He lowered himself onto the floor and drew up his knees, and rested his arms across them, to allow her this power to stall. A twelve-year-old calendar was still pinned to the wall above the bed.
“It’s amazing, really, that they were able to track me down at all, to let me know,” Bobbie began. “But there was a postcard. They found it in her bag, already stamped and addressed. It was evident from its condition that she’d been carrying it around for some time.”
“She happen to mention my kids in that postcard?”
“Well, no. It was meant for me. A message from a daughter to her mother.”
“She had a daughter too.”
Bobbie clasped her hands together and smiled sadly, as if all this had been ordained. As if no one need be sorry for the fact that his kids were growing up without their mother.
“She was found in a place called Wetaskiwin. Just south of Edmonton. Wetaskiwin. Word comes from the Cree, something about the hills where they made peace.” She looked at him, as if she wanted some kind of confirmation. “Maybe she could have found happiness there.”
“Maybe.”
“They found her in a snowbank, right in the middle of town. Apparently it looked like she had just gone to sleep; they’ve ruled out foul play.” She said this stonily, jutting her long chin at the floor.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Somebody did something to her. Obviously. There was vomit in the snow where she lay, and her blood-alcohol level was very high.”
He held his head in his hands and imagined Elka in the snow. “So you think someone forced the booze down her throat and then left her out there in the cold. She didn’t do this to herself.”
“No she did not.”
He stood again and looked out the window, at the sheet of rain slanting across the coastal mountains, the strait all but obliterated. “She’s never been well,” he said.
“You just didn’t understand her. You always thought I was a crackpot, and when I told you she’d get better if she stayed here, you completely disregarded me.”
“Maybe there’s a thing or two you didn’t understand either.”
She shrugged.
“Where’s she buried?”
“She was cremated. A good friend of mine collected her ashes from a funeral home in Vancouver. I kayaked out to Stoney Island the evening I received them. Full moon, water like glass. I made a bonfire and cooked a kelp and carrot stew. Things got pretty intense with half a bottle of whiskey and some chanting, and then I fell asleep on the beach. Froze my ass off. But it was worth it. I gave her back to the sea at dawn, spread her ashes over the kelp bed.” Bobbie looked at him with one squinty eye, as if she were considering something. “Good for the thyroid, kelp. It’s packed with iodine, iron, potassium. I cook it down with essential oils and vitamins to make a salve that can kick the ass out of any burn from here to kingdom come. Would you like to take a bottle home?”
“You didn’t think we’d want to be a part of her funeral?”
She looked at him, her dark eyes shining. “No one on this earth could ever come close to guessing what a man like you wants, Tom.”
Later, Tom stood at the back door, the toes of his boots getting wet from the rain spitting through the screen. It was getting dark and he knew the last ferry would be leaving soon and he would be there for the night. Tomorrow when he got home he would tell his kids that the mother they didn’t know was dead, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that, or how they would react. Right now, all he was was worn out.
Bobbie fed him a soup of lentils and potatoes and poured him a rough clay mug of huckleberry wine. They ate without speaking. He wiped the last of the soup from his bowl with a hunk of bread and sat back in his chair and looked at her across the table. “Bobbie. Why did you ask me to come here?”
She carefully put her spoon down and pulled her braid from one shoulder to the other. “You’re the husband.”
“You could have told me everything in that letter.”
She went to pour more wine into his mug, saw that it was full and frowned. “Don’t you like the wine?”
He laid both of his palms on the table and watched her.
“In the end, she came to me.”
Tom pushed back his chair. “You brought me here so you could gloat?”
“No, you fool. She came to me, and I wanted you to have some real part of it. Telling you in a letter would have been cruel.” Her lip curled. “Goodness, I forgot what an idiot you could be.”
Bloated from the soup, wound up, he tried a few hours later to sleep on her couch, the last of the fire pulsing quietly in the grill. He woke at 5 a.m. when Bobbie clambered through the room in high rubber boots and a swishing nylon jacket. She carried a basket and walking stick, and when he woke properly at eight, she fried him the blue chanterelles and jelly ears she’d picked on the low eastern slope of the hill at dawn.
11
That night when Curtis pulled into the drive and saw his dad flipping meat on the barbecue, he felt guilty for living so far away. It could have been that he was being sentimental over the dog, or Tonya, or it could have been the way his dad looked at that moment: tired, thinner across the shoulders. With enough years in the bag, even a guy as tough and cold and capable as his dad could dull at the edges. He wore the same plaid coat he’d been wearing for years. Even the same barbecue, more than twenty years old, looked after so attentively it was as good and clean as new. His dad had always been great at looking after things that were inanimate. Curtis wanted to put his arms around him and smell what was always there, motor oil and cheap drugstore soap. But his dad was not a guy you put your arms around, or who put his arms around you.
His second night home, after dinner with his dad, Curtis met up with Sean in a bar and they sat at the Pac-Man table in the back and ordered a pitcher. Sean wore the Canucks hat that he’d been wearing since his recovery from the accident in his uncle’s truck, the black peak curved and tattered at the edges. His hair curled up over the hem, like weeds claiming something abandoned. He poured the beer and pulled two cigarettes out of his pack and lit one, then lit the other with the first.
