‘I was just asking your son...’
‘It’s our dog,’ she said quickly, sounding more abrupt than she meant to. ‘Bob, get over here.’ She turned to Jamie. ‘We have to go or we’ll be late for the bus. Go inside and get your things. Take Bob with you.’
He did as she asked, though he looked at her curiously, sensing tensions he didn’t understand. When he was gone, Susan and Michael Somers faced each other in awkward silence. She felt both appalled at her own manner, and at the same time eager for him to leave.
He stared at her, his expression unreadable, and before she could say anything else he turned and headed back through the trees. She hesitated and belatedly called out.
‘Thanks for bringing Bob over.’ He didn’t respond and as he vanished into the woods she wasn’t even sure if he’d heard her. ‘Damn,’ she said quietly. ‘Nice work, Susan.’
***
Snow was settling on the road that led into town. A solitary pair of tire tracks in the oncoming lane was evidence that this was a country road, little used except by people whose properties were accessed by it or by logging trucks heading up into the forest. Jamie hugged his bag to his chest, looking out of the window at the falling snow. His gaze was distant, and he was absorbed in whatever thoughts were going through his head. Susan wondered, as she often did, what they were.
At the stop in town the school bus was waiting, chugging soft clouds of exhaust fumes into the cold air.
‘Don’t forget what day it is,’ she said as Jamie got out. ‘I’ll pick you up at twelve, okay?’
She leaned over to kiss his cheek but he avoided her. She watched him walk over to the bus, where some other kids about his own age were milling around at the doorway, jostling with one another to get on. Jamie hung back from them and waited until the way was clear before he climbed on board. She imagined him walking up the aisle to find a seat by himself somewhere. All the kids would be noisily talking over each other, arguing about a hockey game or something on TV, and Jamie would sit by the window tracing patterns on the glass with his finger.
She waited until the bus moved off before driving to her office across from the diner on Main Street. Depending on her mood, when she arrived each day she either found the town to be instantly depressing or comfortingly familiar. The fact that it was small, and that she knew just about everyone who lived there, struck her as a good thing on some days. On other days it drove her crazy and she dreamed of being anonymous in the flow of a city.
Occasionally, over the past year or so, she’d thought about moving away, thinking it might be good for both her and Jamie. Sometimes, when she was taken with an urge to evaluate her life, she made lists on a sheet of paper; everything positive down one side, the negative down the other. It was supposed to be a technique for figuring things out logically. If the negative side was disproportionately long then you had a problem, but at least you could see it there in black and white, which provided a focus. She didn’t know what conclusion a person should reach if the result was the other way around, but she supposed it probably never happened that way.
Her columns always came out evenly balanced. There was nothing startlingly bad about her life that gave her a compelling urge to change, but still she felt an undercurrent of discontent.
She pulled up outside her office, with its sign painted over the window that read Little River Realty, and switched off the engine. She paused for a moment to look along Main Street. Most things could be bought in town; there was a drug store, some clothing stores, a grocery store, banks and all the usual small businesses. The Valley Hotel was about the only place that served a decent meal, or there was a bar called Clancy’s that served food, but it was mostly just stuff that could be heated in a microwave.
Richard Wells from the bank came by and saw her sitting in her car. He paused, then came and tapped on her window. ‘Everything okay there, Susan?’
She came to, belatedly aware that she’d been daydreaming, and wound down the window. ‘Fine, Richard. I was miles away.’
He smiled. He was a friendly guy in his fifties with a wife and three kids. He looked up at the sky. ‘Think this is going to get any worse?’
The weather was a constant topic of conversation in winter, though around Little River they missed the worst of it. They were in a protected valley at the edge of the Columbia Mountains. This winter had been mild compared to others she’d seen in the time she’d lived there, but there had been some heavy snowfalls already that month and more were expected.
‘The weather report said there was a front coming in,’ she said.
‘Is that right?’ Richard stamped his feet. ‘In that case I’ll stay in my office today.’ They chatted for a minute then he checked his watch and said he had to be going. ‘Bye now.’ He raised his hand and carried on, snowflakes settling on his shoulders.
Susan unlocked her office. Things were quiet this time of year, and she wasn’t expecting to be busy. She planned to make some calls to people who she knew were thinking of selling their houses. The morning passed quickly, and at eleven-thirty she hung a sign on the door to let people know she could be reached on her cell. Outside, the snow had stopped falling, but it felt colder, the breeze cutting to the bone. She scraped snow from her windscreen and drove to William’s Lake, where she picked Jamie up from school. He was waiting for her inside the entrance hall, and when she pulled up he came out and climbed sullenly into the passenger seat. He hated these trips.
Before heading out toward the highway she turned back towards Little River. On the edge of town she stopped outside the church and reached behind for the flowers she’d bought earlier.
‘Jamie, are you coming?’
She might as well have been talking to herself. He continued looking out of the window as if he hadn’t heard her. For a second she was angry but it passed. The frustration got to her sometimes but getting upset was pointless. She had been down that road before. She had been down every road. With a resigned sigh she climbed out and walked back through the snow.
