And if someone came along now and offered to tell Curtis everything—where she went and what she did and whether or not she thought of them at all before she died—he would refuse. Because in his experience, once someone you loved was inexplicably gone, after a while it felt as though the truth would be worse than the stories you told yourself.
Bobbie’s gate looked exactly as Tom remembered it: in utter disrepair and half consumed by the crooked arms of a blackberry bush. He opened the gate and shimmied past the thorns and was relieved to see the old house undisturbed. No telling when the police might turn up. He didn’t know how long they had.
He stood at the base of the porch steps and first called out Bobbie’s name, then Curtis’s. When no one answered, he climbed the steps and rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. He waited, and then pushed open the screen door and poked his head in the dark front room, calling hello. Inside, there was the feeling that someone had just left. A breeze came through the open kitchen window. On the dining table, white smoke rose and curled from a bowl of some smoldering dried herb. He went back out to the porch and sat on the top step. At his feet there was a bowl nearly empty but for a few sulky cherries floating in juice. He toed the bowl away from the edge of the step with his boot. The rumble of an engine approached the gate and he stood up, cocked an ear toward the road, and stood there, clenched, until the sound subsided and was gone.
“Dad?” Curtis was standing on the other side of the screen door, both palms pressed into the mesh. A shadow over his face. He pushed open the door but didn’t step out. Tom turned, unsure of what to do with his hands. Standing here in front of him was a different kid. Hair greasy and falling over his eyes, his eyes rimmed and tired, his skin bloodless. Not even two weeks since he last saw him but the boy was skinnier; his chin and the hollows of his cheeks were roughened with wiry black growth.
“Look what you’ve done to yourself,” Tom said.
Curtis stepped onto the porch and suddenly his arms were around Tom and here was this trembling boy. Curtis held on to him as if he were sinking and Tom put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and pushed him back so he could see his son’s face.
“Was it you? Did you hit that girl?”
Curtis looked down.
“Did you?”
“I tried to tell you at Sean’s. You remember? You were fixing a tap.” He moved away.
Tom reached out and Curtis moved farther into the house, letting the screen door slam shut. Tom followed him in and over to the couch, where he sat next to him. He wanted to touch his son but didn’t, and through the cushion between them could feel his convulsive shuddering.
“It’s okay here, you know,” Curtis said. He fiddled his hands together in his lap, cracked his knuckles. “Bobbie said I could stay as long as I wanted.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s not like you said. She’s knitting me a hat.”
“Did you tell her?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Is that how you’re playing it?” Tom put his hand on the back of Curtis’s neck and held it firmly, feeling the tension there. “I can make this better.”
“How the fuck you going to do that? You don’t even know what this is.” Curtis looked at him, the whites of his eyes stark. “She’s inside my head.”
Tom nodded. “Mine too.”
They sat quietly. Curtis held his head in both hands, gripping his hair. Tom stared into the cold fireplace.
Eventually Curtis spoke. “How come you never told me I was here before? When I was a baby?” His voice shook.
“Curt.”
In the darkening room, the flaking plaster on the wall opposite where they sat looked like a snow angel. Other than on the night Curtis was born, Tom hadn’t had much to do with the baby, this alien, lamblike thing with a neck so delicate you could break it just by looking. He was completely afraid of the boy. But then, the night before Elka took off with the baby, Tom found Curtis alone in the bathtub, braying on his back, pumping his mottled fists in the cold water where she’d left him. Clouds of yellow baby shit floated around his head, which was turned to the side, his mouth partially submerged and spitting. Tom picked him up, and the back of Curtis’s neck, just under the curve of his skull, was blotched a raging purple.
