You feel the back of the truck fan out behind you, the flick of a fish’s tail. You use this analogy to reel it back into your line of control. Control is what you want now. Exactitude. You turn around on one of the pullouts. A crescent of gravel drops into nothing, the valley below. Your mind clears as you calculate exactly how close you can get the tires to the brink without meeting air. If there were someone in the passenger seat, she would probably be screaming by now about how near you are to the edge. Your calculated turn is swift and certain. You gear up again as you move the truck back down the mountain. Second, third, fourth, then fifth. The space between, that slice of time when feet pass each other on the upward and downward motions of clutch and gas, is expansive and crystalline, even in that briefest of moments. Or, perhaps, because the moment is so brief.
It is a rare clear day in the valley. Most days, clouds lie like soup, obliterating even the notion that sky might exist above them. On this day, though, even the people in the valley below will be able to see straight up. Will be able to glimpse the top of the mountain that you drive the truck down. The road you navigate is not quite a ribbon or a snake from below, the corners too sharp for things that smooth. It is more like a zigzag. A child’s drawing of a zipper. Yet from where you are, even the sharpest corners have some degree of roundness. You trace the road with your eyes like you might the image of a woman. Your sight becomes more than one sense. Becomes something that can taste and feel things. You take in the curve of the sides, the conviction of the centre line, the solidity of asphalt.
Just when you think you can taste it, when it is about to fill your mouth and become something you can swallow, you leave the road. You leave the road, taking the truck with you. You leave the road at such a speed that you are able to experience what nothing but air under tires feels like. You are able to experience what falling feels like. Able to experience certainty so clear and absolute, it is blinding.
The moment I find out, something divides in me. It’s as though, in discovering that I never really knew you, I realize that I can never know myself. And so part of me splits off, becomes a stranger. With the other part I try to keep myself together, try to stitch things into place, as though I can create some kind of fabric, a context.
It was Thomas who told me. Near the end of French class, the school counsellor, Mr. Robinson, knocked on the door and spoke in a low voice to my teacher, then called me out. I couldn’t figure out what Thomas was doing in the hall, looking from me to his fingernails, then down the row of lockers. I noticed small things then, tiny things – a rogue piece of Thomas’s hair twisting up, the tip pricked with fluorescent light, Mr. Robinson’s gaping pores.
“What’s going on?” I asked, looking from one to the other.
Mr. Robinson drew in his breath, then said, “Mr. Steele has something to talk to you about.” He exhaled, then reached out his hand as though he were going to place it on my shoulder. It seemed to come at me very slowly and I was able to see the coarse hair that pushed out of his knuckles. I looked away and winced at his touch. He let his arm drop and said, “I’ll let your teachers know that you’ve had to leave early today.”
I looked to Thomas but he only offered me a slow nod. “Thomas, what’s going on? Tell me,” I implored.
He looked from me to Mr. Robinson, uncertain, then said, “Harper, let’s get your coat. This isn’t the right place.” I kept my eyes on Thomas and this time when Mr. Robinson reached out to touch me, I wasn’t fast enough to move away. He squeezed my shoulder, then left Thomas and me in the hall.
As we walked to my locker, Thomas pulled at his jacket as though he were hot, or his clothes were constricting, and repeatedly cleared his throat. I looked straight ahead and said nothing. Heat rose from my chest, along my neck, to the top of my head until my scalp seemed barbed with it. I swallowed and tried to breathe deeply but my mouth could take in only short gasps. My hands shook as I dialled my lock combination and it banged against the door. While Thomas waited, I pulled out textbooks and looked at them, trying to figure out if they’d be any use. I felt as though I was about to be taken somewhere I’d never been before, and I had no idea what to bring.
As if reading my thoughts, Thomas said sharply, “You won’t need those today. Just get your coat and let’s go.” His words were like a slap.
I fumbled with my coat then yanked it off the hook, turned to him and said, “Thomas, please, just tell me what’s going on. I know it’s something about Gabe. It’s something about Gabe, isn’t it?”
Instead of answering, Thomas took the coat out of my hands and held it out to me. I looked at him for a moment, wanting to say something, but I saw his red-rimmed eyes, the way the corner of his mouth was twitching slightly, and I took the coat from him, walked towards the door.
Thomas drove to a place where there was a small park propped up on a bank rising from the Salmon River. In the late summer, you could launch the green spiked armour of horse chestnuts from the bench there, watch them bob once on the current and go under.
We got out of the truck, walked to the edge, looked down at the river. “Harper,” Thomas started, stopped, then started again. “Harper, Gabe was found … His truck went off the road. He went off the road on the way down from the mountain.”
I stopped walking and asked, calmly, “Which road?” Then stared down at the water. Dizzy, I put one arm out to a tree, felt the bark rough under my palm. The river was completely thawed, but the snow pack hadn’t melted off the mountains so the current wasn’t strong yet. When Thomas didn’t say anything, I said again, evenly, “Which road, Thomas?” pausing after each word, then, “Which road, damn it! Where is he, Thomas?”
“Harper, he’s –” Thomas started, then turned me to face him and took my hand.
