Anna From Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

always liked to go to bed late, sleep late, and Chet had sometimes brought her coffee there. She missed those little kindnesses, indications that he’d cared about her, his concern for her even when she knew he was attracted to other women and the fun of pursuing them, whether he succeeded or not. Alicia Snow, of course, had changed everything.
    All right. Anna had spent years with a man who proved a disappointment. Then again, what did that mean? What had she wanted from him that she should be disappointed when he failed to provide it? Not money certainly, not goods, her hardened feelings toward him did not lie in his being or not being “a good provider,” a term Anna loathed, a favourite of her mother’s, ever-practical Joan, who’d urged her daughter, if she was going to be muleheaded about sticking with art, to at least teach it in school like her dad. Yes. It made him so happy, Anna said.
    Yet holding down a job those early years with Chet, she had languished as an artist, living in the background of her husband’s needs. At that time all she’d really wanted from him was love, uncontested, felt, visible, completely theirs. But in the long haul of a married life, that might not have been possible anyway, she realized, with any man—or with the woman she was. She had had her own affairs, but they were harmless. Weren’t they? And it had been a long time since she and Chet had been truly
close,
the clarity of that astonished her now.
Hadn’t
they loved? Yes, passionately, once. But they had ceased to be intimate, entwined, long before Alicia struck Chet like lightning. Maybe that was better—disentwining was painful enough, the tighter, the worse. Or could that keep you together in the first place? She did not know anymore. She had a solitary streak in her, always, she’d often wanted to be alone, like her dad, though she had never been alone like this, and neither had he.
    This morning seemed to focus cruelly all her doubts. She could feel tears coming and she gave in to them, cried softly. But soon the luxury of feeling thoroughly and unashamedly sorry for herself, under her covers, became a kind of tonic, and who would know anyway? After a few minutes, she wiped her face on the sheet and got up. The women who’d lived in this house would shame her.
    Once comfortable in her fleece-lined boots, gripping a hot mug of tea, Anna stoked the
Warm Morning
with more wood and turned to the sketches she’d laid out across her big table, the disturbing immediacy of the dog. It seemed at times that it had been tossed
to her
somehow, that she was intended to witness its fall. Absurd of course. And sometimes she was not certain that she
had
seen it. Keeping control of her mind was crucial, she knew that, alone and isolated as she was, points of reference so unfamiliar. Charcoal figures on white paper, what could they say? A series of mingled perspectives—the dog in the air as a bird might see it, or its killer, revolving, diminishing, and from below as Anna had, but now its jaws yawning grotesquely as if to devour its own incomprehensible fate.
    Spirits low or high, she had worked every day, landscape, seascape, all kinds of objects, still lifes, in pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, oil pastels, a medium she liked, it could mimic paint, oil paints had never attracted her. But her main project was still the dog in the air, in moments of pure knowledge—
I am running, falling, I cannot fly.…
    W HAT MADE HER drive to the bridge so late that night? The unbelievable stillness when she’d stepped out the back door? A white moon above the cold black lines of the bridge, sending an icy shimmer over the water of the strait? Restless, at least, that night, a bit down, she had the urge to drive, to get out, but she’d gotten no further than the bridge.…
    After the third curve, she’d passed the defunct ferry wharf, its rotting timbers invisible, just west of it the cottage where sometimes cars were parked haphazardly, lights