The Exhalation (2)
I. Tauranga Moana
The girl makes angels in the black sand while her grandmother films her on a phone held sideways. Wrong, technically—vertical is what the young ones prefer now—but Aroha doesn't care about such things. She wants the whole frame: the child, the surf, the sky pressing down like a held breath.
Maya's white communion dress fans around her small body, and this is not exactly appropriate either. The dress should be boxed, preserved, kept for another daughter who may never come. But Maya asked to wear it to the beach, and what grandmother says no to that?
"Do another one, Nana. Film me doing another."
The sand receives the child's shape over and over. Arms sweeping up, legs fanning out. Getting up and lying down again, never the same twice. Aroha thinks of all the bodies this beach has held. The ones that came ashore and the ones that left. The ones that never got to leave.
She zooms in as Maya exhales a long breath that catches the salt air and hangs there, visible. Like something exiting the body for good.
"Did you get it? Did you see my soul?"
"I got it, love."
Later, after Maya's mother comes to collect her—a brief exchange at the car park, tense around the edges as it's been since the separation—Aroha drives the coast road alone. She shouldn't. The doctor said so, after the episodes. The blank spaces arriving without warning, minutes erased from the tape. But she knows this road, and more than that, she needs to check on it.
She stops at the dairy for milk she doesn't need, just to hear Hemi behind the counter ask how she's keeping. "Good, good," she tells him, and they both know it's only half true. She's been cleaning houses three days a week since the redundancy, work that leaves her knees aching and her mind mercifully blank. The other days she volunteers at the kohanga reo, watching children younger than Maya learn their language better than Aroha ever did.
The field appears after the bend, where the freight line runs close to the highway. Three years they've been working it, pulling out the gorse and broom that choked everything native. Now in late spring the kōwhai blooms again, and the harakeke, and flowers whose names she's still learning from the young Pākehā woman who leads the restoration work.
Aroha pulls onto the shoulder. Gets out. The field moves in the wind, a gold and purple conversation with itself.
She makes herself look at the other spot too. The place where the stones form outlines—human shapes and what might be animals, arranged by someone in the weeks after the accident. Forty meters from where the metallic blue SUV ended up, crumpled like foil, every surface coated in that dark residue. Soot or worse. The forensics team spent days there.
The man driving the blue vehicle hadn't wanted to hit the train. That much came out in the investigation. The vehicle behind him, the silver one—the driver of that one had lost himself. Paranoia, the family said. Convinced he was being followed, hunted. He'd rammed the blue SUV from behind, pushed it straight into the path of the freight train at the crossing.
Two dead, one destroyed, one in prison.
The man from the blue vehicle had been in his seventies. Retired. Māori. A teacher, back when that meant something different than it does now. He'd been driving home from the beach with his mokopuna in the back seat, a girl Maya's age.
Aroha never films here. This is not for recording.
She kneels in the dirt beside the stone outlines, her knees releasing small sounds of protest, and presses her palms flat against the earth. It's warm from the sun, almost body temperature. She closes her eyes and breathes out, long and deliberate, expelling something she doesn't have words for. Colonial violence, if she were an academic. History's weight, if she were a poet. Grief and rage and guilt, if she were simply honest.
The guide from the restoration project—Ellen, Emma, something—told her once that the land remembers. That trauma lives in the soil, in the root systems, in the seed bank that waits decades to germinate when conditions finally allow it.
"We're not just planting natives," the young woman had said, kneeling beside a trough of seedlings, earth under her fingernails. "We're apologizing."
Aroha had nodded but thought: to whom?
She doesn't know how long she stays there, pressed into the earth like a child making an angel, feeling the pulse of the trains in the distance. When she stands, her dress—not white but close, a cream linen she wore to her daughter's wedding—bears the imprint of dark soil across the front. She doesn't brush it off.
Driving home, she passes the spot where the accident happened three more times before she realizes she's circling. The episodes again. Minutes missing. She grips the wheel harder and forces herself toward town, toward the harbor, toward home.
II. Manitoulin Island
Thomas Brennan spent forty-three years teaching history to high school students in Thunder Bay before retiring to the island. Before the insomnia. Before the dreams that weren't dreams but memories rearranging themselves into accusations.
