The Sweetest One

by Melanie Mah

  We get a long ride, close to five minutes. When it’s over, Aabidah asks if we wanna go for ice cream, but I’ve never hung out with her in my life, and three is a bad number for a hangout. “Sounds good,” I say, “but I gotta meet my dad.”

  “Conrad?” Aabidah asks.

  “Nah, I should go, too,” he says. “Maybe next time?”

  “Sure,” she says. “Anytime.”

  Our arms swing as we walk down the south service road. When we graze against each other our coats make zjoop zjoop sounds.

  “That was fun,” he says. The wind in his hair.

  “Yeah. That was my first time on that thing. You know, you could’ve stayed with her if you wanted.”

  “What, and miss hanging out with you? You’re, like, the best inspirational speaker I’ve ever met. That caveman stuff? It didn’t really help, but it was interesting.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I really do have to meet my dad, though.”

  “Were you ever gonna tell me what was wrong? Seems like before you were having a bad day.”

  No one ever asks how my day has gone. People say, How are you? Most of them don’t mean it. “I hit some animals in a field with my dad’s car.”

  “Animals.”

  “Yeah.” I tell him how it felt to hit them, what they looked like after, how I had to get out of there as soon as it happened. The whole time, he’s got this real sorry look on his face.

  “Did you see what kind they were?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe rabbits? As I said, I couldn’t stay.”

  And then somehow, without speaking, we decide to stop walking. I close my eyes and feel him coming near but I don’t move, feel his arms around me, and I can’t let him, but I do. I’m afraid, so afraid, can he feel it? He draws me in deep, I should like it, they did studies on this. Without physical contact, people die. Still, I’m stiff, clenching, my arms are at my sides. Think of something else, not his smell because that’s scary, maybe think of Trina, think of someone being carried by the wind, a little magic bird that’s come to bring us something good, think of the wind, that thing that just fell on your head.

  It’s water, a drop of it. Rain.

  We start running, even though my hip still hurts. We’re at least a mile from the car. The sky cracks and it starts coming down in cold buckets. We pretend it’s acid rain. The object of the game is to stay as dry as possible. I run under the lips of buildings, avoiding ice piles, while Conrad splashes through puddles, unafraid. Closer to the car, he asks if he can see me next Sunday. He can.

  Once he leaves, the day starts to drag. I think of him as I wait. When my dad gets back he makes me drive home. I’m shaking, going extra slow, but he doesn’t notice.

  We stop at the post office on the way. Another letter from Trina in our box. I sneak it into my pocket, put everything else — the newspaper, junk mail, other envelopes — under my arm. As soon as we get home, we have lunch, then my parents go for their daily walk. Normally I’d go with them, but this time I stay back to read the letter. It tells me things I both do and don’t want to know.

  Trina’s having the time of her life. She had spent a mind-bending time in Kluane, where the harshness of the terrain showed her, more than anything she’d ever seen in her life, just how small she was, how magnificent the world. After that, she walked into a terrible Chinese-place-slash-pizzeria in Haines Junction, and walked out with a travelling companion. She’s going to Dawson City with her now. Her name is Billy. Apparently, she’s fun — troubled but good company. And smart. She knows random facts just like you do, Chris, Trina writes.

  I feel my stomach fall out of my body.

  14

  *

  I’VE OFTEN THOUGHT I had an attractive family. Trina’s bold and in your face. She has nice eyes, good style, this smile she practised in the mirror but didn’t have to. Gene was funny, wild, and dangerous. He had these really intense eyes and a tall, lean, strong build. Me and Reggie were the worst: plain, I guess, a little nerdy. Not bad, though.

  Stef was somewhere in the middle — smart without being a geek, pretty without the mass appeal. Good personality, too. Her friend Josh McMurtry was crazy about her, used to send flowers every few months with those little cards attached. His pathetic handwriting and skipping ballpoint pen. Merry Christmas. Happy birthday. Happy Thanksgiving. Stef took the cards off the flowers as soon as they arrived. My dad asked me a few times where they came from, but I’d seen enough of him yelling at all of us for no reason to tell him.

