They stop at the water, panting like dogs. The run has turned Shane’s stomach inside out and left his chest burning. His dry tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and his heart shakes everything in his body at once. Something dark in him is waking up, like a shapeless toad dragging itself out of the stiff mud in spring.
David coughs. “How much did you get?”
Shane waves a single twenty-dollar bill in the air and lets out a jittery laugh that dies on the air. Shane’s body clenches, sick. Twenty dollars. That’s a cheese pizza. That’s a two-pack of underwear at the mall in Dryden. Fuck. Is that what all of it was for? Tara, Destiny, Jackie, David—all gone one way or another. Is that how it ends? He should have ignored Roberta. He should have ignored his stupid dreams and kept himself small. Because if you shoot for the stars and don’t make it, no one will forgive you. You can do anything. What bullshit.
“Oh god.” Shane looks up at David. “I fucked up. I’m poison. I’m fucking poisonous to everyone.” Shane fights back a sob that comes from his guts. David reaches out for his shoulder, but it’s tentative.
“Don’t touch me!” Shane jerks away, searching David’s face for some sign of betrayal. After all, this is what David must have wanted all along. He never wanted Shane to leave, and now he’s trapped. No school, no Toronto, no girlfriend, no need to come out. He’s got them frozen in rez-time forever.
“I know you’re happy,” Shane says. “You win—nothing fucking changes!” Shane shoves David, sending him tumbling back onto the ground.
David’s eyes are wide “I’m not happy! How could I be happy!?”
Shane doubles over. The soil heaves and swells beneath his feet, like water. His guts are coils of muscle pushing for his throat. The pressure of Debbie’s gun against his thigh is the only thing clear and real. Everything else spins out into the blur of space. The protective skin that keeps him from crossing into the spirit world has never been thinner. Like a balloon under a faucet, it grows and stretches tight with the weight of both worlds pressing from both sides, threatening to split open. He wishes it would. It would be easier there. It has to be. Shane pounds the side of his head with his fist. There’s a flash of pain and then a rush of relief moves through him. Relief. Shane pulls his fist back and cracks his head again, clearing the darkness with blasts of pain until all that’s left is dizzy white fire. No thoughts. No feelings. Free.
“Shane!” David takes a step forward, and then stops. He’s afraid. Shane slams his fist against his own head again and again. Everything is a lie. They’re all liars. They told him he was smart. They told him he was special, that he was going to do great things. He let them down. He’s not good enough. He’ll never be good enough … Shane keeps punching. David screams at him to stop, but he can’t. The pain is shaking something loose. His hand tightens around the gun.
David reaches out to him but Shane lurches away from David and charges into the lake, sending up a spray of water like fireworks all around him. The lake wraps itself around his thighs. His waterlogged pants cling to his body like a drowning child. David charges after him.
“Go away!” Shane calls.
David keeps on coming. Shane pushes into deeper water, the gun raised above his head. He stops and puts the gun to his temple. He feels a lurch and suddenly everything disappears but the black water and the pressure of David’s hands holding him under. His arms push back at David, flailing for life, but the truest part of him is already somewhere far away. Drifting.
There is no sound here. Nothing but emptiness, and then a flash of Destiny’s face, her laugh. And then his mother is holding him with hands that smell like tomato vines. And David. His pulse, his teeth, his heartbeat. And then all of it disappears. The skin ruptures. The barrier to the spirit world opens wide and … no one is there. No Destiny, no Tara, no smiling father to meet him. But he’s not alone either.
His body feels strange, like he’s being brushed with feathers. He is dissolving. Cell by cell. Not vanishing, but melting like the creek’s crust of ice in spring. Not carried away by the current, but carried deeper into the world, filling the spaces between the molecules of the earth, the air, and the water, with life. His own life. It’s like seeing the whole world and being inside the skin of every creature at once. Like hearing all the songs and dancing all the dances, living the lives of every person, every rock, every tree at the same time. But as more of him is drawn into that stream, as he begins to feel himself joining the pulse of his ancestors—the secret beat underneath them all—Shane pulls back. One day he will have to walk this path; that much is guaranteed to everyone who lives and breathes. But if he takes this path now, his pain won’t die with him. It will pass to the ones he loves the most. Just as Destiny’s pain did when she went to the spirit world, Shane’s pain will become his mother’s pain. But it won’t end with her; it will fall over the community like ashes from a volcano, blanketing everything, becoming part of everyone from the oldest among them to the ones just born.
