The Sweetest One

by Melanie Mah

  “Yeah,” I said. “I heard Stef talk about this place a few times. She said there’d been bear attacks.” I looked at my mom. She was looking out the window, hands in her lap. I put my hand on top of hers. Hot bones. “They said the chances weren’t great,” I said to Trina. “I don’t think they think she’s —”

  “She was in Outdoor Ed for four years. You know, they teach survival in that class — how to make a fire without matches, what plants to eat.” Trina popped her seat back. “You got enough room?” she asked.

  “Yah,” my mom said. “Yah, I do.”

  “Those energy bars were weird,” I said. I asked my mom if she ate one. She said she had a bite. I said, “Lei ho noi mo sic yeh.”

  “I don’t have mood to eat,” she said.

  Gene: “Do you think we’re gonna find anything out tonight?”

  Trina: “I don’t know. Kind of thought we’d stay the night.”

  “Maybe we should eat,” he said. “Anyone hungry?”

  I pictured Stef in the river in the dark. She was probably less than ten miles from where we were. I rolled the window down, and the water got louder. I rolled the window back up.

  Gene said, “Dad’s probably worried.”

  No one replied. The clock said 9:34. I looked out the window and locked the door.

  Trina said, “Do you remember the time Stef got lost?” That was more than ten years before, when Trina was three or four, but she asked like she remembered. Maybe she did.

  I’d heard the story before from Gene. When Stef was seven she started wandering off, going on adventures. First time it happened, my parents lost their shit. My dad frantically searched the store, house, and basement before driving off to search town. He was gone for hours and had forgotten to eat so his sugar level dropped. He almost collapsed in the Dairy Burger parking lot on his way to a bacon double cheese and cone. The whole time he was gone, my mom ran around the store, fretting and serving customers, worried and useless, not looking for Stef at all. A cop came and started questioning everyone, and it was in the middle of that that Stef walked in, wondering what the fuss was about.

  “I’ll never forget,” Gene said. “She was holding this bag of chips, only it wasn’t chips, it was ants.”

  They were those big ones. She kept them in a box with sand and sugar, but within a day or two, they all got free.

  “Yeah,” Trina said. “They were on me. You know how sometimes you feel something on you, and you look and there’s nothing there? This time there was. A big fucking ant. It freaked me out. I had to sleep on the couch.”

  My mom was looking down, but you could tell she was listening. Gene’s soft eyes in the rearview. He was smiling. “That was the first time,” he said. “She kept going after that, she’d come back and tell me about a bird she saw or a flat squirrel in the middle of the street. We got used to her leaving. She left during a —”

  There was tapping at the window. Josh McMurtry. The nerve of that guy, showing his face. He brought friends with him, held something in his hands. It was football-sized, shiny, multi-faceted like a metal gemstone.

  Gene cracked his window. “Yeah?”

  It was foil. “We thought you guys would be hungry,” Josh said. “We got some leftover meat and potatoes. Thought we’d bring some over.”

  Gene didn’t say anything. Three or four guys, two girls, all of them expecting some kind of response, but he just let them hang.

  “Gene,” Trina said.

  Josh: “Well, do you want it?”

  “Gene, I’m hungry,” Trina said.

  The closest town was Nordegg. We could’ve been there in forty-five minutes. But the restaurant would be closed, if there was a restaurant. Two hundred people.

  I rolled down my window. “I’ll take it,” I said, and Josh passed the package to me. It was cold. “Thanks,” I said.

  Trina called out the window. “Are you sure you guys have enough?”

  “Yeah,” one of them said. “It was a big doe. There’s lots.”

  That was a joke. We didn’t laugh. Trina asked if they were staying the night.

  “Yeah,” Josh said. “There might be something for us to do.”

  Gene thanked him for the food, then closed his window and said something under his breath I couldn’t hear. They were still standing there.

