The Sudden Weight of Snow

by Laisha Rosnau

  One night, a few weeks after I had arrived, Gabe left during one of these cross-table conversations and didn’t come back. When people got up to leave, I stood and looked out the window toward the shed. There were no lights on there. I decided to wait in the cookshack.

  Thomas stayed behind with me. He came out of the kitchen, two mugs in hand. I knew his ploy already. “Black, right?” he asked, handing me one. I nodded. Even the small lies stick with you. I took the mug and watched his hands. I had a new fascination with the wrists of men and boys. How fine or coarse the hairs could be there. How, sometimes, I could see the shift of small muscle around bone.

  “Do you know where Gabe went?” I asked.

  “Back to the shed, I’d guess.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, motioning with my chin toward a window from which the shed was visible. “No lights on.” I went to the stove and started poking at the wood, adding a couple more pieces. I was practising my fire-building skills. As I blew and nudged the wood, I could imagine Thomas’s eyes on the curve of my spine, my waist, my butt where it met my heels as I crouched.

  “Have you talked to your mother recently?” he asked.

  I turned, remained on my knees. “Yes. Well, kind of. I told her I didn’t want to come back, that I needed to stay away for a while, but I don’t know … I said some things to her that I probably shouldn’t have and I don’t know how I can talk around that.” I stood up.

  “Have you tried talking through it?”

  “Yes, a little.” I shifted in front of the fire. “We tried.” I held my palms open behind me to collect warmth.

  “What are you going to do here, Harper?”

  “What do you mean, what am I going to do here? What everyone else does, live. I’ll help out, too. I just don’t know how yet. I’ll garden in the summer, I don’t know, maybe help Gabe fence. Maybe Susan can get me work at the nursery. There’s got to be something I’m good at.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You’re welcome here, Harper. You don’t have to do anything until you’re ready. I just don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

  “Really? What do you think would be the right place for me then?”

  “It’s just not the right place for everyone, that’s all. To be honest, not much happens here. We play music, people do their own thing, every once in a while we put on a play or a craft fair. Not much. There are so many other things you could do. I don’t mind it. I like meeting the people who come and go. I like things simple – good food, good music, good people.”

  “I like things simple too,” I said, heard my own voice pleading.

  Thomas laughed when I said this, then stopped. He put down his coffee mug and cleared his throat, but instead of saying anything, he took one step toward me. I watched as his hand reached for my jaw, felt the tips of his fingers along the outline of it, then trailing down my neck lightly. I felt something tighten. A cord between chest and neck and his fingers, a taut string. Just as quickly, his hand dropped. “You’ll figure things out,” Thomas said, then left the room. I heard him rinse his cup in the kitchen, his footsteps out the back door.

  GABE

  The kid cracked. Gord told your family that they took him into a room and interrogated him like they do people on TV. Hard-nosed, suspicious cops, one-way glass, grey light, and stifling air spotted with dust. Gord tells you he can understand why people buckle, tells you all he’s so sorry. You learn first-hand that there is a wholesale war on drugs and that drugs tear families apart. Peter is taken away for questioning, then arrested. After that, everything changes.

  Anise cries for weeks. Peter asks you from the other side of the glass to be strong, to be there for Anise and the girls, just like a scene from a movie. The girls experience personality reversals of the kind you thought only existed in Anise’s books, the ones you flipped through when they were left open on the kitchen table. The oldest becomes kind and compassionate, wanting to devote all of her free time to nurturing her mother and sisters. The middle one snaps out of years of daydreaming and transforms into her older sister’s former role, stubborn and demanding. The youngest one becomes quiet and withdrawn, and, as much as she was beginning to grate on everyone’s nerves, you all miss her theatrics. You find out from another mom that the girls are being ridiculed at school, that people are calling your father a stoner and a drug lord. She tells you because you are the one who answers the door. Anise is in her room, not able to get out of bed to see anyone. Moms – older women – still like you and this woman tells you how strong you’ve been, asks if you need a hug. If there’s anything you don’t need now, it’s a hug. You thank her politely and close the door behind her when she leaves.

