Zoe's Last Trip to Cranberry Flats
This picture of Nico and Sophie at the river was taken on the day of Zoe’s last trip to Cranberry Flats. The weather was gorgeous – it was late in the afternoon but it was early enough in the summer, the first week of June, that the day felt as though it would last forever. There were only a few people at the beach. We decided to walk out into the shallow river and play on a sand bar. Zoe was afraid to go in the water – we put her a few feet out from the shore – and each time she would ardently swim back. Because Seb and I had all three kids to navigate across the river, we were unable to carry Zoe – but there were two people on the shore, a man and a woman who offered to guide us across the river at the shallowest point to the sand bar where they said they had been hanging out all day with their children. We accepted their offer.
The man carried Zoe. In his large hands. Shivering and wet, Zoe looked to be even smaller than the small white dog that she was. When we all made it to the sand bar and the man set Zoe on the ground, I felt a funny sense of relief.
The man at the beach had a shaved head, he looked like a guy I remember from high school who liked the Dead Kennedys and D.O.A. He smoked pot behind the school and smashed a beer bottle on his shiny head at a school dance and he got kicked out in the middle of grade ten – he was called “Fish”.
It became clear that Fish and his girlfriend were a blended family – his kids were the young ones, a 3 year old girl and a 5 year old boy, while the older girl was hers. Her daughter had a voloptuous body. She was wearing a white bikini and she seemed tired and much older than her age which her mom told me was thirteen. The other child in their party was a friend of the teenage daughter – the friend also wore a bikini and she had acne although it was hard to tell about the acne because I only saw her face once as she mostly kept her head down. “Mom” wore a leopard print bikini that had beaded strings hanging from the bra. She told me that her daughter had recently taken a babysitting course.
While we lounged in the sun on the sand bar, Fish tried to teach his son to have a water gun fight, using big water guns he had with him, Fish showed the little boy how to shoot the gun into the other guy’s head – the instructions were clumsy, it seemed harmless – actually it seemed like Fish was trying to impart to his son something that had importance for him, something that could be called good fun. Shortly after this lesson, Fish offered Nico a water gun so that his son and Nico could play together. But the little boy did not seem to understand how to shoot the water gun at Nico’s head or even why it was fun and Nico didn’t want to play, the water gun he had been given didn’t work. When we crossed the river back to the shore, Seb carried Sophie on his shoulders, I cradled Liam in my arms. Nico walked and Zoe eagerly swam.
We walked a little ways along the shore before deciding it was getting late and it was time to go home. On our return toward the main path we heard someone shout angrily, “FUCK” We looked to where the shout was coming from and Fish and “mom” were throwing themselves at each other, swearing and screaming, beaded strings of bikini and arms flying. Suddenly his hand shot forward and he struck her with his fist. She fell backwards, losing her footing, falling from the sand bar, stumbling in the water.
He roared, “I don’t give a fuck about that little bitch.” – it seemed to me that he was refering to the teenage girl in the white bikini. I thought of the friend’s head hanging down and the little boy’s grape juice moustache.
I yelled out, “You had better stop it, we can see what you’re doing over there. Stop it buddy. We can see you.” It was such a clear evening my voice carried throughout the river valley, faintly echoing back to us.
Seb told me quietly, “your intention is good Tamara but be quiet, it won’t help right now.” Nico asked me, “What’s happening, mom?” Then I suddenly felt scared, as I had when I was a child, and I started to walk really fast up the sand dunes to the board walk. There was a couple, two women, huddled together, watching at the main path’s edge, asking, “do you have a cell phone that we could use to call the police?” No we didn’t.
All of us, me and seb and the kids and the two women then turned our backs and walked quickly away from the violence on the sand bar. When we reached the top of the path, at the look-out, we saw a middle-aged man standing on the wooden platform, looking down into the river valley, to the sand bar below. I asked him, “do you have a cell phone”. He said flatly “they seem to have settled down” and he didn’t look at me when he spoke, he just kept staring into the valley.
We kept on walking, the two women had decided to cut through bush rather than walk on the main path.
After ten quick minutes on the sandy path, we reached our van and buckled in our seats, Zoe happily sat on my lap, stiil damp and sandy. As we drove off I looked back and I could see Fish slowly walking on the main path toward the parking lot, wearing only his bathing suit and barefeet, his two little kids, bathing suits and bare feet, walking at an awkward distance from him, following.
In the van on the way back to saskatoon, traveling along Lorne Avenue Nico asked me, “Why did you say that , mom, why did you say, stop it buddy, we can see what you’re doing?”
When we lost Zoe at Christopher Lake, the last weekend in July, I remembered her that day at Cranberry Flats, shivering in the big hands of that man and I wished that I had been the one to have carried her across the river to the sand bar, that I had comforted her. She had been scared of going in the river. If I had carried her that day, maybe we wouldn’t have lost her at Christopher Lake. I know it’s not at all logical but grief is not logical, sometimes it involves making superstitious fanciful connections that allow you to think you have some control over a horrible situation, far beyond your understanding or control. Sometimes it involves wishing intensely for what you have lost to return, despite knowing she is gone.
