Smoke River (28 page)

The break stretches into an hour. Then it’s announced that negotiations have ended for the day. The elders who did not get to speak put their names on tomorrow’s list, despite the entreaties of the aides to wait for the official agenda.

Shayna finds Clarence sitting alone in the hotel courtyard, and she watches him for a moment. He’s waiting for her, she
sees that. He is waiting not to say anything in particular but to restore some ease between them.

During their marriage she had a talent for righteousness. Pete-Pete arrived on the fifth-floor maternity ward of the Pemcoe hospital, during a long summer night when her water wouldn’t break and the doctors and nurses became irritated with her stillness, her refusal to shout or even pant. The quietness she demanded for her son’s birth was stolen by the heart monitor, its tiny
boops
and infuriating
whoosh
like muffled waves. She was struck dumb by the epidural, the cold intrusion of forceps, the yank and the long tear, the blood that flowed and flowed, the bruised, dented head of her baby covered in the alien green of meconium. Her righteousness ripened, as red as the bedsheets became with her blood. Sick from the Demerol, she was barely able to hold up her head as the nurses brought in her swaddled son, pink-brown and already too strong for her, eager to suckle. How their lips curled with scolding at the sight of the blood-soiled bed, when the child they pressed to her veined breast was so soft and clean. The coldness of such a place: the way they eyed her skin and asked her where the baby’s father was – Clarence was in court, winning his first case – and cooed over the woman in the next bed, whose name was Kayla and whose side of the room was crowded with flowers, fruit baskets, stuffed bears holding Mylar balloons, and relatives who blocked the shared bathroom.

After Pete-Pete died, she made a backyard heap out of the photo albums, his little overalls and T-shirts, books, stuffed toys and plastic trucks. She poured kerosene over all of it, thinking that what wouldn’t burn would melt beyond recognition. When Clarence came running out the back door, yelling at her to stop, she let the lit match fall from her hands. He grabbed her wrist too late: every photo of the little boy was pulled into the tarry cone of smoke, sent to the spirits scented with tobacco and sweetgrass. This was what their mothers and fathers had done
with grief, and so this is what they would do. When Clarence was out of the house again, Joe Montagne came by to take away Pete-Pete’s dresser and grown-up bed, the one she had found Clarence curled up in, the mornings after the fire. The room was repainted a depthless shade before dinnertime.

She didn’t say her child’s name for six months; she didn’t tell stories about him. But Clarence clung hard to his memories, and so forced her to remember too. And what she remembered most was how it had been her, not him, who’d turned her head – really, it couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds – on a spring evening made hopeful with early heat, the scent of chokecherry blossoms. A moment of inattention. It was the thing he wouldn’t say aloud: she’d looked away and their little boy had died. Clarence never weakened, never laid the blame she felt. Instead she took their dirty dishes outside and smashed every one on the patio stones. Clarence went silent, and silence became its own accusation between them. When she finally stopped trying to make him say something, it was too late. He didn’t come home.

Shayna startles Clarence by kneeling at his feet in the empty courtyard. She tells him about Cherisse. She tells him that their pretty niece, their wild runaway, their fledgling pop star, was found in a tobacco field, hurt in ways that make her lower her voice. She doesn’t say that the tobacco farmer who found Cherisse is her lover. Or that she carries that man’s child, a child that may turn out queerly fair, blue-eyed, with hair the shade of indecision. Or that she can’t imagine such a creature toddling behind her on the reserve – not like Pete-Pete, who had her hair, Clarence’s eyes, their skin. Instead she wonders aloud if the protest made her less watchful over Cherisse. It is a relief to say, finally, how she wishes she’d paid more attention. “I’m sorry,” she says and wipes her nose on her sleeve, and she says it again and again. Then she lays her head on Clarence’s lap and he bends over, holds her close.

H
er laptop balancing on her knees, Stephanie is in her bedroom in the early morning, writing vertical lists to get a grip on all the things that need remembering. And forgetting. Last semester, her Careers teacher, Ms. Ellwood, emphasized the usefulness of a vertical list, with proper parallel construction, to convey a series of ideas in a job presentation or even a longish cover letter.

Stephanie pushes back in her chair, reads her list and smiles. She thinks of Nate’s hand snaking under her top, his fingers sandwiched by her waistband, his palm resting in the small of her back. The gentle pressure of a claim on her.

But she has another list to tackle. The scratch on her brother’s neck is now faded and insubstantial, but it made her curious; she couldn’t stop looking for it whenever he sat down to eat or passed her in the hallway. A week earlier, when Las had stormed off from the dinner table, she wandered into his room and lifted up the clothing on his floor a piece at a time, all of it off-gassing beer and sweat, a microbial guy-compost. Secure in her top desk drawer are a camouflage kerchief and a black baseball cap with an insignia: a sun framing the face of an Iroquois Warrior. Filaments of blond hair are stuck to the cap’s Velcro strap. The cap and kerchief were shoved under his bed, and both reeked of gasoline. A sharper boy might have burned or buried them. Or noticed them missing.

She opens a new file, creates two columns, and labels them
MOM
and
DAD
. Then she divides each of these columns into
PROS
and
CONS
. Under her Mom’s cons column, she writes
WON
’
T BELIEVE ME
. She thinks about it for a while and then writes the same under her dad’s cons column. There is no splurge of type, as when she does a free association exercise or a mind map. After twenty minutes, all she has been able to add is
WILL BE EVEN COLDER TO ME
under her mom’s cons column and
COULD HURT HIS BUSINESS
under her dad’s. There really are no pros.

