by D. W. Wilson
I’m not sure I can distract her that long.
He peered at me past the bulges where his eyebrows ought to have been, and I hopped down from the truck and ran my thumb along that sketch of my mother and thought about what kind of things I could possibly say.
The Verge smelled like a hockey arena—like ice skates and antiseptic and men breathing rust out their mouths. The scent of grilled eggs and grease wafted from the kitchen where a pair of boys, a fifth Archer’s age, stacked dishes and pushed each other with great friendly heaves. The place looked how a diner ought to—maroon booths and bubbly cushions and linoleum tiles and tables like stethoscopes turned upside-down. It was like I’d walked into a Tom Waits song.
Not many people out and about right now, a woman said.
Turning, I looked upon my mother—name tag as confirmation—dressed how I’d expected a waitress in a place like that to dress: a whitish apron with finger smears not quite bleached out; a maroon top, to match the decor; short brown hair highlighted with dishwater blond. She had wrinkles enough to show her age. Beside her nose: a small mole, and even in that first moment she reached up to scratch it—a habit, maybe. One eye focused a degree off-centre and she seemed in constant struggle with it. She leaned her head sideways and reached for a notebook in the pouch of her apron and I just fumbled the picture in my hands and looked at it and away from it and crumpled it more than I’d wished.
You okay, kid?
I wanted to say, I’m fine, thanks, or, Much better now, thanks, but something about her rooted me in place. Here was my mother. She drew her brow together in a look of lunatic amazement, one eyebrow cocking up—how often did she deal with guys either doped up or liquored to speechlessness?—so she resembled Archer in about every way a daughter can. I felt myself swallow. Those moments, that sensation of seeing my biological origin, of seeing where I began—I don’t even know why it stunned me as desperately as it did. It’s not as if I had lived my life in resentment or longing, not like I counted this as a major destination in my journey to find my dad. But it felt like all of a sudden looking in a mirror, seeing yourself for the first time, or from a new angle, a different light, in a different hat, with mustard on your chin. It felt like being told to stop staring.
Outside, the world burned, and beyond that, almost back in time, men I hardly knew wrestled with demons that never let them sleep.
I’m here to see Miss West, I managed.
She ran her tongue along her teeth, pinched it between her canines. Something like a smile?
Miss West, she said, and crossed her arms. You’re looking for Miss West.
I nodded.
And does Miss West have a first name?
Linnea.
I think you may have been misled, kid, she said. There’s no Linnea West here.
I nodded.
But I’m going to bet you’re looking for me.
Yes, I said. Probably so.
And that makes you my son.
I nodded again, hated myself for it—for just doing my impression of a bobble-head. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t know where to look or stand or if I should show her the sketch that I was playing with like a highschool love letter.
You want something to eat? I can get one of my boys to make you something.
Boys?
Employees, she said. No long-lost half-brothers for you.
You don’t have to apologize, I said, which is pretty much the stupidest thing.
Jack and I never married.
I know so little, I said.
My dad send you here?
Archer—
Yeah, my dad.
Archer’s outside with my dog. He’s hurt.
My dad’s hurt?
No, my dog is.
Her face twisted up—an expression that meant stupid boy.
There’s no vet, she said, and her face softened, became motherly, maybe. Left town with most of them when the evac was called. But my husband might be able to help, if he’s not busy getting ready.
Ready for what?
She leaned sideways on a maroon booth, hip against plastic backing, and jerked her chin out the window, at the glow. You pick a helluva time to show up, she said.
Gramps had a heart attack.
Ah, shit.
He’s okay.
I always had a soft spot for Cecil.
I’ll let him know.
Too bad he’s not here. Where’s my dad, anyway?
Scared.
She smiled toward her feet, and I saw that her left canine tooth—the one she didn’t pinch her tongue against—was chipped and flat. She looked like a woman who smiled often. There’s hope in that, in knowing your mother is not too burdened by life, but I can’t possibly explain it. Maybe it speaks toward your own future, your own prospects. It’s nice to know you’re not biologically destined to unhappiness.
