He walks for hours in the ugly company of his thoughts. He lets the sun set without slowing his stride or taking as much as a drop of water from his pack. A warm, warning wind has begun to slither over and between the branches of the trees overhead. From the hum he can hear if he listens for it, issuing from deep in the hills, he knows what is beginning, one of the wild gales that descend with the arrival of spring. But he no longer trusts the weather of this strange, endless season.
Driven by the wind, the clouds go racing past the moon. Its tilted white smile appears and disappears, trumpeting light and then vanishing. He stares up at this fast and fickle sky, which slips like oil running over paint. It is near to dreaming, looking at something so grand and distant, everything between erased by darkness, drawing the sky so close, the same wind that moves those clouds lashing his face. Back in his and Judy’s hide, the mountain winds scarcely troubled them. Their shelter was built in the shadow of the hills, and at the turn of the season they’d hear the winds howl overhead and afterward, in the open plains, they’d see the ruined wake of their passage, but between the trees they were hidden as well from the wind as from everything else. He walks through the night, bowed forward, thinking of that other time. Of Judy.
And then, a few hours after dawn, when the winds have weakened and the sun is high and bright, he finds her.
* * *
—
In the shade of a sagging hemlock, Judy sits cross-legged, her belly cradled in her lap. She has her back to him, so that he doesn’t notice her until he has almost passed her, but she must have seen him coming for some time.
As he stares at her, motionless and mute, a smile slices her face. “I knew you’d look for me,” she says.
But he wasn’t looking for her. He’s almost sure he wasn’t.
There’s an unfamiliar effort in her rise to her feet, an extra step involved in pitching her weight forward over her belly, with a hard push from her right hand. He could help but doesn’t.
As she approaches him, she keeps one hand under her belly, which he can’t lift his eyes from. He wants to doubt and doesn’t. Her head is cocked to the side, looking too closely, too carefully at him.
“You let me go,” she whispers when she is close enough that he could touch her.
He drops his head for a moment, thinking, and then slowly, he nods.
“Thank you.” She looks ahead down the path. “Golda is long gone by now. I gave her everything she needed to make the trip. She didn’t want to wait. She wanted to go alone.” She looks to see if he understands. “I think she wants to go back into the valley. To the cities. It doesn’t frighten her.”
There’s something awake in her, something lit and alive that he thought was extinguished years before. He can feel its current humming in her, its charge dangerous and close.
“Eban, it’s time to go. You know it. We’ve waited too long.”
If, he thinks. If there it was, right before him, something true and invisible, all at the same time. If her belly hides something already begun and not yet even properly alive, if something so impossible could transpire, what else might? What might she come one day to say to him, or him to her, or to feel?
He squeezes his eyes shut behind his hand, admitting, for an instant, the thought of it. Judy’s baby. His. A thing made of them and entirely its own, more new and alive and unknowable and certain than anything else had ever been. Its tiny step on the world would shake the planet.
Judy with a baby in her arms, turning to look at him over her shoulder. Judy knowing what to do if it cried. Or turning to him, a question in her eyes. Him with an answer.
He doesn’t know if she has in her the gentleness to care for something small. He thinks everything about her, every gesture of her hands, every expression that crosses her face is clumsy and broad. But small things need to be handled only by fine, careful hands.
“Eban, when we left to come here, we said we were looking for answers. But those people have none. It’s more of the same, more of all we’ve ever had. Other people’s words. Borrowed terrors. I went through the houses last night to pack the things I needed. I saw how empty they were.” She reaches into the pocket of the coat she wears, which he notices is too thin even for this turning weather. She withdraws something and holds it out for him to take. “I don’t want to be safe. I want to know what we’re hiding from. Maybe there are other reasons for everything we’ve been told. Maybe there is more to know. We know so little, Eban.”
He takes the slip of paper from her hand. The shining surface of the paper briefly catches a ray of light through the needles of the tree above, singing out with its gold for an instant. A photograph.
We have eyes, he thinks, that slowly cease to see the things before us.
He feels her watching him, the weight of her gaze. “I found it in Sladja’s things,” she says. “With a note from a man named Lincoln. A runner, she called him.”