  “Thanks,” I said again out my window. “Really. Thanks.” I was mad at Josh, worse than mad, but hunger has a way of making you do things you wouldn’t normally do. The meat was tough but tasted okay. For a while, the only sounds, besides the river and the wind, were of chewing. I watched Trina in the dark. She’s a dainty eater, held her sandwich with her finger-tips. I gave my mom my potatoes because she doesn’t like meat. We borrowed one of the rescue workers’ phones and called my dad, told him we’d be staying the night. His voice was faraway and quiet. He never sounded that way in his whole life. What a night to be alone.

  We fell asleep. When I woke for good it was dawn. My mom, closed eyes, open mouth, leaned against the door. Trina’s head was back, her sleeping face exposed in the yellow morning light.

  I got out of the car. The door whined, and I closed it behind me as softly as I could and went down to the river. Gene was there. He looked out at the water, arms crossed, holding himself. It was cold. I walked towards him and he saw me.

  “They showed me this chart,” he said over the river. “It was a graph, the amount of time someone has been missing against the chance of recovery.”

  “What do you think we should do?” I said.

  “Eighteen hours she’s been gone. The river only goes one way. There’s nothing to do. She’s either gone or has reached land and is waiting to be found. I say leave it to the pros.”

  I didn’t want to do that, but it made sense. None of us had the survival or tracking skills needed to find someone in the woods. We’d probably just get lost ourselves.

  “If anyone could survive out here, it’s Stef,” Gene said, looking at my feet. “You, Reg, and her — you’re the smart ones in the family.” It was like he was thinking out loud. I wondered if he’d miss me if I were the one who was gone. He picked up a stone and threw it into the water. “The only thing I can fault her on is her friends.”

  What do you say in a situation like that? Sorry is weak, you need something at least four or five times stronger. I can’t believe it? No. That’s for when you’re buying gas and you see it’s ten cents more than you thought it’d be. I can’t believe it’s not butter. If only there was a word that could bring someone back, a word that could turn back time.

  “You never know,” I said.

  He looked at me, then at the water. We found a spot and sat. I looked at the sky and imagined flying away, then realized I didn’t want to do that, so then I thought about why the sky was blue. I’d read the explanation recently. The bushes moved. Stef? Hope rose in me, but it was only Trina and my mom. I looked at Gene and knew he had felt the exact same thing. When they got closer he told them what he told me, that we should go, but Trina refused. We went on a twisty little walk in the woods and ended up upstream fifty feet from where we started, trees on one side, water on the other. It was quiet, birds, early morning sun. We didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say.

  Sometime in the late morning, we decided to leave. Checked in with a couple of rescue guys still at the site, who said there was no news and that we could go. We were quiet the whole way home, gliding down the highway in my dad’s Oldsmobile, edging away from the mountains, the trees, the bighorn sheep and deer on the sides of roads that cut through rocks, the little waterfalls you pass on your way to wherever you’re going, the natural sounds and peace, the beavers, otters, weasels, whatever, the birds and the green lake, the river that had taken Stef, all the beautiful things that continue on when you leave, that don’t care if you’re gone, back to your town in the middle of nowhere of auto body shops and farmers and fast food joints and convenience stores and drugs, only it’s not nowhere because you stop there, you
live there, you belong there, so it’s somewhere. Close to the mountains, not close enough. I vowed to move to the mountains as soon as I could. After university, I guessed.

  It was a Monday, and we still had school. We got back in time for last period. Gene and Trina both went to John Palliser, so they could walk, but I was in Grade Eight, going to Ridgemore, so my dad gave me a ride. In the car, he was quiet, but the quiet felt different. He didn’t talk about Stef that day, and almost never did after that, even though she was his favourite, she and Trina. Who knows what was going on for him? It had also been more than a year since he last mentioned Reg around me. Over time, I came to realize that as soon as someone was gone, my dad stopped talking about them.

  When I showed up at school, everyone already knew. Someone’s dad or brother might have been a part of the rescue crew, or knew someone who was. What a thing, people knowing something like that without you ever having told them, without you even knowing how they know. In Social Studies, while Ms. Jesperson told us about Japan — the honesty and pride of people there, the low crime rate, kids killing themselves if they didn’t get into the right school — people whispered. “Two in a row,” I heard somebody say.