Go bring him inside, she said. And when Colton gets back—my husband—I’ll tell him that you’re here, and to see if he can help your dog.
She turned to the kitchen, a set of double-hinged doors like you’d find at the front of a saloon. I couldn’t summon the nerve to call out Mom.
Do you know where Jack is? I said, and she stopped cold.
Cecil finally calling him back, eh?
He thinks he’s dying.
She wandered to the window that granted a view of the kitchen, crossed her arms. I imagined she was the kind of woman who could get people to follow orders. A second later, she poured herself a coffee from a stained carafe. It banged around on its rim, that sound like a hollow clock. It’s pleasing to know that places like the Verge exist, that, somewhere, life simply goes on.
I have a soft spot for your grandad, she said to the window. I’m just not sure he deserves to see Jack again.
Shouldn’t that be Jack’s choice?
All Jack ever wanted was to be called home, she said, and lifted the coffee to her lips and swallowed a loud mouthful. Did Cecil tell you what he was gonna say?
No.
Ever seen Cecil apologize?
I thought about that. Gramps knows how to make amends, I said.
She watched me over the edge of her mug. Maybe he’s changed, she said.
Gramps told me, about Archer coming along—he said it’d make them even. What’s that mean?
I don’t know.
Do you really not know, or do you just not want to tell me?
I’m sorry, I don’t know.
Maybe we all skirt secrets, but right then I could feel the biggest one pressing on me like a dumbbell: that problem of Gramps and Archer, and Nora, and whoever the hell else. Jack, my mom—Archer had only begun filling me in, and there were things he wouldn’t tell. There had to be. Everybody dangled secrets over my head as if expecting me to leap at them, or to get tired of leaping at them, to just sit and pant and idly wonder. Even Darby, goalkeeping for her handball team—another secret, another loose thread. At the end, she tricked me into believing that by some magic of pheromones and good luck we’d rekindled what was lost from our old, warm days. And what if Gramps just wanted to dish out one last blindsider? I wasn’t supposed to be skulking across the Kootenays in a breakneck search and rescue. I had a thesis to complete. I had a woman to forget.
You think I’ll be bringing Jack to Gramps just to have him bitched at? I said.
She clunked the mug down on the counter. Behind her, one of the kitchen boys flew by the window brandishing what looked like an inflatable lizard. I don’t know, kid, she said. But it’s probably something you should be prepared for.
ARCHER HAD MOVED to the driver seat. He was scratching Puck under the jowls. I leaned on the Ranger’s hood.
I’m ready, he said.
Do you think this is gonna end happy?
Things look grim, I take it.
The whole thing. Will Gramps forgive Jack?
You mean, did you drive me out here for nothing?
Puck smacked his gums, flung his tongue around t
rying to catch Archer’s hand. I’ve killed my own dog, Archer, I wanted to say. Instead: That, yes.
It ain’t nothing, kid, Archer said, and flicked gobs of dog spit off his fingers. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.
That’s a stupid cliché, and I don’t believe it.
It is what it is.
Another stupid cliché—maybe he’d earned the right to them. I fetched his wheelchair and he lowered himself in without my help. Fierce independence, as far as possible without surrender. He was such a classic old guy, such an army vet, so much like Gramps that for a moment I saw the whole trajectory of my mad search and rescue like a ricochet between those two men: like Gramps, Archer needed me to reconcile him with his daughter, except he didn’t know how to ask; like Archer, Gramps was saddled with a guilt I couldn’t comprehend, and I feared that by the end of it, through all the smokescreen and posturing, it’d leave him wheelchair-bound and terminally ill and more alone than he’d ever known—a man with nothing left to do but die. The saddest truth of all is that we either lose the ones we love, or they lose us.
Archer stretched his arms over his head and winced like before, like he’d forgotten that his gears hadn’t been oiled.
Good luck in there, I said.
You’re not coming?
This is your thing.
He tapped his wrists on the arms of the chair.
Two against one, right? Strength in numbers?