Elka was sitting on the bedroom floor in the dark, her back against the bed. Tom turned on the light and searched the dresser for a clean diaper, warm pajamas. He carried Curtis in the crook of his arm back into the bathroom and laid him on a towel. Curtis hollered with all of his red body. Tom emptied the tub and turned on the hot water and waited for it to steam, and cleaned the tub with bleach powder. Then he filled it with warm water and lowered the baby in, supporting Curtis’s head and neck with his forearm, the way he’d seen Elka do. And then she appeared next to him, on her knees, gripping the edge of the tub as if she were trying not to fall.
“Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to let the stroller roll into traffic,” she said. She was crying now, her upper lip wet. “Or…maybe just let him sink under the water.”
“Elka?”
“Sometimes I think about it.”
He held her in bed all that night, and in the morning put in for a few days off at the mill. After trying to get her to eat breakfast, he left her for twenty minutes to pick up his mother, and when they got back, Elka and Curtis were gone.
So he drove. Methodically up and down streets, to the river. He checked parks, restaurants, the movie theater. He sat up in the kitchen until four in the morning, drinking coffee, and woke at seven with his head on the table and an almighty crick in his neck. She called two days later, from an Aguanish pay phone. When he got to the island the following afternoon, his heart beating three meters outside his body, he held his baby tight and whispered fiercely into his ear, you’re mine.
“It wasn’t a nice story to tell,” Tom said now, his hand still on Curtis’s neck. “I never wanted you to know how bad she could get.”
“You should have just left us here. It was your ticket.”
Tom nodded slowly. “You really believe that’s what I’ve always wanted.”
Curtis shifted away from him, hugged the pillow tighter to his body.
“Maybe one day you’ll see it differently.” Tom turned sideways so he could face Curtis directly. A loose spring in the back of the couch jabbed at his knee. “But we need to figure out what we’re going to do now.”
“There’s nothing to figure out. This is what I’m doing.”
“How long you think you can keep this up? You’ve got to go to the police.”
Curtis got up from the couch, shaking his head. “I thought you were here to help me.”
“I am.”
“You gotta fucken help me hide.”
Tom stood, clenched, hot breath coming out of him like a bull. “You must have mistaken me for somebody else, thinking I’m going to help you hide. How could you leave her there? How could you do that? I’ve been going over this the whole way down here and I don’t know when you became such a coward.” They faced each other in the middle of the room. “I’m not going to let you crawl under some rock,” he said, his feet hot in his boots.
“Thomas Berry!” Bobbie stood in the doorway wearing a green rain poncho and gripping a large, white-bellied salmon by its tail. “You’re never far behind this boy, are you?”
“Bobbie.”
She slapped the fish on the kitchen counter and struggled to get her poncho over her head, and then came and stood between them, drying her hands on her dress. “Fish is big enough for three, Tom, if you’re staying until dinner. Just traded it with my neighbor for hard labor. Curtis, you’re helping him reshingle his garage roof tomorrow.”
“We won’t be staying,” Tom said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Curtis. He stood by the fireplace now, holding the mantel with one hand, holding his stomach with the other as if he’d been punched.
Bobbie looked at Tom and then at Curtis. “What in h
ell’s going on?”
“Tell her,” said Tom. “I’d like to hear you say it out loud.”
“Tell me what?”
“What the fuck, Dad?” Curtis said. “You suddenly give a shit?”
“Tell me what?” said Bobbie, her eyes large.
“Curt. Tell her.”
“Can you hear yourself? You? You want me to talk about my feelings while I’m at it? How about you listen to this? Only thing I can be sure of when it comes to you is that you’ve been trying to get away from me and Erin since we were born. Well, here you go: I release you. Now fuck off and let me figure this out alone.” Curtis stood there, breathless, eyes lit.
“I don’t know what’s going on here, gentlemen,” Bobbie said, “but you know, Tom, he’s fine here, with me. How about this time you just let us be, eh?”
The sun had sunk below the trees now and the room was growing dark. Bobbie switched on a lamp in the corner and sat down at a spinning wheel. She threw the wheel into motion and began to pump the pedal, feeding dark wool onto a spool through pinched fingers.
