A Certain Mr. Takahashi. Ann Ireland

      Hooray, I’m back, Colette. I’m home!

      Colette was living with her boyfriend in an apartment near the old police station. I couldn’t wait to surprise her—two years. I’d changed a lot.

      Weird walking through that part of Toronto, the Polish market, with its bakeries, pirogi joints, and sausages hanging in windows. She’d written me about her apartment, a third-floor walk-up next to an auto-body shop. I still couldn’t imagine her with her own place, away from Dundeen Square. Did she take her dresser with her? I forgot to look. Would she still live in spartan Japanese-style simplicity? She’s still Colette, I reminded myself, pushing through crowds of people on the narrow sidewalk. She’d be pleased to see me — but what if she wasn’t?

      The door opened to my knock, and her face spread with surprise. “Jean!” Then we hugged like I imagined we would and of course cried because it had been so long. Oh, Jean. Oh, Colette. Then we laughed at our red eyes and wet cheeks, and she pushed me into the apartment where there were walls lined with Mexican serapes and Moroccan cowbells and posters from rallies and rock concerts. A giant photo of Karl Marx hung at the top of the stairway. I guess her Japanese phase was over. She went into the kitchen to make camomile tea and told me to roll a joint, the stuff was on the table in the wooden box.

      “Where’s the man?” I looked for signs of his existence.

      “He’s out,” she said. “At a political meeting.”

      “Oh.”

      “And what have you been doing for the last two years?”

      There was so much to tell, and I began to wonder, just for a moment, if I’d be able. How could I explain going to school in Manhattan? “I sit in Washington Square, Colette, and read a book while all around people roller skate, drop flaming swords down their throats, deal dope—everything’s there, things you can’t imagine-and, Colette, the man I’ve been going with, the married professor who publishes stories in the New Yorker—it’s over now. He decided to stick with his wife and it hurts, Colette, sweet glorious pain.”

      I sat dumbly, words lodged in my throat like dry toast. We watched each other over aromatic tea, checking out adult faces and bodies. I’d gained weight and become plumpish, rosy-cheeked. I looked over her shoulder at the bookshelf and read titles. Where would our conversation begin when there was so much?

      Then something went click, a gear I’d sworn not to use, the beginning of the end of us. I said, “Do you remember the time … ?”

      And laughing, resigned to it but a little ashamed, we dug into reminiscence, that durable cactus. Yoshi.

      That’s all I had to say. Then “Montreal”. Our smiles broadened, overlapped.

      “How did you feel when you realized we’d be staying in the room with him?”

      “Terrified,” I admitted. “Thrilled.”

      “And when the bellboy came in … ”

      “ … and there we were sprawled on the floor on hotel mattresses. He didn’t bat an eyelash.”

      “But he wondered, all right.” A trill of shared laughter.

      “After all, what were we, seventeen, eighteen?”

      Brief silence as each re-enacted the scene. More tea.

      “What a remarkable dream it was,” Colette said, dead serious.

      I shook my head. “Nothing like it can happen again.”

      We continued the story, incident by incident, breath by shared breath, as if we were one person all those years. We remembered his house with the yellow door, the black car, the thick white rug, the jasmine tree in a pot, his yukata and olive skin. And, Colette, the music.

      Marijuana lapsed into the Italian wine I’d brought, and Colette produced freshly baked oatmeal bread and a tub of peanut butter. She had furniture, clothes, dishes, shapes of her own. I caught a sniff of the interior of her fridge, later used her bathroom and saw his toilet things neatly stacked on the tub’s edge. Scissors, toenail clippers, razor, Brut.

      Our talk surged forward as if we needed to pass through each phase of our shared life just to get to this point.

      We were lying on the couch, half drunk, unable to finish a story because we were laughing so hard, when he came in. His shadow crossed the rug before us, elongated by the evening light. Colette pulled herself together and made the introduction.

      “Nelson,” Colette waved. “I’d like you to meet my sister, Jean, who you’ve heard so much about.”

      We kissed gently, on the lips. His beard grazed my cheek. He was dark, older, long-haired, and wore a blue turtleneck and jeans. He must have heard a piece of the conversation, or felt a tone.

      “Going over old times?”

      He said it lightly, but I felt caught out, guilty. Colette looked once at me, then almost visibly moved her heart from us to him and said, “Maybe that’s all we have now.”

      My own heart crumpled as if kicked. Colette, I could not bear what you said, its naked tone, the grave disloyalty. The man was there, smiling and wise.

       Chapter Three

      Jean steps down the precarious log stairway along the cliff face, reaching at one point for a non-existent handrail. Not built yet. She nearly hurtles into the darkness of watery cold Juan de Fuca Strait before regaining balance. She sits on a step and pauses for breath and nerve.

      The sea air is almost too pungent, piercing her nostrils way back into her head.

      She thinks of calling Colette’s name. The dark is suddenly frightening. She has left the range of the coach lamps and the fluorescent bug-zappers mounted on poles in the garden.

      She cups a hand to her mouth and cries a wolf wail — “Ow-owww”—then holds her breath and waits, her ears filling with the racket of crickets and the rhythmic slap of waves.

      “Ow-owwww”: the answering call from below. Again Jean lets one go, full-throated and animal proud, and slips down the remaining steps, one after the other, on her behind.

      She wobbles to her feet on the final step.

      A tall, slim shape is pressed flat against the shoreline, the posture so familiar Jean could sketch its silhouette without looking. She waits until she feels the sureness of sand beneath her feet and nearly speaks. But a flurry of words screams through her head like a flock of birds, knocking her off balance again. She strains at the darkness, hoping to be masked a while longer.

      The shape moves toward her, soundless over sand. Suddenly Jean is wrapped in an embrace so tight that sea and sky disappear and she’s a small rock surrounded by a wiry starfish. She can feel her tears wet Colette’s shoulder, and her ears, blocked since the plane’s descent, pop at last. A rush of clear warm sound pumps in, and she can hear the roar in her veins, a sound like the sea, only higher.

      “Come and sit on my rock,” says Colette.

      She leads them to a stone platform, far enough from water so they won’t get wet, yet near enough so the largest waves peter out inches away, leaving a clogged outline of silt and seaweed. Jean perches cross-legged, scraping her knee against the remains of an oyster.

      “When did you get here?” She hugs herself, chilly now that Colette has pulled away.

      “Early morning.”

      “You must be beat.”

      “I am.”

      The sea fills up the silence.

      I saw you with him, she begins numbly. But even thinking the words causes a swell of nausea. There will be a reply and explanations, descriptions, and reasons drawn. Too clearly. So she finds herself bone-silent again. When she leans forward something invisible presses tautly against her belly.