FOR THE SECOND year in a row, the silver maple forest at the end of her street, where she and her husband usually went canoeing in the spring with their kids, did not flood. She was there in her rain boots sloshing around in the mud, mostly to satisfy her yearning to be outside after a long winter, but also from curiosity: maybe she could figure out why the forest hadn’t flooded. She knew that the climate crisis was making things drier, but there had been enough snow to ski well into March, seemingly enough to transform the corridors between the trees into canals upon melting. 

Frankly, instead of the bucolic water playground it usually was, it looked like a disaster zone, like the trenches of World War I, the downed trees standing in for fallen soldiers. A system in decay. It was that moment in the year when the snapshot of winter pureness had faded to sepia and the force of spring renewal had not yet swooped in to save the system from entropy. In the dry areas, last year’s leaves looked like last month’s snow, sickly grey. Or like her face after six months with little sun. In that eerie absence of colour, the buds had started to form—furry, silver bullets, but even they hadn’t taken on any green yet. 

She came to an area that was in particular disarray. What’s going on with these deep depressions? she wondered as she prodded a clump and inspected the soil-laden roots protruding from the ground. While walking through an opaque pool her foot kicked up something hard, which poked out from the murky surface briefly, starkly white, and sunk back. She pushed up her sleeve and plunged her arm into the cold puddle. After a few unceremonious branches, she was about to give up. But her next catch had her grasping a massive bone. 

With no regard for her washing machine, she wiped the bone on her jeans. It was as wide as her hand and as long as her arm. As she drew her fingers over its elegant arch, something about the object gave her shivers. 

She remembered suddenly that she was on her lunch break. She had a Zoom call and had to get back home. 

She wasn’t leading this call, but all her projects were winding up after a year of emergency Covid funding and she had no new prospects. She had been invited as an expert in participatory research to sit on this advisory committee for a project with youth living on the streets. They were going to be starting the year-long field work in Montréal shortly. She was hoping that she could impress and land herself a bigger role. I won’t be impressing anyone, though, arriving late with grime in my hair, Else thought as she restrained herself from her nervous tick of running her fingers through her greying auburn crew cut.

Else gripped the bone and launched into a parody of running. Her rain boots made an infuriatingly slow suction sound, as if mocking her, until she became completely stuck.

To free herself she pointed her toe, slipped her foot out and balanced like a blue heron on one leg while she struggled with the imprisoned wellington. With a good grip, she was able to extirpate her boot from the muck. She jammed her foot back in and identified the route with the least amount of swamp. She hit the road with ten minutes before the call. 

THE TENSION FROM her dash was just dissipating from her shoulders when a familiar face popped up on the screen. She went as white as the bone she had taken a shower with and that now lay in her lap. She thought she saw the same blanching in her former friend’s already pale face as she took stock of those in attendance. She hadn’t seen Arianne for twenty years.

Else didn’t “hide self-view.” There they were, side by side, just as they had been for all those years of foolhardiness. Arianne and Else. The years had been kind to Arianne. She must have stopped the heavy stuff too. The crow’s feet around her eyes softened her face. When Else knew her, she was all skin and bones, hard angles etched into her body by hard nights. Hallows carved into her cheeks by hollow relationships. Except theirs. 

As Arianne introduced herself everyone seemed rapt, catapulting Else to her twenties. Arianne looked directly into the camera, not at her screen (self-view was likely off), making Else feel examined, scrutinized, a familiar feeling. She was a “knowledge user” on this grant. Translation—she was not an academic and she either worked for a community group providing services to underhoused people or she lived on the streets herself. Or both. Else wouldn’t put it past Arianne to have gained some social work skills and insist on being close to her “subject.” Arianne was not wearing black, but her raven black hair was as long and thick as it had always been and had started to grey around the temples where it curled more than the rest. The room she was in was lit with natural sunlight, which glinted off her hair in places, making it look indigo. In Else’s kitchen, where the sun had reigned triumphant on the clouds, it warmed her otherwise chilled skin. Arianne’s accent had softened too. She had shed the telltale “d” of the Québecois, finally mastering the “th.” But you still wouldn’t mistake her for an Anglophone.

