to the dock. On my knees I dip it into the cold green water and wash the last of the glass flecks away. Lifting it dripping and smooth before my eyes I can’t keep from laughing again, it’s so ridiculous, this fishing float of great mystique.

  I’m holding it in the midst of a city buried in broken glass, the bright sound of its shattering still ringing out from every direction, and this float, lighter than my daughter, hasn’t a scratch upon it. Turning it over and over in my hands it’s perfectly intact, unscuffed and gleaming, as though it is still in the cradle Jin Su built for it with toy blocks on her piano last night. As though I’d never taken it, like any old piece of happened-upon flotsam, from its endless drifting on the sea.

  WE’RE HOVERING OVER my home on the Esowista Peninsula watching a wal
l of water wash over it. When the earth finished rumbling I lay stunned in my bed as an image I’d seen years before played through my mind: a shaky hand-held shot of a great wave surging onto the Thai shore and slamming into the hotel the cameraman was filming from; water rising in swift, swirling torrents toward the third floor perspective. Then I leapt from bed and jammed myself into the first clothes I came upon. I thought for a moment of Poseidon, my cloud-white Persian, but knew trying to find him was futile.

  So I ran from the house, across the orchard and up the sandy embankment, my panic-driven feet slipping out beneath me. I could hear the ocean pounding the beach far below; I could almost feel it surging, and thought, as I entered Jim’s forest, of the Good Friday Tsunami that destroyed Port Alberni in 1964. The epicentre of the 9.1-magnitude quake that caused that tsunami was far north of here in Prince William Sound, some seventy miles east of Anchorage, Alaska. I had no way of knowing, as I ran through the trails Jim cut between my house and his, what the severity of the quake that awoke me was or where its epicentre may have been located. All I knew was the fear Jim imbued within me on our many walks through those trails together. A fear of the worst. Of the wall of water now washing over both our homes.

  In the forest I became disoriented, panic confounding my thoughts and my sight, until I was no longer on the trails but stumbling over and through the forest’s thick ferns and blowdown without bearing. I can’t say how long I struggled like that, lost, until I saw the wide relief in the treetops that could only indicate a clearing. Keeping my sights trained upon it and my ears on the helicopter’s percussive roar, I came out finally into the acres of green surrounding Jim’s house.

  He was already seated in the cockpit, the prop blades whirring above, when I raced over the grass toward the helicopter, ducking down low as I climbed up and in beside him. He’d waited for me to the last moment, just as he’d promised he would if, in the event of an earthquake or some other emergency, we were forced to evacuate.

  He lifted the helicopter off the ground perhaps a minute before the tsunami broke shore and we’ve hovered over our homes ever since watching the water stampede toward them. Now the sea is washing over the land like it normally does the intertidal zone, runnelling through the age-old forest as though it were just a rock-clinging bed of kelp.

  Jim turns us to the east, and we fly. Up the Tofino Creek Valley, over Great Central Lake and across the shoulder of Mount Arrowsmith. As we crest the mountain, massive clouds of dark grey ash suspended over the Cascades come into view, and I know that one of the many long-dormant volcanoes north of the city has erupted in the earth’s convulsions. The helicopter shudders in the wind funnelling down through the valley off Qualicum Lake, Jim steering it adeptly over the ruins of the town, the magnitude of the quake made apparent by the heaps of brick and wood that were once Qualicum Beach’s older buildings. We travel down the island’s eastern coastline to Schooner Cove and Jim spins us low over the rows of yachts tied snug in their slips.

  One of my late husband Horace’s great ambitions was to sail the world. It was never going to happen, him lacking the necessary bravado for such an undertaking, but there was nothing stopping him from buying an open water-ready sixty-five-foot ketch and keeping it spit-polished at this exclusive marina. We made a few weekend forays on the Princess Belle to the sandy beach of Tribune Bay on Hornby Island and the blue shallows of Home Bay on Jedediah. We even stopped in False Bay and hiked up Mount Tremeton to visit Fairwin’ Verge at his tree fort.

  Then Horace, gaining confidence, decided we should venture further afield, so we took the Belle up to Princess Louisa Inlet to view its glacial till, aquamarine waters and the majestic Chatterbox Falls. On the way back we nearly lost the boat (or so Horace’s story went—to my mind it wasn’t as close a call as he imagined) when he misjudged the residual whirlpools passing through Malibu Rapids at high water slack and the hull sucked over, leaning so far to port the jack-line saw green. After that Horace—the wind gone out of his proverbial sails—gave up his seafaring dreams.

  There she is, Princess Belle, long and dark and regal in her slip. Jim sees her, too, and pulls the helicopter up high over the trees, then spins down into the ballpark just a few blocks from the marina. I unbuckle myself and so does Jim and we hug each other in the roaring cockpit, the blades still slicing the air above us. “I’ll be there,” Jim calls to me over the deafening noise of his machine.

