Carefully, he built a small pyramid of kindling and stuffed it with the paper bag that had held the plums. He lit the paper and blew at the pulse of fire until the whole structure caught. He sat back and surveyed his setup: tent ropes pegged tightly against the rain, a pile of dry wood, this fire built the way he’d been shown as a child. His dad would be proud that Curtis was well enough equipped to live like this.
When the kindling was going steady he balanced two bigger chunks of wood on top of it, careful to set them at the right angle, and then the girl came back again, nestled into the base of his fire. With her knees drawn to her chest, she sat and pulled savagely at a fistful of bread as if she were desperate for the last strands of meat off a bone. She asked Curtis what he knew about her and he told her what he’d learned on the news. She was three years younger than him and eldest to a couple of brothers. She went to a university at the top of a hill in Vancouver and was home for the summer, working for her parents. Something to do with furniture. She was unexpected in this part of the strait in June.
He lit a stale, flattened joint that he’d found in one of the pockets of his backpack and watched a troupe of wood mites sprint in panic over the burning logs. The smart ones made their way to the edge of the pit while the dopey ones ran in circles and back into the flames, where they burned to white ash.
The guy who had seen a killer whale for the first time came over and asked Curtis if he wanted to have a beer and join him and his friends at their fire. He was saying something about orcas, but Curtis was thinking about the thing the guy had said earlier, about his life being changed forever. The guy had no idea. What if Curtis sat with them now, under the watch of stars, and told them everything? Maybe they would tell him that it was her fault for walking next to an unlit road at three o’clock in the morning. Yes, they would tell him that an act was bad only if you meant it to be. In fact, they would say that none of it mattered, none of it, because fate had had it in for him all along. But he didn’t think he could stand it, sharing the soft glow of their fire, while the blood pumped so healthily through their bodies that it bloomed in their cheeks like flowers. They might have decided he’d done a terrible thing and he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from crying, or screaming, or from booting the embers of their fire to the wind.
“Maybe next time,” he said.
Sleep that night was angry, prodding. Rain began to fall steadily; it fell and fell until the tent, filled with the damp smell of mildew, lifted from the ground and pitched toward the sea on a slide of mud. Ice-cold water rose around the edges of Curtis’s body, creeping into the spaces between his fingers, rising up his neck, one hair at a time, and spilling over his shoulders into the ditch of his collarbone. He brought his hand up close to his face and saw that the skin was covered in maggots. His whole body was writhing with them, milk white and pulsing. Now he hovered at the apex of the tent, watching the larvae consume a body that had become the girl’s, the skin so tight over swollen limbs that if he were to touch her, she would explode like a blister with congealed, black blood.
He woke and, not wanting to sleep, sat up. Some comfort could be found in the pattern of rain drumming the tent, a chorus of fingers. If he listened closely he could keep her out of his head, and wait, almost in peace, for dawn.
When he crouched out of his tent into fine morning rain, the kayakers were already gone, their camp tied tightly against the weather. He packed up his wet tent and the rest of his gear. Today he would look for his mother’s old house, where possibly his grandmother still lived. The little he knew about his grandmother had come from his dad in small, torn pieces. Her head was in the clouds, he often said. She lived like a hermit and made her own soap. She was selfish, and incompetent, the latter an unforgivable flaw in his dad’s book. She had come to Prince George to meet Curtis when he was born, and had, for some reason, rubbed his infant body with weeds from the backyard. She came again a year later, and then after that, Elka didn’t want to see her anymore. In his life, he hadn’t given his grandmother much thought. But now, looking for her was the one thing keeping him from chewing his own fingers to the bone.
