by Freya North
Aaron took the children fishing a few times, enabling Frankie and Scott to have some time alone.
‘You know it takes five hours for the water to come from Múmleq – from Mount Meager – to here?’ Aaron told them. ‘One time the hydro company tried to redirect the water but the river fought back and reclaimed its favoured path. You see all these logs? They just appear. Look at them all. Log jams are something else – and when they shift, the noise wow! Like a massive gun-crack.’
‘Scott told me when the rivers flood, the very last thing to go are the beaver dams,’ said Sam, toying with his fishing rod; loving the peace and the anticipation, waiting for the slightest feel at the end of the line, waiting for the water to spume silver with activity.
‘Twit,’ Aaron said to him. ‘That’s you.’
Sam frowned but Aaron just laughed. ‘Not your stupid white word,’ he explained. ‘Twit is Ĺíĺwat for “young man who has finished his training”, for a hunter with special powers.’
Annabel was delighted. ‘You’re a twit, Sam – you’re a twit! But Aaron,’ she said, ‘if Sam’s a twit, what am I?’
He threaded bait onto her line and cast for her. ‘Liisáos,’ he said. ‘An angel – like your mother.’
Scott and Frankie took the children hiking to Joffre. They made it to the middle lake where Annabel flopped down saying, yes it’s blue and beautiful but now I’m on strike. Frankie was happy to join her daughter’s picket line and just sit alongside her and contemplate the surroundings, stroking Annabel’s hair while her daughter rested in her lap. Frankie loved it that Sam had said come on, Scott – I want to keep going. Yes she was excited for her son to see the upper lake, but the warmest thrill came from observing Sam and Scott’s growing affection. Peta’s husband Philip always ruffled Sam’s hair and talked about sport but Scott gave Sam time to talk about himself and Scott seemed to know what he’d like.
But then she thought about Miles moving back to England next month because he loved the children too and wanted to be more present in their lives. Frankie shuddered and Annabel looked up, alarmed.
‘What’s wrong? How can you be cold?’
‘I’m not darling – I’m fine. It’s nothing.’
But it was everything. Frankie wanted Joffre to be on her doorstep. Miles wanted the children to be on his. Sam and Annabel shouldn’t have to leap an ocean between two homes. There had to be a solution, there had to be.
Jenna came to stay the weekends they were there and Annabel experienced her first girl crush, while Jenna and Scott embraced the feeling of a larger family, a noisier household. There was a lot of loafing around, those weekends. Enjoying the house, hanging out in the shade on the porch, lying on the grass in the sun and gathering around the table for raucous mealtimes.
‘My mum is absolute rubbish at plaiting hair,’ Annabel told Jenna who was combing it through. ‘Rubbish rubbish rubbish.’
‘We call it braiding,’ Jenna told her. ‘And your mom can’t be brilliant at everything.’
‘She’s not very good at keeping the snack drawer full either,’ Annabel said darkly.
Jenna giggled. What a cute kid. It was like having a little sister.
They were all in the living room. Frankie sitting quietly in the armchair, tweaking her manuscript in progress. Sam with a guitar and Scott next to him with another, teaching him a few chords. Buddy was outside, whining to get in but he’d licked the roast chicken that was resting on the table and Scott was cross with him. Jenna was dividing Annabel’s hair. She looked over to the cabinet on which the television and hi-fi were kept. It was a lovely old piece of furniture, with lots of drawers and compartments. When she was at school, she’d kept all her bands and ribbons for her hair in one of the drawers. Were they still there? Buddy scrabbling at the door. She’d go and check.
Scott suddenly leapt up.
Frankie looked over. Jenna was by the cabinet, standing very still. It didn’t look like Jenna, she looked like a waxwork.
‘Scott?’
The children looked up quickly at the tone of their mother’s voice.
‘Jenna,’ Scott was saying, low but insistent. ‘Jenna, come. Jenna – come.’
Jenna wasn’t moving, just standing there, trance-like.
And Annabel, Sam and Frankie all wondered, is this epilepsy? Is this a focal seizure?
