The Visit
Fiction by Sarah Gilbert
Evelyn was incommunicado. After a sweaty bike ride, she’d gone wading in the golden shallows at the beach. Minnows grazed her shins, and, bending over to peer at them—plop. Her phone dropped into the river, lying underwater on the mica-flecked sand just long enough to get wet deep inside.
Now it was on the cabin porch drying out.
She pedaled into town to call Marc from the payphone outside the post office. He was working in the city, and Frédérique was with him, taking advantage of the WiFi. Evelyn stopped at the store and picked up milk, bananas, beer, and potato chips, and biked home with a full basket.
Every time she sat down to write, she thought of other, more urgent things to do. She’d heard you were supposed to put every distracting thought on a list to think about later:
• Replace phone?
• Get new plan?
• Get wifi @ cabin?
• Call Mom
• Call Georgia
• Reasons not to get wifi @ cabin.
Turned out the only thing she was writing was that list.
On the fifth morning of solitude, her dead phone rang, startling her mid-toast.
“Hey, I’m in your time zone, just heading home. Thought I’d call.” This was her brother Dominic’s standard kiss-my-ass hello/goodbye.
“Knock yourself out.” Evelyn’s voice cracked like an old person’s. It had been days since she’d spoken to anyone.
“Yeah well,” he exhaled. “I’ve been on the road for over a week.”
“Good trip?”
“Should be. Heading for a multi-million-dollar sale up at the mine in Val d’Or. If all goes well, a tidy commission will be coming my way.”
“Multiple millions, huh?”
“Not all for me, sadly. Heavy equipment is expensive.”
“It doesn’t grow on trees,” she agreed. “What’s new with you?”
“Spending some time at the cabin. Super green, quiet, except for the birds. Hey,” she felt the idea form as she spoke it. “Why don’t you come visit?”
In the pause she heard him blow out a lungful of smoke. “That’d be nice and all, but I really can’t. I need to get home. My bed’s calling me. My cats. My very own bottle of bourbon.”
“I have a spare bed. I may even have a bottle of bourbon. It’s a beautiful day. Change your flight,” she urged. “We can relax, go for a walk. You’ve never been here. Come see.”
The sun was still behind the trees, edging up in the sky. Mist hung in pockets between the maples and the pine grove. Hammocks of spiderweb clung to the grass, cradling dew, and the air smelled of the wild strawberries that dotted the grass. A hummingbird hovered until another zoomed in to fight for the spot on the feeder.
The Laurentian road ribboned up and down, past lakes and through tiny towns before Google Maps told Dominic to turn off onto a gravel drive that curved around a meadow. He gunned the rental car up a steep incline and pulled into a clearing at the top of the hill. Sun shone on a poppy patch near a weathered log cabin. He realized he’d been bracing himself for a fly-infested shack in a muddy swamp. You never knew with her. A screen door opened, and a skinny person stepped out. Was that middle-aged woman with streaks of grey his kid sister? Christ.
He grabbed his smokes and stepped out of the car, knees creaking, back aching.
“Hey, kid. Big change from the city. Definitely more parking here.”
“Yeah, that’s why I like it. Good parking spot.” She shook her head at him.
He grinned. He’d never understood how she could stand living where all the houses were squished together, and people parked bumper to bumper. The streets and sidewalks were busy with people, her place with no AC was sweltering in the summer and draughty in the winter. Her toilet was in a closet off the kitchen, instead of a decent shower there was a bendy hose in a tub, and the wires running from the neighbours’ rooftops to the hydro poles looked like something out of a favela in Rio. At least here there was room to breathe. He lit a cigarette.
“Nice poppies.” The bright tissue petals bowed in the sun. He waved his hand in front of his face. “Too bad about the blackflies.”
“They’re on the wane.” She walked around the cabin to a porch that looked over the valley.
“Where is everyone?” he asked. She’d said she was alone but there was always a chance her child or husband might show up. If he had to be sociable, he’d regret the detour.
“Marc has to work. And Fred thinks Netflix is more fun than being here with me, go figure.”