“I joined the IWA,” he said, passing a cigarette to Curtis. He pushed a quarter into the slot by his knee and began to play Pac-Man. “Move your glass.”
Curtis nodded. “A union man, eh? What about all that talk of moving down with me?”
Sean’s lip curled, his eyes on the screen. “It’s all ski bunnies and boarder dudes down there. I don’t want to waste my paycheck on resort rent.” His shoulder jerked with the control stick.
“You sound like my dad.”
“There’s worse people to sound like than him.”
Curtis looked across the room to a pair of old boys drinking together at the bar. Looked as though they’d worked in forestry their whole lives, felling or processing or just heavy-load trucking. He watched Sean’s game. “That pink ghost is right on your ass,” he said.
After finishing two pitchers, they drove into the center of town for something to eat. They parked on Caribou and walked toward Tenth, past the bars and clubs letting out for the night. Packs roamed the sidewalk, some people his age, most younger. He recognized a few, a girl his sister knew, her face hardened by the cigarette between her lips.
Sean must have seen some kind of look on his face because he said, “You fucken asshole. How many hours you spend getting pissed out of your head in these bars?” He pushed Curtis off the curb.
Around the corner, a crowd in the street. Whooping and jeering. In the center, two boys wrestled, one with his shirt torn, his chest and neck flushed red. He took a dull-knuckled punch to the jaw.
“Aw, shit,” Sean said. “I know that kid.”
“The one getting his ass kicked or the other one?”
“I’ll break it up.”
“Leave it. It’ll burn out in a minute.”
“I’ll break it up.” Sean elbowed through the crowd and people booed. The two boy
s were locked together on the ground and Sean got his hands under the arms of the one on top and pried him loose. The boy spun around and took a drunken swing at Sean, knocking his hat off. Someone else jumped in and he and Sean each held a boy in a bear hug around the shoulders, the boys lunging and spitting. A girl was crying; others mewed. Eventually, the crowd dissolved.
Sean grinned at Curtis, shaking his head. Without his hat, there was his scar, tracking from his right ear and diagonally across his forehead, parting his hair. Curtis retrieved Sean’s hat, dusted it off, and handed it to him. Sean flipped it onto his head by the peak, hiding the scar, a flipped truck, wheels spinning in the stars.
Later, they ate pizza on the swings in their old schoolyard under the hazy purple and white shift of northern lights, which had materialized sometime in the night without their noticing.
May had started out rainy, but by the end of the month, when he returned to Whistler from his dad’s, relieved to be back, the weather dried and the sun was out all the time, the mountains clear against the sky. Curtis didn’t think life could get any better, and then Tonya delivered her fucken great big news, and soon after that she cut him off completely. In the days that followed, he rode by her house a few times and saw her on her bike in the village once. She had seen him too—he was sure of it. The curve of her cheek was turned toward him just a little as she passed.
He called his dad at the camp, his dad’s voice through the radiophone distant and his words hard to understand. Asked him if maybe he could come up to the bush for a few weeks to work.
“What’s going on?” his dad asked.
“Just need to get out of here.”
“That girl dumped you?”
Curtis clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth, unable to answer.
“You can’t just leave your job.”
“I found out she was pregnant. Got rid of it without telling me.”
There was nothing but static, and Curtis imagined his dad chewing on his thumb, trying to think of something to say.
“Be glad she made the right choice, then,” he said, the last word distorted by crackle.
Curtis put down the phone and sat on the edge of his bed and rolled a joint. He licked the paper and smoothed it with his thumb, shaking. Too many folds at the seal, a shit job. His dad had a real knack for reminding him what a mistake he was.
And then one night in June his friends filled his apartment, drinking beer, passing joints, playing video games. He settled into the couch and the smoke and pinched a deep drag from the joint that came his way, and he looked around the room at the people who surrounded him, people he knew only because he had made the decision to come to this place. Good people, all gathered in the apartment he worked and paid for, in the warmth that came from the oil he paid for. He could have gone anywhere but chose to come here. He bought the jeans he was wearing, and the bike that hung in the hallway, and the food in the fridge.
They all hitched rides to a party that was hot and dark and pumping. Curtis swallowed two ecstasy pills walking up to the front door and pushed his way through to the back deck, where people talked over the noise, where it looked as if the mountain held up the sky. He recognized a few guys who worked the lift and broke into their conversation, waiting, his stomach fluttering, for the drug to rise in him. He checked his back pocket for the battered mint tin he carried. It held another pill and two well-rolled joints.
In the kitchen, someone yelled for shots, and someone else produced a ski with six full shot glasses cemented to it. Curtis stood in line with five others and they drank in unison, and he coughed the hard taste of tequila off the back of his tongue.