  “You take care,” I holler back, and jump to the soggy grass, my legs a little weak beneath me. Running from under the blades I turn and stand in the helicopter’s heavy thrashing of the air as Jim lifts off and circles northward over the trees and out of sight. I have this foreboding feeling that it will be the last time I see him, but it’s to be expected, I suppose, under the circumstances. So I swallow it and start walking.

  So far, things have gone as we’d planned. Jim is en route to his home away from home, a modest, self-sufficient house on the south end of Reid Island where he can wait out the storm with his radio and his books and his six-month stores of non-perishables; I’m on the way to my boat, fully fuelled, stocked with food, and with seaworthiness and sails to hoist and power me wherever I need or desire to go. This may be straight up to Jim’s to wait out the aftermath with him; to marry the Belle’s resources to his so we can both live with more, and in good company, while we wait for the world to recalibrate.

  Walking out along the finger the Belle is moored to, I hear the unmistakable cry of an infant rising from one of the houses perched above the cove, and it strikes me just how little of the human damage I’ve seen thus far. From the air Qualicum Beach and Parksville looked like ruined ghost towns, the odd emergency vehicle making its way through the streets, but nothing more. No mobs of people in panic. Perhaps the quake occurring early in the morning as it did has been a blessing, most people still in the safety of their homes when it hit. As the baby’s cry rings out again it occurs to me suddenly and with urgency that I have to call my girls. They’ll be worried sick for me.

  I dial Esther in Halifax and leave a message reassuring her I’m fine and asking her to contact Mirabelle, who’s been living in India these past few years. For a moment after I hang up I feel that same sense of foreboding I felt when Jim lifted out of the ballpark, and I want nothing more than to be with my girls. But it’s not to be, not now, and I know it, so I climb aboard the Belle and walk the length of her teak deck inspecting the rigging and masts as I do.

  I climb down into the cabin, walk to the nav station, and turn on the sounder, inverter, computer and GPS. Then I turn the engine over and the little diesel purrs to life, quick as Poseidon would from a nap when he was a kitten… Poseidon, who’s gone now to his namesake’s domain. Gone. My bedroom with the white silk curtains drawn and tied so I can wake with the morning sun spilling across the field of tall grass falling to the sea. Gone. My photos of the girls when they were growing, and their father Yule in his eternal young-manhood. Gone. My morning walk to retrieve the mail at the top of the drive. Gone. My tea on the back porch in the evening watching the sun ignite the western sky magenta, pink and gold, Poseidon brushing against my bare legs as I lean back in my old rocker to take another sip of this good, good life.

  •

  I’ve been married three times. Once for love, once for company, and once for money.

  My first husband was a fisherman from Victoria. The son of a son of a Norwegian fisherman. We met at an anti-oil rig rally in front of the provincial legislature. The Social Credit government of the time wanted to open up the BC offshore to oil and gas exploration, much as the current government intends to do now, almost thirty years later. I was young, the daughter of a conscientious objector and socialist, my father; and a wealthy girl married below her class, my mother, who raised me on nostalgic tales of her enchanted summers at the family estate in southern France, idling the days away on the sandy beaches as whales sang endlessly off the shore. I was studying literature and women’s studies at the time and so was nat
urally there to oppose the proposed industrial despoiling of our pristine coastline. Yule, my first husband, was there to oppose any possible disruption of the fish and his freedom to hunt and catch them.

  He trolled the west coast of Vancouver Island each summer and fall for chinook, coho and sockeye, and shortly after that rally I finished my second-year examinations and headed out with him on his white and blue Wahl-built troller, Misty Girl. Yule schooled me in the ways of hauling and gaffing, gutting and glazing, fellatio and cunnilingus. It was my youth, the times, and his ruggedness that made me love him so fervently, and we were married that fall and set off for the Sea of Cortez where we wintered on his little ferro-cement sloop, eating liberally of the sea and each other. That was love.

  Five years later, while I was still pregnant with our second daughter, Yule went down with the Misty Girl somewhere on the early chinook run northwest of Cape Scott. A nearby lighthouse keeper heard his last call on the VHF as the water rushed in the wheelhouse door. And that was that.

  Shortly after, I married Yule’s best friend, Ray Harving, and except to say that he got me through the raising of my two girls in more comfort than I’d have been without him, there wasn’t much there. Losing Yule had put the fire out in me, and I passed through that time in what I realize now to have been a suspended state of grief. My poor girls, I was gone into the sorrow that swelled up when Yule and the Misty went down.

  When Ray sank with his tuna boat just off the mouth of the Columbia River I awoke to my life as though out of ten long years in a coma. With my girls approaching their university years, and myself almost forty and penniless, I decided on one course of action: find a rich husband, a landlubber, or at the very least not a fisherman. Someone I could love and wouldn’t lose to the sea. Three times lucky. So I began sailing lessons at the Royal Victoria Yacht Club in Cadboro Bay, possibly not the best place to find a non-seafaring man, but certainly a place to find a wealthy one, which I did.