The Spawning Grounds (9 page)

As Hannah mulled over Alex's story, she reached down into the water to stroke the hump of one of the sockeye bucks, this old man who was too exhausted to take flight. She knew by the slowing of the fish's tail he would soon die. The tail beat as the heart beat, continuously and without thought, until life ended. A smaller sockeye buck waited to the side, hoping for a chance to mate with the female once this bigger male was gone. Other males, already spent, rocked in the shallows, their tails flicking from time to time as their lives unravelled.

“So the mystery took Samuel,” Hannah said. “Like you think it took Bran.”

Alex paused before responding. “Like it took your mother.”

“My
mother
.” Hannah looked to the far shore as she considered what he'd said.

In that moment Alex thought he might bring her to some genuine understanding, but then she swung her scepticism around herself like a cloak. “You do understand how fucked all this sounds,” she said.

“You know something's going on,” Alex told her, “or you wouldn't be here asking me about it. And hey, if you don't believe me, go ask your grandfather. Stew knows more than he's been telling you.”

“Grandpa says the Wunks got Bran.”

“The Wunks? Is that what Stew calls the mysteries?”

Hannah tilted her head to appraise him. “Trying to get other people to believe Dennis's stories isn't going to make you believe them yourself, you know,” she said.

Alex raised both hands, exasperated. He wouldn't try to convince her, not now. She would see things for herself or she wouldn't. Dennis had taught him that it was an elder's job, a teacher's job, to guide a kid into discovering things for himself, rather than cutting the lesson into little pieces and feeding it to him, as the teachers did in the white school system. When Alex had asked Dennis to teach him how to drive a car, Dennis threw him the keys to his Buick and said, “Go to it.” Since Alex had watched him drive, Dennis figured that was enough. Dennis was more or less right, Alex thought, though on his second day out he ran the car into a tree.

“When you're ready to hear me out,” Alex told her, “I'll tell you the rest of the story.”

“Tell me now.”

Alex stood to skip a stone across the water. “You're not ready.”

Hannah found a rock and made a sullen attempt to skip it, but the stone plopped sadly into the river.

“How could you grow up around this much water and not know how to skip stones?”

Hannah shrugged. “I don't know. Dad left. Grandpa never got around to teaching me.”

“Come on.” Alex waved her downriver.

“Where are we going?”

“To the lake. You've got to learn how to skip stones and I don't want to scare the fish.”

He led Hannah past Dead Man's Bend to the lakeshore. There, he picked up a stone and took her hand in both of
his to position the rock in her palm. “Now throw with your whole arm, like this,” he said, and he showed her.

Hannah flicked her wrist, holding the image of his throw in her mind. The rock landed with a splash.

“No, don't flick your wrist. Throw with your whole arm. Whip it!”

She watched the way his grip simply let go in the last instant. Then she tried again, and the stone skipped once.

“Here,” he said, and he picked up another rock. “You want a flat stone,” he said, “but one that's rounded on the bottom, like a dinner plate.”

One of the miniature plates from the tea set she had as a child, she thought. He sent it skimming across the water, three, four, five, six times, the circles spreading out, meeting each other.

“And you want one with a bit of weight,” he said, bending to search for another. “Not so light that the wind will catch it. I like them just a little pointed on one end, something I can set my finger on.” He held just such a rock between index finger and thumb, his middle finger supporting the stone from beneath, then sent the rock blazing across the water. A dozen concentric circles melting one into the other.

Hannah chose and threw a rock, but again it only skipped once before sinking into the river. She took a moment to remove a gumboot and stood on one foot to dump the water from it. Her sock was wet and as she removed it, Alex took her hand to help her balance, and she kept on holding it as she stepped, barefoot, back into her boot even though
she no longer needed the steadying. She was both surprised and thrilled by the warmth of his hand.

“Wet socks make me crazy,” she said, to explain herself as she at last removed her hand from Alex's, but she saw from his half-smile that he had not bought that explanation. He bent to search for another stone to avoid looking at her. Hannah did the same, embarrassed now. She let one rock after another drop from her hand, just as he did. The smoothness of the rocks, tumbled by thousands of years of glacier movement and, more recently, the pounding of river water. The heat of his body beside hers.

