This Eden Read online

  Also by Ed O’Loughlin

  Not Untrue and Not Unkind

  Toploader

  Minds of Winter

  Copyright © 2021 Ed O’Loughlin

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  Published in Canada in 2021 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any

  information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously, and

  any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher.

  The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available

  to students and readers with print disabilities.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: This Eden / Ed O'Loughlin.

  Names: O'Loughlin, Ed, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200395661 | Canadiana (ebook) 2020039567X |

  ISBN 9781487005696 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487005702 (EPUB) |

  ISBN 9781487005719 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PR6115.L68 T45 2021 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

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  Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Typeset in Monotype Fournier by CC Book Production

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  House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the

  Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the

  Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council

  for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

  For Bláthnaid and Iseult, alphabetically.

  Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’

  – Auric Goldfinger, from Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming

  Prologue:

  Wonderland

  Alice and Michael had their first date, if you can call it that, at the Museum of Anthropology on the Vancouver campus of the University of British Columbia.

  Their first meeting was an accident, as far as we can tell, generated by a random weather event – a light fall of snow. It was the final day of the first semester of their first year, and most of the engineering students had skipped their last class to enjoy the weather. Vancouver is warm, by Canadian standards, and snow doesn’t last there. You have to use it while you can.

  Fragments of that day – video clips and photos and social media updates – are still posted on various networks. Others, though since taken down, can be seen by those with the right kind of access. Michael didn’t have any social media accounts, then or ever, but he later shared the pictures from his phone with Alice, who posted them with hers.

  At first, we mostly see the students in a parking lot, grinning, red faced in the cold. A few, without gloves, have pulled the sleeves of their jackets over their hands; we can infer from this, and from the ice on their clothes, that there have already been snowballs.

  Scroll down the timelines, and we see the same students in a different location, sliding on refuse sacks down a short slope towards a line of birch and pine trees. These birches have already shed the new snow, so we know it is already thawing. Beyond the stark trees we see the grey ocean, and a bank of grey cloud that will bring sleet or rain, and in that grey cloud the grey shapes of ships, riding at anchor. The rain has reached those ships, and is already falling on them, all those years ago. To the north, across English Bay, West Vancouver and the mountains are hidden by clouds.

  The snow is thin, and the refuse sacks, sliding through it, uncover wide strips of bare grass. No one is wearing waterproof pants. This game won’t last long.

  Alice Field is in many of these pictures. She is wearing jeans, a red hiking jacket, no hat, no gloves, and canvas shoes that are already soaked. Her hair, which is naturally brown, is worn short and dyed red. She is laughing, but her eyes, which are also brown, never rest on the camera. She is watching the slope as it slides up to meet her, reading its curves. She likes to see a few moves ahead.

  Michael Atarian – a dark-haired, slight kid with a shy but stubborn look – is in many of the images created in the parking lot, but in none of those that were posted from the snow slope. It could be that Michael had gone a few yards downhill to take shots of the others, and that the game had to be abandoned, washed out by that cloud we saw over the ocean, that imminent rain in that long ago future, before Michael could have a go himself. Or it could be that Michael didn’t like being photographed, and found ways to avoid it, most of the time.

  Alice is at or near the centre of most of the pictures taken with Michael’s phone. She will notice that, later.

  The Museum of Anthropology is a five-minute walk from the place where they went sliding. It would have been the nearest shelter from the sleet and rain about to blow off English Bay. It was there that the last few photos of the afternoon were taken, in the glass Great Hall at the centre of the building, surrounded by cultural artefacts of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, such as a frontal pole from a longhouse, a Haida canoe, and a Tsimshian bentwood chest, bright in their colours and lines. In a series of selfies, three other students are packed around Michael, pulling faces. One of these is Alice. The other two students, a boy and a girl, are named in the timelines, but they are of no further interest to us.

  The final photograph shows Alice and Michael alone, beside a high window looking over a pond. Rain is streaming down the window, rotting the snow outside. Both are still smiling, but, with the other two gone, there is room in the frame for some daylight between them: alone together, they look awkward. It was probably around this time that Alice suggested coffee in a cafe off the lobby. That’s how she remembered it, anyway.

  And her memory checks out, in so far as we can check it. Alice Field and Michael Atarian had their first date, if you can call it that, in the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, on Friday, 21 December of their first year at university.