When Arianne stopped speaking, Else’s mind wandered to the bone lying dormant in her lap. She noticed that it was rough, but not uniformly so. Its roughness was the result of hundreds of tiny holes, which gave the bone the look of a coral and she wondered if it had belonged to an aquatic creature. She tapped it and heard a hollow, echo-y sound, which made her look up to check that she was on mute. While glancing at the screen she gave a smile and a nod. 

She wanted to put her nose and her ear to it, even her tongue, but her camera was on. Instead, she drew the breadth of her palms over it, remarking how solid it was, despite being so light. Her first attempt at university was in biology, and despite not having finished, she still knew this wasn’t a human bone. Putting these things together, she sensed that this bone was extraordinarily old. 

AS SHE HIT the red “leave” button she shoved her laptop back and rested her forehead on the kitchen table. Her eyes were closed, and she was trying to calm herself through deep breathing. After a few breaths, she registered the pungent stench of decomposing mud. The bone was still on her lap and this close she could tell that one shower was not enough to remove the stink of millennia of internment. 

Too distracted to work, Else set about figuring out what species the bone might be from. Her first line of inquiry was a mammoth, but in a few clicks, she was reminded that this area had been most recently covered – geologically speaking– by the Champlain Sea, making her first hunch of a sea creature more likely. She learned that whale bones did turn up all through the Saint Lawrence River Valley and that the Redpath Museum, McGill University’s natural history museum and one of her kids’ favorites, had some of those very bones. After some wrestling with the museum’s online calendar, Else miraculously got five quickly disappearing spots for her and her family to go the next weekend.

The first thing that gave wind of the Great Change was the temperature. Despite being smaller, the Calm Waters were usually just as icy cold to Whale’s sensitive skin as the Big Water of Push she had just traveled through to get here when the Light from Above lengthened and strengthened. Whale was curious of this change, but not too bothered by it. The Calm Waters were just as welcome after a long journey as they had always been.  

Else was startled out of her abstraction by the boisterous voices of her kids coming up the street on their way home from school. She jumped up and hid the bone in the linen trunk. She didn’t stop herself even as she wondered at her intentions. Her kids were so curious and eventually broke most of her things, but she sensed that that wasn’t all of it. Her discovery of the relic had become somehow synonymous with her reacquaintance with Arianne—buried fragments, resurrected scraps. She had hidden her inglorious past from her family all these years. What was one more skeleton in the closet?

She slid easily and contentedly into the practicality of mothering. How was your day at school? Let’s look at your homework. Cook supper. Wind the family down and put the kitchen to bed. Finally, it was quiet. She headed out to her woodshop, her husband, Nathan, joining her with a beer. He liked to idly watch her and chitchat as she connected with her projects. And Else enjoyed the company. She didn’t ever have much of a plan, she just let the wood lead her. That night she noticed that the piece of wood she was working resembled the bone. It, too, was porous. But mostly, they both abstractly represented ‘home.’ Not her home, but their home – the tree’s and the mysterious species’. The wood was the tree’s framework and the bone was scaffolding to some giant creature.

THE NEXT DAY, she decided to do something she hadn’t done since the kids were babies. In those moments when she thought she couldn’t take it anymore, when she was sure she was going to be consumed by another being’s will and wishes and needs, she would use the pretense of a grocery trip to take the car on highway 15 and drive as fast as she could stand. It was out of character, even then, and certainly now in her mid-forties. But, in those dark, sleepless months, it was one of the only things that made her feel alive and sovereign. As the traffic thinned out, she inched the speed up and was brought back to her escapades with Arianne to Mont Tremblant National Park. 

It must have been May 1997. She had met Arianne over the winter at a house party, but this was the first time they would be doing something alone together. 

It was on the ride down that Else first caught a glimpse of Arianne’s reckless side. The music was loud and Else had felt exhilarated by the familiar notes of Led Zeppelin and the wind in her hair after an eternity in a tuque. They were going too fast for Else’s taste as it was, but then a middle-aged driver in a silver sports car looked at Arianne and tilted his chin. Arianne stepped on the gas and began weaving between cars, staying within sight of her opponent. Else sat on her hands and bit her lip, but she was wary of seeming dull, so remained silent. Arianne’s opportunity arose about fifteen minutes after this fabricated drama began when her adversary got stuck behind a trailer in the righthand lane with a van full of primary school kids on the left. They had just passed Saint Jerome where the 15 widens to three lanes. Arianne had an empty runway. Her opponent’s jaw dropped as they passed him. Clearly, he had underestimated Arianne. Elation flooded over them both, Arianne’s due to her victory, Else’s from relief. 