In two hands, she held out a flat stone the size of a dinner plate. “Here,” she said, joking to ease the uncertainty between them. “Skip this.” And Alex did, five times before it belly-flopped into the water. “Impressive,” she said.

“Grandpa Dennis taught me to skip stones. He used to bring me down to the lake when things got bad at home. He didn't say a word about Mom and Dad fighting, or about Dad after he left. We just skipped stones together. Somehow that made things better. I knew I would be okay.” He skipped the stone he had been holding. “I still come down here when things are rough. I can almost feel Grandpa Dennis skipping stones next to me.”

Hannah weighed the rock in her hand. “I hear Mom sometimes, calling me.” She glanced at Alex to gauge his reaction before she added, “Other times I feel her in the room with me.”

Alex nodded as if this was an everyday occurrence. “The spirits of suicides linger,” he said. “They are often
confused, clinging to the world they abandoned, and can't walk the spirit trail until they let go.” He paused. “Or their families let them go.”

Hannah let the stone drop and reached for another. “Mom found a gold ring here one summer, a wedding band. It was stuck over the end of a bullet.”

“Seriously?”

Hannah had been standing close to her at the time and would have found the ring if her mother had not. She didn't want to leave the beach after that, and sulked as she followed her mother home for supper. At the age of nine she had caught gold fever, the treasure hunter's sickness.

“At the dinner table that night we tried to figure out how the ring had gotten on that bullet. I mean, did they come together in the river, or did someone stick them together intentionally? Grandpa thought the ring was an omen and maybe he was right. It was only a couple of months later that Mom got sick and Dad started disappearing on us. Then Mom left too.” Taking her own life.

Hannah flung her stone across the water and this time it skipped and skipped and skipped, like moments ticking back in time, she thought, watching the circles spread away.

“There, see, you've got it,” Alex said.

Hannah grinned at him, the sudden thrill of this small success in her belly, a feeling she had thought she left behind in childhood, but here it was. When Alex held her gaze, she felt a flush rise from her chest to her face, her body revealing the secret she had been keeping from him. She turned away, to pick up another stone, and skipped it.

Beside her, Alex sent his own stone shuddering across the water. “I would never leave like your dad did,” he said. “If I loved a woman and she was sick, I would stay.” Hannah glanced at him, found him watching her, and looked back to the ripples he had just created. He stooped down to pick up another stone and placed it in Hannah's palm, this one so smooth that it seemed as alive as a hen's egg. He cupped his hand over hers and once again held her gaze so she understood he had also experienced the shift in understanding, in expectation, between them. “The perfect stone,” he said, before letting go.

WIND PLUCKED LEAVES
from the poplar on the front lawn and blew cool air in through the partly open window, bringing with it the sharp, leafy scent of a Shuswap autumn. Just a few more days and they'd be into October. Jesse closed the window but the morning chill remained. The house had never been properly insulated and, with its excessive roof overhang, had rarely been warm, even on summer evenings. This cramped living room was especially cold; Eugene Robertson had designed it that way in the days when a parlour was not only reserved for infrequent guests but for the family dead, who were displayed here until buried. The dead were still here, Jesse thought, present even in this windowsill, where much of the ancient putty had come loose and fallen out. Eugene Robertson had once kneaded linseed oil into this putty to keep it from drying as he worked it, and pressed it into place around the panes. He had left his mark on this window—the whorls of his fingers
and thumbs—just as he had left his mark on this land, in the whorls of the ancient stumps of the trees he had felled, which still stood in the fields. Some were so huge it would take another hundred years for them to rot and to return to the soil they had sprung from.

Gina entered the living room with two cups of coffee, handing Jesse his before cradling her own in both hands as she looked out the window with him. He muttered his thanks but kept his eyes on the river. Nevertheless his attention was very much on Gina. She was long and lean and her skinny jeans exaggerated her slim silhouette. Her long black hair held a few wiry strands of grey and smelled of wood smoke, from the two wood stoves that heated the bungalow she shared with Grant. Her face had grown softer, more welcoming, he thought. More forgiving.

“I appreciate all your advice,” he told her. “And I can't thank you enough for coming over today. I don't think Hannah will listen to me otherwise.”

“Oh, I won't be much help on that front,” Gina said. “Even when she asks for my help, she resents me for it.”

