You have a hard time falling asleep with images of yourself looking down on you. The boy in those photographs isn’t the same one you left behind in California. None of those photographs exist in Arcana. It’s as if there were two of you, who never met.
During lunch breaks, I returned to the loading zone behind the shop classes. By then, Krista usually spent the entire lunch period with Mike. Sometimes, they would ask me to come along to the food court, but after a couple of lunch hours spent deflecting the advances and snide comments of Mike’s tobacco-chewing buddies while he and Krista made out, I declined. Nick was always in the smoking area, though almost never smoking. Most often, he was huddled in one of the doorways with a couple of other geeks, playing cards or hand-held video games. Once, I had been able to dissolve into the neutral, unnoticed masses in the school. I couldn’t do that any more and I would have rather smoked with the freaks than be stared at as I walked the halls alone.
Very few girls hung out with the skids and nerds in the loading zone in sub-zero temperatures. The ones who did could be grouped into two broad categories: tomboys who loved wood and metal and were almost indistinguishable from the guys, and girls lacquered in heavy makeup. Those girls smoked and glared and spoke in a sparse language, never quite turning to look people in the face when they did. Nick’s friends simply stared at me like any thirteen-year-olds would at a seventeen-year-old girl who had deigned to talk to them.
They all acknowledged me soon enough. The tomboys ran their eyes over my shorn hair and I registered their acceptance immediately. The tough girls shot their chins out and said, “Hey, what’s your story?” When I mumbled something about leaving home and living with a guy, I knew I was in. Then I made the ultimate in offers, “Drum?” and held out a pouch. I had gotten it off someone at the farm. Drum was what most people smoked there, that or American Spirit. These were somehow acceptable forms of tobacco.
There wasn’t a lot of talking in the smoking area, and at that time of year none of us spent the entire lunch hour out there. Sometimes, one of the guys would slide an electrical cord under a shop door and bring a stereo outside to play speed metal – a soundtrack for the dumpsters, the chain-link, and the white, abandoned field, for the leather jackets and heavy eyeliner. Each group would exchange a few muttered comments, smoke cigarettes while looking away from the school, shuffle their feet, and then leave after fifteen or twenty minutes, complaining of the cold. Nick and his friends huddled in a doorwell with their games until someone offered them a butt – it was always someone offering, never them asking – at which point they would nod, trying to appear indifferent, and three or four of them would share the smoke together. I had begun rolling cigarettes, thin as pencils, for Nick and his friends, throwing them to the boys like candy to kids at a parade.
At the beginning of February, Nick caught one of the cigarettes and walked up to me. “Can I talk to you, Harp?”
“Sure.” We walked over to the concrete steps leading to an unused door to the gym. We sat on our hands on the top step. The cold was going to drop lower yet, I could feel the edge of it coming on. “What’s up?” I asked Nick.
“I think you should call Mom.”
“I know, I know. Why now, though?”
“She’s just acting strange. For one thing, I think she’s having trouble sleeping. You know how weird that is. I hear her walking around at night. It kind of freaks me out a bit. I think she misses you or something. Who knows why.” Nick turned his head away from me and spat, as though to show he had some handle on the situation
“Nice gob, hero. Okay. I’ll call Mom.” I put my hands on my lap and turned them palms up. “Don’t say anything to her though, okay?”
“Yeah, okay, I won’t.” Nick pushed himself up from the concrete step. “See you around.” This time, he was up and down the stairs before I had given him an unspoken cue to leave.
I remember in surprising detail the first time that I left a place without letting anyone know where I was going. I was in the first grade. It was during the transition when we had first arrived in Sawmill and were still living at the motel. Vera wanted to make us feel like we belonged. She thought new friends could do this and so made it her mission to find some for Nick and me. Her means were simple. Any adult – the real estate agent, a cashier at the supermarket, the guy who pumped our gas – was a potential parent, their children potential friends. Nick and I were dropped off at strangers’ houses, encouraged to play with kids with whom we often had no more in common than our age, and sometimes that was a stretch.
One afternoon, Vera dropped me off at a girl’s house. I don’t remember who she was, or ever seeing her again. We were playing in her carport, metres away from where Vera had dropped me off. We didn’t interact as we roamed the carport like detectives, in silence, picking toys up and putting them down. When I picked up a glossy red plastic change purse, it was so smooth, so gleaming that I couldn’t imagine not having it, holding it in my pocket, a space within a space like one of the stacked Russian dolls my baba had sent me for Christmas.
I slipped the purse into the pocket, felt a hot itch on my face and neck, then took it back out. I wanted to leave, get out of that carport with the silent girl stranger. Vera found me later, walking from the girl’s house to wherever the road would take me. “Sylvie, honey, where are you going?” She bent to me, grasped my arms until they hurt, the van still running on the side of the road.
“I don’t know. I wanted to go home. I didn’t like it there.” I was glad she had found me. I don’t think I would actually have walked home if she hadn’t. The memory of holding that purse in my pocket was propelling me in some other direction.