  They don’t fine drug traffickers in California. It makes no sense. Drugs make money, so traffickers could just pay the fines off and go deeper underground. They send them to jail; it is a crime, after all. Your father, it is believed, is being used as an example. He has been sentenced to nine years in a state correctional facility – a phrase you have only heard on TV, read in books. He will be eligible for parole – another one of those phrases – in three years. By that time, you will almost be legally able to drink and to vote.

  Peter and Anise have a lot of friends – theatre people, people for whom Peter has built things, young families, and all the decent, simple-living folk that “the conservatory” supplied. You find out that your father was a good supplier, an honest man. He charged a fair price and never sold to kids, gangs, or other dealers, just to people like himself and Anise. People who simply wanted to relax every once in a while.

  Several of Anise and Peter’s sundry friends drop by in the months after your father’s arrest. They bring care packages for your family – Mason jars of soup, frozen vegetarian lasagnas, squash and zucchini from their gardens, loaves of bread, cookies, and homemade granola bars. Eventually, Anise is able to get out of bed for these visits. She emerges from her room looking like some kind of prophet in billowing pants and long loose tunics and tells her friends that their visits sustain her. You are the one who takes the care packages, puts the food away, makes tea and brings out cookies on plates to pass around. Anise makes a point of telling everyone how she could never make it through this without you. If the girls are home, they glare at you, whine, or launch tantrums.

  All of their friends tell Anise that Peter’s been done wrong and that they’ll do everything in their power to get him out sooner, although none of their friends have a lot of social clout. “They should be concentrating on the real criminals, the guys dealing hard drugs. A little smoke has never hurt anyone,” one of them says.

  Another concurs, “It’s alcohol that kills – with the drunk driving, assaults – you’d think they’d know that by now. They should be thanking Peter, not arresting him.”

  “It’s Reagan and his almighty war on drugs, nothing but misinformation and propaganda. Another instrument of oppression by the right wing.”

  “Well, we know he’s being used as an example. He’ll be out as soon as they find another one.”

  Talk like this can go on for hours, Anise cross-legged on the couch, nodding and dabbing tears from her cheeks. If their friends come over after dinner, they bring bottles of wine and raise glasses to Peter over and over, reassuring themselves that that’s what he would want them to do. No one, thank God, lights up. Even these friends have more tact than that.

  After one of these evenings, Anise scares you in the kitchen. You have been washing the wineglasses in the dark, letting them drip-dry by the sink on a tea towel. When you turn around, she’s standing there, not moving, not making a sound. She looks like an apparition with those white clothes on. You jump at the sight of her and she doesn’t say anything but comes toward you and gives you a hug. Anise rarely hugs you, and when she does, it’s usually when other people are around as if to show how close you all are. This time, she’s hugging you in the dark, not letting go. What follows next is like a scene from another bad television special. You
r life has become surreal, full of awkwardly dramatic moments. Anise sobs softly then tells you how much your support has meant to her, how proud your father would be. As she says this, she strokes your hair and not in a particularly maternal way. She leans back to give you a meaningful look and then draws you in, shifts until she meets your mouth. Anise’s lips are surprisingly soft, her tongue quick. While she kisses you, you think of the magazines, bad porn movies you have watched in the basements of friends’ houses, all of you jerking off together under blankets. You think of Hamlet.

  When you pull away, Anise sobs on your shoulder until your shirt is soaked through. “I’ll get you a drink,” you finally say – this is something Peter would do at a time like this. You pull a bottle down from the cupboard above the fridge and a can of pop from under the sink and make a gin and tonic, feeling suave and adult for doing so.

  “Go ahead, make yourself one too,” Anise says, almost in a whisper. The two of you sit at the kitchen table in the dark, listen to the crickets in the yard and the ice in your glasses until the alcohol melts it away.