And then a terrible sound, a disembodied scream they never imagined could come from the girl with the soft and sing-song voice. Suddenly, she was down on the floor, her body in spasms. Annabel burst into tears and Sam just said Mum! Mum! as if there had to be something Frankie could do. Jenna was facing them, Scott crouching near, his hands gently on her arm, her waist, talking to her all the time. Her lips were blueish, her face a flat white, her eyes half-closed, her hands in rigid claws while her arms and legs flailed and her breath came in staccato gasps and grunts.
‘What can we do?’ Frankie’s voice on the verge of tears. That poor child. Jesus Christ, that poor girl. Her children were clinging to her. ‘What can we do?’
But Scott didn’t answer her, he was just talking at Jenna, using his voice to help him breathe too. Frankie and the children came a little closer. Annabel hid her face in her mother’s clasp and Sam stared at the floor just in front of Jenna.
Two minutes and seven seconds.
And then the room filled with Jenna’s long sigh and everything was still.
‘It’s OK, baby, it’s OK. You’re back, you’re with us. Jenna. Jenna baby. You’re here. You’re OK. We’re here.’
Little moans, as though she was six years old.
‘Why did you scream, though?’ Annabel, tear-streaked, was on her knees while Jenna recovered on the floor. ‘Why did you scream like that?’
Jenna, too tired to speak. She’d never heard herself, anyway.
‘She’s not screaming – like you’d scream if you were scared,’ Scott told Annabel. ‘It’s when her muscles tighten – it forces all the air out. And when she sighs afterwards, that’s because the muscles have relaxed again.’
‘Why isn’t she talking though? If she’s relaxed now?’ Annabel had started to cry again. Frankie sat down beside her. Sam joined her. They were all sitting around Jenna, close as they could.
‘Because when she has a seizure, her body is beat up with the effort. Like it’s run a marathon,’ Scott said. ‘In a while we’ll help her up – she’ll be groggy and she’ll sleep a long time.’
Annabel put her hand tentatively out and touched Jenna’s hair lightly. Jenna blinked slowly. Annabel started to stroke her.
Scott looked around at the family. Frankie brushing a tear away. Sam ashen. Annabel focused, frightened, but brave enough to stroke his daughter.
‘See how I’ve put her in the recovery position? Can you see that? Sam?’ Scott said quietly. ‘That was a tonic-clonic seizure. I know it’s so scary to see but you guys need to know what to do. So you can help – if you see someone having a seizure. Not just Jenna. Someone in Norfolk. Someone in London. Someone in the airport, at the bus stop, in a store. You must try to help. Because I’m telling you this, it happens. And a lot of people get kind of frozen with fear.’
Sam cleared his throat. ‘What’s the first thing we should do?’
‘Make sure that nothing is in their way that they could injure themselves on.’
‘OK – and then?’
‘Don’t try and hold their arms or legs – but try, if you can, if it’s safe for you to do so, to ease them onto their side.’
‘Like you did?’
‘Yes.’
‘And keep talking and talking, like you did?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can do that,’ said Sam.
‘If a seizure lasts more than three minutes, call an ambulance.’
‘OK. I’ll remember,’ said Sam, knowing he’d never, ever forget.
Scott looked at their faces striated with worry. ‘Please don’t treat Jenna any differently later,’ he said. ‘It’s just this Thing t
hat happens to her. She’s going to be tired, then she’s going to be fine. You did brilliantly guys, thank you.’
Sam, Annabel and Frankie all wished they could have done more.
Frankie looked from Scott to Jenna and from Sam to Annabel and she thought to herself, if that was my child I wouldn’t ever want to be too far away.
* * *
They did see a bear.
Every day, Annabel and Sam checked their watches in the late afternoon, Scott’s casual comment becoming their mantra.
The forest starts moving around half-four.
Eight days in a row, 4.30 had come and gone with no bear in sight and when he finally came, it was closer to 7.00. The children were sitting out on the porch because their mother was cooking and had told them to chill out to the view – which just sounded so wrong. Grown-ups shouldn’t say chill out for a start, and they shouldn’t expect kids to be enthralled by views. But as supper was going to take ages on account of all the chatting and cuddling Frankie and Scott did, the children knew they could sit out there not gazing at the dusk-drenched mountain but at Sam’s phone instead.