Else realized suddenly she had gone far too far to still be able to swing by and do a full grocery run. Nonetheless, she thought it best to pick something up and get directly home, so no one would notice the absence of sundries. She arrived home to a lovely smorgasbord lunch Nathan had put together. Her olives and brie were a perfect addition.

AFTER LUNCH AND her daughter’s soccer game, Else went back to the forest by herself for a walk. It was a relief, following a year bound to her house, that activities like soccer were up and running again. Else delighted to see her daughter lithely traverse the field. But it didn’t quite fill the cavernous hole of want that had developed at her core throughout the pandemic. In that space of endless searching, Else saw her neighborhood forest landscape with new eyes. The clayey soil was silt from a long-ago sea. The dead trees seemed almost as though they were petrified, otherworldly, their jagged, bare trunks jutting out helter-skelter. Snags, they’re called, an essential habitat for insects and animals that prey on them. Also: a snag, as in a snag in your plan; and to snag, both to tear and to catch something quickly. Arianne had been all of that. In French, the word is a chicot and the verb chicoter means, in Québec, to bother, irritate, or be a thorn in your side. Arianne had also been that. 

Years later, the smell also changed. Whale had summered here all her life. When she would come with her Big Nourisher, she would always know they were close from the sweet smell. But of late it smelled rotten. No place you would want to be. But this is where Whale spent Long Day season, so came she did.  

The misty air was starting to penetrate Else’s clothes when she saw her first sign of spring—evening- primrose, the tiny specks of yellow the only colour as far as the eye could see.  

Arianne had called her prim. Raide. She had learned that French word from Arianne, at her own expense. It’s true that compared to Arianne she was stiff and proper. But not compared to most. Arianne was magnetic. The pull that she exerted over Else was like a tight rope. The tension between them was a strong attraction, but to get to the other side was dangerous. The first time was a threesome. They brought a very appreciative and incredulous young guy back to Arianne’s apartment late and drunk. Else hadn’t remembered much, but the next day she felt like a prop in Arianne’s circus act. When Else confronted her about it though Arianne snapped, and the whiplash hurt more than feeling like an instrument had.  

The next time was something else altogether. Arianne had always changed in front of Else, but this time she lingered. There was a tinge of shyness mixed in with Arianne’s usual bravado. For months, Else had been aching for more but she was unsure of where she stood. She recognized Arianne’s hesitation as an entreaty and crossed the room, sitting next to Arianne, placing her hand on her bare thigh. With her other hand she cupped Arianne’s whittled chin and gave her the softest kiss. Almost imperceptibly, the edges were smoothed – both Arianne’s barbed wire instincts and the boundaries of pretense between them. In this openness, a dike was burst and there was no possibility of gathering up all that had spilt and tucking it neatly back behind the dam’s safe walls. 

WHEN ELSE LOGGED in early for their next team meeting, she was dismayed to see only Arianne there. 

“Allo. I thought I’d catch you here early. We can’t just pretend nothing ever happened, Else,” Arianne launched right in. 

Arianne had said her name with that French lilt that puts all the emphasis on the last syllable. It sounded like an accusation. They had only made love several times before Arianne started being jealous. 

“I put all of that behind me. It was a mistake to drop out of McGill to party. I went back to university, I have a position in the School of Public Health, I have a family.”

“I can see that…” scoffed Arianne. Behind Else were all the telltale signs of a functional kitchen where primary school children ruled. Else knew the contempt that Arianne would feel at anything so conventional as hooks lined up for backpacks and a fridge system for knowing when to return the library books.

“I’m happy.”

“Are you really, Else?”

Else thought back to Saturday’s joy ride and felt unsettled. Maybe I am missing something. But isn’t everyone missing something? 

“Else, I need to see you. You left and a lot of things went unsaid.” 

