Rain pelts the car, a constant barrage sliding down the windshield. Charlie pulls off his toque and blinks at the tree, rubbing his head as if trying to conjure an intelligent thought. He searches his pockets for his phone before seeing it in his mind’s eye, sitting on the prep counter next to the cutting board. He forgot it in his rush to get out the door. Out of the car, the rain pours over him like a cold shower. The street is deserted. Fear nestles deep into his belly, lifting the haze of alcohol he’s been swimming through the entire evening. In the distance, Charlie can hear the sound of sirens, the sound of waves crashing, the sound of someone yelling at him, You’re awake, Charlie. You are wide awake. It’s not like a light bulb illuminating his brain, it’s the kind of frickin’ bolt of white-hot lighting that brings Frankenstein’s monster to life. Charlie scrambles over the tree and starts to run.
THE CBC IS REPORTING that a red cedar estimated to be over a thousand years old was felled by last night’s winds. The largest of its kind in the world, the reporter says, now lying prostrate on the forest floor. Charlie can’t imagine something of that size, something that had survived hundreds and hundreds of years, uprooted and toppled in the dead of night. The tree must have made a terrible noise as it came down, shuddering and groaning with Godzillian force, a mythic reptile slain.
The ocean is dead calm now, cool, steely, shimmering in the early morning light, circling the tall, shut-eyed buildings of the city like a sheltered lake, without a hint of the rage from the night before. Charlie stands in the middle of the empty restaurant looking out across the mouth of Burrard Inlet at what is left of Stanley Park. The entire west side has been ravaged by last night’s storm. When he drove through the causeway on his way to work this morning, the forest was noticeably thinner, ocean appearing where trees once grew tall and dense. He sips his scalding coffee and surveys the altered landscape. He has a headache from his hangover, but it feels far away, like an afterthought. The fire hasn’t been started in the oven and the restaurant is cold. He can see his breath. Martin is sleeping on the leather couch in the lounge, snoring lightly, one of the patio blankets pulled up under his chin. Charlie lets him sleep and walks out back to collect the firewood. The winds have piled garbage into one corner of the parking lot and seagulls are pecking away happily at a loose scattering of soggy french fries. He piles a few logs into his arms and trudges back up the steps to start the fire.
Once the fire starts glowing good and hot, Charlie turns on one of the burners and heats some butter in a pan for eggs. He throws back two aspirin, crunching the pills into bitter powder and letting them melt down his throat like an acidic regurgitation. He feels hollowed and equates that with hunger, a need to be filled. Two eggs over easy. The yolk breaks on the second one and ruins the egg, but Charlie will eat it anyway. James calls to say he’ll be late — things are a mess in Lions Bay. Charlie grabs a place setting from one of the empty tables and sits at the pass-bar, angling his plate and straightening his knife and fork. He takes a bite and the silence in the restaurant grows deeper.
Last night, when he arrived drenched and breathless at the hospital, a nurse helped him into a yellow gown and cap. In the delivery room he headed straight for the baby without realizing where he was going. There was a crowd of people working around the baby, grabbing tubes and vials, their hands on the tiny body, which was blue-skinned, not his, not of this world. He wanted to push past all of them so that he could stand above the baby, inert, and stare. All he could think was: People get things they don’t deserve all the time, so why can’t I have this?
“You look cheery in yellow,” Aisha said, as he brought his face close to hers. Her eyes were swollen from crying. “It’s a girl,” she said. “Go with her.” He followed the baby out of the room and waited on the outskirts of the neonatal unit. Doctors and nurses asked him questions, but he didn’t hear much. He and Aisha hadn’t talked about anything yet. The barnacle was here and she didn’t even have a name. Every time he tried to think of one, lists of food whirled in his head. You couldn’t call a child Dijon or Scallop or Frissé. Through the viewing window all he could see was one of her tiny hands, delicate as a sugary roll of tuile. The rest of her was obscured by tubes and tape and machines. “Every hour she remains stable is a good sign,” was all anyone could tell them. One of the nurses pulled Charlie into the room and encouraged him toward the little plastic portal of the incubator. “It’s good for them,” she said, patting his shoulder. “They want to know you right away, the second they enter the world.” He scrubbed his hands three times before putting on gloves and reaching into the incubator to run the tip of his finger over her forehead and along the ridge of her tiny nose. His hands still didn’t seem clean enough.
ROSE COMES IN LOOKING tired, like she had no sleep. She walks right by him and goes straight for the coffee machine. Her hair is pulled into a messy loop at the crown of her head and she’s wearing the same top from service last night, with a food stain on the sleeve. She stands at the back sink and tries to rub it out before sitting in front of him with her cup of coffee and taking out her scratch pad. She searches through her apron for a pen that works, squiggling invisible lines down the top page.
“You’re here early,” he says, measuring oil for a vinaigrette. Charlie’s not sure why, but he needs her to look at him, and she does, but blankly, and then she looks back down at her pen. She shakes it vigorously and sucks on the tip, trying to encourage the ink to the nib, her cheeks hollowing in a way that makes her look gaunt, but pretty. She tries the pen again and the ink flows freely.
“Where’s the fresh sheet?” she says, focusing on the little X’s she’s drawing at the top of her pad. There’s a spot of ink in the middle of her lip.
“Hungry?” Charlie has a glob of egg stuck somewhere far down, where he feels dry and raw.
“This is my breakfast,” Rose says, holding up her cup of coffee and giving him a look hairy with suspicion.
Ever since he touched the baby last night, he can’t stop looking at his hands. For the first time he notices how ugly they are, covered in scars from burns and slips of the knife. He had tucked his index finger into the baby’s palm, which was pure and untouched by the world. A baby’s palm is as simple as it gets — it was the most delicate thing he’d ever felt in his life. Aisha was sleeping when he left the hospital. He left a note on top of a turkey sandwich wrapped in cellophane that he had bought from the vending machine: Be back after the brunch rush. He tries to dispel the image of Aisha sitting alone in her hospital room, eating the sandwich. She won’t be alone, her sister will be there fussing and clucking and making enough noise for a roomful of people.
Rose pushes away from the counter and picks up a dishrag. He knows he should tell her about the baby’s birth, but there’s something stopping him, as though the words are buried in the deep layers of fat in his gut. He’d need a shovel to dig them out.
“You might want to wake up Martin,” he says instead. “He’s passed out on the couch.”
Rose rolls her eyes, indifferent. “No one’s going to come in today anyway.”