Read Online In the Land of Birdfishes by Rebecca Silver Slayter - Free Book Online Page A

had disappeared did I remember that I hadn’t asked him if he knew my sister. By the time I turned back around, Taz was handing me back my card. “All done. Enjoy your stay.”
    I slept until past dinnertime. When I woke, I was shocked to realize I had fallen asleep right on top of the plaid bedspread. “You think they wash these for every guest?” I’d always told Stephan when we stayed at the motel by his sister’s place.
    My headache had somehow gotten worse while I slept. Rubbing my temples, I stood and looked out the window at the town below. It was so small and yet I hadn’t a clue how to find her in it. I would have to ask someone—who knew how many people—till I found someone who could tell me where she was.
    Exhausted at the thought, I sat back down on the bed. No one knew I was here. There wasn’t anyone to know, not really. With Stephan gone, and the only people we’d met in Toronto friends of his from work. I’d had a few friends left from the university I’d taught at in Halifax, and when we lived there we’d have dinner with them once in a while. But they weren’t the kind of friends you kept in touch with once you were gone from a place. So there was no one but Stephan to tell that he had left me.
    It was thinking that that made me realize I could just as easily leave this place as stay. No one would miss me if I left. My sister, wherever she was, would have long ago stopped wondering when I’d come for her, if she ever wondered at all. The few people I’d met would be glad enough not to see me again—Annie and that boy at the desk. If I could just get a ride somehow back to Whitehorse, I could sleep away the four-day drive home and it would be as if all this had been a dream. There’d be nobody I’d even need to confess how stupid I’d been to—it would be as if I’d never come and I could resume my life as if I’d never left it.
    But at the thought of turning the key in the lock of the front door of our house, I felt a chill. What life, after all, would I be resuming? I had only a part-time job teaching rudimentary grammar to Korean immigrants, and nothing to spend my days on except thinking about a long trip I’d taken to find no one and then come home again to no one.
    I couldn’t stand being in the hotel room. I noticed a faint stain on the quilt by my hand or maybe just a worn spot, something that reminded me of the hundred other bodies that had slept on it, fucked on it, sat at the bottom of the worst of their godforsaken lives on it and tried to weasel out of the one thing they’d meant to do. I had to leave.
    I grabbed my purse from the bedside table and hurried out the door and down the stairs. Taz didn’t look up as I passed him, and I slammed the front door behind me as I stumbled down the steps onto the street.
    The sun was still high and bright overhead, and I squinted as I made my way along the sidewalk with the idea of the river in my head. I got as far as I’d gone earlier in the day, and then I turned down toward the water and kept walking. Down by the shore I could see a couple dozen people gathered, and I could hear a woman singing.
    As I got closer, I could hear her voice rise and fall in the air. A guitar rang out. She hit a high note that seemed unlikely, even impossible, her voice flickering so easily all the way up there and down again.
    It was music like the folk songs of my childhood. Earnest, not tired like most music I heard these days. It was some kind of love song she was playing. I could tell that from just the sound of it. How it made me think for a moment again how easy it would be to go home. How I might go about finding him, how I might ask one more time for him to stay … the other words I might use to convince him.
    I crossed the last street before the river and climbed down the hill to where people were gathered in front of the woman with the guitar. She was just finishing her song when I took a seat on the grass not too far from her. I