Hannah sat at the table with him and stared out the window for a time, her eyes clearly fixed on the reserve village, on Alex’s house. She looked so tired. Beyond tired. Shattered. Jesse elbowed her, offering the joint, but she shook her head. He shrugged and inhaled.
“We’re not doing this anymore,” he said. “Bran’s going back to the hospital until I can find some decent care for him.”
“You promised if he took the pills he wouldn’t go back.”
“You’re exhausted. It’s obvious we’re getting nowhere with him. If anything, he’s getting worse. He’s becoming violent. He could hurt you.”
“We’ll talk to his doctor about changing up the meds, like you said. She told us it would take time to work that out. She said we’d have to experiment with different drugs.”
Jesse shook his head. “I’ve had enough.”
“What are you saying?”
“There’s nothing to stop the sale of the farm now. I can’t put it off any longer.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Hannah, there isn’t anything here for me now. And you need to go back to college. I’ll make sure Bran gets the care he needs.”
“You need to stay here and be his dad.”
Jesse shook his head as he blew out a stream of smoke. “Today was the first time he talked to me in weeks. Some days I’m not even sure he knows who I am.”
“You’re really just going to walk away?”
“I have a life, Hannah.”
“Just not here, with us.”
Jesse pinched out his joint and stood. “I can’t do this right now.”
“You’re running away, like you always do.”
“Whatever.”
“I hate you!”
Jesse turned and pointed at her, the joint still in hand. “I’m sick of you blaming me, judging me. I came back here. I paid the bills. I took care of things with Dad. I made sure he got good medical care. And I took care of things with Bran too. You think you can do better, then go ahead and try.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Fine. Go to it. I’m out of here.”
Jesse slammed the door and stood on the kitchen steps. Then he kicked the side of the old house, putting a hole in the tarpaper. “Fuck.” He took out his lighter and relit the joint and smoked as he walked to the orchard.
The landscape before him was a grey wash, the cloud and low-hanging fog indistinguishable from the snow beneath. The churning river was the only horizon. Winters in this narrow valley were heavy and dark. He felt he would suffocate under the weight of this one.
Across the road Gina stepped outside with a bucket of ash after cleaning her wood stove. Her sweep of black hair covered her face as she bent to toss the ash over her garden plot. Embers in the ash, catching oxygen, lit up, showering the air with light before they hit snow.
When Gina straightened, she saw Jesse watching her. Jesse waited for some gesture, some invitation from her, but she only stood there. Finally she turned and carried her ash bucket back into the house.
— 28 —
Family Services
AS HANNAH CROSSED the slushy road to Gina’s yard, Spice, Stew’s mare—Gina’s mare now—whinnied in recognition and trotted through snow to the gate of her enclosure. Hannah scratched her forehead and rested her face on the mare’s neck, taking in the familiar smell of her. Other than Abby, Spice was the last of her grandfather’s animals left in the valley. Jesse had trucked the rest to auction.
Hannah turned as she heard the crunch of Gina’s boots.
“You know you can take her out for a ride any time,” Gina said.
“I don’t ride anymore.”
“You should. It would be good for you.”
Hannah gave Spice a last scratch and stepped away from the horse. “She’s yours now.” She glanced at Grant watching them from the window. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”
Gina paused as she registered the emotion on Hannah’s face. “How you holding up?”
Hannah shrugged but felt on the verge of tears. “Okay, I guess.”
“And Brandon?”
Hannah looked away, to her home where Bran slept in his bedroom. She had chosen his naptime to talk to Gina, but she still had to watch from here. Bran took any opportunity to run away. “Not so good. That’s why I’m here. I wonder—shit.” Hannah wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, crushing her tears. Then she looked directly at Gina. “Am I the reason you stopped coming around, to help us out? I mean, I know I was rude a lot of the time.”
“Oh, no. Hannah, it wasn’t you.” When Hannah looked back at the house, her lip trembling, Gina asked her, “Hey, hey, what’s going on?”