“That kid is more fun when you’re not around,” he said. Something about the way Evelyn acted with her daughter made each of them doubly annoying, as if no one had ever had, or been, an only child before. Who knows? Maybe that’s what happened when you had your kid at forty.
Evelyn looked at him like she was about to say something, and then changed her mind. Instead, she held the screen door open and gestured inside like it was a grand hall.
“We’ve got the whole place to ourselves.”
“Whoo-hoo!” He put out his half-smoked cigarette on the sole of his boot and tucked it in the pack, which he slipped back into his shirt pocket. The cottage was just one room with steep stairs up to what he guessed were a couple of bedrooms. Flimsy cabinets lined a wall in the kitchen corner. The floor was crappy parquet buckling in the humidity and a dumpy couch sat in the corner by a wood stove. But there were windows on all sides that let in the dappled green of the surrounding forest. He watched as she ran water and spooned coffee into one of those stovetop espresso pots.
The leafy breeze outside reminded him of the treehouse in the yard of their childhood home. He said,
“Speaking of having the place to ourselves, remember when the parents came home during my 18th birthday bash?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. And I told them, first thing, Dom and Tina used your bed, but it’s OK, they changed the sheets.” Evelyn shook her head at her child self. “I think I wanted attention. Like, ‘Hello, parents. You deserted me.’ I was only nine. I woke up in the night and there were teenagers all over the house, the yard, and even across the alley in the park. Not even Georgia, our responsible big sister, was in control. The party was still winding down when Mom and Dad came home the next day.”
“Amazing I thought to do the laundry, actually. That must have been Tina. Tempus fugit.”
A woodpecker tap-tap-tapped on the outside of the cabin, as if counting off the years.
“Eventually I had my own party when they were out of town and I had to call you for help.” She handed him a chipped teacup of coffee and went out to the porch where there was a table with two hard little IKEA folding chairs.
He squinted at her. “You did?”
“You came over and glared at people. They left.”
“Saved the day, huh. Comes in handy having an asshole for a big brother.”
“Well, I knew you had experience.”
“Yeah, I’ve got some practice at being an asshole.”
“With parties.” He took a sip and winced. “Your coffee is going to kill me.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t take milk. I could add water to turn it into an allongé.”
“Nah, I’m a regular coffee kind of guy.” Dominic pushed the cup away.
Evelyn couldn’t quite believe it. Had her brother really come to visit her? Now she had to figure out what to do with him. She decided they’d walk to the river. Red-winged blackbirds perched on the power lines along the fields. They stopped to peer at the graves in the little cemetery where a dozen valley residents had been buried the century before. Bright yellow birds flitted from the neighbouring pines. He said, “I love goldfinches.”
“I never knew you liked poppies or goldfinches.” Despite his crankiness there was something tender-hearted about him, Evelyn thought.
“There’s probably a lot you don’t know about me.” His voice, suddenly flat, sliced through her claim to know him at all.
“So, tell me something, then. Set me straight.” She wondered why he always had to cover any tender tracks.
“What’s the point? We haven’t lived in the same city in what, thirty-five years?”
“OK, that’s just stating the obvious. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to try and make connections? We come from the same mix, the same batch of dough,” she said.
“Doesn’t add up to anything. We’re pretty much strangers.”
She bent down to touch the lichen-covered grave markers flush against the grass: Mother. Father. The stone letters were rough against her fingertips. “Really? I mean, if you truly think that, why bother? Why even call me? Why come all the way out here?”
“I wasn’t going to. You invited me. You pleaded.”
“Call me crazy but I thought my brother could come see our cabin in the country for the first time and we could hang out and enjoy the day.” She squeezed out of the gap in the cemetery fence and turned her back on him, walking away, stones flying under her heels.
Evelyn walked past the old schoolhouse and kept on past the deserted farmhouse and then followed the route of the old railroad tracks that had been turned into a cycling path along the creek to the river. It was midday now and hot. Shadeless. Their feet crunched on the gravel. Cows dotted the soft green hill beyond the blue barn.
He walked so far behind her she wasn’t sure he was still there. She slowed down. Eventually he caught up and said, “You didn’t tell me we were going to walk twenty miles.”