“Please don’t touch me!” I shouted and wrenched my hand away, as if raising my voice could stop me from crying but the tears came anyway. “He’s gone, isn’t he? He’s gone and this is what you’ve come to tell me.” I started to kick at the exposed roots near the top of the cut bank.
“He went off one of the switchbacks,” Thomas said. “He must’ve been going too fast, miscalculated the turn.”
I looked up at Thomas through a blur of tears. “He was a good driver, Thomas,” I choked out. “He just wasn’t used to these roads.”
Thomas took both of my hands in his. “I know, Harper. He was. I know.”
I had been at Krista’s for more than a week. Her home had been a kind of neutral place, a buffer zone between the reality of the farm and the reality of home. After the news about Gabe sank in, I didn’t have the energy to even consider packing the few things I had. The thought of going home exhausted me. Therese phoned my mom and told her what had happened. I stayed back from school for a week, lying either on Krista’s bed or on the couch in the rec room, or wandering aimlessly around the house. When they were home, Krista and her mom did their best to cheer me up.
Susan called me at Krista’s one evening. I was surprised to hear her voice but remembered that I had given the number to Brenda. I thought she would simply tell me when the funeral was going to be held but she asked if we could meet. Though I didn’t feel ready to see her, I agreed.
We met later that afternoon in a café downtown. We greeted each other with small smiles stretched tight across our faces. Susan looked pale and even thinner than usual and sat looking down at her napkin, which she was twisting into a helix. We sat in silence for a moment, then I said, “I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry, Susan.”
She looked up. “I am too, Harper. I am too,” she said, then paused. “I know that you cared for him. I never should have said what I did to you. I had no right. We try to do the best we can to understand a person. I’m not sure I could ever read my son, but I could see you were there for him.”
“I don’t know if I was, Susan.”
Susan looked out the window and continued as though she hadn’t heard me. “I was so young when I had Gabe. We were so young,” she started.
“Peter and I thought we could solve everything, save the world, by coming here before he got drafted. But, aside from knowing that we didn’t believe in war, we didn’t know yet what we wanted, what we were looking for.” She paused and then moved her gaze from the window to me. “Turned out we wanted different things and when the war ended, and Peter wanted to take Gabe back to the States, I thought – well, to be honest, I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that simply by nature of him being my son, I would be able to see him whenever I wanted to, like it would be inevitable. But, neither Peter nor I had a lot of money, California’s a long way away and, God, I hate to say it – I got used to living without him.” When she looked at me then, there were tears in her eyes. “And now –”
I took her hand in mid-sentence and Susan stopped talking. She put her other hand over mine and we sat like that, looking at each other.
After a few minutes, Susan took a breath and said, “I don’t know if the funeral’s going to be here, Harper.”
“What do you mean?”
“Peter’s wife wanted me to ship, to ship the – his – body down.”
“Anise?”
“Yes, Anise. She thinks that Gabe should be buried down there, in California. I’m just so tired. He’s my son. I didn’t want to have to fight over his body.”
I suddenly hated those people, his family in California whom I had never met.
Susan looked out the window. “They say that there was no ice on the road, no packed snow. It was clear and dry. Clear and dry.” She pulled more napkins from the holder and unfolded them, smoothed them flat in front of her. “No skid marks, none, but that could mean anything. I don’t even know what he was doing on that road.”
“He was probably just going for a drive to sort things out. He was driving too fast, that’s all.”
She steadied her voice, hardened it. “There are no guardrails on that turn, you know, knocked off in some other accident, that one not fatal,” her voice caught like skin on a nail. “They haven’t replaced them.” She started to tear the napkins into small pieces. “Thomas knows roads, he’s been on every goddamn road in this province. He says it’s sheer luck that this didn’t happen sooner.”
I had been told often enough that there were no accidents, no coincidences. At the farm, people mouthed things about the universe, karma, cause and effect. For the people at the Free Church, it was the hand of God. As a child, I thought the hand of God was just that – a giant hand descending from Heaven, moving things, picking people up, putting them down. I saw that hand on the way down from the hill, saw the thumb meet the forefinger in an O and flick Gabe’s truck off the switchback.
Susan was bordering the pile of napkin bits with the sides of her hands, creating edges. She looked at the pile with her head to one side, then at me. “I’m flying to California on Monday,” then paused as if to gauge my reaction. I just looked back and nodded. “We agreed that the funeral would be on Tuesday. This wasn’t really his home. Maybe he should go back.”
When she joins the Friends of Christ Free Church, my mother doesn’t know if she’ll stay. She wants something for the kids, a place where they can feel as though they belong. She has taken them away from everything they have ever known – their father, their house, their family, their province. She has taken them because she had to leave and the three of them are inextricably linked, strangers in the same car of a moving train. They have only each other for now.
She passes by the park one afternoon when a group of women from the church are singing, their voices carried by the river. She is drawn to the women by their voices, and by the circle of children around them. Friends, she thinks. She has never wanted to isolate herself or her kids. When she finds out that the women are, in fact, part of a group with Friends in the name, she takes this as a sign.