  She didn’t like Josh back. He was just a friend. Old Josh McMurtry, whose parents own the Red Mart. A sweet guy, all in all, but I guess Stef just never saw him that way. Nature and her family were her real loves. Most of her time she spent working in the store, studying, reading wilderness and survival guides, and hanging out with us. The rest of the time, when-ever she could get away without rousing suspicion, she was camping. Josh McMurtry was a camper, too. They’d bring their guitars to the mountains and sing country duets by the fire. “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man.” “Sweet Thang.” “Islands in the Stream.” At home, she’d sing along to Trina’s tapes in that la la la way you do when you don’t know a song so well. She especially liked boy-girl songs. “The harmonies are sweeter when a guy and girl sing together,” she said. I agreed.

  The summer after she graduated, Stef, Josh, and a bunch of their friends went on a trip to Bull River to pitch tents a few miles before the falls. There’s a campground near there, but Stef was known to say campgrounds were worse than cheap motels. She was all about the authentic experience. I think of them hiking and fishing, Stef with her pocket plant guide, Josh hunting with his crossbow, a deer, giant Flintstone drumsticks. We had to lie to our dad about it. She said she was going for school, which didn’t make sense, since the trip was after graduation, but my dad still doesn’t know how school works here, and that’s a thing you can exploit if you have to.

  When we got the call about Stef, I was scooping rice for supper. Black things in the pot of white rice, little skinny brown bugs that found their way into the bag in the hall. My dad made beef and greens that night, lots of leftovers. Trina answered the phone, didn’t know who it was at first. Then she figured out. My dad told her to set the table. She didn’t even flinch.

  “When’d it happen?” she said, then listened, hand curved around the mouthpiece.

  What was going on? I filled the bowls little by little so I could take out all the bugs, and my dad brought a pot of soup to the table. Gene funky-danced into the room, past Trina, past me, but I wasn’t feeling it. He stopped at the table, picked a strip of beef from the plate, dangled it into his mouth, and sat down.

  “Lui la,” my dad said to Trina. Come on.

  I grabbed chopsticks, bone plates, and spoons, everything in multiples of five, and set the table. Trina still on the phone. My mom — fresh out of the shower, extra-long strands of hair poised to drop into her food — sat down, the grunt-squeak of her chair.

  My dad turned to Trina. “Kut cheng hee,” he said. His impatience. “Talk talk talk.”

  “Did you call the cops?” Trina said. “Is everyone else still at the river?”

  I finished scooping the last bowl — mine — and sat down, ears on her conversation. She wasn’t saying much. I took some beef, shovelled rice into my mouth and my mouth was instantly itchy. Allergies, I guess. “Wow. It’s good,” I said to my dad. “You want some water?” He didn’t answer, he was stewing, so I got up and came back with water, then went back to the kitchen for more.

  When Trina asked how far their campsite was from the falls, my dad started freaking out. It’s funny when you think of what he’s actually saying — I’ll stone your entire family to death, I’ll stab you — but in the moment, it was a pile of shit. Put us all on edge, and why?

  Trina covered the mouthpiece. “Can you shut the fuck up? They lost Stef in the river.”

  Gene stood up. “What do you mean?”

  “Josh McMurtry threw her in the
river.”

  “Is she —”

  “I don’t know. They called Search and Rescue.”

  I put the water down, and Gene and I went for the door. My mom stood, too, lost in her own little world. Who knows what she was thinking? My dad was confused. We had to explain a few times before he understood.

  “Where are you now?” Trina said into the phone. A pause. “Okay. We’ll meet you.” She hung up. “Come on, Ba,” she said. We all went downstairs. Gene insisted on driving, said my dad would go too slow. Gene’s brand new licence.

  At the bottom of the stairs, my dad said, “If Gene drive, I not go.”

  “You don’t want to go?” I said. I was worried about Gene. He was okay then — in retrospect it’d be weeks till his next bout — but you never knew. Plus, two hours each way is a lot of driving.