He'd taught the residential schools, of course. Required curriculum by the time he started in the seventies. But he'd taught them as history, as something finished. Look at what they did. Aren't we better now?
The cottage he's renting smells like mildew and old coffee. He's been here four months, ever since his wife stopped pretending they could live in the same house. The plumbing makes sounds at night that remind him he's not alone but might as well be. He does crosswords in the morning, walks in the afternoon, lies awake at night counting all the things he noticed too late.
He stands at the shore where Georgian Bay meets the land, watching his granddaughter throw stones into the water. She's eight. Mixed—his son married an Ojibwe woman from the island, which had seemed progressive at the time, evidence of his own open-mindedness. Now Thomas isn't sure what it means.
Sarah makes each stone skip three times before it sinks. She's good at this, patient. Better than Thomas ever was.
"Grandpa, you look like a ghost."
"Do I?"
"All white and see-through."
He supposes he does. The weight he's lost, the color drained from his face. The doctor called it stress-induced insomnia, prescribed pills that don't work. His wife called it conscience before she left him last winter, moving to their daughter's house in Ottawa. His son won't call it anything, just looks at him with a mix of pity and something harder.
It started with the photographs. A former student sent them—someone Thomas didn't even remember teaching, which was part of the problem. The photos showed a school Thomas had visited once in the eighties. Just a visit, just to observe. But there he was in the background of someone's documentation, standing with administrators, smiling, part of the apparatus.
"I was only observing," he'd told his wife.
"That's exactly it," she'd said.
Sarah abandons the stones and runs up the beach to him. "Want to make angels?"
"In the sand?"
"Where else?"
She's already lying down, sweeping her arms and legs. Thomas lowers himself more carefully, his back complaining. The sand is cool and slightly damp, receiving him. He moves his limbs through the motions, feeling foolish and then not.
They make six angels before Sarah gets bored and runs toward the water. Thomas sits up, breathless. Around him, the imprints of their bodies remain, temporary monuments to nothing much. He thinks of all the children who left their shapes in the earth. The ones in unmarked graves near schools he'd marked present at, signed forms for, driven past without stopping.
That night he can't sleep again. He walks to the field behind his rental cottage, where a volunteer group has been working all summer to restore the native prairie that used to cover the island before colonization. Before cattle and wheat and the insistence that land should look a certain way to mean anything.
The field glows strangely in the moonlight—purple bergamot, yellow black-eyed susan, the tall waving grass he can't name. He's seen the people working here, mostly young, mostly Indigenous, though some white volunteers too. Kids Sarah's age sometimes, pulling invasive garlic mustard with their parents.
Thomas lies down in the field. Just lies there in his pajamas like a lunatic, feeling the scratch of stems against his neck, the give of earth beneath his shoulder blades. He presses himself down as if trying to make his own imprint permanent, or trying to be buried, or trying to finally feel the weight of himself as it really is.
He doesn't mean to fall asleep, but he does.
In the morning he wakes to find a woman standing over him. She's younger than his daughter, wearing muddy jeans and work gloves, a thermos of coffee in one hand.
"You okay?"
Thomas sits up, disoriented, covered in dew and bits of plant matter. "I don't know."
She nods as if this is a reasonable answer. Offers her hand to help him up. He takes it.
"I'm on the restoration crew," she says. "We plant on Thursdays. You're welcome to join if you want something to do."
"I don't know anything about plants."
She shrugs. "Most of us didn't when we started. The land teaches you if you listen."
It's a simple statement, not a lecture, and something about that simplicity makes Thomas's throat close. He manages a nod.
"Thursdays," she repeats. "Seven-thirty. We bring extra gloves."
She walks away before he can ask her name or apologize or explain himself. He's grateful for that.
III. Thursday
Aroha plants on Thursdays now too, though she didn't plan to make it regular. The first time was accidental—she'd stopped at the field during one of her episodes, found herself with a trowel in her hand and Ellen (yes, Ellen, she finally remembered) showing her how to tuck a harakeke seedling into the soil.
"Not too deep," Ellen had said. "You want the crown just above the surface. Like it's looking up."