Hannah shook her head, and rubbed her face with both hands, trying to pull herself together. “Jesse’s leaving,” she said.
“Did he say when?”
“He wants to put Bran back in the hospital. He says he’ll leave as soon as that’s set up. He has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.”
“I’m not sure what you want me to do.”
Hannah hugged herself tighter. “This is so hard for me, you know, asking.” Begging. “Could you come over again, give us a hand with Brandon? Maybe if Jesse didn’t have to help out so much he’d stay. Or if he does leave, maybe I could keep Brandon at home, if I had help. When the farm sells, Bran and I can find a place.”
“That would be a decision you’d have to make with your dad,” Gina told her. “He has custody.”
“Jesse just wants to leave. Could you talk to him for me? I could take care of Bran myself, if I had help.”
Gina looked back at the bungalow, where Grant still watched from the living-room window. She fiddled with her engagement and wedding bands. “Spending time at the farmhouse would cause certain issues for me at home.”
“So you aren’t going to help.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Hannah turned from Gina, feeling sick to her stomach. She scanned the blackened supports of the old bridge, the dark windows of the reserve houses that dotted the thin strip of lowland on the opposite shore, and found Alex keeping watch at the tent over Samuel’s grave up on the benchland. He had fished the protest signs out of the water at Dead Man’s Bend and set them up around the tent: O Canada, Your Home on Native Land. The gesture was senseless now, Hannah thought. The crew couldn’t cross the river until the new bridge was built, and construction on that wouldn’t start until spring. Yet Alex kept vigil over the grave.
“You’re in love with Alex, aren’t you?” Gina asked, following her gaze. When Hannah looked away, Gina added, “It would be hard, you know, to be with him, hard to fit in. I tried to go back as soon as I was old enough to leave my foster home. I felt like I didn’t belong in their tidy, sterile world. But it took only days to realize I no longer belonged on the reserve either.”
“Alex and I aren’t seeing each other. I managed to fuck that up.”
“But you do love him.”
Hannah didn’t answer. The question made her angry. She glared at Grant watching them from the window until he moved away into the shadows. She turned to Gina as the pieces fell into place. “You were seeing Dad again, weren’t you?” Hannah asked. “Grant figured it out and you broke things off with Dad. That’s why you haven’t been around.”
Gina paused before answering. “It’s not that simple. Jesse needed to step up, to take care of you and Bran on his own. If I was there, he wouldn’t. You know he wouldn’t.”
“Dad had other affairs back then, you know. There were other women before you, and one while you were together.”
Gina breathed out slowly, purposefully. “I know,” she said. “I was married too. Jesse and I both had our reasons for hooking up.” She paused. “I wanted a child.”
“But you never had kids.”
“No.”
“Dad wasn’t just screwing around on Mom. He betrayed Bran and me too. He broke up our family.” You broke up our family, she thought.
Gina shook he
r head. “He wasn’t trying to leave you then, Hannah, any more than he is now. Taking care of someone so sick—losing someone you love to madness—that can destroy you. Maybe he made the wrong choices then, just like he is now, but he did need something—someone—to help him through your mother’s illness. I shouldn’t have to explain that to you, especially now.”
“But after she died, Dad should have stayed. He should stay now.”
“Of course he should have stayed, and I agree, he should stay now. But not all of us can cope. Jesse is a brilliant man. He could have done anything he wanted. When we were all still at school, everyone thought he’d end up at university, rather than in a trade. In my experience, the really smart people often have the most trouble coping with the terrible realities of the world. You must have felt like running away many times over this last year. I imagine you feel that way now.”
Hannah straightened her back. “I can cope. I had to, with Grandpa. I have to now.”
A crow landed on the tin roof of the house and clattered to the edge to peer down at them, ducking a cluster of electrical wires. Hannah had once seen a crow land on an electrical transformer in town and get zapped with the pop of an explosion, like a gun going off. The crow had dropped dead, smoking, to the street. Black feathers fluttered down after it. Terrible. Darkly funny.