“She's not still holding a grudge, is she? After all these years.”

“Can you blame her?”

Jesse sipped his coffee. “I suppose not.”

Gina looked away briefly and Jesse realized he had hurt her. They both watched a flock of Canada geese lift from the field and fly towards the lake, circling as they gained strength for their flight south.

“I hope I can get this place cleaned up before snow hits,” Jesse said, to break the silence.

“You do understand you'll need to stay for a while now. You may have to rethink the sale of the farm.”

“That's not going to happen.”

Gina didn't respond right away. “Got a girlfriend?” she asked him finally. “Is that why you don't want to come back?”

Jesse laughed at the bluntness of her question. “No,” he said, meeting her eyes. “No girlfriend.”

She smiled a little at him as she sipped her coffee. He was surprised that Gina appraised him with such obvious pleasure. Her attention made him feel awkward; he was all at once the boy in high school, navigating his way into adulthood, that shy, skinny kid who was more comfortable reading books than hanging out at parties. He only found his footing with women in his twenties, after he was married. And then, after Elaine's death, he lost what little confidence he'd had in that regard. He'd spent most nights in recent years eating his supper alone in front of the TV.

“What then?” Gina asked. “Why won't you stay?”

“Work, I guess. I have a business to run.”

Gina raised an eyebrow, though she understood all the many reasons he didn't want to return. “Stew is proud of you, you know,” she said. “The work you do. He never wastes a chance to brag about how you own your own business.”

Jesse grunted. His business was a mobile welding rig mounted on the back of his Chevy pickup. Stew had taught Jesse to weld in the first place, then harangued him to give
it up after he earned his ticket, warning him that his chosen occupation would leave him blind if it didn't kill him. Jesse had already experienced his share of welder's flash when he worked at the mill: the painful, watery eyes and sensitivity to light that left him grounded for days, unable to drive or even watch TV. Sparks had set his pants and shirts on fire several times. His hands and arms were covered in burns.

When Jesse didn't volunteer anything more, Gina looked back out the window. “You
will
have to move back,” she said. “The kids need you. You have to stay.”

“You almost sound like you
want
me back.”

Gina kept her eyes on the landscape in front of them, the brilliant yellow leaves of the poplars, the rust and gold leaves of the fruit trees, the deep blue of the river. She didn't reply, but still, a small smile played on her face.

Jesse studied her. “What would Grant think about that? Me moving home?”

Gina's smile faded. “That's all behind us now, isn't it?”

Jesse looked back to the river, the relentless movement of its water, knowing he was stepping into one of those moments he would likely regret. “I think about you all the time,” he said, but then Hannah drove her grandfather's truck into the yard.

“Why is she home already?” Jesse said. “She only just left for the hospital.” He hadn't been in to see the old man himself again in the days since he arrived. He promised himself he would, tomorrow, or the next day.

As Hannah got out of the truck, Abby ran up to greet her and she bent to pet the dog.

“Are you clear on how you're going to handle this?” Gina asked.

“I think so.”

“Stay calm,” Gina said. “Don't let your emotions get the better of you. She'll undoubtedly fight you.”

Hannah had disappeared from view, heading for the back entrance. As she opened the kitchen door, the wind picked up again; the glass of the window shuddered and even the floorboards vibrated as if a giant were attempting to rip the house from its foundation and expose its wretched, spider-infested crawl space to the sky.

Hannah entered the living room, apparently intent on watching some television before making supper, but she stopped when she saw Jesse and Gina and turned on her heel, as if she had caught them in an incriminating embrace. Gina tipped her head at Jesse, nodding him towards the kitchen, and he followed his daughter. Hannah had put the kettle on and was placing a round Tetley tea bag in a mug, something Jesse had seen Elaine do many times.

“How's Dad?” he asked Hannah.

“He was asleep, so I turned around and came home.” When Jesse leaned on the counter next to her, she lowered her voice to a near whisper. “What's Gina doing here? Fuck, Dad, she's married to a
cop
.”

“I had some questions about Bran, about the drawings on his bedroom walls. When I talked to him about them, he seemed confused.”

Hannah poured hot water into her cup. “He's into sketching, that's all. His art teacher thinks he should go to Emily Carr.”

“He's drawing on the walls, for Christ's sake.”