I think you’re better off mano-a-mano.
I’m scared shitless.
That’s the point.
What the hell do you mean by that?
You need to do the talking yourself, I said.
Don’t give me a fucking lecture.
I winked. Trust me on this one.
He cupped his hands over his face, pulled the droopy skin low under his eyes.
You can’t just send me in blind, he said, and I tilted my head, cat-like, with pleasure. Come on, kid, forewarned is forearmed.
Fuck you, Archer.
He craned back in his chair—an act of bewilderment. I watched him mesh his fingers together at his solar plexus, elbows loose at his sides like wings. He wasn’t a stupid man—I’m sure the irony wasn’t wasted on him.
Then Archer nodded and pressed his lips to a pucker to mask a stupid grin. Typical army guy. Maybe I had him pegged, after all. He vanished inside the Verge and I stood beside the open driver door and kneaded my fingers in the doughy skin at the base of Puck’s neck. He drooled. He gurgled, nearly purred. As a pup, he used to kick nightly, gripped by dream chase, great hunts, moonlight pursuits of beasts far grander than he. But he’d grown out of that. For years he’d lain still on his dog bed—an old chair Gramps relinquished after Puck tore off one of the arms.
Puck lapsed into a slumber fuelled by Gramps’ beer—all I could hope for given the circumstances, sleep being some intermediary between pain and death. I hoped the trade-off was worth it: dog for son. They had a history, Gramps and the mutt, but I only knew snippets of it. Some old painter named Sal had gifted Gramps with a mastiff puppy, decades before I was born, in payment for Gramps helping him build a house. That dog wasn’t Puck, but it’d ignited Gramps’ love for mastiffs. What’s the point of having a small dog, he always said. He liked a beast with a certain weight to it, that could achieve a certain momentum. You can’t wrestle a dachshund.
I could see Archer and my mom squirm through those first moments of reunion. His lips moved like a chastened man’s and in his lap his hands picked themselves raw. She towered above him. She cut an imposing figure. Around her swirled her father’s fate and she crossed her arms in a way that said she knew it. The neon Open sign above the Verge’s front doors went dim but its contours stayed momentarily radiant in my vision. Archer rubbed his palms together in front of him. My mom nodded, once. Perhaps the corner of her mouth twitched to a lopsided smile. I couldn’t fathom the courage that’d take from both of them: Archer to go prostrate and her to forgive—it is so much easier to stay angry and indignant. My mom discarded her apron. Archer laid his hands on his knees, knuckles down. They turned toward one of the booths and as they did Archer caught me watching, and even through the window I could see the wateriness of his eyes, the whites awash with the heady shades of plum.
A boy appeared before them, ferrying coffees. Archer touched the mug’s handle, looked at his daughter, and in that span of seconds his posture grew straighter and his shoulders drew upright, as if all his tension-wound muscles had, after so many beleaguered years, released—as if a great burden had passed to someone else. I saw him smile. Coffee had long been banned to him too, I bet, so his grin was at least part mischief. Nora would’ve tsked at me for letting it happen. I bet Nora would’ve liked to see him as I saw him then.
Against my better judgment I left Puck and wandered a short distance down the road. Owenswood was only a few hauntings short of ghost town, and as I sloped away from the Verge I peered into the gaps between buildings and expected to see tumbleweeds barrel-roll alley to alley. It felt like the set of a spaghetti western, that resinous curl of splintered wood and self-smelted shot. Even the night seemed permeated by it. Uphill, the Verge squatted like a bunker, encased in its own orange glow. Figures darted here and there past windows, and I imagined the exchange between Archer and my mom—all that emotion. Christ, how do you overcome three decades of missing someone? How do you even get past hello? Archer would eventually try to extract himself to a booth and fail, and she’d see right through him—old, waxing alpha male. Their first contact, maybe: her hand on his bannister of a forearm, his shoulder against the swish of her hips. Who knows.