“Did she love me?” Hannah asked Gina, still looking up at the crow.
“Your mom? Oh, Hannah, of course she loved you.”
“Just not enough.” Not enough to stay. Jesse didn’t love her enough to stay.
“I know how hard all this is for you. Losing your mom, your dad. Now Stew and Brandon. You must feel abandoned. Orphaned.”
Hannah swung around to look directly at her. “Don’t throw your counsellor bullshit at me. You have no idea how I feel.”
“Stew drank,” Gina said. She didn’t ask. She stated it as a fact.
Hannah paused. “Yes.”
“He drank when Jesse was a kid too. My own mother drank and later turned to crack. That’s how she lost custody of me. Neglect. Neglect of herself, mostly. My older brother lived on his own and would have taken me in, but family services put me in a foster home up the valley, with a white family. The Tomlinsons. Remember them? Janet and Phil?”
“I didn’t know about your mom,” Hannah said. A flood of embarrassment rose up from her chest to her face.
“Well, gossip rarely crosses that bridge.” Gina lifted her chin to the burned remains of the old wooden structure. “After the Tomlinsons took me in, my mom phoned, wanting to see me. She was usually stoned when she called. She turned up at the door once, stinking of booze, and Phil turned her away. The Tomlinsons were good people, naïve in their way. I was embarrassed, for myself, for my mother, for the Tomlinsons, that they had to see her like that. Then Mom died of an overdose.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“So I do know something of what you’ve been living with. I should have come to help you much, much sooner. Maybe I should have continued to help after Jesse and I—” She stopped short. “I should have talked to you before stepping back. But you didn’t want me there.”
“It wasn’t your problem.”
“I should have made it my problem.”
Hannah looked back across the river, to Alex and the pictograph on the cliff face above him. “You and Dad never got back together, after Mom’s death, I mean?”
“Oh, no. How could we after that?”
“Do you regret…” Hannah hesitated as she thought how best to ask. Did Gina regret ending her relationship with her father? If Gina wanted children, had she ever wished to take Hannah and Bran on, as her own?
She glanced up to meet Gina’s keen hazel eyes, a hand-me-down from some white ancestor. This woman who might have been like a mother to her if circumstances, if Gina’s choices and her father’s, had been different. Gina said, at last, “You look so very much like your mother, like Elaine did when we were all young.” She put a hand to Hannah’s cheek as if she knew how Hannah might have finished her question, as if her past was visiting her on this late winter day.
— 29 —
Welder’s Flash
GINA LIFTED THE hummingbird feeder from its hook in front of the kitchen window and carried it down the stepladder. The feeder was covered in snow. The Anna’s hummingbird hadn’t been around for weeks. She had watched for it, kept the feeder thawed and fresh, available during the bird’s usual feeding times, but now she had to admit it was gone. Dead. Likely frozen within some tree in the night when temperatures dipped. It would have died alone, huddled under the branches. The thought made Gina weep. She wiped the tears from her face as she carried the feeder to the kitchen door. She had been too emotional in recent weeks, and sleep was hard won. The change coming on, she thought. It had hit her mother early too.
As she reached for the kitchen doorknob, she heard the front door close and saw Grant jog down the deck stairs and cross the snow-covered lawn as he left for work. Avoiding her. He had kept his distance since Hannah’s visit the day before. She assumed Grant had taken Hannah’s appearance as a sign that she had continued to visit the Robertson house either for Jesse or for the kids. She hadn’t bothered to correct him, if that was in fact what was bothering him. He was a man who resorted to cold silences rather than outward rage. His unwillingness to talk things through, to argue, used to bother her. She had once peppered him with questions until he finally opened up to her, revealing the source of the wound he nursed, but in the last few months she had lost energy for it. She realized she no longer cared. Nevertheless she raised a hand to Grant when he glanced back at her as he got in his truck. But he didn’t say goodbye.