“Just go,” said Curtis. “I already told you, I like it here.”
“He likes it here, Tom. You can’t take him this time.”
“I can’t go without you.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Curtis whispered.
The creak of the pedal under Bobbie’s prodding foot and the hum of the wheel spun the thick air in the room until Tom felt that his ears might implode.
“What wasn’t his fault?” asked Bobbie.
Tom looked at her. More than ten years had passed since he had last seen her, when he came down after Elka died, and she still blamed him. As he blamed her. He looked back at Curtis, clinging to the mantel. Shivers moved up the boy’s body, like wind on water. “He hit a girl with his truck,” said Tom, his eyes steady on the boy’s face. “And left her by the side of the road. The police tell me she lived through the night. If he’d stayed, got help, she wouldn’t be dead.”
The wheel stopped spinning and Bobbie turned on her stool to face them. “That’s why you look so haggard, boy.”
“You’re lying,” said Curtis, his voice small, curled up at the back of his throat. “They never said that on the news.” He let go of the mantel and covered his face with his hands, and swayed. He leaned with his back against the wall and slid down it until he was sitting, pulling with him flakes of plaster.
“And I was beginning to think you were just generally feral.” Bobbie jutted her chin at Tom, her voice accusatory. “Why on earth would you tell him something like that? If he’d stayed, got help…Why make it worse than it is already?” The wheel was back in motion, her leg moving rhythmically under her big dress.
“Bobbie, he needs to turn himself in. The cops’ll be knocking anytime now.”
“What good will it do to ruin his life over this? He’s not a criminal.”
Curtis shook his head.
“If you hand this child over to the police he’ll be slammed in a concrete box, not much bigger than a coffin, festering and totally disconnected from the world. And he’ll hate you. I’m sure you want him to redeem himself in some way, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be accomplished at home. What he needs is a good lancing, like a boil.”
“I’ve been doing all kinds of work here, Dad. Bobbie needs me.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, son,” she said, her hand raised. “But I’ve gotten used to having you around.”
“So tell me what he could do,” Tom said to Bobbie. He sat on the couch again, leaned forward with his palms on his knees.
“What do you mean?” The wheel wound down like a clock.
“You claim to have some sort of recipe for homemade redemption.”
She rotated toward him on the stool and shrugged as if these things were obvious. “Sweatbox. Vision quest. Community service. A vow of silence?”
“What the fuck is a vision quest?” said Tom. “How’s that going to make it up to the girl? And what about her parents?”
“You’re talking nonsense. There’s nothing that can be done for that girl. Her parents, they don’t need anything from him.”
“Curt, is there somewhere we can be alone?”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Curtis’s face locked. Some kind of haunting hung off the bones of his sunken cheeks. In the low-lit room, Tom could see what would happen to him, what was already happening. Curtis’s young body shrinking until there was nothing left and you could pass your hand right through him. If he kept running, he would always be alone, he would always feel cornered, and the thought of your kid, scared and alone—well, he couldn’t live with that. The thing to do now was step back and give Curtis an open pathway to the door. Tom relaxed back into the couch and turned his gaze around the room.
“I think he’s made his decision, Tom,” Bobbie said, her tongue pushing at the corner of her mouth to block the smile. She moved behind him and into the kitchen.
“And I think I will have some of that fish,” Tom said, “if you don’t mind cooking it.”
“Don’t mind a bit. I was thinking of steaming it with lemon and thyme and salal berry. Elka used to put salal with everything.”
“Sounds delicious.”
“I thought it fitting.”
Tom ate voraciously, mopping the juice from his plate with a hunk of bread. Curtis had gone out to his tent and Bobbie told a story about sending him out to Stoney Island to collect kelp.
“Do you remember what I told you about Stoney?” she asked Tom. She was bent over a bag of tobacco, tucking a cigarette paper into her fingers. “That’s where I spread her ashes. You remember? Over the kelp bed.”
“Does Curtis know that?”