For years, Vera would tell the story of finding me walking on the side of the road. To her, it attested to my innate wilfulness, stubbornness like a steel bar in my spine. To me, it was about a fear I couldn’t name. About wanting something so badly that I had to walk away from it, lose my way.
I called Vera on a Sunday evening from the cookshack. There had been a potluck and I had helped clean up afterwards. The kids had reached the point when they were beginning to stutter and become delirious, running wide wobbling circles in the middle of the room.
“Hello?” Vera answered.
I had to raise my voice to say, “Hi, Mom. It’s me.”
Silence on her end, then she asked, “How are you?”
“I’m okay. Listen, Mom, I don’t really want to talk like this, over the phone. There are people here, you know, and –”
“I know. Maybe we could meet. Here, at home.”
“At home?”
“Yes, honey, the place you used to live?” Vera said sarcastically, then shifted her tone quickly once she caught herself. “I mean, if you’d be comfortable here,” she said. I could hear something thin and tight in Vera’s voice, as though it were strained through a crack. I felt as though I couldn’t push her any farther.
I walked to Vera’s after school, having agreed to meet Gabe at the café downtown in an hour. Entering through the front door seemed too formal so I went around the back. Once I got there, however, I felt presumptuous simply walking into the kitchen, so I knocked first and waited a moment before letting myself in. I almost expected Vera to be at the table waiting, but she wasn’t. I started to take my coat off but decided against it. Then I heard some movement from the direction of the living room and called out.
I could hear Vera get up and walk down the hall toward the kitchen, her steps neither fast nor slow. She stopped inside the kitchen door, smiled, then took a step toward me. “Hello, Harper. It’s good to –” Vera began to reach for me, then let her arm drop. “How are you doing?”
“I’m – are you sure you want me to answer that question?” I asked.
My response must have relaxed her a little. I saw the slight shadow of a smile pass over her face as she shook her head. She moved toward the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. “Yes, unbelievably enough, I really would.” She pulled an empty cup to
ward her, tilted it and peered in. She looked up at me and asked, “Are you going to sit?”
I considered this, took my hands out of my pockets and held the back of a chair, then pulled it out and sat down. “Okay. I’m doing well at the farm. I like it there.”
“Good. That’s good, really.”
I looked at Vera to see if she really meant it but her expression was wiped flat. “How’s Nick?” I asked.
“As far as I can tell, Nick is fine, although it can’t be good for him to see his older sister walk out on her family.”
Instead of addressing this, I asked, “And council? Have you decided anything about council?”
“No, I haven’t.” Vera looked out the window, then turned back to me and asked, “Has it ever occurred to you that I might have some kind of comprehension of what you’re going through?”
“I knew it would come back to this.”
“Sylvia, it isn’t coming back to anything. Whether you like it or not, you are my daughter. You’ve been very vocal about what you think is wrong with my life. Now it’s my turn to make my observations about yours. Would that be all right?”
“Sure, as long as you’re really looking at me, Mom, and not at yourself.”
“So, you think you have it figured out, do you? You’ve already made your mind up with what you think you know about me. Where does that leave us?”
“Here, I guess.”
By the end of February, the valley had been socked in with clouds thick as gravy for two weeks solid. The temperatures had begun to rise under this blanket, enough that skin didn’t ache when exposed to air, but the clouds shed no new snow. The dirt roads were either mud or frozen mud. The paved roads were gritty with old salt. The snow was yellow and grey and melting. In the fields, leafless plants and patches of brown broke through the snow.
I felt restless, as though only movement could shake off the dormancy of weeks of grey and brown. Having convinced myself it was a fresh start, I hadn’t skipped any classes since moving to the farm. But one afternoon in February, in a windowless classroom in the belly of the school, the teacher’s drone began to join with the hum of the fluorescent lights and I knew I had to get out. I knew too that I would end up at the Catholic Church downtown, oddly enough.
Before moving to the farm I had skipped class to go to the church on the corner of Pine and Twenty-seventh, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I seemed to be perpetually in need of something and once I had thought it was help. Going through the doors meant crossing over into everything the Free Church had left behind – idolatry, blasphemy, ritual. Our Lady was the only church with unlocked doors on weekdays when I needed a place to sit alone. I went there for silence. The Virgin would welcome me, hand half-opened at her heart, a passing gesture frozen. The Mother of God didn’t mean the same thing at the Free Church and she was resolutely not worshipped. The women who were named in sermons – Bathsheba, Jezebel – were the bad ones. The good ones – Esther, Ruth – were given to girls in Sunday school parables, stories as sweet and tart as powdered candy licked off lips. Esther was my favourite. She was beautiful enough to pass between worlds, smart enough to bring peace to both.