Gina crossed the road to the Robertson driveway in the dark, the yard light by the old farmhouse guiding her way. The snow squeaked underfoot and flakes continued to fall, as they had for most of the evening. She loved these winter nights, snowflakes drifting, collecting in the shaft of light from the farmhouse.
Hannah was in the living room. Gina could see her through the window, sitting on that old red couch. Brandon was in the room with her, perched, as she so often saw him now, in a chair in front of the main window. He sat where Elaine had sat, leaning forward, eyes staring straight ahead with a similar intensity, though what he was looking at was anyone’s guess. The river beyond was dark. Only the street lights of the reserve offered light.
As Gina reached the outbuildings, Abby barked once from the machine shed, but then only wagged her tail. The dog knew her. From her house across the road Gina had seen the spray of sparks leap from the shed and out into falling snow. So she knew Jesse was out here working late, as he had since Stew’s death, keeping his distance from the house, from Hannah, from Bran.
Gina waited outside the round metal shed as Jesse finished up his weld. She shielded her eyes to watch the blue and white sparks, and not the brilliant glow at the heart of the weld, fearing welder’s flash. She had nursed Jesse through an episode during Elaine’s illness. He had groaned with the pain and had been all but blind for a day after he’d stupidly worked without his mask. Jesse lifted the shield on his helmet to inspect his work and startled a little when he saw Gina there, waiting in the snow outside the shop. “Gina,” he said.
She stepped inside, brushing the snowflakes from her hair. “I didn’t want to interrupt,” she said.
He took off his helmet and welding gloves, placing them on the workbench beside him. “I was just finishing up for the night.”
“You’ve been working late a lot. A rush job?”
“No, just a bit of fabrication. Stairs and railings for the mill. I’ve been picking up work from them now and again.” He turned off the MIG welder.
“I bet they would hire you back.”
“I suppose. If I wanted the job.” He unbuttoned his leather shirt and turned off the valve on the tank. “So, what brings you here?”
Gina noted the distance in his voice. She had talked to him only once in the last couple of months, for
a few minutes stolen at Stew’s funeral, when she had offered her hand in condolence. There had been others waiting to talk with Jesse, his father’s old friends, farmers from the valley, and she’d had to move on.
“Hannah came by yesterday.”
Jesse shrugged off the leather shirt and hung it on a hook by the door, then took down his coat. “Does Grant know you’re here?”
“She tells me you’re leaving, heading back to the coast.”
“Once I get Bran set up.”
“He’ll need ongoing care. You can’t just house him in some ward or group home and leave.”
“I have a life I left behind, Gina. A business. A house.”
“You have a life you left behind here. Your kids.”
“Hannah is a grown woman. I said I would help her pay for a place while she’s in school. Brandon needs more care than I can give him.” He put on his jacket. “Look, we gave it a shot. Keeping Bran at home is just too much for us. It’s not fair to Hannah either. She should be in college, making a life for herself, not playing nurse to Bran.”
“You’re right, of course.” Gina looked out into the snow. The flakes shining in the shop light like sparks from a welder. Then she turned back to him. “Would it make a difference if I stepped in to help?”
“You made it clear that wasn’t going to happen. Grant made it clear.”
“Would you stay if I did?”
“I don’t know.”
Gina took his hand. “You’re burned,” she said, circling her thumb around the edge of the fresh wound on his finger. There was a bandage on the palm of his hand where he’d suffered another burn, evidently that evening.
“I got lazy,” he said. “Welded without my gloves.”
She kept holding his hand, inspecting, and rubbing a thumb over the many recent and healed burns that covered it. “I’ve missed you,” she said.
He pulled his hand away. “You made your choice.”
“I said we needed to cool it. Things were moving too fast. And you had other things to think about. I haven’t made a choice, Jesse.”
The Spawning Grounds Page 19
