Soil Samples

Noah wasn’t in any of his usual places. the ski trip had been his idea but now Andi couldn’t find him—he wasn’t in his bedroom or in the basement with his jars or in the blue nylon tent in the backyard where he slept in warmer weather. She returned to the kitchen where her older son Richard was shaking his head, like he should have known better than to have come. “Sorry, but I should be at my site,” he said. “If he’s not here, he doesn’t want to go.”

“Please take a breath,” Andi said, “find your trust.”

Richard set the orange ski boots he had brought for his brother firmly on the linoleum and started scrolling on his phone.

Andi had another thought and dashed back to the yard. Setting her hands against the chain link fence, she spotted Noah off by the school, stabbing at the grassy hillside with a gardening trowel. She called his name several times before he looked up and started walking without hustle, a six-foot giant with a wild beard against the backdrop of the children’s playground.

“Richard’s here,” she said. “For the ski trip we planned?”

“Richard’s here?” Noah sounded ambushed by his brother’s presence.

“You said you wanted to go skiing. We’re going to Mont Vert today.”

“I don’t think that’s wise, though,” Noah said. He projected no awareness that he was contradicting himself. “It was fun when we were kids, but will we really get along with each other, so near a mountain? The soil up there is probably full of alkali.”

Andi tried to keep her voice even, holding the confusion out of it. “I think we could get along anywhere,” she offered. “You said you would go.”

Noah visibly reconsidered, his eyes flaring into attention as if something had risen up before him. “Give me a minute,” he said. He returned carrying her trowel and a large mason jar half-full of dirt. The basement was lined with such jars, packed on a rickety bookshelf where they had displaced Andi’s own preserves and the batches of natural household products she made: clove toothpaste, lavender and lemongrass essential oils. Andi sometimes stood at the top of the basement stairs and listened to Noah mumbling and grunting in frustration, slamming the jars into new arrangements as if they resisted him. For months she had been waiting for a signal about how to proceed. She did not know what struggle of spirit Noah was manifesting, but she knew her job was to listen and wait for him to reach out. His body would know what it needed; everyone creates their own health from their own being. And yet she also knew that at root she was to blame.

Catching up to her at the back door, Noah declared, “Yeah, I could go skiing” as if this was a new proposal. “Like, will the skis get away from me? It’s okay so long as you know you’re in charge. Don’t let the mountain be in charge!”

Andi took a breath and reminded herself: you have to honour the journey each soul is taking.

---

It had been almost as difficult to get Richard to come skiing. He was so busy with his landscaping business, somehow year-round. Their speciality was building water fixtures for the lawns and atriums of new condos. Andi had only gotten him to promise he would be there by taking him to lunch and weeping over her Buddha Bowl.

“Noah—I just…” she trailed off. “Where is he?”

Noah had always been a thoughtful soul, growing in the shape of a series of obsessions. He had loved in turn everything sharks, then everything Star Trek (she had almost lost him at a convention when he was twelve, when he dashed across the showroom floor to meet the actor who played the android, brandishing a pale yellow action figure for a signature). After puberty it was everything Zeppelin, then everything Beatles. When he was seventeen, she asked him about the Sgt. Pepper’s poster he bought—she was amazed you could still find such a thing—and his quiet voice had unfurled for ten minutes as he detailed the relationship between the various songs, returning several times to the lyrics to “With a Little Help from My Friends.” From a young age words had been a world of private delight to Noah, the ingredients of something he was carefully baking. Richard, by contrast, so much more like their father, stumbled through sentences like his mouth was full of stones—his running joke through high school was describing every class as “just stupid.” His favorite word seemed to be “just.”

But this summer Noah’s old posters had been crumpled into the closet, transforming his childhood bedroom into a white vacuum. At twenty-three he had no plan. When Andi first asked him about the backyard tent, he said only that it was important to be ready, “because not everyone has good intentions.” Andi shied away from asking him who he was talking about, and then felt unable to bring it up later. It had been impossible to get him to do anything with her, and skiing had been the only suggestion that awakened his interest, prompting him to half-smile declare suddenly that he was planning a trip to the Rockies. They formed the continental divide, he said: “Things West of them run West, and East of them run East. I admire that. Sorta decisive.” For a moment he had sounded like his old self, and Andi agreed they would go skiing. The next day she spoke to the bank and figured out a plan for helping him get to the Rockies.

“I think he’s getting ready for some kind of trip out West,” Andi said, poking at her soba noodles.

“And that’s why he wants to go skiing?” Richard asked.

“Maybe he finds mountains—soothing.” She paused. “I know why this is happening.”

“Wait—do you think this is because of vaccines?”

Andi nodded slowly and Richard shook his head, and they sat wagging yes and no at each other in silence.

“Vaccines don’t hurt anybody,” Richard said. “And besides he’s not autistic. People don’t just start that as adults.”