  No one talked to me on the bus ride home, and I walked home alone from my stop. Cars drove by oblivious, or else the drivers knew and were unsympathetic, or they were sympathetic, just not in the way I wanted them to be. How did I want them to be? No way, I just wanted my sister back. I went upstairs, tired. I wanted company. I used to lie on the couch after school, watching tv, Today’s Special or The Urban Peasant. I’d fall asleep and wake in time for dinner, but it struck me then as a lonely way to spend time.

  We’d all been through a lot and I thought we’d bonded, or had gotten through it because we were close-knit, but when I passed the boys’ room, I saw a new knob. A lock. I knocked. Through the door, Gene told me to go away.

  “Y’okay, Gene?”

  “Go away,” he said again.

  But I needed someone to be with. Trina was out somewhere. My dad hadn’t been at the river, and he wouldn’t know how to be. Neither would my mom. Stef would have been great. She was good company, often lent a new perspective on things and gave good advice. Sometimes we’d just sit and not talk at all, or just very little, about things unrelated to what was bothering me. Usually, though, I’d pour it all out. She’d comfort me, maybe take me out for ice cream.

  Music started playing behind Gene’s door. Industrial music: loud, fast guitars, shouting. Our rooms were right beside each other and when I went to bed, his music pounded through the wall. Gene didn’t come out for dinner that night, though one by one we all tried to convince him. My dad started yelling, banged on the door for five minutes. Gene opened up and growled back, “Leave me alone!” then shoved my dad, who fell into some chairs. Gene should have had some sympathy — my dad was sixty-seven, old, and there was all that stuff with Stef — but my dad should’ve had some, too. Years of dishing it out, I guess it was time for him to take it.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER stef went missing, we got a call. They found a body, and had to check dental records to figure out who it was.

  “Sorry we didn’t find her earlier,” the guy on the other side said.

  Of course, we sort of knew by then, but we had our hopes. That she was walking home from the falls and would come in the front door, the same way she did as a kid. Or that she’d gone rogue, was tired of taking care of us all and needed a break. That she was living off the land. But we knew, and I felt bad. Her whole life she spent taking care of us, she only needed one thing in return, and we couldn’t give it.

  Still, I wonder how she felt about dying. I don’t mean, Did she want to die? Of course she didn’t. But I wonder if she feared it, if she was okay with it. Some people aren’t afraid. They say things like, Well, if it’s my time, I guess I have no choice, or I’ve lived a full life. If I had to go, at least I have no regrets. I could see Stef being that way. At least, I hope she was.

  15

  *

  MONDAY MORNING, I finish my contest essay and drop it off with Mac before heading to Math. In the end, I wrote a lot about Trina. I hadn’t actually used her name, I made up a character, then imagined her in a variety of travel destinations. New York, China, a tropical beach, the North. A cool first-person sort of thing. I wrote that travel changes your perspective on things, but perspective is all it changes. You’re still the same person inside, and you’d be a fool to think you can go somewhere new and try to be someone else. It’ll always come out, who you really are. Mostly I sugar-coated my opinion on things. I’m not dumb. I want to win, and winning essays go in the travel section of the newspaper, which exists to sell fantasies and plane tickets and resort and tour packages. You have to make travel sound appealing. The sky is the limit.

  My real feelings: travel, leaving, is a kind of betrayal. What about the people you leave behind? You go off and they miss you, or you go and they’re left to lead their boring lives and guess at what things you’re experiencing that they cannot, and worry about how you’re going to be crushed by an elephant or muskox, or how you’re going to go off and never come back or that you’ll replace the people who love you with others you could grow to love.

  After class, Aabidah Meer comes prancing up asking about Conrad. Who gives a shit? I almost say, but instead, I walk away.

  “Yeah, so,” she says, following me, “I think he likes me?”

  We’re not friends. I’m not here. “Yeah, maybe,” I say to get her off my back.

  Conrad calls later that day and knows right away that something’s wrong. When I don’t want to talk about it, he starts guessing at what it is. He asks how school is, if my parents are okay. We agree that narwhals are a mindfuck. The Winter Formal is soon: I don’t have a date?

