The back door was open. We went in, set my things down by the kitchen table, then Therese stood in the doorway, an awkward smile tugging at her face. “Well, I know she’ll be glad to have you back, anyway. And, after what you’ve been through, well …” Her words trailed off. She reached for my hair, stroked it, then pulled her hand back as though surprised at her own gesture. “I’m really sorry about Gabe, Harper.”
“I know. Thanks for everything, Mrs. Delaney.”
“That’s ‘Therese’ to you and thanks shmanks. You’re welcome at the Delaney Home for Wayward Girls any time, honey. Next time, just be prepared to pay some rent, eh?” Therese winked and wiggled her French-tipped nails at me, then went out the back door and made her way around the house. I could hear her swearing as she went, imagined her high heels sinking into the uneven, muddy ground.
The house was empty and buzzing with appliances. I looked around, everything familiar and foreign at once. The kitchen was small, orderly, gleaming. It looked like a safe and clean place, no herbs hanging from the ceiling, no footprints etched in ashes tracked from the woodstove. This was a place where one woman and a teenager ate. The fridge door layered in school notices, peanut butter and bread occupying a permanent corner of the counter. An efficient space, the clutter slight. It smelled familiar – of lemon, burnt toast, Vera’s perfume. Weak sunlight strained through clouds and windows, the hum of the fridge. I quickly gulped down milk out of the carton and my head sliced with pain. I was going to leave it empty on the counter but changed my mind and threw it in the trash.
In the bathroom, I leaned over the sink to the mirror to see if I looked different, if I had changed. My hair was growing out oddly, in misshapen chunks. I stripped off my clothes and balanced on the edge of the tub, toes gripping porcelain, hands holding the shower curtain rod, to try to see my entire body. I decided that my breasts were a bit larger, though that may have been wishful thinking. It did seem as though my body had more mass, as though there was more flesh to hold me to my bones. I expected something else, to be marked somehow, the faint traces of a map or a code smudged into my skin.
I left my clothes where I’d removed them, at the side of the tub, and climbed the stairs wrapped in a towel. Photographs of Nick and me at various ages lined the wall going up the staircase, the oldest ones near the base, the most recent ones near the top. The last one is a photo of Vera and me arm in arm outside the church on Christmas Eve. Vera had asked Gabe to take it. She isn’t smiling in the photograph and looks as though she is uncomfortable, wondering when he is going to snap the shot. I am grinning bravely in spite of the cold, my cheeks flushed and my eyes looking straight into the camera. It was Gabe’s face I was trying to look at, not at the hand he waved as he said Say cheese! He was practically a stranger then, just a party and a church service between us. I wondered if, after everything, we’d ever got far beyond that.
I went into my room. The manufactured heat in the closed space felt stifling, so I opened a window wide, hoping to let in the wet scent of the field thawing, mown grass. The snow had melted off the golf course and they had begun cutting the green down. I climbed into my bed and immediately fell asleep.
When I woke, it was getting dark, my door was open and Vera was there, standing beside my bed. I shifted, holding the blankets to my chest, then said simply, “Hi.”
“May I?” Vera asked, motioning to the bed.
“Sure, go ahead,” I answered. She sat down and we were both silent for a moment.
“I knew you were back. I saw your bags at the door,” Vera started, as though I needed an explanation. “And your clothes by the tub.” I just nodded. She reached out, took my hand and held it loosely at first, turning hers around it, then gripped it so tightly it hurt.
I grimaced but didn’t pull away.
“I guess I can’t hold you that tight, hey?” she asked, then sighed and let go of my hand. “I don’t know what I can say to you now, Harper. Are you all right?”
“Gabe’s gone, Mom,” I said quietly.
“I know.” She paused, then said, “I can’t even pretend to imagine what you must be going through.” We sat on the bed in silence for several minutes, then Vera continued. “I know you’ve always thought that when I look at you it’s myself I’m seeing at your age. Maybe I have seen you that way at times, but I’ve never believed that things are that simple. I’ve never tried to make my mistakes be your own. I just hope that you don’t think that you could’ve done something to make things turn out differently for Gabe.”
“I don’t.” I thought for a moment, then said, “He was never really here, you know. I think he thought he could find what he was searching for by coming here, but that didn’t happen, even when I was with him. No matter where Gabe was he was probably always somewhere else.”
“Your father liked to say ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’ Used to bother me so much, him repeating it. There was one night, though, when you were a baby and we were living in the farmhouse, when we were all lying together on a mattress on the floor and he said ‘Wherever I go from now on, here we are.’ He was talking about the three of us, how we’d become a unit. We never thought that would change.”
“Things always do though.”
“Yes, they always do.”
We sat together quietly on my bed. It was completely dark by then.