Stephanie goes to the kitchen, wrestles a new filter into the coffee maker, and dumps two big handfuls of dark roast coffee into the filter. It looks like the amount her father uses. She pulls two mugs from the cupboard. Into one she pours two heaping spoonfuls of sugar and a splash of cream, just the way her father prepares his. Waiting for the coffee to drip through, Stephanie wonders if this is her turning point, her moment of courage. She takes the second mug, fills it with black coffee for her mother. There is enough left for her, so she grabs a third mug and finds a tray. She envisions how things will go down. She will sit on the edge of her parents’ bed. All three of them will drink coffee and they will talk in the calm, logical way adults do.

Maybe there should be something to eat too. The refined carbohydrates of toast might distress her mother. She will bring fresh fruit. In the refrigerator there is a honeydew melon. She shouldn’t have poured the coffee; with the time it takes to prepare the melon, it will be too cool to drink. Which of her parents needs it piping hot? Stephanie starts to perspire, worries she will lose her nerve if one of them complains about the coffee or, worse, leaves to make a better batch. She is cradling the honeydew in her palms, propping the fridge door open with her shoulder, when her mother comes into the kitchen in her sweats and no makeup, her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail.

“Stephanie! What are you doing with that melon?” Her mother’s voice breaks with agitation.

Stephanie cringes. She is more tired than she realizes.

“No, no, no, sweetheart.”

With two strides and one bend, her mother advances, grabs the fruit, places it gently back in the crisper as if it were a baby’s lost head. She knocks the refrigerator door shut with her hip. “You can’t eat that. I have plans for it.”

Her mother looks at the three mugs, wrinkles her brow. “Did you have friends sleep over? And when did you start drinking coffee?”

Stephanie’s gut gets heavy. She wants to do the right thing. She grabs the mug closest to her, takes a swallow. It scalds her throat.

“Mom,” she says, sounding hoarse, rushed. “I have to tell you something about Las. Something’s wrong.” A pearl of water rolls from the side of Stephanie’s nose to the crook of her mouth. Is she crying?

“Where is he?”

Please don’t cry
, she tells herself.

“Where is he, Stephanie?”

“I don’t know, Mom. That’s not the point. What I’m—”

Her mother moves, shoves past Stephanie and the cups of wasted coffee to the stairs, which she takes in twos. There is a single knock on the door of Las’s bedroom at the very top. Stephanie hears it yank open and climbs the staircase with dread.

The sight of her brother is as terrible as it is beautiful. Las lies across his bed sprawled out on his back, as if his body has been tossed there. The bedsheets are thrown. One arm is flung over his head, his nose nestles in the crook of his elbow, all of him is naked but for a pair of cotton shorts. Stephanie can’t help but be struck dumb by him in such moments – the toasted mallow of his skin, the firm swells of his thighs and pectorals, the slender ridge of his jaw.

Her mother rushes to the window, pulls up the blind, and leans into his face to confirm that he is breathing. Stephanie follows her mother’s gaze as it trails along the length of him, until she sees his feet dangling over the edge of the bed, caked with mud along the arches, his flip-flops abandoned on the floor below. Something about the top of one foot looks strange – as if he has stuck his toes into the carcass of an animal.

Stephanie moves closer and sees it is Las’s flesh that has curled and darkened like a fatty brisket, burnt on the outside and with a pulpy centre of blood and gristle.

Her mother looks up at her. What comes out is a weak rasp. “Get your father.”

Mitch can’t hear his family when he’s in the office, an advantage he wouldn’t do without. It is the one room in the house where he feels that all the disparate litter of his life is gathered and sorted, made tidy and manageable. Despite Ella’s preference for barely perceptible colours, the walls are painted golden brown, the medium dark shade of an Arturo Fuente cigar’s broadleaf wrapper. Mitch still has a dozen left from his most recent purchase – there is one smoke shack that specializes in cigars – and it is a continuing source of antagonism between himself and his wife that he smokes in the privacy of the study, which he’s gone to the expense of having separately ventilated to appease her prickliness. There’s a long wall of windows with wooden blinds, another wall of bookshelves – he isn’t a great reader, but Mitch is comforted by the smell and heft of leather-bound sets – and in the centre is the ponderous oak desk, solid as a favourite uncle. He stashes his humidor in the bottom left of its six capacious drawers. He would keep his Scotch there too, were he able to lock the drawers against his plundering son.

Mitch rubs his forehead. His eyebrows feel rammed into his hairline, as if paralyzed in a state of perpetual alarm. He is withered and underslept. He reaches into the humidor, plucks out a Cañones Natural, slides the cigar under his nose, breathes in hints of the Spanish cedar it was aged in, and wills all the day’s tasks already over so he can pull its peppery heat right into his lungs. He will have a good-sized Scotch with it. But that is hours and hours away. First there are more calls to be made to lawyers, mid-level bureaucrats, creditors, builders, clients. Nervous or evasive – ten days after the blockade stoppered the highway in front of the development, these were the only two responses he could count on.

When he hears a short knock, he half hopes it’s his wife, arriving at his office door with a piping hot cup of coffee, her face free of accusation, knowing that he needs the relief of a small kindness, unspoken recognition of his doggedness in fighting for the development and their future. He feels a slight twitch in his mouth, a swell of love pushing against the acid reflux in his chest.