He wishes he could walk through the world so lightly that he’ll never make a mark, never hurt anyone, or take up space. But it’s impossible. He changed the world the moment he took his first breath and his mother kissed the top of his head. Being alive changes things. It just does. He can choose to do good or bad, but he can’t do nothing. Everything he says and does matters. Living is a choice. Dying is a choice too, but dying is a choice that affects more than just himself. It’s a choice to hurt the ones he loves. Seems like the only way out is to live, no matter how much it hurts. And the only way to live is to discover what he’s capable of, to find a way to be of use. Because this is the only story of himself that anyone will ever know—his only life—and there’s too much left untold. The ancestors will be waiting when his time comes.
With a rush of air in Shane’s lungs, the world comes back. The lake. The moon. The rice. The stars. Shane is cold and shaking, coughing up water. David is already trudging back to shore. Shane watches the gentle lurch of David’s back, the angle of his lowered head rounding his shoulders forward, his neck parallel with the ground. Shane has never loved him more. David finds a spot close to shore and lowers himself to the sand. He wraps his arms tightly around his legs and presses his forehead to his knees. The lights of the powwow grounds glow behind him.
Shane walks to the shoreline, feeling the darkness drain out of him and into the water of the lake. The gun is somewhere deep, covered with sand, already beginning to rust. Shane collapses on the shore beside David and rests his head on his shoulder. David doesn’t move. His body feels like stone.
“I’m sorry,” Shane says. He knows it’s not enough but it’s all he can offer.
David keeps his eyes out on the lake, but reaches out for Shane’s hand. Shane takes it.
“Never again,” Shane says.
David squeezes Shane’s hand and curls into his lap. The moon is gone now. The night has nearly exhausted herself. A haze of lavender is beginning to glow behind the trees at the east end of the lake. Another day is coming.
chapter twenty-seven
Shane doesn’t remember taking off his clothes or crawling under the covers with David, but when he opens his eyes again, David is asleep with his face pushed against Shane’s shoulder. The house is quiet except for their breathing. Shane turns to check the time. The digital clock blinks from 3:59 to 4:00 p.m. Once when she was making pie, Jackie told him that 4:00 was the perfect time of day. It’s late enough that most of the work is done and there is still time yet for an evening of laughter. She called it the balancing time, poised at the center of the medicine wheel, a moment suspended in perfect balance. Four directions. Four seasons. Four o’clock. When she told him about the balancing time, it made Shane sad to think that his mother only ever got one moment to feel good each day. As though reading his mind, Jackie had told Shane there would be periods when the balancing time could be flattened and rolled out like dough: that our lives, like o
ur days, revolve in cycles, and that there would be days—even whole years of his life—when he would feel like he was living under the blanket of the balancing time. Like every moment was as perfect as four o’clock. Shane laughed and told her she was too young and good-looking to be talking like an elder.
My balancing time started after you were about one.
Not when I was born?
Jackie laughed. No, that first year was nuts. I never slept. Shane smiled and watched her pour the bowl of bouncing blueberries into the pie shell. Their juice splattered red flecks along the raw edges of the crust. Jackie smoothed the berries over with her fingers and tucked them in like sleeping babies under the pale skin of dough. She stepped back to examine her work, then said, The balancing time ended the day your dad’s boat went down.
He hadn’t asked. He didn’t want to know. You might have another time like that. Maybe it’s starting right now.
Jackie had pulled the oven door open and set the pie inside. It might. But I’m not holding my breath.