She turned to glance back at his feet. Black leather, pull-on, with a low heel and his bootcut Levi’s over them. Not exactly summer footwear. The same motorcycle boots he’d always worn, even though his motorcycle was long gone. “Not that much further. Blisters?”
He shrugged away the question and lit a cigarette. He had no hat, and his face was pink. She should have thought to bring water, hats, maybe a picnic.
“One thing I for sure don’t know is what happened with you and Dad,” she said. “Like why you stopped talking to him.” At fifty-nine, receding grey hair, a beard, and a belly, Dom looked exactly like their father, except for the shit-kickers.
“I lost interest. He never cared what I did or had to say. I always had to listen to him and then I just couldn’t anymore.”
“Yeah, Georgia and I always say he was hard of listening.” They kept walking. “But you know, all those years, he always, always, asked about you. To the point where she and I were like, ‘Hey, we’re here. Your daughters. We’re visiting you! We made the trip. We took airplanes. Why don’t you forget about Dom for a while?’”
A heron rose from the creek in slow prehistoric flaps.
“Tell me about your girls,” she said. “How are they doing?”
“Not speaking to me, so I don’t know.”
“Come on, Dom.”
“I call, they don’t pick up. I text, they don’t reply. What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. Show up?” she suggested. “Ring a doorbell?”
“That’s a little scary. For me, I mean.”
“Don’t be a weenie. Don’t you miss them?”
“I’d rather it didn’t turn into a decades-long Cold War, yeah.” He paused to watch goldfinches flutter in a tree near a stretch of wild raspberry brambles.
“Especially since you’re on the other side of the wall now. Dominic, you’ve been through this kind of thing with Dad. But you’re the adult this time. You’ve got to grow up.”
“Maybe I’m a double agent,” he mused. His chuckles rat-a-tat-tatted, woodpecker-style.
“Oooh,” they both gasped at the same moment as an indigo bunting dipped between trees like an iridescent blue sparrow. “How’s Emily doing with that research job at the museum?” she asked him.
“Not sure. I know she was part of a show at a gallery and I missed it.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“I was travelling and then I was tired, and I was busy with work, and I thought I had more time, but it ended before I got there.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah. I apologized. More than once. As far as she’s concerned it’s just the proof she needed: I’m an inveterate asshole.”
The path dipped into the cedar-smelling shade and then reached the old railway bridge. Upstream, the rapids churned white before the river curved and smoothed out along a wide bend of golden sand.
“Welcome to our beach.”
“Nice.” He lit a cigarette and leaned over the railing. They looked down at the water moving.
“A true asshole wouldn’t have given me his leather jacket when I was fifteen,” Evelyn told him.
Back before he’d given her the jacket, back when he still rode the motorcycle that went with the coat and the boots, he used to pick her up at lunch and rescue her. She held onto his back, he accelerated, and high school disappeared.
They walked down to the beach and skipped stones where the river slowed.
“Aren’t you hot?”
He stood in the sand in his jeans and boots, face red, sleeves rolled up. He looked hot. Not in a good way.
She stepped out of her sandals, rolled up her shorts as high as possible and waded in. This is how she’d dropped the phone. But today she had nothing in her shirt pocket.
He patted his for smokes.
Dominic’s back was killing him after that walk and he had a headache, probably from the undrinkable coffee and not eating anything all day. His heels were bleeding.
When he got up from a nap, he picked mint from the garden, dissolved sugar into simple syrup on the stove, and, with a bottle of bourbon he found on top of her cupboard, made mint juleps. “You should get a real fridge,” he remarked. “When are these ice cubes from — 1979?”
“It’s the cabin. It’s not supposed to be state of the art.”
He worked at finding a comfortable position on the lumpy couch. “Have you ever tried sitting on this thing? You need a hammock. And how about one goddamn comfortable chair.”
“It’s true,” she said. “What’s that?”
“You do act like an asshole.”
He smiled, raised his glass in her direction.