The boy in the photograph is fifteen years old. His face is unreadable, faintly blurred as he turns his head to look at something over his shoulder, something happening in the distance.
He remembers the peddler who visited that day. They’d never seen him before. His cart was smaller than most, and though he offered them some unfamiliar wares (a device for peeling apples, pear saplings wrapped in burlap, a flashlight that ran on enormous batteries), none of these items were the real thing he was selling. Out of his cart, he lifted a small black case, which he opened delicately, gesturing to Eban and his mother to peer inside.
Eban had no idea what they were looking at, but his mother recognized it instantly. “A camera?”
“And so it is,” said the peddler, and both Eban and his mother flinched at the sound. He was the only peddler with the capacity to speak—or the first one willing to admit it—that they had ever encountered. Eban waited for his mother to lead him back inside and lock the door, as she did when anyone dangerous passed through.
But instead she took the camera from the peddler and turned it over in her hands as he explained that it would produce a print immediately, and then named a price. Eban was shocked, but his mother went into the house and returned with an armload of furs, a winter’s worth. “These,” she said, her face set. “And there are two laying hens that I can spare.”
While the man, with a satisfied expression, loaded the furs into his cart and installed the hens in a cage already packed near-full with other fowl, Eban’s mother turned to him. “Hurry now,” she said. “Go and fetch your brother.”
Eban ran into the house and called for his brother, but there was no answer. He stood at the window, looking out across the barren outland, but saw nothing. Then he noticed his brother’s shoes missing by the door.
Outside, his mother and the peddler were waiting. “He’s gone,” he said.
“Gone?” the peddler repeated, amused.
His mother looked grim. “Running.”
“Should I go and try to find him?” Eban asked.
His mother bit her lip and then shook her head. “Come stand here,” she said. “So the sun will be on you.”
“Ma?”
“Do as I say.”
The man grinned a mouthful of black teeth at them. “It’s very popular, this camera. Nothing sells like these pictures do. Can’t hit a place more than once, so I had to widen my route, but worth every penny I paid for it.”
“What’s it for?” Eban asked his mother, but the man answered.
“See this slot here? A picture of you, just like you are, will come out there. Like looking in a mirror. Better than any artist could paint.”
Eban stood under the glare of the sun, squinting up at his mother, who retreated to the elm in the yard.
“Don’t you want to be in it too?” the peddler asked. “Nice picture of you both? Or one of each?”
“We don’t have enough,” she said. “I just want a
picture of my boy.”
“Smile,” said the man, just as Eban’s mother took a sudden step forward.
“Wait!” she said. “He’s coming! I see him there.”
Eban spun to look where his mother pointed, just as she landed a hand on the peddler’s shoulder to stop him.
There was a snapping sound as Eban perceived the long, thin shape of his brother, emerging from the horizon, far in the distance.
He turned back to the peddler just as the man drew a slip of paper out of the camera. “Come see this, boy,” he hissed. “You won’t believe it.”
“Wait,” said Eban’s mother. “I wanted both boys. My other son is coming now. Wait for him.”
“You’ll like this one,” insisted the peddler. “Wait and see. Just takes a minute or two.” As they watched, a shape took form on the paper, like oil surfacing on water. And then Eban’s own face was there. Squinted against the sun, slightly blurred by the turning of his head as he looked away from the camera and off to his side, as if someone were creeping up behind him. And the shadow of his mother, at the peddler’s side, was flung over him. He could pick out the long, exaggerated lines of her legs cast over the grass and then hinged over his own body, where her shape was imprinted on him.
“Too bad, that,” commented the peddler.
“Take another one,” cried Eban’s mother. “He’s not even looking, and it’s got a shadow on it.”
The peddler shook his head. “You’ll have to pay again. Price I told you’s just for one picture.”
Eban had never seen his mother look so upset. He thought she would give the peddler a piece of her mind, but instead tears welled in her eyes. “I wanted a picture of both my children.”
“One picture. Pay again, and you’ll get two. I can even offer you a deal.”
“I don’t have anything else to sell.”
“Well.” The peddler retreated to his cart. “It’s a nice picture of the boy. You’ll treasure it later. Maybe it’s better like this. Not too posed. More natural. Thing is, he’ll grow up faster than you guess. I’ve got kids of my own. Listen to me. I know. He won’t look like that ever again, and you’ll be glad you can remember it now.”