Just then the team lead popped up on the screen and Else and Arianne replaced the creases on their foreheads with laugh lines around the eyes. In a private message just seconds later, Else read, “16h, samedi, Parc Lafontaine, tu connais l’endroit.”

She would be downtown already. And, yes, of course, she knew the spot. It was just like Arianne to produce this like an order. But after everything that had come between them, she still cast a spell over Else. 

FOLLOWING THE CALL, there was no possibility of working. Else decided to go for a run.  

It was only a week since she had found the bone, but the forest had transformed. All that latent chlorophyll had bubbled up in the buds and each surface seemed to be touched by a glow of florescent green. 

Another Long Day season, Whale noticed how the taste of the water had changed. It was saltier. It made the Pink Abundant Food taste bad. The smell was still there too. Would Whale be able to stomach such salty fare? She saw her Big Nourisher with a new Little One and felt reassured. This is where she always summered and so summer here, she would. 

Else rounded a corner and was astonished to see the underbrush awash in blue – forget-me-nots, myosotis, escaped from a nearby garden. They had replaced the evening primrose. One spring, Arianne showed up at their usual spot in Parc Lafontaine with a bouquet of forget-me-nots and a guitar. She serenaded Else with Georges Brassens’ Le myosotis. 

Like the forget-me-nots, Else had deserted.

SATURDAY WAS UPON her before she had much time to prepare mentally or plan or even say yes or no. Which meant yes. It had often been that way with Arianne. But before their impending rendez-vous, she had the museum to explore. 

Even though it had been her idea, her husband took the lead on the preparations. They had their routine down pat from before the pandemic – train, metro, walk. They were like a small, ambulant ecosystem, complete with nutrients, water and defences against the elements packed into backpacks. The excitement this time, though, was at a boiling point after a year spent in about a 5km radius. This, despite, the fact that no one thought that the Redpath Museum would be any different than the last time they visited. One of its charms was that it hadn’t seemed to have changed since the early 20th century – the little specimen tags on yellowed paper written by hand with a fountain pen in classic calligraphy, descriptions of cultures still employing the word ‘man’ for ‘human,’ and artifacts that certainly should have been returned to the descendants of the people who made them by now. She got a kick out of seeing her kids’ bobbly gait, their bodies darting out at odd angles unexpectedly, like they were literally bubbling over with excitement. Nathan, a nerd through and through, was nearly as excited as the kids.

She knew she would find what she was looking for on the first floor and there it was, in the entry. She gazed at the ceiling where the skeleton of a beluga hung. Before leaving the house, alone in her room, she took another good look at the bone. She saw that it was incomplete. The tip of the curved part ended neatly, whereas the end of the long segment was ragged. The suspended skeleton was unbroken; the bone she had found must have been from a larger animal. Upon closer inspection, she could see the similarities. She must be in possession of a rib from a larger whale species. 

In a wood-framed case along the wall, she found an exhibit of a humpback whale discovered near Ottawa that dated from the Champlain Sea, ten thousand years ago: two vertebrae and part of a rib. There was no question that the bone still tucked safely in her linen chest was the same species as the whale before her. 

Whale knew she had come down the right channel. She had made this trip with ten Little Ones. But it didn’t look the same. In fact, what had changed was that she couldn’t see. The water was silty. She could sense that the passage was much narrower. And, still, she knew she was headed to the Calm Waters.

WITH A PARTING kiss to Nathan and their kids, who would go back home for a movie and pop-corn night, she made her way east “to meet a friend.” She had worn a full skirt with tights and flat Mary Janes. She could feel her bum cheeks tighten and loosen, jiggling slightly, against her skirt with every step. She was also aware of her hip making a circular motion: up, forward, out, down and back. 

She thought she should be nervous, but she wasn’t. She knew she had hurt Arianne. But Arianne had hurt her too. She hadn’t left only because of the lifestyle, the hangovers, the regrets and stolen memories. It was that Arianne could be mean. 

She saw Arianne from a distance, the same leather jacket that she used to wear beside her, lying in a heap. Else’s fingertips tingled with the memory of gripping the supple leather as she sat astride Arianne’s motorcycle. Her feet were bare, and she was sprawled on the blanket, facing west. She knew Else would arrive from the west. 

