Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Stephanie rolls her eyes. Her mother being hilarious – since when? She’s seen only the barest glimpse. Her mother’s face flushed with wine, her twitchy frame uncharacteristically slumped on the basement sofa, and out of nowhere a story about her inexplicable parents and their storybook old European ways. How Stephanie’s grandmother stuffed bread in her pockets if she walked in the woods, to protect herself from the mullo – ill-intentioned ghosts and little people. Or how at ten, Ella, febrile and nauseated, was led out into the bush to shake a young tree. Shake, shake! Stephanie’s grandfather instructed his wilting child. Fevers like movement. It will go to the tree. But the quivering sapling did not get hot and sweaty, nor she any cooler. Still, when she vomited on its roots, Stephanie’s grandfather clapped his hands. There, it is done. It is good. Caught up in the reminiscence, her mother took another gulp of wine, giggled. I did feel better. I hated him for that. When her grandfather died, her grandmother packed his nostrils with wax so bad spirits couldn’t enter his body. She tucked screwdrivers and hairbrushes, warm socks and sugar cubes into his casket, despite the funeral director’s alarm and her mother’s adolescent humiliation. As she told these rare stories, Stephanie’s mother’s laugh became wet-eyed and was followed by a stretch of quiet.

  Now the mayor’s eyes are similarly wet-rimmed. Stephanie squints and can see that those eyes were pretty once, likely her best feature.

  “You know – and this is embarrassing to admit – I always thought your mother would turf me as a friend, because I was such a loser when we met. Fat. Struggling with being a mom. Married to an angry man.” The mayor turns in her seat. The red wine has made crumbs of her lipstick; they cling to her lower lip, the corners of her mouth. “As it turns out, your mother turfed me when I became more of a winner. I didn’t see that coming.”

  The idea of her mother coming home to find them both warm-cheeked and talking loudly begins to both alarm and amuse Stephanie.

  “And it’s not like she ever said, ‘I’m done with our friendship,’ ” the mayor continues. “She just sort of phased me out. Gradually. The way grocery stores get rid of an underperforming brand you rely on. Less shelf space every week. And then – whammo! It just disappears. As if it was never there.”

  Stephanie reaches for more wine and tops up the mayor’s glass after her own. If I am totally fucked up, she decides, I can’t be accused of betraying my mom.

  “You know, I racked my brain for months. What had I done? I went over entire conversations, how much I’d spent on birthday gifts, how quickly I responded to answering machine messages, whether I’d been too friendly with your dad. I left her messages apologizing for whatever it was. Nothing.” The mayor’s voice cracks. She pulls back into her chair.

  My mom broke the mayor’s heart, Stephanie realizes, surprised. “It’s getting hot out here. Let’s wait inside,” she says aloud. Late afternoon sun has chased shade from the patio.

  The mayor gets up, holding her wineglass, opens the patio doors, and heads to the kitchen’s breakfast nook. She slides into a banquette seat and perches there awkwardly. The seats are unforgiving – Stephanie hates the way they make her even more conscious of her curves – and she wants to tell the mayor how her mother insisted on building the painful seats into the tight space so they are practical only for an ectomorph who wears size three jeans and has a tight coil of muscle for a bum. Like her mother. This would make the mayor laugh, possibly lighten the mood. But the thought of acting like besties with a woman her mother’s age feels pathetic to Stephanie. Even in her increasing tipsiness, she doesn’t want to feel pathetic. She takes the tray to the kitchen counter.

  Peg sips and clock-watches, sips and clock-watches. It’s only a few minutes later that her glass is empty again. “That’s one long appointment,” she says.

  The second bottle has only an eighth of its liquid remaining. Stephanie empties the last of it down the drain and then slips both bottles into the recycling bin under the sink so they won’t be the first thing her mother sees on their return. “We’re all out of wine,” she announces. “Can I make you some coffee?”

  Her nod to sobriety has come too late. The mayor is suddenly holding up her head with the heels of her palms and sobbing. Her shoulders graze the ends of her near-purple hair, sending little tremors up to its roots. And Stephanie is very, very sure she is up shit creek for aiding and abetting this outburst of emotion. She fetches a box of Kleenex and slides back into the banquette across from the mayor, reaching across the table and rubbing the mayor’s arm and nudging the tissues towards her at the same time. She feels dangerously grown up in this act of comfort.

