I Saw Three Ships. Bill Richardson
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anymore, it’s been so long, and I was hoping you’d remember the combination.”
“Or maybe you have some bolt cutters?” Philip blurts, a sudden inspiration. He’s never used bolt cutters. He’s not sure how he knows bolt cutters are a thing in the world. He couldn’t tell a bolt cutter from a mascara wand. Bonnie gives him a levelling look.
“First time for everything,” he says.
“In fact, that is not so.”
These two. Their act. This routine they’ve been performing since the earth cooled. How can they not know how shopworn it is?
Thirty-five years – half a Biblical lifespan – that’s how long ago they came aboard the Santa Maria, Bonnie staggering under the weight of her excess freight, Rosellen like a Buddhist with a bean can for a begging bowl. Bonnie was twenty-two, newly graduated from Emily Carr when they first met in the storage room, the younger woman pressing the whole of her bodyweight into the door of the kennel-like cage she’d been assigned to store her overflow. Laws of physics would have to be more broken than bent for containment to be achieved.
“Mine’s empty,” Rosellen said.
“You can’t mean it,” said Bonnie. “You are the woman I aspire to be. You are the mother I should have had. You must have stuff to come.”
“Nope. Brought everything over in a cab. Back seat. Didn’t even need the trunk.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Have it if you want. The locker. I don’t need it.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“You’d actually rent it to me?”
“No need. It’s yours. I have power. I can make it so. Keep the lock, too, if you want.”
Rosellen had clapped her high-school locker relic on the door, a pro forma gesture; there was nothing she needed to secure. She ripped a page from her notebook, wrote down the combination. Bonnie read it aloud.
“13-31-55.”
To Rosellen it sounded like a mangled incantation. For so long, she’d been the only other person on the planet to whom it meant anything. It was inexplicably unnerving, giving it away, as if she’d siphoned vital fuel into the tank of a total stranger.
On Christmas Eve –
Bonnie and Philip in Rosellen’s doorway, Bonnie clutching a bottle of something sparkling, as though there were a ship to christen rather than the Santa Maria to bury. To set aflame, set adrift, Viking-style.
“I remember it started with 13, right? Lucky 13.”
Rosellen nods, takes a sheet of scrap paper, an estimate from a roofing contractor that dates from when the Santa Maria merited maintenance beyond the merely palliative. Earlier that day Rosellen had clutched at the empty air, grabbing at the free-floating, forgotten word “guacamole” – she’d had to google “avocado + garlic + dip” to retrieve it – but this necessary, talismanic sequence, for so many years part of her proprioceptive arsenal, rises to the fore. She writes it down.
“There you go.”
“Thanks, Rosie.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“You, too. Oh,” she says, remembering the wine, “here, Rosie. For you.”
“Prosecco,” says Philip. An operatic roll of the r.
“You’ve got a long night ahead of you,” says Rosellen. “You’ll need it more than I will.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
They’re off, giggling down the hall. Unappealing sound coming from anyone over forty. Silence settles. Of J.C., no sign. Maybe he won’t come. Worse things have happened. He’s not the only game in town. She’s discovered Netflix. If he’s not here by 9:30, she’ll move on. The Crown. Stranger Things.
“Last chance,” she says, at 9:29.
The air unresponsive; then, not. It’s nothing gradual. It’s as though a lever is pulled, a dam opens, a flood rushes in, changing all before it. The atmosphere, re-atomized. His telltale scent. His olfactory calling card.
“Oh.”
Rosellen is vibrantly awake.
“Oh, oh.”
She feels a relief so profound it should be tangible, something she could gather, burn, warm her hands over.
“Oh, oh, oh.”
Here come the tears, creatures of water, salt, evolving out of the corners of her eyes. From a remote province of her brain the chemical signal “Make snot now” is telegraphed to the appropriate worker.
“You’re here.”
She’s choking on happiness. She’s never been so glad to be breathless.
From her mother, in addition to the Royal Doulton shepherdess, Rosellen inherited a keen sense of smell. Even so, it took her a long while to decode the tripartite layerings of J.C.’s giveaway scent. She easily tagged the citrusy, cloying assault of Armani’s eau pour homme; it was one Bryan tried before committing himself to Inebriate, by Johnnie Walker. She could readily name the particular pungency of Gauloises; she’d smoked them when she was toying with la vie de bohème, then came to her senses. But what else? Something chemical.
Antiseptic. It made the nostrils pucker. It was when she evicted a trio of party boys – standing in their doorway, pointing to the quiet time clause, Can’t you read, have you got no repsect? – that she got it. In their freezer, along with the dregs of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, and a zip-lock bag containing what appeared to be used condoms but which she convinced herself were fishing lures, plus a family-sized bag of corn + pea + carrot medley, were row upon row of tiny bottles, medicinal-looking. “Locker Room,” the labels said.
Rosellen consulted Bonnie.
“Poppers!”
Thrill of unanticipated recognition. Happy exclamation of one who, say, opens the door to discover the cat, three months absent and presumed dead, has now returned. As in, “Poppers! Where have you been? Are those your kittens?”
Bonnie’s disquisition on the deployment of these nightlife accessories struck Rosellen as more empirical than breezily anecdotal. Rosellen, daring a tentative whiff, recoiled. She feared she might be jolted out of menopause where she’d been securely buckled for years. It was worth it. Mystery solved. Picture made whole. Armani + Gauloises + Poppers. This was the equation that, when correctly calculated, worked out to J.C. So what if they added up to something that lacked the gravitas, the burnished historicity of frankincense + gold + myrrh? Rosellen didn’t care. She knew it was possible to do good work with simple tools. It impressed her that J.C. managed as well as he did, considering his situation, his liabilities, what he had to work with. Which was nothing. Unless invisibility counts as something. Which, maybe, it does.
Rosellen would like to find a J.C. confidant, an informant, some neighbour who remembers him, could clear a few things up. Stealthy inquiry has revealed a handful of likely candidates; Google has been helpful. Under what pretext would she accost them, whether on the street, or at the Tim Hortons, or at the No Frills? She couldn’t keep up a pretence of detachment, or explain her more-than-passing interest in her Santa Maria predecessor, long gone but not gone, who manifests out of the ether every Christmas Eve, exuding the potent aroma peculiar