  After Thomas left the cookshack, I stayed, waiting for a light to go on in the shed, telling myself I wasn’t looking for it. I kept the fire going, sat with my boots off, feet balanced on an upturned log in front of the stove. I felt desire as certain and sharp as a knife then. Not necessarily for Thomas, not even necessarily for things sexual, but desire like a fine, absolute edge between something, and something else. I thought about Thomas’s hand along the line of my jaw, my neck. That was mine. I knew he meant that gesture to be mine and no one else’s.

  Then I remembered a baby-sitter Nick and I had when I was in the second grade. Her name was Melody – not Melanie but Melody, like a song or something hummed – and I had idolized her. She had hair that was long and layered in a way that if she parted it down the middle, curled each layer into a wave and combed it from her face, it would meet in a perfect line down her scalp to the nape of her neck. This was just one sign of her perfection. Melody smelled like the colour pink – sweet and slightly spicy at once, like bubble gum and cinnamon.

  I had decided that Melody, at thirteen, was the perfect woman, something that I, as a girl who aspired to be a boy, was sure I could never become. How could one aspire to be both? Melody made it easier. She would attempt to curl my lank hair, dab purple eyeshadow on my lids and pink gloss on my lips, then announce to Nick and me that we were going to war. We weren’t allowed to play with toy guns so we made do with our hands, shaped them into pistols or wrapped them around air grenades, and battles would ensue that led the three of us, ducking, diving, and climbing, across every inch of the property. After this, when Nick and I required baths and scrubbing to come clean, Melody needed only her white leather purse. Out of this she would pull her fat Goody comb, sweep her hair back into place and hold it there with a deft shot of Tame hair spray from the same bag. A layer of lip gloss and she was as beautiful as she had ever been.

  I discovered that lip gloss was one of the things that gave Melody her smell. Her purse was full of different kinds of gloss. She had lip gloss shaped like a crayon, one like a chocolate chip cookie that twisted in two, plastic tubes of liquid pearl that were applied with a wand. It was the gloss disguised in a pack of gum that fascinated me. One evening, instead of launching grenades from the ravine, I snuck back into the house, pulled the plastic pack of gum out of her purse and hid in the broom closet. There, I crouched and slid it open to two perfect rectangles of sweet, pink gloss. I don’t know how long I was there, applying thin layers to my lips and licking them off for the taste. I believed I could taste everything to come – a teenage-hood of jeans as tight and pliant as skin, white leather purses, strawberries, and cinnamon. I slipped the gloss back into the purse and waited inside the house, saying I didn’t feel well when Nick and Melody came in red-cheeked and out of breath. I felt like I had stolen something elusive and unnamed. A small part of whatever made Melody perfect. The unattainable. It filled me with the same sense of buoyant peace. A full, clean place inside me that no one else had access to.

  It was nearly midnight when I returned to the shed, turned on the space heater and lit balled newsprint and twigs in the woodstove to start the fire. I got into bed to keep warm and waited. Gabe came in when I was slipping into sleep and he unplugged the heater and added wood to the stove.

  “Where were you?” I mumbled, turning over.

  “Thinking.”

  I opened my eyes, but they hadn’t adjusted to the dark yet. I could hear one boot drop, then the other, the sounds of denim and buttons. “Where, though?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Go back to sleep.” I heard him rub his hands against his skin, then inhale quickly, as though testing cold water. I had begun wearing fewer and fewer clothes to bed, piling on more blankets, collected from around the farm. By this time, I was sleeping naked.

  When he got into bed, I turned to him. “Why do you want me to go back to sleep?” The whites of his eyes were four quarter moons. He was propped up on one shoulder where his skin caught what little light came in the window and shone, looked buttery and thick.