  “Can I ask you something? If you’re not still friends with my mother, if she hasn’t been good to you, then why are you here?”

  The mayor tries to gain control of her breathing and raises her head. Her eyes look wasp-bitten, as if they could disappear into the wet, swollen skin. Stephanie pulls a tissue from the box and offers it directly, hovering within an inch of the mayor’s nose. After an unembarrassed honk that makes the Kleenex sag, the mayor clears her throat.

  “It’s my son,” she says with a waver. “I’m pretty sure the ass-clown has got himself into trouble. Serious trouble … it’s complicated. Your brother may know something. Maybe he even said something to your parents.”

  The mayor starts to cry again, but this time in little whimpers. Stephanie drops her hands to her lap. It’s as if relief has cut the strings holding up her shoulders; all her weight collapses inwards. She wants to cry too. That scratch on Las’s neck – she’s only entertained one possibility. Now she sees what she has missed: Gordo, the verging-on-psychotic creeper, had been there. And if this was true, Las likely intervened, pulling Gordo away from the girl who’d meant her nails for him. Las’s foot another casualty of that struggle. Stephanie feels seismic with gratitude. She lets out a laugh.

  The mayor looks startled, girding for insult.

  “I was worried my brother did it,” says Stephanie.

  She will see in retrospect that this is when the wine and relief from the weeks of strain get ahead of her. She tells the mayor about gathering evidence: the pictures of the girl’s injuries, the girl’s broken fingernails, the scratch on her brother’s neck, the black baseball cap and camouflage kerchief that reeked of gas, the inexplicable foot injury. And how she convinced herself it was him. Because added together, the facts and artifacts sorted themselves into a story that was hard to ignore. More so if you’re a little sister, always in the shadow of your brother’s triple threat of good looks, athletic talent, and uncanny luck. Wouldn’t you be more likely to let your imagination go there, ignoring that facts and reason point to Gordo, who everybody knows is sketchy? “No disrespect,” Stephanie says to the mayor a few times.

  Suddenly the mayor is up, pouring the freshly made coffee, bringing milk and sugar to the table, and rubbing Stephanie’s forearm, encouraging her to slow down and continue. Stephanie trusts that the disclosures of the preceding two hours – the mayor’s vulnerability, the revelations about Stephanie’s mother, the shared wine – have put them on the same team. And Stephanie has a hunger for disclosure. What is it about wine that makes the background story seem so important, urgent even? So much of your life, your actions, your privacy becomes that necessary context. She tells the mayor everything, starting with Nate in biology class and then Nate in the dairy bar, and finally the weeks of meeting Nate in the tobacco fields, coming home with sand in her bra and panties, still rosy from the prickle of his cheek stubble. Because it’s as awful being alone with doubt as it is with happiness, isn’t it? Having to swallow everything you know into a tight bloat inside you.

  The mayor’s tears dry as Stephanie speaks. Her eyes reassert themselves in the swell of skin, she withdraws her elbows from the table, sinks her back into the thin banquette pillows, and folds her arms across her waist. Stephanie’s head is furry from the wine, and by the time she has revealed everything to the mayor, she is the one who is crying,
and it feels good. It feels as if she could spend the rest of her life crying.

  The sound of a car whooshing into the vacuum seal of the garage, followed by a slamming door, interrupts them. The mayor speaks to her in a soothing, motherly tone. “Perhaps it’s better if they don’t come in to this scene.”

  Stephanie pats under her eyes with a tissue; it comes away stained with mascara and foundation. She takes her coffee into her bedroom.

  Peg rinses her coffee mug and straightens her clothes. Two hours earlier she arrived with a vague design of unloading her woes, asking for sympathy, crying in her friend’s arms about her failures as a mother and a mayor. She was almost looking forward to it, throwing up the white flag to Ella Bain, grovelling even. Yup, still a loser after all these years, Ella. Rescue me. Please. Now she has another, more satisfying option.