“I didn’t say autism,” Andi protested. But it was impossible to say what she did mean. She could explain to Richard again that the diagnoses and divisions between various ailments were artificial—just ways for doctors to prescribe more poison. That the chemicals that silenced the rhythms of nature were inevitably the problem. But he would just disagree, and nothing about the conversation would touch the ugly knot in her gut that told her that sometime, probably long ago, a wall had been breached. That health was the body’s natural state, and her job should have been to patrol the perimeter for contaminants. As a baby, Noah had burst into a fury of rashes when he got the MMR vaccine, and only a fool would fail to notice that it was Noah who was struggling now. She hadn’t worried enough then—that was during the chemical cruise of her marriage, when she had known really nothing. Patrick, cold, impatient, had always demanded the quick fix. He had shouted and stormed about his lost time whenever a toddler made a mess and demanded she go on medications to ease what she knew were simply the normal anxieties of parenthood. Only after the divorce had she found the planet she and her boys were meant to live on, where people breathed deeply and felt whole.

She pressed on. “He seems drawn to my homeopathic lavender, so that may help.”

“Homeopathy is just water, mom” Richard said. “Same as doing nothing.”

“But it works for me.” Andi didn’t want to reignite the routine of their arguments. They had practically yelled at each other in the summer, after someone in a Facebook group had advised her to look into healing crystals, and her computer had started displaying ads for them. Andi told Richard the universe was responding to her call, and he had made a production of his laughter, falling out of his Adirondack chair before explaining that this was just a matter of her computer being infected with something called cookies.

“If you think there’s a problem, let me take him to a normal shrink,” he said.

Andi shuddered. Mainstream medicine only invited the image of some sinister technician holding callipers over the peeled flaps of her son’s scalp and ripping out a piece of him. “No pill dispensers,” she said. “Please just spend time with us.”

Richard agreed to the ski trip. He returned to the table having paid for lunch without warning her. “The important thing is, do you feel safe around him?”

“Of course,” Andi said. “Why wouldn’t I feel safe?”

---

Andi sat between her boys in silence as they teetered fifty feet above Mont Vert, watching the grey cannon beneath the chairlift spew clouds of snow. Her gear smelled of sweat and melt and her hips ached from swiveling. From the moment they had put on their lift tickets she had watched Noah, wondering if he might glow with familiarity as he started to find whatever he was seeking from the small Ontario mountain. It was then, of course, that she would tell him she could help him get to the Rockies. But so far nothing was different.

“So warm today,” Richard said. They had barely spoken in the last hour and this was a reasonable start to conversation. “All this snow is just the artificial stuff,” he added.

“Yeah you’ve gotta watch out,” Noah said.

“It’s just snow,” Andi said. But then she was suddenly unsure. “Is that right?”

“It’s got an additive,” Richard said. It hadn’t occurred to Andi that like anything related to landscaping, Richard would know this. “It’s called Snomax. Just makes the snow form.”

“It doesn’t sound very natural if it’s called Snomax.”

“It’s fine,” Richard insisted.

But Andi’s anxiety blossomed slowly in her chest over the next few lift rides. She sent the boys on a run together and went to the bathroom, wondering if she should pull her phone from the locker and google “Snomax Ingredients.” When they were young, she remembered the boys had liked to crouch down and race through the clouds of manufactured snow, their faces startled red by the spray.

She decided not to google, and instead found a spot outside under a giant spruce tree where she could do a low lunge pose to stretch her hip flexor. She thrust her arms up and lowered her weight. From that position she could see half a bearded face through the ski racks. It looked like Noah, but older, more battered. That man looks homeless, she thought. And then he opened his mouth, and she heard a familiar voice say “No.” The features seemed to slide into place, and she realized it was Noah, looking just the same as he had all day.

He started shouting. “Is that what it’s like, bossman?”

Andi shifted her head to see Richard standing nearby, poking the snow off his bindings with his poles.

“Yeah I’m sorry but that’s just what it’s like.”

“What’s going on?” Andi asked, stumbling toward them on her ski boots.

“You’ve gotta go,” Richard said. “That’s just how it is.”

“Guys?” Andi asked. Richard glanced at her. For a long moment no one would speak. Where did Noah have to go? Into the silence, Andi blurted out, “I haven’t mentioned this Noah, but I’d like to help you with your trip.”

“What trip?” Noah asked.

“You’re planning a trip out West?” she reminded him.

“I’m planning no plans,” Noah said.

Richard pushed in again. “I think mom’s saying it’s a drain to have you hanging around.”

“What? I didn’t say that.”

“This guy, dad knows him. His name is Doctor Sherman. We think he could help.”

And there it was. Richard had been downplaying everything, but he didn’t really think nothing was wrong—he was colluding with his father to cut her out altogether.

“What the hell is going on?” Andi yelled. She strained to explain how she envisioned Noah’s journey, veering into the suggestion he could take some homeopathy on the flight. But Richard simultaneously pressed on with his spiel, until he arrived at repeating the words, “You don’t make sense anymore. It’s not fair to mom.”

Noah started muttering, and they fell silent. He raised his head and spoke with crisp resolve. “You want to keep me down because of my powers.”

The wind gusted along the edge of Andi’s toque. Noah had never said anything like this before.

“Nobody wants to keep you down,” Andi began.

But Noah was moving. Like a wave rising, he launched forward, his ski pole over his head. A wild and frightened howl of attack. The pole plunged at Richard and stuck, planted in his belly like a flag.