But something made them both look up, a movement that was silent, self-contained and yet filled the garden. And there he was, simply mooching about, black and glossy and round. He was littler than they’d imagined and amusingly pootling about almost for the hell of it, as if forgetting that he was in man’s back yard. Then it was as though he suddenly remembered and that’s when he stopped and looked over at the house, looked straight at the children. The bear looked at them and they looked at the bear and none of them was quite sure how long this lasted. Sam held his breath while Annabel felt she could not breathe if she tried. Then, as if with a shrug, the bear ambled off, heading out through the domestic boundary and back into the wild.
Suddenly, it no longer mattered what was going on in Instagram or who was tweeting what banality. In fact, Sam wouldn’t realize until the next morning that he had left his phone on the swing seat out on the porch. The children rushed into the house.
‘We just saw him!’
Scott and Frankie peeled away from each other and acted busy stirring pans and checking in the oven.
‘Saw who?’
‘We just saw the bear.’ Annabel’s voice was hoarse.
Frankie rushed outside. ‘Why didn’t you tell me!’
Sam looked at Scott, his face flushed and open. ‘We couldn’t,’ he tried to explain. ‘We couldn’t move, we couldn’t speak.’
* * *
Eighteen days. The best holiday ever, the children said. Can’t we stay longer? We don’t start school for another week. Their final evening and Annabel was busy with Buddy for whom she’d made a loom-band embellishment for his collar. Sam was gazing over to the studio, his magical lair. In the palm of his hand his phone stuffed full of new music including a little something he’d recorded with Scott.
Frankie looked out to Mount Currie, sending her thanks and hope that she’d be back soon. Her daughter came and stood next to her. At the other end of the porch, her son and Scott. Scott with his hands loosely resting on his hips, Sam mirroring his pose. Everyone in the moment of wanting to stay but having to go. Frankie gave Annabel’s hand a little squeeze and drew her close for a hug.
‘You never saw the bear, Mummy.’
‘No,’ Frankie sighed. ‘Maybe next time.’
Jenna looked around. She had everything she needed. Her dad was outside rearranging the back of the truck for the umpteenth time. Though really she’d left home last year when she’d moved to Whistler, it was only now that she realized how it had never quite felt like it. Living in Whistler had been like a halfway house, like a protracted sleepover at a close friend’s less than an hour away. She’d been home most weeks anyway, never really been away long enough, or far away enough, to notice its quintessential scents and sounds. It had remained just the same to her, as if time sped up when she was away but for the house, for Buddy and her dad, it padded along just the same. Now though, she felt a growing sense that this was goodbye, she was to take leave of her childhood home for good, and her childhood too, really. She’d finished the charming year between school and university during which she’d earned money, laughed till she cried, had a one-night stand and two lousy boyfriends whom she could keep secret from her dad but dissect with her girlfriends. She’d stood on her own two feet perfectly happily and, on those occasions when she’d fallen, she’d found she could pick herself up again and cope. But what was it going to be like now?
She looked around once more.
She knew her dad was out there, packing the truck, wondering what lay ahead for Jenna, if she’d be OK. But inside the house, Jenna was confronting the same questions on her father’s behalf. Then she caught sight of the picture she’d taken of him and Frankie last month. Annabel’s shoe just visible, Sam a blur as he darted through the background. She remembered that day so well. And she thought yes, my pops’ll be OK. Just then, Jenna felt truly grateful for Frankie. How great that her dad had found someone, what luck that it was someone she actually really liked. She plumped up a cushion and thought back to a couple of women who’d lingered when she’d been a kid, how they’d alternately avoid her and yet toady up to her too – as if the way to her dad’s heart was through some pretence of acceptance and affection towards the girl who was his everything. She’d always be the girl who was his everything, but now he’d tidied up to make space for another. Jenna felt only gratitude, relief too. It freed her up, validated her growing need for independence.