On the trail, the rain had freed the smell of earth and rock into the humid air. Water dripped heavily onto his shoulders from the lofty fir boughs and from the engorged leaves of maple saplings and birch, while the undergrowth, mainly fern and stinging nettle and something tall with salmon-colored flowers, slapped wetly at his thighs. Once he reached the road it was easy to find a lift back to Owl Bay, where he hoped someone would be able to tell him where the house was. He stopped first at the marina coffee shop and sat by the window, looked out over the ferry dock and the boats in the choppy bay. A fishing boat with a blue wheelhouse and crane-like arms at its stern nosed heavily through the waves. On deck, a man wearing a dirty yellow raincoat walked expertly with a coil of rope over his shoulder, and Curtis envied him his balance, and the simple, purposeful weight of a coil of rope. A fresh downpour pelted the window and he looked out beyond the bay into the Georgia Strait and watched the gray water shifting under rain and wind. He ordered a black coffee and asked the girl who brought it if she knew Roberta Sirota, his grandmother, and where she lived. She didn’t but suggested he try the art gallery on the north end of the bay. The man who owned it, she said, had lived on the island for decades. Curtis swallowed the hot coffee and left a few dollars on the table. He circled the top of the bay to the gallery, head down against rain that was now driving in horizontally from the strait.
The gallery was housed in an old cottage of warped, silvered cedar and half hidden by fir trees. He peered through the wide front window into a room with an empty desk and a tabby cat sleeping on a sofa in the corner. Picture frames hung from the walls; a lone plinth in the middle of the room displayed a wooden sculpture. Curtis leaned in closer to look at the sculpture, and it occurred to him that if he did find his grandmother, he wouldn’t have a word to say to her. And she would want to know what he was doing on the island. He squinted, couldn’t make out what the sculpture was supposed to depict. Interlocking waves were carved out of a deep-red wood into a tall, slender figure that could have been a woman. He let his focus drift from the sculpture to the cat to nothing, and stood motionless with his hand cupped loosely over his mouth, unsure of what to do next. When he focused again on the room, there was a thin, bald man standing in the middle of it, smiling and beckoning for him to come in.
“It’s so fluid, isn’t it?” said the man, nodding toward the sculpture as Curtis came in and shucked his wet bag to the floor. “The artist is local. He knows wood like you wouldn’t believe.” The man, in his sixties, wore jeans and a light-blue t-shirt printed with a picture of the earth and the words “Love your mother.” He was so skinny that the t-shirt swayed like a curtain from his bony shoulders. “You look like you’ve been sleeping rough, man. You down at the campsite? Can I get you a tea?”
“I’m all right.”
“You sure? I make it with lots of milk and twice as much sugar. Good energy.” He nodded at the paintings. “These are all done locally too. I’ve got more in the back.”
“I’m actually trying to find someone who lives here. The girl in the coffee shop said I could ask you?”
“Who are you looking for?”
“Roberta Sirota.”
“You a friend of hers?”
“I’m her grandson.”
The man leaned forward and searched Curtis’s face for a long time, and then smiled slowly. “That’s beautiful, man,” he said. “You look just like your mother.”
“You knew her?”
He smiled warmly. “I knew Elka well.” He made a frame around his eyes with his fingers. “It’s all here, just the same.”
This was something he had been reminded of all his life, mostly by his dad’s mother. His dad must have seen it too, but never said. Samantha, though: she would stop Curtis in the middle of things, like when his fork was halfway to his mouth, and point out that the set of his jaw was just like Elka
’s. Or she would knuckle his dark hair when he let it grow and accuse him of looking more like his mother than he usually did. Sometimes he thought she was trying to be kind, as a grandmother should be—sneaking him pieces of Elka like candy before dinner. Other times he felt as if he were being blamed for some shameful thing.
This man was the first person he’d ever met who, at the mention of Elka, didn’t look angry or uncomfortable.
“I’m Dan,” he said. “I knew your mom from when she was born. God, you’re like a carbon copy, man.” He rubbed his scalp with both hands; the skin moved loosely over the bone. He closed his eyes as if he were remembering something. “I met you once, a long time ago. Your mom brought you here when you were a baby.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, that’s understandable—you were just this tiny little baby, man!” Dan shook his head. “I had a feeling something was going to happen today.”