Richard crumpled to the snow. His knees were still pointed at the sky, held upright by his ski boots. The pole wavered terribly in his hands as he struggled to steady it. Andi staggered forward on her knees, yelling her sons’ names interchangeably: “Richard! Noah!” Blood was seeping a purple mark across Richard’s blue jacket.

“Help!” Andi shouted. “Help!” She looked from the ski pole back to Richard’s face as he forced breaths through his clenched teeth.

But Richard saw something behind her. “No!” he yelled.

Andi turned to see Noah, his face contorted with disgust as if he hadn’t thought his brother contained blood. He straightened up—he was going to attack again. Andi cowered under her arms.

“He’s gone,” Richard said.

She looked up. One pole in hand, Noah was pushing himself toward the lift.

“I’m okay,” Richard said.

As he said this, the ski pole teetered to the side and fell. Andi shrieked, expecting a giant wound to reveal itself, but as he pulled up his torn jacket and sweater the damage seemed to be shallow—a flap of bloody skin was hanging loose next to his belly button.

The ski patrollers were hustling over with white kits. Andi cast around for Noah and saw the back of his coat in the single-rider line, ready to head back up the mountain.

“Just go,” Richard said.

When she managed to push her way on to the lift, Noah was already a blur five chairs ahead, teetering into the sky next to what looked like a mother and child. His arms wavered as if he was shouting a complaint at the mountain. He was in danger—he shouldn’t have been allowed on. Andi saw the mother and child slide down the chair to bunch at the opposite edge. Then they all disappeared over the first ridge. She waited, listening to the mechanical sound of the cable squeaking over the pulleys.

---

In the years to come Andi often recounted the story of the chair lift ride. It grew longer with time—the stretched experience of rooting for Noah while he was too far away to hear. After the second ridge, his bar was up. She had begged and whimpered: stay put, just stay put. It had been unbearable. But then he was almost at the top. The mountain sloped up to meet him—he was going to make it.

And then he leapt. His arms wheeled backwards as he plummeted through the empty air, his remaining pole jettisoned. In her memory the fall took forever. But he landed on his skis and his torso flopped back against the mountain and bounced up again like an inflatable punching toy. He gathered momentum and steadied himself, somehow skiing downhill.

He’s such a survivor, she told people.

But she also said that he had almost been there, nearly at the top, ready to find his voice and step out into the world. She started to remember signs of his improvement in the days before the trip, indications he was finding his way. If he had just held on a little longer. But leaping from the chairlift had flung him into the arms of the chemical authorities. Richard had called Patrick, who had driven to Mont Vert at ferocious speed to manage the situation, consulting with the ski patrol, issuing instructions, insisting he would take Noah directly to the hospital. “We aren’t going to fix this with celery,” he said. She should have done more to stand up for him then. But Richard was cradling his bandaged belly and glaring at her, and she was afraid of putting Noah in her car, and she wanted to believe someone could help. She was weak and so Noah started a life of medications, liveable and grey with its own muted sorrows. There were relapses, periods when he abandoned his meds, ran. “Medicines to fix what the last medicines did,” Andi would say. Richard took to reminding her that she had already been worried about Noah before the trip.

Richard spoke about the Mont Vert day often, but just described it as “the day he was stabbed.” Noah’s fall was just ten or twelve feet, he said (he hadn’t seen it). He still came for holidays but avoided Noah otherwise. He seemed relieved to have a reason.

Occasionally Andi remembered the moment she thought Noah looked homeless and felt a pang of guilt, because after he had actually been homeless he looked much worse.

After getting home from the ski trip Andi had ventured into the basement and looked at Noah’s jars of soil. She placed her hand against one—it was cold and smooth, with a white piece of paper taped to the side. The label read East in Noah’s bold, square handwriting. She found other labels: Magnetism; Neighbours. Several lay discarded on the floor.

Noah hadn’t even remembered he was planning a trip. Andi thought vaccines were dangerous. Richard trusted mainstream doctors. These things were steady—you could recognize a person by them. But Noah, who had once loved Beatles lyrics with a luminous focus, was consumed now by fears that wouldn’t stay in place. Whatever he saw gathering here in the soil was a patternless morass of threats, something that he couldn’t own or master. When the lights went off, it must feel as if nothing belonged to him at all.

For a moment, the exhausting scale of this confusion made it impossible to feel guilty. Noah was in the hospital tonight; maybe someone would help. It was time to get ready for bed.

But around midnight, she came back downstairs and whipped the fridge open. She remembered reading somewhere about mental illnesses being caused by a sulfite preservative in frozen foods, and Noah had insisted she buy fish sticks. She pulled out the package and read the ingredients—many sounded chemical, but nothing said “sulfite.” She got out her laptop but she couldn’t find the article again, and now she wasn’t sure if it had been about sulfites at all. The screen glowed on the floor next to the fridge, one browser tab for each potential guilty party. Yoghurts and jams piled on the floor until she lost track of which pile she had checked and had to start again.

Photo by Sam Moghadam Khamseh on Unsplash.