  My dad shook his head. His red face. He looked like how he does when he’s in insulin shock.

  “How about you, Mom?”

  She was quiet, looked down, held her thin right arm with her bony left hand, maybe thinking Why the fuck is my life so sad? as she followed us out.

  We burned down Highway 11, met the guy who’d called — Josh’s friend Mark Jorgenson — in Nordegg, and followed him to the river. A loud fip fip fip noise when we got out of the car. A helicopter. Sunshine. It was a nice place — trees, boulders, mountains, water, sky. We walked downstream till we saw guys in helmets and coveralls, zip lines. A cop there said there wasn’t much for us to do besides look out for her on shore. They gave us supplies, split us into groups of two — my mom and Trina, Gene and me — and told us to head downstream.

  Along the way there were guys in t-shirts and shorts. One of them was screaming Stef’s name, pacing up and down the bank. It was Josh. Gene ran at him, lunged, pinned him down, started punching. My mom stood off at the side as Trina and I and some of Josh’s friends jumped in, tried holding them apart. Josh had a few inches and thirty pounds on him, but wasn’t fighting back. A bunch of us were hanging off Gene, but he kept at it. Josh had it coming. I let go. Trina went between them. “Gene!” she said, her voice higher than mine. “That’s not gonna help us find her. Gene!” He shoved her out of the way, but Trina — who was fourteen then, and small and strong like my mom — is brave when she wants to be. All it took was one kick and Gene fell to the ground. “Fucking idiot,” she said. Then, to Josh: “You’re fucking dead if something happened to her.” She stormed off with my mom, who walked behind her, uneasy.

  I DOUBT ANYONE sober would have done what Josh did. Maybe they were horsing around. Was Stef kicking and screaming? Was she laughing? At what point did it stop being fun? She didn’t love Josh. He loved her. He threw her in. Stef once told me they used to have swimming contests to see who could go fastest or furthest, and usually she won. She could have been a Barracuda — her long hands and height. But the current still swept her up.

  From where Gene and I stood, I could hear the falls in the distance. Besides a couple of tubing and canoeing trips with Nancy, I’d never spent much time near the water. I couldn’t tell if it was going fast or slow and I didn’t know a thing about rescue protocol. Five minutes in, I saw something float by and was sure it was her. “Did you see that?” I asked Gene. He hadn’t. I called in on my walkie-talkie. “Hi,” I said into it. “I’m at Checkpoint D, and I just saw something go by.”

  The guy on the other end said they’d alert some of the guys downstream from us, and he’d tell me whether or not my lead checked out. It didn’t. Your eyes can play tricks on you in a situation like that. Before long, I started seeing more things that looked like her. Something would go by, I would stare at it, and it would end up being a piece of driftwood or an optical illusion in the water, a drawn-out current. Wishful thinking. One time I saw something sleek and long. It had to be her. No, it was brown and had a tail. I didn’t know what it was, maybe a beaver. I’d never seen a beaver before.

  There was a path behind us. I kept my eye on that, too. I wanted to know what the workers were up to and in what ways they were prepared to find my sister. Around ten minutes after I’d called in on my walkie-talkie, one of the hardhat guys came walking down the path soaking wet. He looked up, saw I was watching, didn’t change his expression at all. I thought of Stef in the water clutching a rock, guys in hardhats swimming out to her, tossing her a rope like a lasso.

  A couple of minutes later I saw something in the corner of my eye, someone familiar with long dark hair. It was only Trina, coming up to me to switch spots. The plan was to trade off every twenty minutes, one by one, to keep our eyes fresh. I looked for something in her face, some hidden happiness. I’ve got a secret for you, I wanted her to say, like maybe she’d found Stef and for some reason hadn’t said anything to the guys, like maybe Stef was sitting on a stump somewhere, wrapped in a blanket, shivering but fine. Trina put her arms around me. I wanted her to say something.

  She said, “Chris, what are we gonna do?”