They watched him leave. By the time Eban’s brother reached the yard, breathless and all limbs and sweat-shining skin, the peddler was out of sight, and the picture was complete, all the colours and angles of Eban’s face as he knew it from his reflection resolved. He held it in his hand as his brother asked, “What?” and his mother, without a word, went into the house.
The picture went up on the shelf over the fireplace, beside the one of their grandparents. Two days later, Eban and his mother left the house, and when he last looked inside from the stoop, just before he closed the door, he noticed that it was the only photograph she had taken. Or he assumed she had. But when she died, he searched her possessions and never found it.
“Eban,” Judy says, “how did Sladja get that photograph? How did Lincoln? It’s you, isn’t it? You recognize it, don’t you?” She takes the photograph back from him and holds it up to her face, studying the boy caught in light on paper. She hesitates a moment before speaking. “Eban, you never told me how your brother died.”
He wonders if his mother already knew that they would leave when the photograph was taken. He wonders if she had first meant to take it with her or if it was always intended to be a gift for the son—the child—she would flee. We left him the house. An empty house and a photograph of the brother who once shared it. He fingers the paper, which is worn by touch and time. Did his brother treasure or resent it? How long did he keep it before he charged a stranger with finding the brother who had left him without a question, just because their mother asked? And could he have in him such goodness that he would call that person brother still?
* * *
—
He looks at Judy for a long time. Even now, he loves her, helplessly.
When she lost the pregnancies, he would search for a way to tunnel into her pain, to make a little room for himself, but it was only big enough for her. Now she stares at him with something gentle in her eyes, something that makes room for him.
“His name was Michael,” he begins.
* * *
—
“Come with me,” she says when he has finished. She is already lifting her pack from the ground where she left it, one hand supporting her belly, as she turns her attention to the path.
“I didn’t understand,” he says slowly, “until just now, when I saw those two women grieving. I didn’t understand that loving someone like that means being afraid all the time.”
“No, Eban,” she tells him, shaking her head. “Love isn’t fear.” She adjusts the straps over her shoulders. “It’s faith.”
This day, its rising light and heat, the world emerging around them from buds and branches, from dirt. Meltwater everywhere, running through everything, the sound all around them of water creeping down the hills back to the valley they’ve never seen. The colours, the sun in his eyes, and everything suddenly too bright. All of it swallows him. He understands none of it, and is lost within it, made into its mystery.
Before they begin the long walk ahead of them, through the hills and down into the valley, Judy turns and looks back at him.
She looks back for him, one final time, and it’s enough.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge the support of Arts Nova Scotia and the Canada Council for the Arts in writing this book.
Thank you to my brilliant agent, Ellen Levine, for the gift of your guidance, editorial insight and support from the earliest draft. I admire and am deeply grateful for your devotion to your authors and fierce commitment to the world of books.
Thank you to Martha Kanya Forstner, magnificent editor and first-rate human being. At every stage of editing this book with you, I’ve felt lucky to work with you and learn from you. I am moved by your vision, inspired by your integrity, honoured by your faith. It has been a joy to travel through this book with you.
Thank you to my copyeditor, Melanie Little, for your thoughtful insight and and eagle-eyed, don’t-miss-a-thing precision.
Thank you to my cover designer, Emma Dolan; my proofreader, Gemma Wain; and my publicist, Danielle LeSage. Thank you to Megan Kwan and the Doubleday production team.
Thank you to my first reader and dear friend, Johanna Skibsrud, for encouragement and direction when I needed it most, and thank you to the writers and friends who lent their ears and wisdom throughout the long process of writing this book: Oisín Curran, Sarah Faber, Stef Lenk, Susan Paddon.
Much of this book was written at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York, at the Dancing Goat Café&Bakery in North East Margaree, and at L’abri café in Cheticamp: thank you to the staff of all three for your tabletops and your patience…
Lastly, thank you to my family. Thank you to my parents and to my sisters, Sarah and Lisa. Thank you to my husband, Conrad. And thank you to our son and daughter, who were born as I wrote this book, and who are part of it.
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