The Sudden Weight of Snow (28 page)

It all goes well until you hit Kelowna, in the interior of British Columbia. After that, no one slows down except to glare at you. Twice, men in pickups give you the finger. After spending an unprecedented six hours by the side of the road, you walk back to a minigolf course and phone Susan. “Welcome to the Bible belt, sweetie,” she says. The minigolf course is open late enough that you can wait there while someone drives the hour to come get you. On the course, you try to launch a ball into a castle and hit the moat every time. Later you shoot at things in the arcade until you are confusing sound and colour and have to get some fresh air.

Thomas comes to pick you up. He may or may not be the man from your first memories, the man that you and Susan stayed with in the coldest months of the winter while Peter slept in the shack. You know he’s been around the farm for years but was always working out in the bush when you came up those summers. He laughs and nods his head when he sees you. “Gabriel Miller. Gabe Miller,” he says and shakes your hand.

Once you get into the truck, Thomas says to you, “That’s rough about your old man.” You tell him that Peter may be out soon, that he has some friends pulling strings back in the States. You don’t know why you say this. It’s a lie. Peter’s friends have no strings but it’s as though you want to impress Thomas. This is when he tells you about the money – that Peter has been sending up a bit here and there for Thomas to put aside for you. He’s opened up an account in your name in Canada and, though you’re by no means rich, you’ll have a bit to live off for a few months.

“No offence, but why you? I mean, why not Susan, or I don’t know … Why didn’t he tell me?” you ask. Even after such a short absence, your father is seeming more and more like a stranger. Peter never disclosed what he did for a living and now you find out that he was feeding a trust fund off that money, and not telling you that either, not even during those last times you saw him. Thomas speeds up to overtake a car, then mutters about slow drivers in the passing lane. He doesn’t answer your question and you don’t repeat it.

You get to the farm after midnight. Susan is up, drinking coffee and smoking in the cookshack. She cracks a grin that cleaves her small, taut face when she sees you. You greet her
with feigned nonchalance and, for the first time, when you hug her, you have to bend down. Susan looks older than you expected. Her hair and her skin look thin, her eyes huge, the rest of her features receding. She puts out her cigarette when you come in but lights another one soon after, coughing between the two like someone who has been smoking for years.

As you walk back to her place she tells you that she is sorry about what happened to Peter. She says his name quickly, non-committally. She lives in an A-frame cabin now. After you and Peter left, she built and wired it herself. “Well, not entirely myself. Took me three years and as many men to get this thing off the ground,” she jokes. “I’ve set up the spare room for you, for now, but we’ll get you set up in another space on the land. I’m sure you didn’t come up here to live with your mother.” Susan laughs lightly and you join her, wonder who she is saying this for, you or herself. It’s true, you don’t think you came here to live with your mother, but you may have come to escape your stepmother, the uncomfortable things growing between her and you. You’ve come to forget everything you’ve left behind.

Susan helps you carry your things into the spare room, then leaves you alone. The room has a bed, a desk piled with books, old newspapers, and shoeboxes, an open trunk full of balls of wool, and everywhere photographs of you. Some are framed, some are pinned to the wall. One of Susan holding you is blown up on thin paper and hangs above the bed. There are several of you as a baby and toddler, barefoot and in overalls, the standard uniform for children of your generation. A few look like they were taken shortly before you left, doing boyish, farmish things – sitting on the horse-drawn plough, chasing a
goose, standing on top of a stump. The rest of the photos are from one of four ages – eleven, twelve, thirteen, or fourteen – the years when you visited. In each you look even more awkward and scrawny than the last. As you get older, you look away from the camera and your mouth betrays smiles pulled down in embarrassment.

You have a hard time falling asleep with images of yourself looking down on you. The boy in those photographs isn’t the same one you left behind in California. None of those photographs exist in Arcana. It’s as if there were two of you, who never met.

D
uring lunch breaks, I returned to the loading zone behind the shop classes. By then, Krista usually spent the entire lunch period with Mike. Sometimes, they would ask me to come along to the food court, but after a couple of lunch hours spent deflecting the advances and snide comments of Mike’s tobacco-chewing buddies while he and Krista made out, I declined. Nick was always in the smoking area, though almost never smoking. Most often, he was huddled in one of the doorways with a couple of other geeks, playing cards or hand-held video games. Once, I had been able to dissolve into the neutral, unnoticed masses in the school. I couldn’t do that any more and I would have rather smoked with the freaks than be stared at as I walked the halls alone.

Very few girls hung out with the skids and nerds in the loading zone in sub-zero temperatures. The ones who did could be grouped into two broad categories: tomboys who loved wood and metal and were almost indistinguishable from the guys, and girls lacquered in heavy makeup. Those girls
smoked and glared and spoke in a sparse language, never quite turning to look people in the face when they did. Nick’s friends simply stared at me like any thirteen-year-olds would at a seventeen-year-old girl who had deigned to talk to them.

