Falling From Grace Read Online Free PDF Page A

again,” I said. She didn’t budge. In contrast to her brother, I found her plain, with a nose too tiny and lips too narrow for her square face. Her brown hair appeared without substance, drab and flyaway, but her eyes, large and intense, burned with intelligence. I turned back to the dishes.
    â€œMary says you’re not one of them.”
    I plunged my hand into the grey and greasy dishwater and hunted around for the last few pieces of cutlery. “One of whom?” I pulled out a cheese-caked spoon.
    â€œSnow White’s dwarfs.”
    I groaned. I worked in the wilderness to avoid conversations like this.
    â€œMary says you’re a regular person, but small like me.”
    â€œAnd what do you think?” I glared at the child’s upturned face.
    â€œDo you want to play dolls?” Rainbow pulled two naked plastic dolls—one white, one black, each the size of a thumb— out of her pocket.
    â€œNo, I don’t want to play dolls,” I snapped. I attacked the spoon with a wire pot scrubber.
    â€œThen you’re not like me.” Without another word Rainbow skipped off toward Paul’s tent, leaving me holding the spoon and the scrubber in the air, soapy water dripping onto my foot.
    I stared after her. Paul nudged my shoulder as he walked by with a second pot of water. “You’ve got soap on your boot,” he teased, setting the pot on the stove.
    I threw the spoon onto a plate, carried the dishwater a dozen steps away, and dumped it out in the middle of a sword fern. “I hope you’re making tea.”
    â€œNope.” He grinned. “Diaper water.”
    Mary travelled light. Besides the lack of tent and food, she carried only two cotton diapers for Cedar. “One to wear and one to dry,” she explained. The woman failed to understand she had walked her children into a rainforest, a place where dry is a relative term. A place where three or four metres of rain falls each year. Where trees grow continuously in the mild temperatures, where it’s never too hot or too cold, where it’s too wet for forest fires. You’re a fool , I wanted to scream at her, can’t you see ? Every surface dripped with life, green in a million shades, ankle thick moss, slime moulds, curled sheets of lichen, head high prehistoric ferns, cream and gold mushrooms at the base of every tree, bracket fungi clinging to mouldy trunks—dripping, creeping, clinging, crawling, sprouting, peeling, rotting.
    It turns out Mary had neglected to bring another item for her children. Rain gear.

4
    I woke in the middle of the night to the plop of tentative raindrops on the tent fly. Within five minutes, the rain had accelerated to a deluge. I unzipped the door halfway and shone a flashlight beam around the clearing. Through the curtain of water I could make out the blue polyethylene tarp protecting the kitchen and climbing gear, and the second tent where Mary and her children slept. The afternoon I’d spent in my back yard in Victoria sealing the seams of the two tents meant we would stay dry. But Paul, curled up like a fetus on the gravel bank in his bivy sac—a cocoon of waterproof nylon— was exposed to the elements. He’d chosen the spot with his usual care, away from the trees that dripped water long after a storm passed, and well up from the winter flood level.
    â€œWhy don’t you sleep under the kitchen tarp?” I had suggested when he spread his bedding out on the ground, flipping stones away with his foot.
    â€œYou know I’m wild about stars. Besides, it’s only one night,” he answered.
    Thick, heavy cloud now hid the constellations. I aimed the flashlight at the orange bulge of nylon. In reaction, it folded in half like a caterpillar and Paul squinted against the glare from the draw-stringed opening, beard glinting with droplets of water.
    â€œSorry.” I redirected the beam. “Are you okay?”
    He yawned. Water