So Curtis had been to the island before. His dad had always told him otherwise, and used to say that if their grandmother wanted to see them there was nothing stopping her from coming up to Prince George.
“Here’s what,” said Dan. “I’ve been meaning to go over there for a few weeks; Bobbie makes the most amazing sesame paste, and I need more. Why don’t you let me run you over? She’ll be pleased to see you; I know she will. But you showing up with that face of yours is going to scare the shit out of her. You can use me as a kind of middleman, you know?”
The gravel lane to Bobbie’s house wound through open bush of aspen and birch. Dan pulled up to a low gate made of driftwood, which opened onto a path through a thicket of blackberry. He turned off the engine and looked at Curtis, as if to check that he was okay, then asked him to wait in the truck while he went in first.
The rain had stopped and Curtis rolled down his window. A banana-yellow slug, as fat and long as a finger, glided evenly along the top of the gate, feeling its way with slick tentacles. Curtis thought about the girl. From the time she was born, he decided, the moment of her death had been marked on the side of the road. Which meant that from the time he was born, the moment of her death was marked for him too. All the decisions he had ever made were leading him to that dip in the road. Their meeting at the party had been short and at the time seemed insignificant, but now he saw that it was all part of a plan. They would have talked to the same people, smoked from the same resin-black pipe that had been passed from mouth to mouth all night, their paths slowly converging toward the moment of impact. If there were such a thing as agents of fate, then they were tiny, rat-faced goblins scripting people’s lives like jokes. They would have been lurking somewhere at the party—in the houseplants, behind the drapes—rubbing their thorny hands together and laughing their balls off.
Maybe his grandmother, Bobbie, would let him stay, maybe even until the snow began to fall in the mountains, and then he could go back, not to his mountain in Whistler but to some other one. Back to the safety of snow, powder so airy it looked blue, covering every leaf and rock. Filling every ditch. Until then he could hide on this spongy island, where the weeds grew so fast you could almost hear them climbing.
Dan beckoned to Curtis from the gate and then disappeared behind the blackberry bush. On the other side of the thicket, a wild lawn climbed a gentle rise to a small brick house that looked as if it were being consumed by the vegetation around it. Ivy climbed the walls and draped over the roof, fingers poking through a second-floor window. A bed of twiggy lavender bowed over the top of the porch railing. Plums and cherries hung maturely from hard-looking trees; the fruit that had fallen was rotting in the grass. Dan stood on the porch, holding open the screen door for a tall woman in a shapeless, flowery dress, with straight, bushy white hair parted down the middle. She squinted angrily in Curtis’s direction.
“What did I tell you?” said Dan. “He looks just like her.” He turned to Curtis. “She thought I was fucking with her. But you see, Bobbie? Here he is in the flesh.”
Bobbie took a step forward and gripped the porch railing with both hands. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, sleepy. She tilted her head back and peered down her nose at Curtis.
“But he looks like his father too,” she said. “The cocky way he’s standing there.” Her voice rang loudly, biting through the humidity.
“You going to invite him in?”
“Might as well.” She retreated into the house, and Dan waited for Curtis, holding open the screen door.
The house was stuffy, with low, exposed beams gray with dust. A blackened stone fireplace gaped from the left-hand wall. Damp spread up the walls in patches, leaving blooms of plaster, bubbled and flaky. Toward the back, Dan stood in the small kitchen filling up a kettle and Bobbie sat at a table in an adjoining, windowed nook. She glanced at Curtis and gestured with her head for him to join her. He made his way to the table, stopping at a crowded bookshelf to study a photograph of his mother in a tarnished silver frame. The picture showed her clinging with young arms and legs to a rope swing, suspended over water and riverbank. Her clear eyes were focused intently on a spot where she was probably intending to land. His image of her had been conjured from the few pictures that his dad had, mostly in shadow or out of focus, more like the negative of the photo than the photo itself.