After a couple of Sundays, she tells some of the women her story. They gather in a circle on the carpet in someone’s living room, and listen while she tells them everything. Or, not everything, but the basics: her father’s death, eloping at eighteen, the drugs and the women who filled their mouths with her new husband in San Francisco, the first child at twenty, second at twenty-two, the isolation in the farmhouse, the move to Edmonton, the fighting. By the time she has finished, the women start to tell their own stories, echo each other’s words, sentiments, experiences. She cries at each retelling, then feels a release throughout her whole body, the kind that only too many tears can bring. The women have gathered around her in a circle, are telling her to lie down, let it all go, surrender to Christ. When she gets up her limbs feel heavy, yet liberated with a strange new light, and she knows that she will stay among them. She hopes her kids will thank her for it someday, for finding them all something that feels like community, but when she looks at them, she realizes she will never know what they are thinking. She watches the furrow in her son’s brow when he concentrates, smells the musky sweetness of her daughter’s hair when she sneaks into her room at night, and she realizes she doesn’t need to know.
Several times, I woke when my mother was doing this, leaning over and smelling my hair. I always pretended I was still asleep. I knew, even then, that those moments, though they had to do with me, were only for her.
I saw Gabe’s hands around the steering wheel, thought of all the times we had driven together. As I did, I could feel the slip of road under us on that night, Christmas Eve, when the truck had lost traction and slid into the bank. The wheels spinning under us, the grind of tire, road, engine.
The day after I talked to Susan, I took Krista’s parents’ Camaro without their knowledge or consent. Mr. Delaney was at his shift at the mill, Therese was sleeping. Krista gave me the keys. Even though the muscle car was an embarrassment to be seen in, it was true that it cornered well, shifted smoothly. The car worked with the precision of something well kept and loved. I thought of how God is in the details, how Gabe and I had differed on this. He believed that it was only beauty that one could find in the details.
When I got to the farm, I pulled into the empty spot where Gabe’s truck should have been, and went into the shed. I stood looking at the bed. The sheets and blankets were a tangled mess, as though Gabe had slept with them coiled around him in ropes. There was a glass of water on the floor, half full, half empty, catching the dim light from the window. I thought of the afternoon in the Catholic Church when I was a child and had asked God for a sign, opened my eyes to a wall of red light. I felt that I had lost my ability to believe in anything I couldn’t touch. I didn’t want to ask for signs any more. Signs can be misinterpreted. So can memories, words, the stories we tell each other.
I started with the bed, pulled blankets and sheets off. I saw in them all the nights we had slept together, heard in them how little we had actually said, and overturned the mattress. I went to the shelves where Gabe’s clothes were piled. As I yanked them off, turned things inside out, his smell seemed to fill the room. I turned toward the table and saw the letter from Anise sitting exactly where I had left it. Not wanting anyone else to find it, I picked it up and went back into the workshop. I kicked at tools on the floor, my breath heaving. I emptied screws and nails from jars and then moved to the drafting table, sweeping the wood and diagrams off it with my arm.
With the letter in my fist, I looked at the thin slices of wood that were on the floor. At one time they were supposed to represent a guitar. They never would, just as I could never put the pieces of this story back together in a way that made sense. I tore up the letter and let the scraps fall around me. It took several matches to keep the torn paper and thin wood lit on the cold, concrete floor. Once it started, I watched the fire, not knowing what I would do next, then it caught the edge of the drafting table. It crawled up one of the table legs. I held my hands above the flames, waiting for them to suck on my fingers.
The door of the shed opened. “Harper,” I heard Thomas say, “I didn’t know whose car was in the –” He started, then he saw the fire and pushed me aside, threw his jacket ag
ainst the table leg and kicked the fire out with his boot. When he turned and looked at me, his face flushed, all I could manage was, “I don’t know what happened.”
“Harper –” he started, reaching for my arm. I pulled away from the possibility of his touch, wrapping my arms around myself instead. Then, though I clenched my jaw, I felt glands opening in the back of my throat, sharp pain behind my eyes. When I realized that I was crying, I dropped to the floor, defeated.
Thomas crouched with me. When he put his hand in the middle of my back, it was as though a huge, balled fist had pounded me there and a sob tore out of me.
I drove the Camaro back to the Delaneys’, and realized when I got out that the tires had tracked new dirt and sand into the carport, marking my passage. Later, neither of Krista’s parents said anything, though they must have known I’d taken the car. Part of me wanted to stay in a place where it seemed nothing was demanded of me, but I knew it was time to go home. It felt at once like a relinquishing and a relief.
Krista helped me pack. When I asked if she could give me a ride home, she said that she’d had her driving privileges revoked for letting me take the car. I tried to apologize but she said, “Between us, no more apologies.”
Therese drove me home. She helped me with my bags when we got there. “We can take them around back,” I said. “My mom usually forgets to lock that door.”
“Pretty naive, eh,” Therese said, picking her way in high heels along the path to the back yard. “Either that or trusting.” The last of the snow had slid off the roof and had melted on the spot, creating a small bog.
“A little bit of both,” I answered.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 27