When my mother told me about her childhood, there were stories of picking wildflowers, pounding dough into bread, walking through the snow to a one-room schoolhouse. A different world than my own. But there were other things she told me about. How difficult it was to grow up with parents from another continent, another culture and time. How she once found herself waking up from an unconscious state on the kitchen floor and didn’t know why. And there was a male neighbour – I don’t know whether he was man or boy – who gripped her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and pulled her towards him. That’s as far as she ever got into that memory before her voice would trail off and she would clear her throat. She would cringe whenever Nick or I grabbed her that way, hand around wrist, and shake us off.
But that was not the event I imagined to be the defining moment of Vera Kostak’s adolescence. It was this: she is at the farm, digging potatoes in the garden in gumboots and hand-me-down work jeans from one of her sisters, hair held back with a kerchief. She hears a car in the dirt yard out front. This is during the time before they have a telephone, a time when people “dropped by.” She hears the voices of young men, her mother saying, “She here somewhere, I call her,” in thickly accented English. Vera runs to the outhouse before anyone sees her and stays there while her mother calls, the boys wait, and eventually the car drives out of the yard, pebbles spun out by the tires. She crouches over the hole in the outhouse for a long time, long after she has heard the vehicle retreat down the dirt road, imagines a cloud of dust rising and then falling, small things flattened under tires. Vera didn’t want to be seen dirt-smeared in a kerchief and gumboots, looking like both a baba and a farmer at once. Because of that, she has lost her chance. Those boys are gone now, gone to wherever they wanted to take her.
I started walking to school again, wary of taking rides with friends and strangers alike. Most days I made it through all of my classes. I took long routes home and walked until I found a kind of comfort in the cadence of my own steps. While I did, I tried to call up memories of my father but he kept turning into just a name. I tried to retrace my mother’s past as a way to connect her to my own. I tried to remember your story, to frame it in a way that would bring part of you back, but it kept slipping back into me.
On one of my walks, I meet Krista at a corner downtown. She balances on the curb like a pro, turns quick pirouettes on the edge of light traffic. We no longer walk to drugstore, library, or mall, seeking instead parks, fields, the edge of the lake. One day while we walk we remember the heat of late summer. We remember flip-flops, jean cut-offs, and bikini tops. We can feel backpacks sticking to the sweat collecting on our backs a
s we imagine ourselves hitchhiking out to the lake, shielding our faces from the sun. We know that by August the lake will no longer be refreshing. The top layers will be hot, pollen clinging to the surface. Below, cool silk. We will lie on the dock, the sun on every part of us. When we jump in, it will be sweet relief. I’ll let myself drop, and open my eyes to the layers of green to blue, until I feel the slick pull of milfoil at my ankles. Then I’ll kick back to the light, split open the surface of the lake with a gasp of air. Krista will turn over as I crawl onto the dock, the wood already hot under my wet hands. I’ll lie on my back and join her in facing the sun, water evaporating on my skin, the dark pools that stain the wood lightening around me.
Needing to understand where we all started, where we came to, I try to trace a route back to a place I once thought I knew, to map my way with words. When you lose something before really knowing it, what is unrecoverable becomes the shape of longing, a story you have to tell yourself. I follow the fingers of several valleys, but all of them round in on themselves again, seeking some kind of centre, the lowest point, a place where things gather.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My sincere thanks to:
The three other Ls who complete the square – Lorne, Lorna, and Lucas – and my huge and hugely supportive extended family. Karen Wall, mentor extraordinaire. Catherine O’Connell. John Lent, without whom.
Nancy Lee, the first person to read this manuscript in its infancy and my constant companion and kind critic throughout. Charlotte Gill, Lee Henderson, and Chris Tenove, whose minds, hearts, and humour will always astound.
Jennica Harper, who so graciously lent me her name. Jason Dewinetz, for reminding me to pay attention to the details. Anastasia Hulsizer, my first American reader. Vanessa Timmer, Michelle Patterson, Khaylish Fraser and Jody Wettig, sources of support, diversion, glee. All those who lurked and laughed in the offices of PRISM international.
Keith Maillard, George McWhirter, and the faculty and students of the University of British Columbia’s M.F.A. program. Residents and staff of Green College 1998-2000, who fed, housed, and entertained me through the first drafts. The faculty, participants, and Scotch drinkers at Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Studio 2001.
My agent and literary godmother, Anne McDermid, for falling in love at first read. And Ellen Seligman, for the insight, endurance, and humour necessary to push the book farther than I thought possible.
Laisha Rosnau was born in Pointe Claire, Quebec, and grew up in Vernon, British Columbia. She has worked as a child-care worker, a landscaper, a waitress, a fruit picker, an interpretive guide, a journalist, and an editor. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she was the Executive Editor of PRISM international. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies in Canada, the United States, and Australia. The Sudden Weight of Snow is her first novel.
Laisha Rosnau lives in Vancouver, where she is at work on a collection of poetry and on her second novel.
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