That was years ago. Destiny was alive and everything felt possible. Maybe that day was the beginning of another balancing time. He never asked about it again, although he did tease her about it whenever he noticed that it was four o’clock. Balancing time, Mom! Better get your giggles in!
A pot clangs in the kitchen. David shifts under the covers next to Shane, pulled up toward the surface of his dreams by the sound. After a moment, he lets out a sigh and sinks back down. Shane steps out of bed and puts his ear to the door. He can hear something sizzling in a pan. The house had been empty when he and David arrived home, but his mom and Evie must have come back while they slept.
“How long are we gonna let them stay in there?” he hears Evie ask.
“They need to rest,” Jackie says.
“Are they in the same bed?”
Jackie shushes Evie. Shane imagines his mom puttering around the kitchen like she used to.
“They’re too young. They don’t know what they’re doing,” Evie mutters.
“They’re home. That’s all that matters.”
Shane waits with his ear pressed to the hollow door for another minute, but they’re too busy cooking to say anything else.
He turns away from the door and takes in his bedroom, as if seeing it for the first time. The beige walls are plastered with images of fancy cars and maps of Toronto, London, and New York. The space has never felt smaller than it does right now, with maps of the world’s great cities closing in on him as the smells of coffee and bacon curl toward him like a memory of better times. It makes him want to puke. All that time spent dreaming and hoping and wanting something that there was no chance he would ever have. And what was it that he even wanted? Money? A life like the ones he’s seen on TV? To feel smart and accepted by people like Roberta, who urged him on with the weight of their own lost hopes? He was shooting for something that no one could define in concrete terms, except to say, NOT THIS. This life isn’t good enough. Life on the reserve isn’t good enough. The place where I’m from isn’t good enough. My family isn’t good enough. My teachings aren’t good enough. I’m not good enough. But if I go to school and learn something “useful” maybe one day I might be good enough, and then I can show the other Indians how to be good enough too.
Shane yanks at a corner of the map of Brasilia, then rips the paper in two. The bird-shaped city drops to the carpet. It feels good. He snatches the other large maps from the wall. They crack like thunder, knocking smaller transit maps and pictures down with them. The last to fall is the homemade collage of watches, houses, and luxury cars that Roberta had him put together for his “wealth wall” back when she was getting kids to visualize the physical things that they wanted from life.
David opens his eyes and turns toward the noise of falling paper like he’s under attack. “What time is it?” David asks.
“Like, four o’clock.”
David rolls over and rubs his eyes. “Looks like you’re giving up.”
“Doesn’t matter now, does it?” Shane flops down on the bed beside David. “I’m too fucked-up to leave, even if I wanted to.”
“You don’t want to go?”
David’s question settles in the space between them. David probably wants him to say he doesn’t want to leave, but the truth is he doesn’t know what he wants. He wants to rest. He wants to breathe. He wants to take his time. The sound of Jackie and Evie laughing buzzes through the door.
“Is that my nookomis?”
Shane nods.
“I better go.”
David throws on a shirt and lifts up the window sash to leave.
“She knows you’re in here.”
David glances out the window, eager to go. “Just tell her she’s hearing things. Nothing has to change.”
“Nothing has to change?”
“I still love you,” he says. But when he says it, the words sound more like, Can I go now? Or, Please don’t be mad at me.
Shane holds David’s eyes, making sure that he’s listening. “I love you too. But if you go out that way like you’re ashamed or something, you can’t come back.” David glances at the door to the hall then back at Shane, like he’s trying to figure out whether Shane means it.
Shane leans forward and picks a rumpled T-shirt from the floor. He wants to hug David and tell him everything he wants to hear, but if he starts lying now it’ll be the end of them. Shane shakes out the shirt and slowly pulls it over his head. He pricks his ears and angles his body toward David, trying to make it easier for David to say, No—stop, of course I’ll come out with you. David stays frozen with his eyes fixed on the door, listening to the sounds from the kitchen: a spoon on the rim of a bowl, the clatter of plates. Evie’s low laughter.