They were silently awkward for a while before Arianne spoke. “I did it, the motorcycle trip out West that we were always talking about. I finally did it five years ago.

“It wasn’t how I thought it would be. You know, the feeling we got when we were on my bike? That was there. But it was mostly the opposite of freedom. I couldn’t escape the thoughts. Things I hadn’t thought of in years. 

“You know what I thought about most?” Arianne paused. “You. Else…I thought about how much I loved you and how I screwed up.”

Slow, warm tears rolled down Else’s cheeks and her nose leaked as if it had been waiting for this cue. Back when they were “together” the only time that Else felt that she mattered to Arianne was when they were in bed. She had never said anything like this.    

“I knew that. But I also knew that you didn’t know, and I thought you didn’t care. I think that hurt more than thinking that you didn’t love me would have.” Else replied with more tenderness than she had expected to.

Arianne nodded. “Me, I also went back to school, tsé. I have a degree in social work. It almost killed me, worse than the heroin. But now that it’s over, I can do something to contribute.”

The last thing she thought she would do with Arianne was small talk. But she found herself telling Arianne about her work, her kids, and her “good-guy” husband. Arianne listened, and if she harboured the same disdain for the mainstream that she had before, she was doing a good job of concealing it. Finally, Else described discovering the bone. If Else hadn’t been expecting to share details about her daily life with Arianne, she expected to divulge the bone even less. But as she sat there apprehensively releasing what she thought were snippets of herself, something budged, a boulder she had been harbouring all these years. And it was something as big that that she now needed to hand over, ridding herself, by the same stroke, of the boulder. 

“Wô, ça doit être un choc de trouver un os de baleine !”

To which Else replied: “It was a shock to find a whale bone.” … “As much of a shock as to see you on the screen fifteen minutes later.” 

They didn’t broach the topic of their relationship again until the end. “You know, I almost killed myself. About a month after you left. An overdose. They said it was an accident and I didn’t correct them. Tu m’as garochée aux poubelles comme des restants de table.”

There it was, what Arianne really thought: that Else had thrown her out with the table scraps. Else was beyond exasperated. She felt like she had just been made to recite a sonnet, and here was the turn of thought in the final line. The audience was laughing at her. She hesitated. She wondered if it was worth saying what she really thought. But no. Obviously Arianne was on a path somewhere and this was a step in her process. Else had her own process and she suddenly knew it didn’t lie here. 

“You’re probably right, Arianne,” Else finally said. Their parting was cold, frigid even, but at least it was an ending. 

As she walked through Parc Lafontaine, she recalled her first kiss with her husband, also in a park in spring, and felt an emptiness welling up inside of her, an emptiness borne of her own silence. 

At this time of day, the sea was usually awash in Whale song: Big Nourishers calling in their Little Ones as they strayed too high or too low, lovers locating each other after a day feeding on the Pink Abundant Food, widows wallowing in loneliness, their song, extra voluble to compensate for the absence. But not now, now there was silence. Where were they all?

HER FAMILY HAD waited for the water level to rise so they could walk the canoe down to river, but it never did. Sunday, they capitulated and loaded the canoe on the car. She and Nathan left the kids at a park and set out from the quay. They headed to their part of the river. She could see in through the still-bare trees to where the forget-me-nots were already fading. She knew exactly what took their place in a week’s time – poison ivy. That’s all Arianne could ever be to her.

One year, Whale barely made it in. She had to twist and turn through the sinewy channel. Once she got there, she and the other few whales could hardly turn around without bumping each other. They didn’t have enough Pink Abundant Food, so what was at first accidental jouncing, became intentional as their fat reserves melted away. By mid-Long Day Season, it had already happened a few times, but one day she found herself out of the Calm Waters on the rocky shoreline and couldn’t get back in. As she lay there, helpless, her skin began to itch and sting all over. And then it was as if she had dived too deep...  

Like a whale about ready to go under, she took a deep breath and began her story. She told Nathan everything. She didn’t know when she was crying, when she was whispering.  When she finally came to the bone, the end of her confession, Nathan took her whole body in his arms and rocked her like the Calm Waters.