Emma Donoghue - Landing

Landing

Emma Donoghue

Contents

New Year's Eve 1

Travel Sickness 7

Sic Transit 15

What When Where How Why 28

Genii Loci 33

Old Habits 44

Foreign Correspondents 54

Virtually Nothing 66

Family Feeling 75

Human Habitation 83

Purge 90

Consequences 105

Home Base 111

Peak Time 139

That Which Moves, That Which Changes 168

Songs of Absence 193

Here and Now 200

Geography Lessons 222

Heavy Weather 236

Flying Visit 250

Spring Forward, Fall Back 255

Living History 262

Going the Distance 276

Provenance 303

Place Markers 312

Note

Ireland, Ontario, occupies the same spot on the map as the real Dublin, Ontario, but is in all other respects fictional. Likewise, the Irish airline for which one of my protagonists works is entirely imaginary.

New Year's Eve

Later on, Jude Turner would look back on December thirty-first as the last morning her life had been firm, graspable, all in one piece.

She'd been sleeping naked and dreamless. She woke at six, as always, in the house in Ireland, Ontario, where she'd been born; she didn't own an alarm clock. In her old robe she gave her narrow face the briefest of glances in the mirror as she splashed it with cold water, damped down her hair, reached for her black rectangular glasses. The third and eighth stairs groaned under her feet, and the stove was almost out; she wedged logs into the bed of flushed ash. She drank her coffee black from a blue mug she'd made in second grade.

As Jude drew on her second cigarette it was beginning to get light. She watched the backyard through a portcullis of two-foot icicles: Were those fresh raccoon tracks? Soon she'd shovel the driveway, then the Petersons' next door. The neighbour on the other side was Bub, a cryptic turkey plucker with a huge mustache. Usually her mother would be down by now, hair in curlers, but since Boxing Day, Rachel Turner had been away at her sister's in England. The silence trickled like oil into Jude's ears.

She'd walk the three blocks to the museum by seven so she could get some real work done before anyone called, or dropped by to donate a mangy fur tippet, because this afternoon was the postmortem on the feeble results of the Christmas fundraising campaign. At twenty-five, Judethe curatorwas the age of most of the board members' grandchildren.

The phone started up with a shrill jangle, and though she was inclined not to answer it, she did. It was the accent she recognized, more than the voice.

"Louise! Merry Christmas. Why are you whispering?" Jude broke in on her aunt's gabbled monologue. "Not herself, how?"

"I just don't think" Louise interrupted herself in a louder voice: "I'm only on the phone, Rachel, I'll be right in."

As she stubbed out her cigarette, Jude tried to picture the house in Englanda town called Lutonthough she'd never seen it. "Put Mom on the line, would you?"

Instead of answering, her aunt called out, "Could you stick the kettle on?" Then, hissed into the phone, "Just a tick."

Waiting, Jude felt irritation bloom behind her eyes. Her aunt had always liked her gin; could she possibly be drunk at, whatshe checked the grandfather clock and added five hours11:30 in the morning?

Louise came back on the line, in the exaggerated style of a community theatre production: "Your mother's making tea."

"What's up, is she sick?"

"She'd never complain, and I haven't told her I'm ringing you," her aunt whispered, "but if you ask me, you should pop over and bring her home."

Pop over, as if Luton were a couple of kilometres down the road. Jude couldn't keep her voice from cracking like a whip. "Could I please speak to my mother?"

"The yellow pot," Louise shouted, "the other's for herbal. And a couple of those Atkins gingernuts." Then, quieter, "Jude, dear, I must go, I've tai chi at noonjust take my word for it, would you please, she needs her daughter"

The line went dead. Jude stared at the black Bakelite receiver, then dropped it back in the cradle.

She looked up the number in the stained address book on the counter, but after four rings she got the message, in Louise's guarded tones: "You have reached 3688492..."

"Me again, Jude," she told the machine. "Ilisten, I really don't get what's wrong. I'd appreciate it if Mom could call me back right away." Rachel must be well enough to use the phone if she was walking around making tea, surely?

Jude cooked some oatmeal, just to kill a few minutes. After two spoonfuls her appetite disappeared.

This was ridiculous. Sixty-six, lean, and sharp, Jude's mother never went to the doctor except for flu shots. Not a keen traveler, but a perfectly competent one. Louise was six years her elder, or was it seven? If there was something seriously wrong with Rachelpain or fever, bleeding or a lumpsurely Louise would have said? It struck Jude now that her aunt had sounded evasive, paranoid, almost. Could these be the first signs of senility?

Jude tried the Luton number again and got the machine. This time she didn't leave a message, because she knew she'd sound too fierce. Surely the two sisters wouldn't have gone out a minute after making a pot of tea?

Her stomach was a nest of snakes. Pop over, as easy as that. The Atlantic stretched out in her mind, a wide gray horror.

It wasn't as if she were phobic, exactly. She'd just never felt the need or inclination to get on an airplane. It was one of those things that people wrongly assumed to be compulsory, like cell phones or gym memberships. Jude had got through her first quarter century just fine without air travel. In February, for instance, when much of the population of Ontario headed like shuddering swallows to Mexico or Cuba, she preferred to go snowshoeing in the Pinery. Two years ago, to get to her cousin's wedding in Vancouver, she'd taken a week each way and slept in the back of her Mustang. And the summer her friends from high school had been touring Europe, Jude had been up north planting trees to pay for her first motorbike. Surely it was her business if she preferred to stay on the ground?