  Ella looks wan, uncharacteristically unkempt as she enters her kitchen and throws down her car keys. She starts at the sight of her old friend leaning against the counter.

  “Peg, what are you doing here?” Her tone is cold.

  Peg matches it with mayoral officiousness. “I’ve come to talk to Mitch. It’s important business. I was hoping he’d come back with you.” There’s something spacey and distracted about Ella that almost makes her feel bad.

  “No. No. I don’t know where he is, quite frankly.”

  Peg’s head throbs from too much wine in the afternoon. She wishes middle-aged memory were less like a purse with a torn bottom seam. She needs to hurry home, write down what she remembers from the conversation with Stephanie, details that insure her against future inference that Ella’s son is less culpable, less rotten than hers. “Well, I’m sorry to bother you, then. Please tell him it is urgent.”

  Peg takes a step as if to leave and Ella stiffens. “Is there something I can do? Can I tell Mitch the nature of your business with him?”

  She wants to know, Peg thinks. And it’s going to nettle her, keep her up at night, that she couldn’t wring the information from me. “I think I will need to talk with him first. It’s up to Mitch what he shares with you.” She smiles at Ella. An almost cruelly professional smile.

  Her former friend moves towards the door. “Well, I’d offer you a drink—”

  Peg puts up her hand. “No need. I’m driving,” she says. “I hope Las gets better soon.” Ella squints, nods her head.

  Peg crosses the threshold and then stops and turns just as the door starts to close on her. “Ella?” The door freezes.

  “Yes, Peg?”

  “Well, I don’t know how to finesse this, so I’m just going to come out and say it. There’s a bit of talk around town – not spare on the details, if you know what I mean – that Stephanie has been seeing a native boy. One of those wild kids from the blockade.”

  Ella’s face blanches. She does not open her mouth.

  “Just thought you should know.”

  Stephanie feels lighter. She feels as airy as she ever has. She hasn’t eaten all day and she can barely remember those days when food was the analgesic that made it all bearable.

  Right now her parents and the mayor will be in her father’s study; they are dealing with the news together. The mayor will report what she knows to Constable Holland. Maybe voices will be raised and then subdued – she has no template for such things. All she hears is quiet.

  Stephanie thinks she might become religious. Not a shrewish Christian – too judgey – but something light-filled and near ecstatic, like a Zen Buddhist or a Zoroastrian. She sits down at her computer, does a search of Zoroastrianism, and bookmarks a few sites for when she has the head for reading. On the computer she sees the folder where she has stored the pictures of the girl from the hospital, and she wonders what she should do. A queer mix of shame and sadness about taking them in the first place weighs on her. She grabs an old memory stick from her drawer, drags the photo file onto it, and places the stick back in the drawer among paper clips, thumbtacks, Post-it Notes, and a crocodile-shaped stapler. Then she permanently deletes the photos from her computer. Her buoyancy returns. Eventually they will want her to join the discussion, but she can wait; she is filled with a largeness of spirit that gives her patience. She looks up the Bahá’í Faith and bookmarks a few websites before going over to her dressing table and considering her reflection in the large oval mirror. The reddened pouchiness from wine and crying distracts from the prettiness of her eyes and hair.

  Beautiful, her mother said just a week ago. Stephanie was passing her in the upstairs hallway between bedrooms, where sun laddered through a skylight, when her mother turned and looked at her in such a way that it made her freeze. You look beautiful, Steph. Absolutely radiant, her mother repeated before disappearing behind a door. That was all. Steph stood there, flushed and incredulous, a whole lifetime of believing her mother found her ugly thrown into question. She ran to the bathroom mirror to be sure. And it was true. Love had brightened her, made her luminous. Her mother had noted it as if unsurprised, as if Stephanie was destined to it all along.

  She pulls open the top drawer and gets to work with concealer, then searches for the right lipstick. Something too glam or too dramatic would be inappropriate, even though it is evening, so she works with her daytime palette, adding the palest pink to her lips. She finishes with a kittenish stroke of eyeliner and leans back to survey the effects in the mirror.