  “We could go,” he says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Come on,” he says. “You know you want me.”

  “Okay. You know what? Stop.”

  “I was only kidding,” he says.

  “Saying the same bullshit thing over and over will not make it true.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “I got another letter. From Trina.”

  “Why are you mad?”

  “I have to go. I can’t keep trying to talk to someone who can’t relate.”

  “No offence, but I don’t think anyone can.”

  He’s right. She’s the only one alive who’d know how it feels. Not even her — she wasn’t betrayed.

  Dusty stucco ceiling, bare bulb, mint green wall with a hole covered over with duct tape. Henry Rollins, Tool, Bruce Lee posters. Gene’s clothes in the closet, Reg’s shirts in the dresser.

  “She’s with someone. This girl.”

  “What, travelling with her?”

  “Yes. They’re together. Travelling.”

  “Huh.”

  “Everything we’ve been through, and she abandons me to go traipsing around someplace I’ve always wanted to go to with some random girl. She chose her. After all we’ve been through.”

  Trina and Billy looking up at Northern Lights that take up half the sky. Good colours: purple, blue. That spooky, lonely glow. I’ve never seen ones like that in my life.

  “Yeah, but, like,” he says, then pauses, “you know you can’t take it personally, right?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not like she’s thinking What is the way I can hurt Chrysler the most? before she acts, is it?”

  Trina having an adventure, walking out onto ice with Billy in the half-dark like it’s part of a montage scene in a romantic comedy. Trina driving up to a snow-covered lodge, the Northern Lights in the back. She gets out of the car. No one else in sight. No cars, no sounds of anyone. Lights are off in the lodge. She takes a cigarette and her little yellow lighter from her pack of DuMaurier, makes a little snowdrop of fire, melts the end of the filter, then lights the business end. She’s been jonesing for a smoke, and there’s no better feeling than slakin
g addiction. The first drag is something magic, a yes yes yes kind of moment, she starts to twirl the way she does sometimes when she’s really enjoying something. She gets to a hundred and eighty degrees when she sees someone in her peripheral. She turns all the way. Billy! she says. God, you’re a fucking ghost or something, sneaking up on me. Or a ninja. You’re a ninja.

  Yeah, sorry, Billy says, and the knife comes out of nowhere.

  “Hello?” Conrad says.

  Trina on the ground, motionless. Blood leaking onto snow. Billy gets in on the driver’s side, almost hits Trina’s body as she backs out of the parking spot.

  “Hello?” he says again.

  “It doesn’t make sense. It’s dangerous. She shouldn’t have left.”

  “What?”

  “She had everything here,” I say. “My parents, money, clothes, me, good food. I understood her. Do you think Billy understands?”

  “Okay, one, you can’t fulfill all of a person’s needs and, two, you can’t compete with the world. We live in Buttfuck, Alberta. The smallest towns ever. There are six billion people out there, two hundred countries. Can you see why she’d wanna take a look?”

  “I don’t wanna leave. My parents are here. They’re all I have.”

  “Shouldn’t you try to have the world?”

  “Have it?”

  “I mean see it, experience it.”

  My eyes close.

  His voice in my ear: “I wanna see you.”

  What am I feeling? What do I say? What? “That girl you saw yesterday? Aabidah Meer? She thinks you’re cute.” Relief and pain when I say it.

  “You’re gonna tell me that?” he says. “Seriously? You’re gonna tell me that some random girl likes me? You? Are you stupid? I like you.”

  “I’m gonna go now,” I say.

  “Because I like you?”

  “I’m just really confused. And overwhelmed. Also, I’m not stupid.”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “I’m gonna go now. Sorry.” I hang up, close my eyes, reach under the pillow. The letter. No energy or desire to read, so I just look at it. The date. Her writing — perky, appealing, familiar. But no return address. The phone rings. It rings again, keeps ringing, both in the bedroom and in the hall. It’ll wake my parents. I put the letter away, then disconnect the phones.