‘Feels like I’m holding the door open,’ she said to Buddy. ‘Like I’m holding the door open to let Frankie in on my way out.’
Vancouver beckoned. She was checking into her student accommodation today and registering tomorrow which was why her dad was packing up the truck to drive her there. She fingered her bracelet; it was actually a medical ID but unlike when she was little, these days they were much prettier. The old style made her feel branded like a cow, but now it was a piece of jewellery to enjoy, a conversation starter. She smiled, remembering Annabel trying it on, Jenna explaining its purpose. It speaks for me if I can’t.
If her meds worked and she could be seizure free for another six months, she’d be able to drive herself. She’d be able to offer her new friends a ride for a change; she’d be able to say hey! let’s go visit my home this weekend – and turn up on her dad’s doorstep with a carload of lively people whom she’d be eager for him to meet, whom she’d be proud to show where she’d grown up.
‘Perhaps it’s all going to be just fine,’ she said to Buddy. However negative and down she could become immediately following a seizure, her natural positivity always triumphed.
‘Honey?’
‘Coming, Pops – I’m coming.’
She took a last long look and sent her grin floating around the sitting room. Here we go, she thought, off I go.
Jenna didn’t know that her father had booked into a hotel in Vancouver, in Yale Town, for the night. When she spoke to him on the phone that evening, she assumed he was back home. But Scott couldn’t leave her, he had to stay close, to be her nightwatchman one final time. In the clean and positive light of tomorrow, it would be OK to go home. But not now, not on a day as monumental as today. He looked around the room, decorated in that modern and tasteful way that was a little too sterile for his liking. Buddy was curled quietly under the desk, not quite sure what to make of this. Where exactly was this non-stop place they’d taken Jenna? What was all that pavement under his paws? Who were all those people speaking in all those tongues? Such strong smells. Why did youngsters stand in that long snaking line by a Coca-Cola marquee? Why had they left Jenna standing right there? It was confusing for a dog like him who liked the simpler things in life.
‘Hey,’ said Scott. He loved the way the dog could raise his eyebrows so expressively. God he wanted to speak to Frankie. He felt in desperate need of comfort and he wasn’t afraid, at last, to express it. But it was two in the morning
over there. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, bringing to mind how Frankie looked when she slept, playing across the blank screen of his shut eyelids some of his favourite memories of their times together. He didn’t want to think of Jenna because when he did, it wasn’t the young woman he’d left in Grey Point today, it was the flaxen-haired baby with the saucer-size eyes toddling over to him, it was the child with the beatific smile who’d been patient with him night after night as he taught himself how to braid hair neat and pretty for school, it was the leggy kid who always waved at him from the school gates, it was the teenager who grinned through pink-dipped bangs when he came to watch her in some clangorous band or other. His beautiful girl who dealt with so much and called him Pops and had always told him not to worry.
Not worry? He was a parent, it was his job to worry! He remembered so well being Jenna’s age, feeling invincible and immune, seeking thrills and extremes to prove how vibrant and alive he was. But Jenna had something he didn’t, something many of the people she’d be meeting would never have encountered. Some would have preconceptions and others, fear. Would Jenna be able to say to her roommate, I don’t lock the washroom door – just in case? He knew what three critical minutes of seizure felt like without having to look at his watch – would Jenna please befriend someone at college with that skill?
The girl he left today. Standing in line wearing a disproportionate grin just because she was going to get the name Jenna printed onto a Coke bottle. That couldn’t have been his baby girl. Not so soon. Not gone so soon. No – he wouldn’t think of her. And he wouldn’t think of the little daughter he once had because where did she go? Where’s she gone? What happened to the years one to twenty that had blinked by? Nope. He’d keep his eyes closed to meld into thoughts of Frankie, allow the warmth to seep over him like a coverlet.
‘Hey Buddy – you can come up on the bed, if you like.’
Frankie wasn’t answering her phone. Scott looked at the calendar on which he’d written up the dates she’d sent him. They did that for one another, so that daily lives separated by so many miles still made sense.