Falling From Grace by Ann Eriksson Page A

didn’t know what they asked of me. To jeopardize my reputation, to step over the line of objectivity. I shook my head. “No, I can’t.”
    Paul took my arm and steered me to the other side of the clearing. “They need us. It’ll be safer if we help,” he said, then added. “Do you want to see our trees coming down?”
    â€œOf course not,” I said, shaking his hand off, the rain pelting onto our heads. I pulled up my hood. “But I’m working through proper channels.”
    He gave a short laugh. “Your proper channels don’t seem interested in talking.”
    â€œThey have to,” I argued. “We have the murrelets now.”
    He glanced back over at the shelter where the protesters had resumed talking among themselves. Mary watched us from the edge of the group. “A tree-sit might delay logging long enough for you to get answers.”
    I wavered, the suggestion compelling.
    â€œWho will know?” he said. “They won’t tell the company we helped.”
    Cougar? Mary? Could I trust any of them? I crossed my arms. “No, Paul, I can’t.”
    â€œWell, I’ll do it without you then,” he said and stalked away.
    I watched him return to the circle. The group cheered. Terry slapped him on the back. Mary threw her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth. My chest tightened. I was losing him. To Mary. To my principles. I checked my watch. Enough time for a call in to PCF ’s office. No signal and I’d drive to their yard, to Vancouver if I had to. I grabbed keys, wallet, and cell phone and headed up the soggy trail for the car.
    I collided with two hikers around the first bend. They were shrouded in rain gear, appearing like bulging packs with legs. One of the hikers stepped back and called out a muffled greeting. Sodden wisps of white hair had escaped from the edge of her rain hat and were plastered on her cheek. She let her hood fall back from her face. Her glasses were fogged up.
    â€œHello, Faye,” the woman said.
    â€œMother?” I gasped. “What on earth are you doing here?”
    â€¢ • •
    Terry and Paul left in Terry’s four-by-four to drive to town to buy ropes, gear, tarps, and plywood. The rest of the group, buoyed by the new plan, maintained a presence on the rain-shrouded road. They dodged two loaded logging trucks hauling out of the upper valley and endured the posturing, taunts, and curses of homebound loggers at the end of the day. I spent the afternoon trying to convince Grace and her best friend Esther to go home.
    I sat on a stump under the kitchen shelter and watched the two women set up their camp in the rain. In spite of the bulk of her bright yellow slicker and pants, Grace carried herself with an elegance I had always viewed with awe and envy, the fluidity of her movements suggesting her limbs were made of air or water instead of bone and tendon. She never dropped things, or stumbled, each step, each hand gesture a flawless choreography. I knew she’d danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet until she quit, at twenty-two, to marry Mel and have children. No regrets, she always said. I found the trade hard to believe. A life of dance, music, and fame for Mel, Qualicum, and three rowdy children? My birth a certain shock. Grace must have hoped for a girl. Ballet lessons and pink tutus, satin toe shoes. Instead, after two galumphing boys who preferred hockey and soccer, she got me. A tiny mutation on a single chromosome.
    I was my mother’s fall from grace. When I asked her about my birth, she merely described my emergence “more difficult than the boys”; that relatives and friends had exclaimed on sight of my week-old face, “but she’s so pretty.” My interpretation: the birth was hell, the relatives shocked. As a romantic teenager, I’d conjured the momentous occasion up with pen and paper. I remembered the embarrassing gist of it.
    Unlike my