  Her reflection includes a figure standing in the doorway behind her. Stephanie turns to find her mother, arms against her sides, face slick and tight, watching her. She divines the remorse in her mother’s pain and is ready to offer comfort. Stephanie stands, smiles shyly, and opens her arms, moving forward. A good daughter, finally. She hopes she looks as beautiful to her mother as she did a week earlier.

  Her mother windmills a hand from her hips. The slap meets Stephanie’s modestly applied peach blush with a powerful and exacting sting.

  CHAPTER 21

  Mitch suggested a doughnut shop but Peg said, “No. You might need a drink.” He wanted to be somewhere where few would know him. “Then come by the house. I have a nice Scotch.” Peg said no again. “I don’t think I’m welcome there.” Now Mitch sits in the Squeaky Vicar alone. The mid-afternoon light is unkind to the pub’s stained velveteen seats, the beer-embalmed carpet. He takes a gulp of subpar bar Scotch for which he has overpaid. Peg is late. His hand shakes. Twice this week he’s grabbed Ella’s wrists to keep her from flailing at him. “What’s it about, Mitch? What’s it about? Don’t you dare go without me!”

  He doesn’t know. Is he a good man? He has always thought so, mostly. He worked hard for his dad. He has few vices. He loves his wife. He’s cobbled together some material comforts for his family. The worst thing he’s done, as far as he can figure, is take a risk on a development – with his wife’s money, a second and third mortgage on their house, and investments from a dozen friends whose calls are increasingly prickly. On paper it was a sure thing. Everything was right about it: timing, demographics, the exurban shift, land prices. There are so few things in life that happen in ways better than expected.

  He didn’t anticipate how much worse it could become. The blockade. His wife newly shrill and unpredictable. Las with his meat-grinder foot. And now this news about Stephanie, once his little cherub with a doll’s face and a lightness about her that was nearly confectionary. Even when adolescence freighted her with sadness, he became used to that, found it navigable. This new Stephanie – fiercely pretty and betraying them all – makes a rubble of his certainty. For an hour last night he paced outside her closed bedroom door, waiting for her to stop crying so he could ask why. Of all the available boys, why choose one so intimately attached to the family’s despair? When she finally went quiet, he gave her a few more minutes before he turned the knob. The room was empty. The window was open. She was gone, this daughter who suddenly needed to run away from the burden of having everything. Mitch didn’t tell Ella; her cold fury was being vented on cleaning the refrigerator. But he stayed awake most of
the night waiting for the sound of Stephanie sneaking through the patio doors.

  “Thank you for coming.” Peg stands by the booth, waits for an invitation to sit. When she was his wife’s friend, there was a jokey ease between them. How’d Ella end up with someone almost as fat as me? she’d ask, poking her elbow into the give of his waist. There’s no room for levity now; too much has happened since.

  Peg slides into the booth, waves to Will Jacobs to send another round. Mitch has always liked that she’s a Scotch drinker. She puts her hands on the table. Her posture is upright.

  “Why are we here, Peg?”

  She exhales, a long leak of air that is sharp and mouldy. Drinker’s breath, thinks Mitch. The Scotch arrives. She lifts her glass, nods for a toast, and takes a large swallow. Then she speaks.

  Mitch listens, and as Peg is bluntly describing the assault of a native girl, he’s unzippered by thirst. He lifts two fingers to the barman. “Have you got anything better than this Scotch? Give me your best. Doubles.”

  For the first time in years, an image pops into his head of his son as a small child, a toddler with a beatific face – the first of his angels, all golden curls and roundness. His eyes were the colour of a cloudless June. He was the most kinetic child, a boy who redeemed Mitch’s disappointing genetic contribution to physique and motor skills.

  “I’ve got good reason to believe that Gord and Las were behind the stolen and burned cop car, Mitch. But I’m not touching it. Right now they’re looking for two native kids. I’m not going to implicate my boy or yours.”

  She’s all business. Mitch feels at a disadvantage. Peg has more information and has had time to think, to work things out. His head is reeling and she’s already grabbed control. He’s beginning to despise her.

  “What they may or may not have done to the girl is another matter.”