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

lying in the snow, it was winter, he was just lying in the snow beside the sidewalk across the street. So my husband stopped the car. He pulled over. All this traffic, people walking by, but my husband stopped and ran across the street—it must have been thirty below, and the man was out there with no coat or gloves or anything. I watched him from the window. My husband pulled him up to his feet. And then he started to go over again, taking my husband with him. But Stephan caught him and put him on his feet. And then he gave him something, money or something, and talked to him for a minute. I was getting angry because I was waiting. But he came back in the car and just started driving, without saying a word. I looked back just in time to see the man fall, slowly, slowly, slowly, like someone had a hold of him, all the way to the ground. He hit the snow and just lay there. My husband didn’t see. I just never knew a person who would do something like that before. Who would go pick up a man on the sidewalk.” I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know why your story reminded me of that.”
    “It’s about beauty,” said the beautiful-faced man.
    “And there’s the falling part,” said Annie. “That’s sort of like dancing. A lot of those dancers, they jump in the air sohigh, and I just think, oh boy, she is going to really hurt herself when she comes down! I got a sister that used to do ballet. Her kids do it too. But they don’t hurt themselves. They land like snow does, soft like that, like they’ve got their own invisible parachutes. But right up till that last second, sure looks an awful lot like falling.”
    “I think I might have just gotten distracted,” I said. “I think I forgot what I was going to say. I’m not myself right now. Ever since he slipped on the roof—”
    “Not to worry, honey. Hardly anybody in Dawson’s themselves,” Annie said, and then she took out a pink satin eye mask that said
dormir
on it and went to sleep. The man with a beautiful face and I sat in silence while British Columbia disappeared.
    Because only once I’d been inside an airplane, and it was only a two-hour trip to see Stephan’s sister in Toronto, but I shook the whole time, because there was nothing, not one thing, holding up that plane. Because when I put my hand out for Stephan’s, he said, “You’re being ridiculous—look at everyone around us. People fly every day and nobody but you thinks that the plane is going to fall out of the sky just because you’re on it.” And I looked around and it was true; everyone had their plastic cups of soda or their coffees and their papers, and they looked tired or cranky or they were asleep, but not one of them looked afraid. And so I knew there was something wrong with me. And that thing wrong with me was another reason that there was never a day I woke up and thought,
Now
. Now it’s time to go and find her.
    Whitehorse was a clean, small city stretched out beside a river. A man named Jim met Annie at the bus, and she introduced me to him. “Is he your husband?” I whispered, as we walked toward the truck.
    “Hell, no, Jim? No, not that he doesn’t take that kind of liberties sometimes. Me and Jim go way back. He’s the only man I’ve known as long as I’ve known him and I can still stand. He’s a fool though, and an asshole. They all are. But he’s a good man as fools go.”
    As she backed us out onto the road, Annie explained she drove rigs all over Western Canada, and sometimes farther, too. “And I love it,” she said. “Some folks just suffer through, because the money’s good. But I’ve never minded it. Feels like you own the highway, and that’s something. Some folks never get to know what that’s like.” Annie had her hair pulled through above the plastic strap at the back of her hat, and she looked almost like a kid. I hadn’t realized how tiny she was until we’d stood up from our bus seats, and I saw that her