“No. I wanted to see if he said anything.”
“Said anything about what?”
“If he felt anything. If he felt her.”
“He hardly knew her.”
“She was his mother.”
A light with a burnt orange shade hung low over the table, casting shadows. “You got any coffee?” Tom asked.
“How about some huckleberry wine? Made it myself.”
“I’d prefer coffee.”
She made him a pot of bitter coffee and set it on the table in front of him with a bowl of sugar.
Tom cleaned and dried the dishes and wiped the counters, and then went out to Curtis’s tent. It was a cool night; low clouds quickly sailed just beyond the tips of the tallest trees, lit by a high three-quarter moon. Tom knelt in the damp grass by the tent flap. “Can we talk?” he asked.
When no answer came, Tom opened the flap to a dark interior without any warmth. He stood and looked around the yard, at a long blue shadow at the foot of a silver cherry tree, an overgrown bush hung with ripe, black raspberries.
Back in the house, Bobbie lay on her back on the couch with a book open on her chest, a pair of glasses perched on the end of her nose. Next to her, on the floor, a mug of what could have been huckleberry wine.
“He’s gone,” Tom said. He stood in the middle of the room. “Any particular place you think he might go?”
Bobbie hoisted herself upright and took off her glasses, carefully folded the wire arms, and slipped them into the pocket of her dress. She closed her book and put it on the floor while he waited, flexing his toes in his boots.
“Any ideas?” he asked.
She rubbed her eyes and squinted up at him, smiling. “He’s your son.”
“This isn’t a fucking joke,” Tom yelled, the bark of it a surprise to them both.
Bobbie, her eyes wide, put a finger to her lips. She stood and moved past him and into the dark kitchen and pressed her palms against the counter and looked out the window, her face pale with moon. “Good news is, he can’t get far.”
Curtis seemed to float over the trail to the beach, the rocks and the roots lit by the moon’s pearly light. The island was helping him get away. It was all coming together now: with his tent and most of his belongings cast o
ff, he could move faster. It didn’t matter that he had no place to go, because, when the time was right, the destination would present itself. He tripped on an exposed root and landed on his palms, and wiped the grit and blood on his thighs as he ran.
The driftwood on the beach glowed, pulsed like embers, and the hush of the ocean and the tin can smell of it came up to meet him. He stumbled toward the little lean-to hut, wrenching his ankle in the lattice of wedged wood and rock. The red kayak, with its scar running down the hull, was propped against the back of the hut as before. The paddle lay on the ground. He turned the kayak over and set it on the rocks, hull down, and stuck the paddle into the cockpit. He tried to lift it by the gunnel but the boat was too heavy, so he wrapped his fingers around the looped bow rope and began to pull, dragging the boat over rocks and wood, the scraping of its plastic bottom a dry, hollow sound. Several times he had to stop, drop the boat, and shake his fingers to push the blood back into the joints where the rope bit deeply.
The water was calm, and surged slowly and rhythmically onto the stones. He could just make out the black shoulder of the island where he had gone to cut the kelp. He took off his shoes and slid them under the deck behind the cockpit, and pushed the boat off the beach. He clumsily sat down in it, taking on a gush of cold water, and began to paddle. Wondered where he would end up if he followed the moon trail on the water, that silver, shifting road that lay always just out of reach. He was hemmed in here, and no matter where he pointed the bow he would hit either the mainland, or Vancouver Island, or some other small, rocky island in the strait. It was disorienting, paddling in the dark, with the bow bobbing unpredictably back and forth. As he got farther from the shore, the wind picked up, and the harder he looked at the kelp island, the less it appeared to be there. One moment it was clearly in front of him; the next, a cloud would pass over the moon and the island would be shadow. The water he’d taken on when he got into the boat sloshed at his feet and his backside. He watched the white blade of the paddle as it went through the stroke, like some whale diving down to feed.
The Mountain Can Wait Page 21