  “I just didn’t want to bother you,” he whispered and dropped onto his back, eyes to the ceiling. He shivered once and I rolled on top of him, wanting my heat to blanket his skin. When I did, I realized Gabe still had his long johns on. I sat up and rolled them over his hips, down his legs, over ankles, then crawled back up slowly, letting my breath settle on his skin. He stared at me, pressed his hands into my hip bones. When I put my head between his chin and collar bone, I could feel something tense there. My will was strong – a drive to keep him open, to warm whatever seized up in him. I moved against Gabe, put my cheek against his, my breath on his ear, didn’t say anything. I breathed lightly there, felt the alchemy of his skin and my breath become heat, and waited.

  When a low sound came from Gabe’s throat and he pulled me to him, I rolled away, then slid up against him, met his chest with my back, his mouth with my neck. I guided his hands to my hips, palms on the bone, fingers pressing into the dip there, moving in. I threw one foot over his ankle, hooked it around his leg, arched my back. Then we moved together, rocked until there was no difference between the rhythm of bodies and breath, no difference between his skin and mine. When he entered me it was simple, something catching, then pushing through, the tug of something held tight unravelling. Things are never as they say. I expected pain, tearing apart. Instead, I felt pain as heat, both liquid and solid at once, and tasted metal in my mouth. It was as though there was something else moving between my legs – a big fish, tail pounding. When it broke the surface, I gasped, threw my head back so it hit Gabe’s collarbone. He bent his head toward me, opened his mouth and I could feel the crest of teeth against my shoulder. Then we both collapsed into the mattress. After that night, sex became a place. A place that was wide open and safe only because it was stolen, held so close.

  I had became a kind of low-level celebrity at Sawmill Creek Secondary. To my admittedly limited knowledge, prior to staying at Pilgrims I had been known as two things: a religious freak and a prude. Two attributes that said Stay far away. Then I became a religious prude turned pagan whore and had cut my hair off to prove it. The Matts, Jasons, and Jeffs who had ignored me in the hall before leered and made low noises in their throats when I walked by. The girls cornered me in the change room to let me know they had seen Gabe in town and thought he was so cute. To ask if there were any more like him out there and if they could come party with us. These were girls who used the word party as a verb. They spoke to me in sugared condescension, their smiles like pats on a puppy’s head.

  Krista was spending more time with Mike and some days I wouldn’t even see her at all between classes. On those days, I felt slightly untethered, but I couldn’t describe the feeling as wholly good or bad. I thought perhaps this was simply how it felt to get older. In the past, we had spent numerous weekends watching corny romantic videos on Krista’s couch, squeezing each other�
��s arms when the young lovers on the screen finally kissed. We thought this desire, this ache we felt, would go away when we were finally with boys and men, kissed in ways we could only imagine. Perhaps, though, joining our bodies to someone else’s just brought that ache closer to the surface.

  I thought that if I could share with Krista the fact that I had slept with Gabe, the new loneliness I felt might be abated. I walked the halls looking for her, then staked out her locker. When she appeared, I asked her what she was doing after school.

  First, Krista simply stared at me, looking almost annoyed, then she said, “I need to work at my mom’s store, why?”

  “I thought maybe we could do something. I could come with you to the mall and we could hang out after you’re off.”

  She paused as though considering it before answering, “Yeah, all right.”

  We went to the food court before she started work and as we plucked french fries from the tray, filled our mouths with them, I told Krista about Gabe and me. While I did, she dipped her fries into the mound of ketchup, moaning and clutching the side of the table.

  “Will you cut that out?” I said.

  “Oh, so sorry, Your I’ve-been-laid-by-Gabeness. It sounds all right, though. It couldn’t have been good, not at first, hey, but trust me, it’ll get better.” Krista was looking around the food court as though distracted, or searching for someone.

  “Actually, I don’t know. It wasn’t bad.”

  “Okay, Harp, if ‘you don’t know’ and ‘it wasn’t bad,’ then it wasn’t great. When it’s great, you’ll know.” She shook her head slowly, still looking away, and scanned the tables.

  “Well, what about your first time?”

  Krista’s gaze snapped back to mine. “My first time, my first time? Shit, you remember that prick Derek Jeffries, no pun intended, just jammed it in me before I knew what was happening – remember, grade nine?”