A Bright House
Chapter 11

“Relativity, far from precluding time travel, in some ways almost makes it a certainty” - J.Randles

Jenny wasn’t interested in the hunt for “now”. In fact, “now” had morphed into endlessly bound streams of coping that bore more resemblance to “then”... that one critical event that had inexplicably, ruthlessly, removed the core of her life’s reason, remained always locked to the past. Now, had little to do with her subsequent days and the agonizingly slow process of healing. More truthfully, the concept of healing had itself been rejected. To heal meant to forget. It would be abandonment of hope. The muting of prayer. The irony of such a view was lost on the grieving widow. On her very best days, Jenny would recognize the concept of “when”. It felt as though a glimpse of a solution wanted its chance on those days. For the Saturday that changed her world, Jenny had found something from her past essence. It was a freeing, almost cavalier, letting go.

There were no thoughts to point toward Ray Townes as the catalyst, or creator, or liberator. It all seemed to come, so logically and naturally, from within Jenny and for Jenny. So little of her life experience that was happy had been lived outside of the love with Scott, she had forgotten how to feel that which captured “happy” within her. It reminded her of one elderly customer who had fallen in love with her. One for whom she had harbored considerable empathy and compassion, who suddenly confided over bacon and eggs that he had never “felt happiness” due to his clinical depression. He had learned to mimic the appearance of happiness, from a young age. He could affect a genuine looking smile. He could laugh out loud convincingly. He was by all accounts a man with charisma and positivity; though the confession of his having faked it all through an act of mimicry learned for a lifetime’s coping utterly surprised Jenny, her intuitive receptors had picked up on depths of sadness from him, time and time again.

For the pleasant and largely easily silent public transportation ride that they shared from her tilted home on Bright street, Jenny and her unexpected new friend, Ray, experienced a meld of their thoughts with regards to the comfort level between them. We do meet those who embody easy energy, do we not? Rare, perhaps, but often enough that we believe in some ineffable “reason” for that fast connectivity. These portions of the language-free brain stem are simultaneously primeval and highly evolved in their dichotomous powers. Ray settled in against the window side of the streetcar, watching the various styles of architecture and the city folk hurrying about. He found himself both very relaxed and on edge, alternating in waves that he recognized as the precursor to clairvoyant hunting. Beside him, smelling of subtle vanilla and soap, Jenny looked both straight ahead through the front windshield and sidelong at Ray’s peripheral form. Her eyes dropped repeatedly to his hands, each one in place atop a thigh. She looked at the runes, the fingernails, the long strong digits. She felt it so powerfully from him; the benevolence and balanced energy... and the pain that surely must be a Ray Townes ingredient, for she was certain of the veracity in her dream of his mother. She also wanted very much to place her left hand atop his right. Where even two hours ago this would have been regarded with self suspicion and more than a dollop of fear, she found the want to be natural and sensible. He was beautiful in the ways that made Scott so alluring; he had a uniqueness about him, a strength wrapped in gentleness that she so rarely found among men. Scott had been the strongest yet most tender person of her life, even in the scholastic and creative-spirit limitations that sometimes bothered him as self professed “shortcomings”... his loving energy toward all had been Jenny’s inspiration.

They engaged in small talk about city life versus country living. She found at one point that her knee had been pressing against his leg; felt a tiny nervous system impulse to pull it back but overpowered the reaction. Easy togetherness. She had been alone in a desert, an emotional island castaway, an inmate of a prison built for one, for too long. Even were this touching of their legs an anomalous superficial comfort, she would have it. Monday would see him off - poof - gone back to the pool of horizons and possibilities, and she would retain this one beautiful day. Compared to oceanic crying, a bed that had become far emptier and larger than king sized, or the deafening silences of the caterwauling city machine... this one easy day and its heady whisperings of, dare she say “hope”?, would be a blessing.

When they transferred from the surface route to a subway train, the city was fully engaged in the frenetic movement named “rush hour” that had long since become rush hours. Heading southbound on the Yonge line, packed in like sardines, Ray and Jenny stood close to each other wordlessly sharing more than physical space. It was resistant to description, for two reasons not identical a combined anticipation. In her perspective, stealing glances up at his inscrutable yet peaceful countenance as his wolfish eyes took in the crowded car, she held a strange sense of being with him. A nudge of an insinuation of how he would fit her as a partner, a lover, a chosen best friend. Shedding her layers of protective coating with each passing minute seemed almost an intoxicant; she noted that years of willpower had taken a toll, for when letting go of that armor there came an immediate sensorial rush. With trusting comes a form of freedom that had been long forgotten. The freedom of choice, perhaps the freedom to burn for it, but freedom. She looked at him when she thought he wasn’t noticing and allowed herself, gave herself permission, to take it too far ahead of the circumstances of his being a stranger who was leaving on Monday.

“It is a dramatic skyline” he noted from the upper deck of the island ferry. Jenny stood to his right and slightly behind him along the back railing as they pulled away from the harbor and into the open water of lake Ontario, headed to Ward’s Island a mere ten minutes away. She regarded his profile against the familiarity of the skyline, stricken by the notion that in many ways he was more familiar to her. Certainly, no matter his clairvoyant abilities, he could not have known that her heart ached in those seconds of looking at him that way? That she knew a sharp pang of something that she had striven to banish from her essence; regret. If life had presented this man to her, out of the proverbial blue, what other opportunities had she missed due to her stubborn clinging? Clinging to Scott as though the sheer will of prayer mantra would return him, equally out of the blue. Even the chosen color for that saying struck her as appropriate. Blue. Indeed. Something within that stream of introspection made her remove the oversized sunglasses with an impulsive flourish that verged on urgency, and it caused Ray to turn away from the city’s towers, to look at her eyes as they found his.

He was momentarily taken aback by a rawness there. The wind blew across her wide hat brim. She dropped the hand holding the glasses to her side, looked him straight in the eyes with a tender vulnerability that pushed aside the images he had been dealing with from the dozens of others aboard the ferry. He slowly lifted the fingers of his right hand to her shoulder, squeezing gently, bending enough to better see her eyes within the hat shadow.

“I really appreciate you making this time for me” he told her, finishing the sentence as a brief flash of her weeping in his arms, both of them standing at Union Station, intruded.

“Ray” Jenny’s voice broke ever so slightly, “I have a feeling it will be me appreciating you.”

Things being all that they may ever be, all at once, a nocturnal arrival on the Leslie Street Spit caused a commotion among the thousands of birds roosting, feeding, coupling, defecating in the trees and on the rocky shores of the Toronto landfill site that jutted out into the lake, ever growing. Site of citizenry and tourist recreation. Frequented by photographers who are birders and-or wildlife appreciators. Despite the inner city location, still untamed patches of Rouge and Don River valley forest allowed for coyote, fox, deer visitations. Snakes and turtles shared the wild growth with frogs, jackrabbits, beaver and muskrat, omnipresent insects... and birds by the score. A section of the spit was off-limits to humanity; a protected sanctuary for the feathered who number over 300 in species, 45 or more that breed on the headland. Add over 400 identified plant species into the mix of Cottonwood and Poplar forest, and this would seem an unsurprising location for a surprising new visitor of a late Spring night.