  They had their second date the evening of the day after the snowfall. They met at an Italian restaurant near her house in Kitsilano, where they shared a large pizza and, having shown their IDs, a bottle of Okanagan red. It seemed to Alice that the rain hadn’t stopped since the afternoon before. Water ran down the window next to their table. That’s how she remembered it. And it checks out: she was right. It hadn’t stopped raining.

  Afterwards, they split the bill, went back to her house and opened another bottle of wine, though they didn’t really need it. It was clear where this was going. The only question left for Alice was why. They sat together on the living-room couch, facing the TV, though it wasn’t on. They talked about lectures, about the weather, about classmates. The important thing was to keep talking until the situation resolved itself. She listened to the rain on the window, looked at the blank TV. She’d done all this before. Why did this time feel different?

  She remembered the snowball fight in the parking lot the day before. The students had formed rival skirmish lines, with those who already knew each
other a little more likely to choose the same side. Car roofs provided the wet, sticky snow that is perfect for snowballs.

  Alice, who had come to the fight alone, had turned to scoop snow from the hood of a Buick when she sensed rather than saw a snowball flying towards her, coming the wrong way, from behind her own lines. She ducked behind the Buick, and when she bobbed up again she saw him: a dark-haired boy, the other side of the car, looking sheepish. She hadn’t noticed him in any of their classes. It was like he too had just fallen from the sky.

  Hey, she yelled. That’s cheating!

  It was a bad throw. I wasn’t aiming at you.

  Yeah? Well, stop hiding back there. If you want to be in this fight you have to pick a side.

  Two minutes later, she was reloading again when she felt a snowball hit the back of her knee. She turned. He was standing in the other line of battle, fifteen yards across from her, with another snowball ready to go. This one was also meant for her, but it flew a foot wide.

  She hit him on the chest, then turned away to scoop up more snow.

  Another snowball flew past her head, a little high this time. She tucked her new snowball in her left armpit, made another, turned to find him. His back was to her as he gathered more snow. This time she hit him on the nape of the neck, where the slush would slide under his collar. The shot was deliberate. She had a good arm.

  He turned, gasping from the shock of the ice running down his bare back. It must have felt delicious. She would always remember his face when he saw her, waiting for his full attention, her second snowball ready to go.

  He snatched a shot at her, hit her on the shoulder. He seemed shy, but he wasn’t the type to give up. Which was probably how, on this couch in Kitsilano, he had just found the courage to take hold of her hand.

  Alice was careful not to pack her snowballs too tight. That way, she could go for head shots without doing damage. He had brushed the ice from his eyes and mouth, picked lumps of slush from the front of his collar. Finally, he managed to speak.

  You throw like a girl, he said.

  Most of the boys she had been with before were athletic types, self-centred and sure, worth dating for their muscles and then getting rid of, if they didn’t bail first. They always wanted her to act like a girl, whatever that meant; she didn’t care. They were frightened of silences, but expected her to fill them. She liked to be quiet, most of the time. This kid was also quiet, and he didn’t seem to mind that they’d both fallen silent on this couch in Kitsilano.

  Before this, Alice hadn’t really bothered to see herself as pretty. Now, looking into the unlit television, she saw herself and Michael reflected in its screen. She liked to step outside herself, to watch herself from a distance, to be as objective as she could about the subjective. She wondered, watching herself and Michael in that black rectangle, if that first wildly thrown snowball, the one that connected them, had really been random, or if other forces had vectored it in. She decided that if she hadn’t sensed it and ducked, it would have hit her. That choice, at least, had been hers. If you want to play this game, you have to pick a side. Reflected in the screen, they looked pretty together. That would do her for now. She kissed him.

  *

  Alice still lived in the house she’d grown up in. It had been built in the 1920s from timber frame and shingle, and was small and warm, clean enough, for the most part, though Alice’s parents had a liking for clutter. They’d been renting there for years, from a friend who was, like them, a holdout from the old days, when people without money could still live in Kitsilano. Their rent was a relic of easier times.

  The house stood on a corner where two side streets met, with the living room in the angle, so the rain had its pick of two windows to run down. Sometimes, when the wind was right, it could wash down both windows at once. As a little girl, Alice loved to turn out the lights and stand on the arm of the couch in the corner. From there, she could look out each window in turn. She watched the cars on the street, headlights mirrored in wet asphalt. The lit windows of houses shimmered with rain. Sometimes, in winter, when the weather cleared and the moon was bright, the peaks showed white above the trees at the end of the street. Other times, when there was no moon, she could see a few of the brightest stars, shining through the haze of light thrown up by the city.