From the living room, Gina cleared her throat, reminding him to keep his temper in check, and he lowered his voice. “Do you remember your mother's drawings?” he asked. “The animals? The boy?”

“Of course I remember. When she died you burned them all.”

She was right. Jesse had gathered the drawings from every corner of the house and set them alight in the burn barrel. He had watched bits of the burned images lift and drift up from the fire.

“So he's working out some stuff with those drawings,” Hannah said. “That's not surprising, is it? He just about lost Grandpa to drowning, the same way he lost Mom.”

Gina stepped into the kitchen. “I think we all know there's more going on,” she said. “Why don't both of you sit?” Jesse did, but Hannah remained standing. “Hannah, you must be hungry. I'll make you and Jesse a sandwich.”

“I'm not hungry,” Hannah said, holding up her teacup.

Gina made the sandwiches anyway, moving around the room with the familiarity of family, knowing exactly where the plates, the cutlery, the cheese and bread were kept.

“We had Bran checked out at emergency after he fell in the river,” Hannah said. “We were all checked out.” Then she looked pointedly at her father. “He's fine.”

“The afternoon I got here, Bran walked down to the river in his underwear in broad daylight,” Jesse told her.

Hannah looked into the dark surface of her tea. “So he's eccentric. That's not a crime.”

“He thought something attacked him in the river,” said Gina. “A water mystery. A spirit.”

“So he spends too much time with Alex.” Hannah held out a hand. “Look, Bran is into Alex's stories in the same way he's into his art. He's playing at it, trying to figure out who he is.” She turned to Gina. “And what if he did take some of the old stories seriously? Your own ancestors did. There are paintings all over the cliff face of Little Mountain, what they saw there.”

“But those stories aren't from Brandon's culture,” Gina said.

“So he has no right to have an interest in them? You go to church. I could say the stories you hear there aren't
your
stories.”

Gina placed the sandwiches on the table and sat.

“I think we need to take him to a psychiatrist,” Jesse said. “Have him assessed.”

“You're not taking him to see a shrink.” Hannah looked from Jesse to Gina. “You don't know him. Neither of you know him.”

“Hannah, we've already been through all this, with your mother,” Gina said, then reached across the table, took Jesse's hand and held it a moment before letting go.

Hannah turned her back on them and braced herself on the counter. “I do remember,” she said. “I was here too.”

“I know,” Jesse said quietly. He saw his daughter's face reflected, distorted, in the electric kettle on the counter in front of her. Jesse had used that same kettle to make cups of tea for Elaine and had asked Hannah to carry them into the
living room, where her mother sat drugged and alone in the captain's chair, staring out the window that overlooked the river and the reserve. Elaine took the cups Hannah offered without saying thanks or even acknowledging her daughter. Her eyes remained unblinking on the river or something beyond. Jesse had once watched Hannah bend in front of her mother so Elaine was forced to look into her face. Elaine startled and, for a moment, focused on Hannah. Elaine's eyes were bloodshot and confused as if she had just been woken from a dream. Then she shifted the captain's chair so she could look past Hannah, to the cliff. Hannah had hugged her anyway. Elaine had not hugged her back.

Hannah opened the cupboard under the sink and pulled out a wash bucket and scrubby, before filling the bucket with warm soapy water. “You come waltzing in here like you own the place,” she said to Gina, though Jesse knew she was also talking to him. “You act like you're part of this family. You're not. You don't know shit.” She lifted the bucket from the sink and headed through the dining room.

“What are you doing?” Jesse asked her. When she didn't answer, he followed her, took her arm and made her turn to him. “I said, what are you doing?”

Hannah yanked her arm from her father's grip, sloshing water on the floor, and carried the bucket through the living room and up to Brandon's room.

“Let her be,” Gina told Jesse.

Brandon was huddled in the corner of his bed with his sketchbook on his lap, drawing with frantic strokes. The floor and walls of the room were covered with pictures of animals in various stages of transformation, human into animal, animal into human. Hannah took down one, then another and another, crumpling them and dropping them to the floor, to reveal the drawings he'd sketched right on the wall.

Brandon jumped up. “What are you doing?”

In answer, Hannah pulled the scrubby from the bucket, squeezed the water from it and started washing the wall.