My fascination with the Catholic Church had begun one summer when we returned to Alberta after moving to Sawmill Creek. Then, Vera’s family had still been able to convince her to bring us to services in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Vera explained to Nick and me both, although it seemed to me that my little brother could barely understand English at that age, that this was our relatives’ church, not our own. We didn’t believe we needed special smells, and chants, and signs to talk to God. It was their church I liked, though. The priest walked down the aisle, swinging a lantern of smoke that smelled both sweet and old. The congregation all knew the same mumbled language and would kneel down and stand up in unison, chant in a low hum. The ceilings were painted with heavenly hosts and on the panels on the walls still-faced, sombre saints all held a hand open at their chest in a gesture I assumed to be a small wave, an acknowledgment.
On one of those Sundays, I had asked God for a sign. It took me most of the sermon to try to think of what I wanted a sign for, and I never did come up with anything specific. I just wanted a sign; that seemed like enough to ask. We had been told that God didn’t like specifics, that He knew best. Ask and ye shall receive. So I asked and received a sudden band of sunlight, like those shafts of light that spill from clouds as though made from the stuff of angels. The band shot through a window, picked up the red from the stain on the glass, and created for a moment a wall of light that wouldn’t allow me to see through it. The priest intoning in Ukrainian on the other side was invisible. That’s all. Eventually, my eyes adjusted and I couldn’t even see the red tint to it. The light became just something else in the air.
On that day in late February, I wanted something. Not a sign necessarily. Even a wash of light would do. But I wouldn’t recognize what did come to me that afternoon.
Though I had seen a lot of Krista, we hadn’t spent much time alone in the previous two months. Before last period I waited outside of her class, catching her before she went in. “Come downtown with me,” I whispered, as students crowded around us to get into the class.
Krista looked at me without saying anything, glanced into the classroom for a moment, as though considering her options, then she shrugged. I took this to mean she would come. When I smiled, she moved past me, and turned. “Meet you outside in a couple minutes,” she said.
We walked downtown. When we were at the bottom of the church steps, Krista and I stopped talking and went in. She didn’t ask any questions, just followed me. Not knowing what they were for, I lit some candles on one side of the altar and Krista followed my lead, lit some on the other, then we sat in empty pews across the aisle from each other. I had forgotten what it was like to chase prayers out of my mind. Sometimes when Gabe turned me over and I spread my legs and arms and gripped the sides of the mattress, everything heat and liquid, I heard myself saying, “Oh God, oh God,” but I didn’t really consider that praying.
Something about sitting in a pew brought the words back to me. Words that asked for things to be given, then asked for others to be taken away. Words that implored, then apologized. I wanted to wipe my mind clear of each one. I thought that the absence of thought would be better than trying to sort out what exactly it was that I wanted to believe. I tried paying attention to my breath instead as it passed through my nostrils. Tried to see clouds moving, skies about to clear, waves rolling and abating until the water was smooth as glass but the prayer started anyway. Our Father, who art, the Lord’s Prayer started up like a recording, in Heaven, hallowed be, and kept breaking through, even though the Free Church had only adopted it a couple of years before, Thy name, when Pastor John had decided that something about the rhythm of those words would bring us closer to God, Thy kingdom come, come – I was still uncomfortable with that word for what happened, Thy will be done, that word for the liquid we both expelled as though the impact of our bodies against each other forced something out, drained us in small ways, on earth as it is.
I opened my eyes and looked across the aisle. Krista was shaking slightly in the pew, arms wrapped around herself. I closed my eyes, opened them and looked again to see her still shaking. Not knowing what to do, I lay down on the pew, stared at the ceiling, and waited.
When I heard Krista get up and walk down the aisle, I followed her out. I touched the arm of her coat in the foyer and we exchanged a glance – one in which I asked Are you all right? and she answered Leave it.
Back outside, we took runs at the remnants of packed snow on the sidewalks, trying to get a good slide in, in spite of how we both felt, or perhaps to cheer ourselves up. Most of it had already melted and the few patches that remained were grainy with dirt and salt, not great for gliding. Krista coasted a small way, then spun around to face me, breath flowering the air, cheeks bright. “Let’s go to Community Drugs.”
I could tell by the way she raised
her eyebrow as she walked backwards what Krista wanted to do. “I don’t know, Kris –” I started.
Krista shifted so she was walking beside me. “You don’t know? I come with you to the Catholic church for no particular reason and now, you don’t know?”
“I just don’t feel like it today,” I answered.
I stopped on the sidewalk for a moment and Krista kept walking, then said over her shoulder, “Well, I’m going. You can do whatever.” She shrugged and headed in the direction of the drugstore. Something about that shrug, her turned back, made me follow.
Perhaps it was our haste or the lack of recent practice but we got caught that day, a clerk hollering at us as we tried to make it out the door and across the parking lot unnoticed. There being little else for excitement in her life, the clerk insisted on calling the police after she got us back inside and had us empty our clothes of loot.
“Cry when the cop gets here,” whispered Krista.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Of course you can. Whatever you do, don’t act cocky.”
“Huh! Look who’s talking,” I shot back in a whisper.
When the officer arrived, Krista cried enough for both of us. He agreed not to press charges but insisted we call our parents to pick us up. I felt my throat constrict and I squeezed out, “Um, officer, I don’t live at home.”
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 20