I put my weight on the shaft of a nearby lamppost and felt my entire body shudder. Fatigue, overspent muscles, Gramps’ salvation in my white knuckles on that blasted Ranger’s steering wheel—perhaps it all caught up with me. The ochre streetlight lit an orb around me and I studied my own shadow on the sidewalk. Up the street, the Verge could’ve been a church, the only object in sight not washed to some shade of brown. Haloed, almost. It felt good to have distance from it all: from Archer, my mom, even from Puck, bless him. It felt good to just slump there and wallow and let the tiredness wash on over me.
I CAME TO on the warm ground with my back to the lamppost. Someone stood above me, downlit so I couldn’t see the face, and this person had tapped me awake: short, with hair at the shoulders. A woman, with her elbows loose and sideways and her hands in the gut pocket of her coat, the lower hem of an apron at her thighs. My mom, of course. Something metal in her ear caught a band of light, glinted like a ring.
You caused me a small ruckus, she cooed. Set Archer all a-tither.
I scrubbed my knuckles in my eyes, tried to blink away that gooey feeling of sleep. My lips had gone parched and my hands felt papery, as if the moisture had been sponged out of me.
How long was I asleep?
Her head tilted sideways and she didn’t remove her hands from the coat. It was by now dark enough for the streets to be colourless and washed out. My mom turned at the hip and squinted along the road downhill; she stayed like that for a good few seconds. An hour, maybe? she said. Long enough for me to take notice. Back in my life not an hour and you already cause me shit.
My bad, I said.
Yeah, I’m not pissed off. Archer’d have left you out here for the wolves, though.
A gentleman, your old man.
He likes to think so.
She smiled down at me then—a twitch of the cheek, her lips drawing up. Her hair shone dark as lamp oil and the orange streetlight hid all traces of grey. I searched for a similarity between us, one biological clue or another: mannerisms, maybe, or a way of looking at the world.
You don’t worry about me, she said. You just keep sitting there. Take your time.
Sorry, I said, dusting off. Didn’t realize.
Of course not. It’s just an evening stroll for me.
With her teeth, my mom torqued off a scrap of hangnail. Sorry, kid, she said w
ith her mouth mostly closed. I default to sarcasm.
In the distance, the mountains flashed with ochre, but no thunder pounded down from them; that phenomenon, I guess, only Archer and I would share. My mom plucked the chunk of nail from her tongue and flicked it aside. She jerked her chin toward the Verge and set off. I followed.
The whole town’s been evacuated, she said between breaths. Colton’s here on evac duty. We’re running a skeleton crew from the diner.
You said Colton was a park ranger?
I never said that.
So he’s RCMP?
She reined up. She didn’t look at me. Her gaze swung in a slow arc around the darkness, as if she expected an ambush. Uphill, the Verge had darkened, castle-like, and nobody milled around inside.
I think he prefers last man standing, she said after a time, with an emphasis at the end, like exasperation but more than that—like the way you’d say enough when you say, I’ve had enough.
We went the last few hundred metres in silence. I’d heard about those leftover squads of guys who, during an evacuation, defend people’s homes from criminals. The tales were all severed radio contact and last-minute dashes down a highway with the raging blaze mere seconds behind. When we reached the Verge’s parking lot, I caught the low growl of a diesel engine, and my mom turned to face the invisible grumble.
She nodded at the darkness. The engine got louder. It took me a moment to realize that whoever was driving was driving without lights.
That’s Colton, she hollered, and when she spoke her cheek twitched up, under her eye.
Everything okay? I said.
She took the time to look at me. I don’t know if it meant anything.
I won’t lie to you, kid, she said, but never finished, because Colton’s hazards came on—so as not to blind us, I suspect—and my mom stepped toward them even as the vehicle took shape in the dark. A jeep, with an engine that chortled the deep, hacking coughs of an aged bully. It ground to a halt beside Gramps’ Ranger, and the headlights very briefly illuminated me and Owenswood behind me—a shantytown of rough brickwork and houses built squat as a child’s cushion fort.
Shit, my mom said, and bolted for the jeep.