He took a seat opposite Bobbie. From a fold in her dress, she took out a pack of rolling tobacco and cigarette papers. She squinted at her work, shaking a pinch of tobacco into the crease of a rolling paper. Closer up, she appeared boxy and strong, the muscles in her arms solid under thick, old skin.
“Bobbie,” Dan said, turning slowly in the middle of the kitchen. “Where do you keep your cups?”
Bobbie looked up, and all the tobacco fell from the paper she was mincing between her fingers. “On top of the fridge. Why? Where do you keep your cups?”
“Just brewing some tea,” Dan said, smiling.
“I’ve only got dandelion. I wasn’t expecting anyone.” She put her hands flat on the table, exhaled slowly, and started again on her cigarette.
“Mind if I?” Curtis said, pointing to her bag of tobacco.
“Be my guest.”
“Since when do you smoke, Bobbie?” Dan called from the kitchen.
“About two months now. I can’t believe I left it this long. It’s frigging marvelous.”
Curtis deftly rolled a well-packed smoke and passed it to her while she still concentrated on her own. She waved his away impatiently with her elbow.
“The ritual of rolling the damn thing is why I started,” she explained, working the cigarette inches from her nose. She licked the paper and smoothed it down with her thumbs, gave the whole cigarette a twist, and held up the wrinkled thing for inspection. Nodded at it. “I have to earn the right to smoke each one.”
Dan brought in three mugs and sat down.
“You like that picture, eh? Of your mom?” she asked Curtis. “Her dad took that one.”
“She looks so different,” he said.
“Different from what?” Bobbie stared at him. “You barely got the chance to know her, you poor thing.” She tilted her head at him, and her smile was sad but also, though he couldn’t be sure, a little smug. “When my daughter was little, she used to tear dandelion stems into strips and put them in a bowl of cold water.” She tucked her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and with her eyes still on him, she searched the folds of her dress and produced a book of matches. “You know what happens when you do that?”
Curtis looked at Dan.
“They curl up, perfectly, into these tight little springs. They take on this pearly, silvery sheen. She would make dozens of them and tie them into her hair. My daughter was very good at that sort of thing, making things beautiful.” Bobbie lit her cigarette and inhaled deeply, and watched the smoke rise and curl from the cherry as if she were testing its quality.
Curtis blew across the surface of his tea. “I don’t remember,” he said.
“Well, no, you wouldn’t. Would you?” Bobbie adjusted her dr
ess and pushed her brittle hair behind her ears. It fell back over her eyes. “I suppose you want to know why I haven’t been in contact with you?”
He took a sip of tea, which was oily and coated his teeth and the edges of his tongue.
“My daughter brought you here to me when you were a baby. I don’t know what went on in Prince George, but she was getting you away from your father. The two of you were going to stay here, and for a few days it was, as I recall, idyllic. We foraged together, with you tied to her back in a sling. I rocked you to sleep in this very kitchen. You were a cute kid. But then your dad came looking for you, with his dirty boots and his face all stony. He blamed me for everything, and convinced her to go back with him.”
“It wasn’t really like that, was it, Bobbie?” Dan asked, his forehead creased.
“How the hell would you know?” she said.
Dan raised his palms apologetically, winking at Curtis.
“He hated me,” Bobbie said. “And I wasn’t going to go into combat with that man.”
“He never told me any of this,” Curtis said.
“Well, no shock there. Not much of a talker, is he?” She looked out the window and delicately picked a shred of tobacco off her lip. When her gaze met his again, it was skeptical. “What were you expecting to find here?”
Curtis didn’t know what to say. What he hadn’t expected was for her to be so solid, to be so unnerving. And he hadn’t expected to like her, but he thought that maybe he did.
“Is there something you want from me?” she asked.
“I need somewhere to crash for a bit,” he said, judging that it was better to be straight with this woman than not. “I could help you out around the yard or whatever.”
The Mountain Can Wait Page 15