Aroha had nodded, thinking of all the things that needed to look up.
Now she brings Maya sometimes, on the weeks when she has her for longer. The child likes the digging, the worms, the practical magic of putting something small in the ground and being told it will grow. She doesn't ask about the stone outlines anymore. Aroha told her once—a crash, people who died—and Maya had nodded solemnly and then asked if she could plant a flower near them. They had.
This Thursday is overcast, threatening rain. Aroha kneels in the dirt with Maya beside her, both of them in old clothes that can take the soil. Around them, a dozen other volunteers work in comfortable silence—students from the local school, a few retirees, Ellen moving between them with encouragement and correction.
Aroha's knees protest but she stays down, patting earth around roots, feeling the give and resistance of soil that's learning to hold life again. Maya chatters beside her about a bird she saw, then about nothing in particular, then falls quiet and focused on her own small hole.
The rain starts gently, just a mist at first. No one leaves.
Later, Maya wants to go to the beach. They're both dirty, soil under their nails and on their knees, but Aroha drives them there anyway. The black sand is darker in the rain, the water gray and restless.
Maya doesn't mention the white dress. She just runs to the tide line in her muddy jeans and lies down in the sand, making angels while rain falls on her upturned face.
Aroha films her—the child, the surf, the gray sky, the whole tender frame. In the video, Maya's breath doesn't catch the way it did that first time, no visible soul, just a girl breathing normally in the rain. But somehow that seems right. Not every moment needs to be ceremony.
"Can we go through the field again?" Maya asks on the drive home.
"We just planted there."
"I know. I want to see it."
So Aroha pulls over at the field, and they get out in the rain, and Maya runs into it without waiting, disappearing into the kōwhai and hebe and harakeke they've been tending. The plants are tall enough now that she's lost among them, just the top of her dark head visible, moving through the growth like a small boat through waves.
Then she emerges on the other side, turns back, and waves.
Aroha lifts her phone and films, though she doesn't need to. She has this image already, has had it since before Maya was born, since before her own daughter left, since before the crash and the stones and the choosing to come here every Thursday to put small living things in the ground.
In the video, Maya's voice carries across the restored land: "Nana! I made it through!"
Aroha's voice catches in her throat, barely audible over the rain. "I saw, love."
The girl comes back through the flowers, running this time, laughing, and something small and ordinary breaks open in Aroha's chest. Not healing, exactly. But the shape of grief pressed into soil, and something green pushing through anyway.
IV. Elsewhere
On Manitoulin Island, Thomas Brennan kneels in a different field under a different sky, planting bergamot with hands that shake slightly. He's been coming for six weeks now, every Thursday, and no one has asked him why he's here or what he's atoning for. They just hand him gloves and seedlings and show him where to dig.
Sarah visits less often now that school has started. His son brings her when he can, stays for coffee that Thomas makes too strong, conversations that stay too shallow. But it's something. It's more than it was.
The woman who found him that first morning—her name is Christine—works beside him today, quiet and efficient. She doesn't make small talk, which Thomas appreciates. Sometimes they work for an hour without speaking, just the sound of trowels in earth, the rustle of plants, the distant call of gulls from the bay.
"You're getting better at this," Christine says eventually, nodding at the neat row of bergamot he's planted.
"I had good teachers."
She smiles slightly. "The land teaches. We just translate."
Thomas pats soil around the last seedling. His knees ache. His back complains. He's covered in dirt and sweat and tired in a way that might, eventually, let him sleep.
When he's done, he sits back on his heels and looks at what they've accomplished—acres of prairie restoration where there was nothing native for generations. It's not redemption. He's not foolish enough to think that. But it's work that needs doing, and he's here doing it, and that's different from what he was before.
"Same time next week?" Christine asks, packing up her tools.
"Yes," Thomas says. "I'll be here."
And he will be. He'll be here next Thursday and the one after that, putting small living things in the ground, watching them take root or fail to, learning slowly what the land has always known about burial and resurrection and the long, patient work of growing something true from broken soil.
Somewhere across the ocean, in a place he'll never visit, another person is doing the same work for the same unnameable reasons. He doesn't know this, but it doesn't matter. The work is the same. The soil receives them both.