When Shane is fully dressed, he turns to David and reaches out his hand. All he has to do is take it. David teeters like he’s considering a dive from a cliff. In or out. Now or never. Shane steps forward with his hand outstretched. After what feels like the longest moment of his life, David reaches out and takes it.
*
When they step out of the bedroom, the kitchen looks better than it has in a long time. It still needs work, but the piles of garbage and the stacks of crusty dishes are gone. Evie is mixing up a bowl of bannock with blueberries. Jackie leans against the counter with a cup of coffee. It feels too good to be true.
“What are you doing?” Shane asks.
“What’s it look like?” Jackie says. “You boys go sit down.” Evie frowns and shakes her head a little. She’s noticed Shane’s and David’s fingers twined together. Bad eyes or not—she doesn’t miss much. Jackie shoots Evie a warning look, but neither woman says anything.
Shane takes David to the table, unsure whether to be relieved that neither his mother nor Evie seems to be in the mood for invasive questions, or pissed off that they are ignoring what feels like an important moment. It took guts to come out here together. Couldn’t they at least acknowledge it? If his mom and Evie thought they could pretend that nothing happened …
“You were gone when we came home. Where did you go?” Shane asks.
“I was at Evie’s. Where were you?”
“Out.”
If she’s not going to say more, neither is he. Evie’s whisk sings against the inside of the bowl, soaring over the wet plop of beaten eggs.
“How do you want your eggs?” Jackie asks.
Shane stares out the window. David jumps in. “Scrambled, please.”
Jackie waits for Shane’s response. Shane looks at her blankly, not letting it go. “You pay the store yet? Janice isn’t gonna wait past today.”
Jackie shakes her head. “I’m not paying her.”
Shane’s head snaps up. “What does that mean?” He watches her like a dog that’s been offered a bit of meat, hungry but wary.
“I’m gonna move,” she says. “This
house is way past repair, even with the money I planned to spend.”
“Okay but …”
“Evie and I worked it out so that I could live with her and David while you’re at school.”
“So my inheritance money is still there?”
Jackie tosses a debit card on the table. “You can see for yourself next time we go into town.”
Shane picks up the card and runs a finger over the raised letters of his name. “Even with the inheritance, it’s not enough.”
Jackie shrugs. “It buys us time. I’m sure we can figure it out for the second semester. Once they know you, maybe we can apply for scholarships and …”
Shane shakes his head. “You can’t do this, Mom. We’ve lived here forever.”
“But this way you can go to school.”
“What, you’re just gonna let it rot and fall in? Nobody gives up their house, Mom. You can’t.”
Jackie sits down at the table. “Janice can sell that stuff to someone else. And Evie’s got room.” Jackie smiles at him expectantly.
Shane frowns. She thinks she’s solved all his problems. Like she can run away from him at the exact moment that he falls off a cliff, then come back later and stitch him up like nothing happened.
“I thought you would be happy.”
Shane lifts his head to meet his mother’s eyes, but the closest he can get is her mouth. Any closer and he’ll lose it. He’s needed her for so long that, now that she’s here, looking at him the way she used to do, everything wants to come out in a tumble, and he’s frozen. David is rigid beside him, waiting to hear what he will say. Shane tries to slow his brain down and focus on his options. He can tell his mom that yes, he is happy, then thank her and make plans to move to Toronto to go to school. But that would be a lie.
He could tell Jackie that he’s been hiding pieces of himself for longer than he can remember, and that he’s been performing the role of Heroic Young Straight Son, Future University Graduate, Future Nish Leader for so long he doesn’t know who he is or what he wants anymore. But that’s not all there is. Because if he’s really being honest, he would have to help her understand that he hasn’t stopped moving since Destiny died. He’s been circling around and around, losing himself in pain because in some way it’s right. He should be sad. He should be guilty. They all should. They let Destiny down. He let Tara down too. He hurt her to save himself and there is no making that right. He will have to carry that grief until it’s as much a part of him as the land he was born on.
Fire Song Page 17