  There was a payphone on the corner, and Alice liked to watch the people who came to use it. She wondered who they were, and why they were making calls on a payphone; even her parents had cell phones by then. Some people stayed a long time inside the box, misting the glass with their breath. Others opened the door, reached in without entering, then wandered away again. Years later, she understood: they were checking the refund slot for lost change, begging alms from a forsaken shrine.

  Eventually, her parents would come in and turn the lights back on and carry her off to the room she shared with her big sister. She had everything she wanted: the city and the mountains and the rain on the window. She thought she could never live anywhere else.

  On their first morning there together, when the light crept up the walls, Michael noticed a black and white photograph over the bed. It showed two young people with short, spiky hair, and eyeliner, and Dr. Martens boots. They were holding hands, unsmiling. The girl had a torn dress, the boy wore an old army jacket. The girl looked like Alice.

  The far wall was taken up by a closet and a bookcase – novels and travel and history and science. The closet was open. He saw men’s clothes on hangers. Among them was an old army jacket.

  He sat up in the bed.

  This is your parents’ room.

  She pulled him down again.

  It’s mine, for now.

  They aren’t coming back today?

  They work up in the Territories. They teach high school math. They earn more money up there, and it’ll bump up their pensions for when they retire. I’m paying the rent until we’ve saved enough to buy this place. We have first refusal.

  She pushed across him, pinning him down.

  What about you?

  What about me?

  Your parents. Where are they?

  So he told her.

  A few days after his nineteenth birthday, when Michael was finishing high school, his parents were driving to work on the edge of Grande Prairie, Alberta, when a truck full of steel for the McMurray oil sands ran a red light and flattened their car. The driver, who was trying to clear off some mortgage arrears, had exceeded his permissible hours, and fell asleep at the wheel. He went to jail, and his family lost its home, and then fell apart. But that doesn’t matter. We’ve checked the incident from every possible angle and it seems to have been a genuine accident, if accidents are ever really a thing.

  Because Michael was past his eighteenth birthday there wasn’t much the government could do for him, or to him. But his high school had a contract with a grief counsellor, and the principal sent him to see her. He only went once.

  The counsellor’s notes for the session are covered by patient confidentiality, but she typed up a transcript at home, then emailed it to her office inbox. Which makes it accessible. It goes like this:

  Hi, Mike. Please sit down.

  Thanks . . . I prefer to go by Michael.

  OK, then: Michael . . . Ms Shevchenko says that your teachers are worried about your reaction to your terrible loss. She says that you went to school the day after the funeral and acted like nothing had happened.

  I didn’t want to stay at home.

  Do you like school?

  No.

  But you have friends there?

  Sure. A few.

  Are they being supportive?

  I don’t really know. I’ve been kind of avoiding them.

  Why?

  I don’t want to make a big deal of it.

  Pause.

  OK . . . It says here you have no relatives in Canada. Do you have any family i
n . . . ? Your parents were from Iran, it says here?

  My parents didn’t talk about that. They never mentioned any relatives.

  So you’re alone in the world?

  I guess.

  I am truly very sorry for you.

  Thanks.

  Pause.

  Were you close to your parents?

  I don’t know. I guess.

  Do you miss them?

  Yes.

  Pause.

  I’m here to help you, Mike, if you’ll let me. You’ve suffered a terrible loss. It helps to talk about these things. It helps to share your feelings with other people.

  I don’t want to.

  Why not?

  I don’t want to have to think about it.

  What’s wrong with facing your feelings, Mike?

  Part of me is glad that my parents are dead.

  You’re glad that your parents have passed?

  They were always scared of something . . . Now that they’re gone, I don’t have to worry about them. It’s like they finally got away.

  This grief counsellor wrote Sociopath? in her notebook. She had missed the point entirely. Unsure what to do next, she turned to techniques used for drawing out people who are in shock or denial. She didn’t think that he was in shock or denial, but the school paid by the hour, so she needed to run down the clock.

  There was a truck, a stop light, a sleep-deprived driver. The truck was hauling twenty tons of steel rods for reinforcing poured concrete. It was moving at eighty kilometres per hour when it T-boned their pickup. Unlike Michael, they wouldn’t have suffered.

  As soon as he left early childhood, and could see outside the nest that they had built for him, Michael had started to feel sorry for his parents. He tried to take care of them, their native-born son.