“Maybe it started out of contempt for your family members. Like, if we’re stupid enough to believe the asshole act, we deserve to have a jerk for a brother, father, son.” She looked at him. “That way you can be mad at us for not understanding you, and you get to feel hurt and superior at the same time.”
“I’m not sure I’d put it like that. But if you say so.”
Evelyn swirled the crushed ice in her glass and gulped the minty-sweet tea-coloured drink. He realized his sister was tipsy.
She blurted, “Frédérique is afraid of you, you know, from that time you snapped at her for using your iPad. You also barked at her for not eating the food at the restaurant and snapped when she did her presentation for you in French.”
“Well, she shouldn’t be. I’m not that bad.” “I know that but Fredo doesn’t. Why do you have to be like that?”
“I thought you had all the answers,” he said.
“Well, I do think it’s become a habit. And it’s hostile. Besides, it’s BORING.” She took a swig of her drink.
“Well, excuse me. I never meant to bore you,” he laughed. She was already a little beyond tipsy.
“Please try to be less predictable.”
“Got any books I can read?” he asked. “A thriller set in WWII, or something about the Stasi, the KGB, spies, surveillance. Your stuff is tough for me.”
“My stuff?”
“You know, all those heart-breaking short stories. That one where the guy pawns his watch to buy her combs for her hair and meanwhile, she’s cut off her hair to buy him a watch chain ... I can’t take it!”
“What, ‘The Gift of the Magi’ makes you misty?”
“I want to bawl my eyes out,” he admitted.
“Are you for real? Next, you’re going to tell me you cry at Tim Horton’s commercials.”
“Why do you think I act so tough?”
She gave him a collection of stories by a writer whose bio said he’d put himself through school working as a logger and a miner.
Slim pickings ingredients-wise but he made a marinade for the chicken and some dough for naan, then sat on the porch outside, smoking, while he grilled everything on her rickety low-end Canadian Tire barbecue. “This is delicious,” she said, folding the soft naan into her mouth.
He nodded, feeling some grit in his teeth from her salad of garden lettuce.
“Next time you come we can explore the old gold mine up the road,” she suggested. “It used to be open for visits.”
“If you want to explore a gold mine, you should come up with me next time I go to Val d’Or.”
“Road trip. OK, why not?”
After dinner, they sat in chairs on the grass in the inky dark. He polished off the bourbon. They looked up at the sprinkle of glinting pinpoints until their necks hurt. In the distance the river rapids rumbled like a highway.
“Too much description, not enough plot,” he told her the next morning, handing back the book.
She knocked coffee grounds into the compost bucket.
“I’ll try it again someday when I’m not so tired.” He stepped outside. She brought a cup to him on the porch where he was smoking. He took a tiny sip.
“You can get a nice Tim Horton’s at the airport. Some toast? Cereal?”
He shuddered. “I don’t touch the stuff.” He put the cup down.
She followed him to the car, dew damp on her toes. “Thanks for coming. Next time I’m home I’ll come out to your place. I owe you a visit now.”
“Maybe we’ll even change the sheets for you,” he replied.
Evelyn shook out her hand, stiff from scrawling in her spiral-bound notebook, and stood up. She heard the sparrow that sang in long tuneful bursts in the half-hour just past sunset when the day was dissolving. It was the loneliest moment.
At least, instead of blowing her off with his usual phone call from the airport, he’d made the effort to come and visit her out here in the country. They had walked and talked and looked at birds, cooked out, and drunk bourbon.
They might have. If she’d ever invited him. He’d emailed, mentioning what he’d thought was a disc problem. At emergency they’d given him anti-inflammatories, and an appointment for an eventual MRI. But a month later, in agony, he drove himself back to the hospital. He never left. A scan revealed cancer everywhere. This was back in the early days of the pandemic. No one was travelling. She didn’t get out there, two provinces over, to see him. Three weeks later, he was gone.
Out on the porch, she picked up the phone and tapped the black screen. Nothing. Inside, she plugged it in again. All dark. It would not come to life.
Because of covid, there’d been no memorial service. No gathering. She’d written an obit, a eulogy, many to-do lists, and probably too much description.
The last light faded from the sky. »