They all acknowledged me soon enough. The tomboys ran their eyes over my shorn hair and I registered their acceptance immediately. The tough girls shot their chins out and said, “Hey, what’s your story?” When I mumbled something about leaving home and living with a guy, I knew I was in. Then I made the ultimate in offers, “Drum?” and held out a pouch. I had gotten it off someone at the farm. Drum was what most people smoked there, that or American Spirit. These were somehow acceptable forms of tobacco.

There wasn’t a lot of talking in the smoking area, and at that time of year none of us spent the entire lunch hour out there. Sometimes, one of the guys would slide an electrical cord under a shop door and bring a stereo outside to play speed metal – a soundtrack for the dumpsters, the chain-link, and the white, abandoned field, for the leather jackets and heavy eyeliner. Each group would exchange a few muttered comments, smoke cigarettes while looking away from the school, shuffle their feet, and then leave after fifteen or twenty minutes, complaining of the cold. Nick and his friends huddled in a doorwell with their games until someone offered them a butt – it was always someone offering, never them asking – at which point they would nod, trying to appear indifferent, and three or four of them would share the smoke together. I had begun rolling cigarettes, thin as pencils, for Nick and his friends, throwing them to the boys like candy to kids at a parade.

At the beginning of February, Nick caught one of the cigarettes and walked up to me. “Can I talk to you, Harp?”

“Sure.” We walked over to the concrete steps leading to an unused door to the gym. We sat on our hands on the top step. The cold was going to drop lower yet, I could feel the edge of it coming on. “What’s up?” I asked Nick.

“I think you should call Mom.”

“I know, I know. Why now, though?”

“She’s just acting strange. For one thing, I think she’s having trouble sleeping. You know how weird that is. I hear her walking around at night. It kind of freaks me out a bit. I think she misses you or something. Who knows why.” Nick turned his head away from me and spat, as though to show he had some handle on the situation

“Nice gob, hero. Okay. I’ll call Mom.” I put my hands on my lap and turned them palms up. “Don’t say anything to her though, okay?”

“Yeah, okay, I won’t.” Nick pushed himself up from the concrete step. “See you around.” This time, he was up and down the stairs before I had given him an unspoken cue to leave.

I remember in surprising detail the first time that I left a place without letting anyone know where I was going. I was in the first grade. It was during the transition when we had first arrived in Sawmill and were still living at the motel. Vera wanted to make us feel like we belonged. She thought new friends could do this and so made it her mission to find some
for Nick and me. Her means were simple. Any adult – the real estate agent, a cashier at the supermarket, the guy who pumped our gas – was a potential parent, their children potential friends. Nick and I were dropped off at strangers’ houses, encouraged to play with kids with whom we often had no more in common than our age, and sometimes that was a stretch.

One afternoon, Vera dropped me off at a girl’s house. I don’t remember who she was, or ever seeing her again. We were playing in her carport, metres away from where Vera had dropped me off. We didn’t interact as we roamed the carport like detectives, in silence, picking toys up and putting them down. When I picked up a glossy red plastic change purse, it was so smooth, so gleaming that I couldn’t imagine not having it, holding it in my pocket, a space within a space like one of the stacked Russian dolls my baba had sent me for Christmas.

I slipped the purse into the pocket, felt a hot itch on my face and neck, then took it back out. I wanted to leave, get out of that carport with the silent girl stranger. Vera found me later, walking from the girl’s house to wherever the road would take me. “Sylvie, honey, where are you going?” She bent to me, grasped my arms until they hurt, the van still running on the side of the road.

“I don’t know. I wanted to go home. I didn’t like it there.” I was glad she had found me. I don’t think I would actually have walked home if she hadn’t. The memory of holding that purse in my pocket was propelling me in some other direction.

For years, Vera would tell the story of finding me walking on the side of the road. To her, it attested to my innate wilfulness, stubbornness like a steel bar in my spine. To me, it was
about a fear I couldn’t name. About wanting something so badly that I had to walk away from it, lose my way.

I called Vera on a Sunday evening from the cookshack. There had been a potluck and I had helped clean up afterwards. The kids had reached the point when they were beginning to stutter and become delirious, running wide wobbling circles in the middle of the room.

“Hello?” Vera answered.

I had to raise my voice to say, “Hi, Mom. It’s me.”

Silence on her end, then she asked, “How are you?”

“I’m okay. Listen, Mom, I don’t really want to talk like this, over the phone. There are people here, you know, and –”

“I know. Maybe we could meet. Here, at home.”

“At home?”

“Yes, honey, the place you used to live?” Vera said sarcastically, then shifted her tone quickly once she caught herself. “I mean, if you’d be comfortable here,” she said. I could hear something thin and tight in Vera’s voice, as though it were strained through a crack. I felt as though I couldn’t push her any farther.