The headstone was a simple granite marker, recording David’s name and the dates of his birth and death carved into it. Underneath it read, ‘Beloved Husband and Father’. She often thought the words were inadequate, but at the time she hadn’t known what else to put. David was thirty-six years old when he was killed in a hunting accident, something that happened regularly if not in epidemic numbers throughout the country. Just a moment’s carelessness and the man she had loved for eleven years was dead. There was a period afterwards when she’d felt bitter that he could have let it happen, and left her all alone to deal with the aftermath. It hadn’t lasted but sometimes she still felt a lingering trace of it. She looked back towards her car where Jamie was still determinedly looking the other way.
She remembered the morning she’d waved from the window as they left. Jamie had been alone to witness his father’s blood leaking away into the ground, his life ebbing with it into the forest floor. It wasn’t clear exactly what had happened, and since Jamie hadn’t spoken a word since, it remained mostly conjecture. It seemed as though David simply tripped and somehow or other the gun went off. The bullet hit him in the chest. When Jamie was brought home he was soaked in his father’s blood. The sheer volume of it was deeply shocking. The memory of him, red from head to foot, still came back to her sometimes at night and numbed her with horror.
Tears welled in her eyes. She wiped them away and took a breath, blinking up at the sky. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, but she missed David with a deep physical ache. At night she sometimes hugged a pillow to help her sleep, forming a picture of his face to carry her through her dreams.
Overhead the cloud was clearing, showing brief glimpses of blue sky. The ground around the church was covered with a few inches of white snow, the forest beyond a green canopy of spruce that in summer was broken up with patches of dazzling willow. Right now it appeared dark. The landscape was vast and empty, emphasized by the bare, glacial slopes above the tree line, high in
the mountains. She wanted to put David behind her now and she knew she ought to, but with Jamie it was difficult. Perhaps she ought to make a new start somewhere else, perhaps Seattle or even move south to California. It might be the best thing for both of them.
As she turned and started back toward her Ford, a vehicle came along the road from the direction of town, and as it got closer she saw the Little River PD logo. It pulled over and the local police chief, who everybody knew as Coop, rolled the window down. The police lights on top of the roof had a cap of frozen snow.
‘Going to Spokane today?’ He looked over at Jamie and raised a hand, but got no response.
Susan frowned. She hated the way Jamie simply blanked anything out he didn’t want to know about. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said. ‘You know how he is on these days.’
Coop looked unconcerned. ‘He’ll come around. Listen, how about when you get back I take you both out for supper at the hotel? What do you say? I bet Jamie’d like that.’
She doubted that somehow. Not for the first time it struck her that Coop seemed immune to the way Jamie treated him. It bordered on outright hostility at times, but he didn’t seem to mind. A lot of people would have given up long ago. She tried to remember at what point her relationship with Coop had altered, when exactly he became more than simply David’s friend looking out for his widow and young son. She couldn’t get a fix on it and wasn’t even sure what their relationship was. It had been on her mind lately. Some kind of understanding seemed to have developed between them without her really being aware of it. She wondered if that was possible, or had she been aware all along and just lacked the energy or the will to acknowledge it? For now she cried off his invitation claiming she would be tired, which was true enough.
‘Okay,’ he said easily. ‘How about just you and I have dinner on Saturday?’
‘I don’t know, Coop ...’ She didn’t know what to say or even why she was backing off. It just seemed like things had drifted beyond her control and she needed some space to think.
‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘Saturday at eight, okay?’
Susan relented. She could think of no good reason to turn him down, and if she did he’d be hurt, and she didn’t want that. She didn’t know what she would have done without him in those early days so she smiled and said eight would be fine.
‘Okay, see you then.’ He raised a hand to Jamie as he left and told her to drive carefully on the way home. ‘It’ll freeze up later,’ he warned.
She waved and got back in her Ford where Jamie sat with his shoulders hunched, turned away from her. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ she told him, but he just looked out of the window as if he hadn’t heard.
***
Daniel Carey was a child psychologist Jamie had been referred to by Doctor Patterson in Little River.
The therapy had been going on for more than a year now, though it was closer to eighteen months since the accident. That morning, when Susan last saw David alive, Jamie looked back at her and waved, yelling that they’d bring home a deer. It was the last time she could remember hearing his voice. She had dreams occasionally where he spoke to her again, but though she could see his lips move, the words were unintelligible. She would wake distressed and try to recall exactly how his voice sounded, and each time it seemed her recollection was less clear.
It was shock, everybody told her initially. They said it would wear off and she’d tried to believe it. For the first few weeks she was a mess herself, dazed from loss and prescription tranquillizers, but one morning as they sat at the table, the two of them like zombies, she went upstairs and flushed the rest of her medication down the toilet. After that she put her own feelings aside. She told herself there would be time for grieving later, and since then Jamie had been her first concern.
