Open by Lisa Moore Page A

the children were born while they travelled.
    When will you stop, I ask.
    We will continue for a long time, she says.
    Maureen wears her sunglasses. We have finished the Norwegian biscuits. In the big black lenses of Maureen’s sunglasses the ropes and booms and masts all crisscross like a cat’s cradle. She is crying and the tears slide down her cheeks and hang on her chin. I can’t get a straight answer out of her. She has her arms wrapped around her knees. I sit up on one elbow and wave the Duras novel at her.
    I say, This is nothing like what we thought.
    She turns and the sun, which is setting, catches in one lens of her sunglasses and it burns a dark piercing amber and she ducks her head and puts her hand over her eyes.
    She says, I wanted you to see this life.
    It’s foggy the day we leave. My husband shoots a video of Antoine on the dock as the ferry pulls away. He is wearing a navy and white striped T-shirt like a real Frenchman. He waves, and does not stop waving until he is engulfed by the fog.
    Maureen and I met him in a bar last summer. He was wearing a faded fluorescent pink undershirt. He has an orange beard, tufts of orange under his arms, and a long orange braid.He told us that his granny, on her deathbed, made him promise never to cut his hair.
    Why would she do such a thing?
    So I would understand the weight of a promise.
    We watch him climb the rigging. His bare feet curling over the skeleton of the sails, a great height over the deck. His wiry body a part of the spare geometry.
    Antoine’s brother visits Newfoundland from Nigeria, where he’s been studying giraffes and getting his pilot’s license.
    He raps the brass knocker on the front door and steps inside. Sunlight flashes under his arms and between his legs and the door closes and the hall is dark. He stands, not moving. I am in the kitchen with my hands in the sink. I walk down the hall to greet him. He’s wearing a straw hat with tiny brass bells on the rim and patterns woven in wine and dark green straw. His face is so like Antoine’s that for a moment I think it is Antoine, playing a joke. I hold out my hand, he grips it, soapsuds squish through my fingers.
    Any brother of Antoine’s is a brother of mine, I say. He tilts his head quizzically, and the bells jingle through the empty house.
    He sleeps in the living room on the couch. There’s a French door with no curtain and he sleeps in his briefs with the blankets kicked away. He finally gets up and I don’t know what to do with him. With Antoine, misunderstandings could keep us talking for hours, but this guy has a firm grip on English and I’m at a loss.
    Okay, stay still, I say. I’m going to paint you.
    His knife pauses over the bread. A gob of marmalade hangs along the serrated edge. I do portraits in ink on wet paper. The thing about ink, as soon as you touch the brush to paper you have decided the course of the drawing. First, I am looking into his eyes. I am thinking about the shape of the eyeball, and the size, how far the eye sinks into the face. How the shadow slopes over the bone of the brow — if he sits back even an inch, the shadow will be radically different. Then the colour of his eyes startles me. I thought they were dark brown, but in this light there is a tawny copper underneath, like the bottle of marmalade, which the sun strikes so it seems to pulse. He has just come from Nigeria, and how far away that is, and what he has seen. Then I realize that I have been staring with an unself-conscious intensity into a stranger’s eyes. And this brother of Antoine is staring at me and we become aware of ourselves, and the intimacy is briefly but fiercely embarrassing.
    He says, gesturing to the sketchbook, Forgive me, it’s my first time.
    Weeks later in our kitchen I say, Antoine seemed strange to me. That weekend in St. Pierre I marked a change in him.
    Late at night Maureen watched the video again and in the morning she said it was true. He had behaved