  I didn’t know. I got on the path and walked downstream. The falls got louder and louder. Up close, they were amazing, white and hard like ice, a one hundred foot drop. My mom was there, a good four feet from the edge of the valley. It was just like her not to take a risk, even in the hopes of saving her own kid. But I understood her point.

  I went past her and peered down. She said, “Mo kei gum mai,” Don’t stand so close, but I couldn’t obey. I could see the river had been way bigger once, or that there had been a glacier. The bottom of the falls was surrounded by a deep round crevasse like a bowl. The sound of the water was clear, like thousands of crisp sheets of paper being crumpled all at once, over and over through an amp, or marbles clattering while someone made K and C noises – kuh kuh kuh kuh kuh. I thought the sound would make me crazy, but you can get used to anything, even danger.

  I imagined Stef being carried by the water. Would she be alive or dead? I’d heard of people going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Had they lived? I didn’t know.

  They wanted us to stay at the top of the falls. It wasn’t a bad place to be, but it seemed too far from the action, so when Gene showed up, we climbed down together. I’ve always been bad at going down hills, so I held his hand as we went. I thought he’d say something to make me feel bad — I was thirteen and old enough to take care of myself — but he didn’t. The mist was like backwards rain, upsplash from the falls, and it pelted us so hard I thought I’d lose my balance. It was all slope and no flat bank at the bottom. It was slippery. Gene with his arm out across the front of my shoulders so I wouldn’t fall in. It was kind of an asshole thing to do — patronizing, plus he wasn’t as strong as he used to be — but it made me feel safer.

  Through the mist, I saw something move that wasn’t water. I walked around a bit on the slope, changed my angle to get a better view. It took a minute to understand: rescue workers going in and out of the cave behind the falls. How many of them were there and what were they doing? I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around. “You shouldn’t be down here,” the worker said. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I wanted a better view.”

  Back at the top of the falls, Gene and I stared out at the water, not talking because the falls were loud. Sometimes it seemed like he wasn’t present, like the things he saw weren’t penetrating. This dull-eyed look on his face sometimes. We waited for news but nothing came, and soon went back upstream to switch places with our mom and Trina. They looked tired. We went back and forth seven or eight more times, we set up camping chairs at our lookout stations and ate our cookies and energy bars.

  Dusk fell and they still hadn’t found her.

  After two more changeovers, the workers started telling us we should leave. I asked one of them how much longer the search would go. He said you can’t really see much in the dark.

  “So you’re gonna leave?” I said.

  “A couple of us will stay behind. We might get lucky. Occasionally, it happens that a person goes missing for a while then turns up alive. But
at this point — I’m not gonna lie to you — at this point, it’s more likely retrieval.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we’re probably looking for a body. You can’t survive long in water this cold. A couple of hours if you’re lucky.”

  I didn’t move. Grey light on my shoes, on the rocks.

  “It’s dark,” he said. “There’s a better chance of you falling in, and it’d be hard for us to pull you out.”

  So we sat in the car. I shut my eyes thinking about the chances, but Trina said that anything was possible. Gene, in the driver’s seat, kept flipping the sun visor, kept putting his hands through his hair and gripping like he wanted to rip it out. Waterfall sound in the night, the clock said 9:28.

  “She’s a good swimmer,” Trina said from the front seat.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Could’ve made the Barracudas.”

  “Still can. Tryouts in September. Kirk’s sister said.” Only Stef was supposed to be moving to Edmonton in under two weeks.

  The workers set up a few lights outside. I saw silhouettes coming towards us, the nubby tops of hard hats, two people carrying toolboxes and backpacks with lengths of rope looped over their shoulders. They stopped at their truck, next to our car. I heard one of them laugh. He talked friendly to the other guy, said something about Cancun as he threw his rope in the back of the truck.

  “So Gene,” Trina said. “Tracy Lawson?” Kirk’s sister had a thing for Gene.

  Extended cab. Internal lights on. The Cancun guy was young and in his twenties, cute.

  “It’s pretty nice out here,” Trina said. “They picked a good spot.”