Down in a basement bedroom, he found his roommate, Pete, sitting on the floor with a few English girls they knew. Pete was halfway through one of his self-deprecating stories and they were laughing into their laps as if it were the first time they’d heard it. Curtis sat among them and his legs turned to velvet. He rubbed his thighs. One of the girls gripped his shoulder and massaged it. He smiled at her and closed his eyes and listened to the music in Pete’s voice. When he grew restless, he climbed the soft-carpeted stairs and placed himself close in the corner of the main room to dance. A DJ stood behind a table, her hands hovering over two spinning records, and behind her lights projected onto the wall, morphing with the music. He danced with his eyes closed, sometimes pressing his palms on the two cool walls at his shoulders. This was exactly where he wanted to be. Smiles shining and bouncing off smiles, okay for lips to touch strange lips. It was a false love, but who the fuck cared? Euphoria came up in him like carbonation and he pushed harder against the walls and stopped dancing just so he could feel the oxygen rushing cleanly down his throat and into his lungs. He opened his eyes and fingered the tin in his back pocket and there was Pete, kissing someone. No, he wasn’t kissing her at all, just talking into her ear. His hand was on her back, between her shoulder blades, and he stood still while she continued to dance. Curtis closed his eyes again and danced and imagined that Pete and the girl were kissing, rubbing, licking. In fact, the whole room was in on it. He convinced himself of this, but when he opened his eyes, Pete was gone. No one was kissing. The girl was still there. Her hair was long and brown and tied back neatly with an elastic, a cord of hair looped and plastered wetly to the nape of her neck.
He forgot about the other people in the room and danced for hours, sometimes under the weight of a friend holding him tightly, but mostly alone. Depending on which way the music flowed, Tonya would come into his head, and he pressed against the walls and cast her off. But then one track weaved into another and her voice was sewn up in its layers, repeating, There was this thing, alive. In those days after she told him, he was like—it was so clear to him now—he was like a heap of junk jammed in the back of her closet. He knew how these things went; he’d lost interest in other girls enough times. The flick of a switch to something a lot like revulsion. He knew what was happening, but he stuck to her, like dirt. Because there was that time in the park one night when they’d held on to each other for what seemed like hours. Of course there were stars. Billions of the tricksy fuckers. And there was the open-faced moon shining on the mountains. It was bone cold but still they stood there wrapped together, no words. So he held on like scum, like mold. Eventually she told him he was too much. They’d broken it anyway and she couldn’t give him what he needed.
He reached into his back pocket for his tin and swallowed the third pill, bitter on his tongue, and went looking for beer in the kitchen. Found one floating in ice water in the sink. The dancing girl Pete had been talking to was next to him and asked him for a sip of his beer. She had eyes like a husky dog, one frozen blue and the other brown, and wore a silky t-shirt, and a skirt, and white high-top sneakers. The fronts of her calves were bruised like a little kid’s.
She passed his beer back to him. “It’s too cold.”
“How can beer be too cold?”
“It hurts my teeth.”
The third pill brought him back up, but not to the place he’d been before. He went looking for his friends and found some, like night ships, in a bedroom fogged with smoke. He sat cross-legged on the floor and dropped his arms loosely in his lap and listened to the resonance of familiar voices, a wheezy laugh. He asked for the time and was told it was 2 a.m. Pete passed him a plastic bottle of water and he drank, his lips trembling against the rim, hardly connecting with it, the plastic crackling under the pads of his fingers. A hair was caught deep in his throat. He passed back the bottle.
“No, have some more.”
“It’s got hair in it.”
“It hasn’t, you fuckwit.”
“I don’t want it.”
So then a mug half filled with something black was put in his hands. It tasted woody and too sweet and coated his teeth like powder. This wasn’t the place he wanted to be anymore. He wandered from room to room, up to a closed door at the very top level of the house. On the other side of the door there was deep, slow-pulse mu
sic and unrecognizable faces that rotated toward him like moons. All along he had been looking for Tonya.
He left the party without telling anyone and walked home under gathering clouds. In his room, he emptied his backpack onto his bed, then folded his blanket into it, a woolly hat, gloves, and a raincoat. A bottle of water. His movements were whispered, fluid, the drug still pulsing gently against him from within, against the backs of his eyes, against his inner ear. He pulled his bike down off its hook on the wall and found the front tire flat, and reached for the pump that should have been stowed in a bracket on the frame. It wasn’t there, so he went back to look where he’d emptied his bag onto his bed. He couldn’t find the pump in Pete’s room, or the hall closet, or anywhere else, so he sat on the couch and swayed to music in his head. Pictured the road rushing under his front tire, the lines of the road like the grooves of a record spinning under the needle. Fuck it: he needed to be on the move. If he couldn’t ride his bike he would drive.
When he returned home that night, he moved through the house with actions that were articulate and careful, as if he were balancing a plate on his head. He checked to see if Pete was home and was relieved to find that he was not. He went into the bathroom, careful not to turn on the light, and pissed for a long time. He stood by the sink and drank a glass of water and dried the glass with a hand towel, and when he put the glass on the edge of the basin it clattered into the sink but didn’t break. He left it there. He lay in bed with his shoes on and could feel the ecstasy in his blood, still. If he closed his eyes, they popped open as if attached to strings. He listened to the rain, relaxed his face, and realized only then that he had been grinding his teeth. By the time morning came, blue, bright, and torturous, he had not moved a muscle.
12
The Mountain Can Wait Page 7