Over time he started to come out of himself. He started to smile again and life resumed an almost normal rhythm, except that Jamie still wouldn’t speak. There were other things too; he didn’t hang out with kids he knew from school, and never acknowledged the pictures of David she placed around the house or referred to his dad in any way. That was when she decided to bring him to see a psychologist, though she was unsure about what good it had done.
When they arrived she left Jamie in the waiting room. Dan Carey perched on the edge of his desk, reviewing Jamie’s file.
‘So, tell me how he’s been.’
‘The same. He’s out there now staring into space as if nothing exists.’
During the drive to Spokane, Jamie’s behavior had followed a familiar pattern. She could almost feel him retreating inside himself. He flicked radio stations a few times, changing channels without apparent reason, rhythmically kicking his heels against the seat bottom.
She knew what to expect when they got home. Often he was difficult, angry with her. Sometimes he broke things. The last time it had been a Florentine vase he knew she treasured, another time he spilled hot coffee over her.
‘He doesn’t want to come here and he blames me,’ she said.
‘So how do you feel about that?’
She gave him a wan smile. How did he think she felt? Hurt, unsure she was doing the right thing. Sometimes his anger even scared her a little.
‘It’s not that I’m afraid for myself,’ she explained. ‘It’s just I’m worried he’ll start to hate me.’
Carey nodded his understanding. ‘But this only ever lasts for a few days?’
‘Until the next time.’
He put down the file and came and sat in the chair beside her. ‘You know why he’s doing this don’t you?’
‘Because he doesn’t want to come here.’
‘Yes, but why? It’s the underlying reason you need to think about. He doesn’t want to confront what happened. The same reason he’s refusing to speak. It’s a form of denial. My guess is Jamie has blocked out the day of the accident. He wants to pretend it never happened.’
She’d heard this before and it made partial sense, but what she couldn’t understand was why Jamie acted like he never had a father. Why was he oblivious to his pictures?
‘It’s as if David never existed,’ she said. “But they were so close. They hung out all the time.”
‘We won’t know that until he starts to talk again. Maybe it’s part of the denial. Maybe he’s angry with his father.’
‘Angry? Why?’
‘Because his dad left him, or maybe it has something to do with the accident that we don’t know about. It’s impossible to say. How is he with other people?’
‘Most of the time he’s okay. I mean in as much as he is with anyone.’
Carey paused a moment. ‘How about with your friends? Is there anyone who comes to the house for instance?’
She saw what he was getting at and thought of Coop. ‘There’s a guy who was a friend of David’s, he’s the local cop. He comes around now and then. Jamie doesn’t like it. He does his best to ignore him.’
‘How do you think Jamie sees this guy?’
‘I don’t know. He’s just a friend.’
‘But Jamie’s attitude has changed toward him since his dad died, right?’
‘I guess,’ Susan said. She thought back, trying to recall when it started happening. It hadn’t been right away, maybe a month or so after the accident when Coop started showing up at the house unexpectedly to make sure they were okay. Sometimes he’d stay for supper.
‘Jamie’s probably afraid this guy is going to take his dad’s place. It’s a conflict he can’t deal with so he does his best to put him off.’
‘But it isn’t like that,’ Susan said quickly.
‘Maybe that’s not how Jamie sees it. It’s his perception we’re talking about here.’
There was a short silence. ‘Look, the way I see it you have two options at the moment,’ Carey told her. ‘Jamie hasn’t made any outward progress since you started bringing him here, am I right?’
‘In some ways he gets worse, like the way he is now.’ She pictured him in the waitin
g room, his gaze vacant.
‘Okay, here’s what I think,’ Carey said. ‘You can keep coming here and hope that one of these days Jamie will start to trust me, or else you can give it a break for a while and take the pressure off him.’
‘If I take the second option, what do you think will happen?’
‘Maybe nothing. But to be honest I don’t think a break is going to hurt right now. Jamie’s stubborn and he’s a bright kid. All he ever does is stare at the wall when he’s here. He knows what’s going on and he’s just decided he doesn’t want to play ball. He could do that forever.’
It was the last thing Susan wanted to hear. It was her greatest fear that Jamie would never speak again, that he’d gradually withdraw from the real world and sink ever further into himself.
Carey guessed what she was thinking. ‘I don’t think it’s going to come to that. I think he’ll find a way to deal with this in his own way. Take him home and tell him he doesn’t have to come here anymore and let’s see what happens. Try to treat him as normally as possible and don’t make allowances for him. You’re still not letting him sign?’
She shook her head. At one time she’d thought she ought to consider having him taught sign language, but Doctor Carey had advised her not to. It would just make it too easy for him he said.
‘Let’s give it three months and call me if you need to. And another thing, don’t let him stop you from seeing anybody. That’s not going to help him in the long run.’
She was surprised and started to say again that it wasn’t like that with Coop, but she stopped herself, uncertain if it was true.
Outside, Jamie sat in a chair gazing into space, but when Carey crouched down and said goodbye there was a flicker of puzzled response in Jamie’s expression.
‘Doctor Carey says you don’t have to come here anymore,’ Susan explained.
She held out her hand and hesitantly he took it, watching her carefully as if this was some kind of trick.
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