face. He was struck by that—that she felt hurt, not fear.
“Your mother,” she said, her voice quieting. “You need to go in. And your father, too. She has something to tell you.” Touching his arm, she got in her car and slowly drove away. He stood there watching her. Fear pumped through his heart. It suffocated his brain and tasted like sulphur in his mouth. He went to the house and could see Addie’s shape through the window. He heard his father call from the shed and then call again but he couldn’t move, couldn’t tear himself from the window, couldn’t leave her.
He went inside. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her coat still on. She beckoned for him to sit, her eyes so fiercely blue they held him to her. She said the cancer was in both breasts. She said they wanted to remove them and launch an aggressive attack with chemo and radiation. It may extend my life by five, ten years and who can think beyond that, she said. He tried to twist away from her but the strength in her eyes held him in place. Hope, Kyle. They’re offering much hope. Others have done well with the same cancer and treatments.
But he was done with hope. It took her babies and Chris and he had no more courage for hope. Hope had failed her too many times. Rather that she had never hoped. Rather that it was just those babies she grieved and not the pain of lost hope as well.
She bore his choked sobs with a bowed head. When he was done she leaned across the table and gripped his hands and spoke softly but firmly. I don’t fear death, it’s taken too much from me. I owe it nothing. But I’ll learn to hate like your father if it takes you from me too. This isn’t the worst thing to happen. Losing him was the worst thing. And knowing it’ll be hard for you is the second worst. The biggest thing you can help me with is taking care of you. I already lost your father; the bottle got him. But you must tend to him while I’m sick. Keep him from me when he’s drunk. There’s nothing sacred about a drunk and I’ll not have my coming days defiled more by his drinking. She rose and held his forehead against her belly that bore him. She stroked the back of his neck and then kissed his nape and removed herself and gathered the cloth off the table. Go get your father now. It’s time for supper.
He wiped his eyes and nose, made his way outside, and stood gazing down the darkening hull of the bay. He walked to the side of the house and sat down, his head thrown back, gazing at the ashy sky, wishing it was dark and there were stars. Chris loved the stars, loved sitting right here and gazing up at them. Proud evening star in thy glory afar—he was always quoting from some poem. Once when Kyle was small and playing outside in drifting snow, Chris came home with a box of Cracker Jacks and led him to this very sheltered spot and they sat with their backs to the house and Chris packed the snow snug around them like a blanket and fed him half the Cracker Jacks. One for Kyle and one for himself. One for Kyle and one for himself. Except for the glazed peanuts. Those he kept and popped into his own mouth. He always remembered that. How good he felt, banked in with snow and his mouth opening like a baby bird’s and Chris feeding him the Cracker Jacks. First time he had knowingly felt love. Before that it had been fed to him daily like bread and he hadn’t noticed. He always loved Cracker Jacks after that; they were his favourite sweet. Oh, Chris. That something like this can be happening with Mother and you not know. He thought of Sylvie and his heart closed in anger. You should be here.
He sat there for another long minute, the hazy light beginning to wane. The light went on in the kitchen, throwing a pale shimmer on the seawater gurgling around the pilings beneath him. He got to his feet and went to the shed for his father.
THREE
He opened the shed door to a smell of damp sawdust. It was darkish inside, his father a phantom-grey sitting hunched on his chopping block. He was filing the steel-toothed chain from his saw laid across his knees. It was always his way to do something while he drank. Justified his time. And he was always sitting in the near dark. Times Kyle got up in the middle of the night for a drink of water and his father would be sitting at the kitchen table with no lights on, staring out the window at the water shifting restlessly around the pilings. Sadness tugging his face. As though the sea had lost its wonder and he was struggling to get it back.
“You have to go in,” said Kyle. “You have to,” he repeated as his father kept his head down, kept his eyes riveted to the slow gentle chafing of steel against steel. Kyle approached him and put his hand over his father’s misshapen knuckle. “You have to go in. She’s waiting.” He stood back as his father heaved up a shoulder, deflecting his words. “You have to go in!” he pleaded from the doorway. “I’m going down Hampden, down to the bar. Tell her, so she don’t make supper for me. You hear me, Dad? You’ll go in now?”
His father nodded and he started up the road. He walked past the gravel flat; Kate’s car wasn’t there, her blinds closed. He turned up Bottom Hill and looked back and thought he glimpsed Kate’s blind move in her window. He paused. He stepped nearer the edge of the road, staring harder, and something else caught his eye. Angled left of Kate’s eave and farther in through the high-grown alder bed nearer the river he saw a smidgen of red, the colour of Bonnie Gillard’s car. He couldn’t figure it—the old park road cut through the alder bed, but not that far. Too mucky to drive a car. And it was where the river roiled the hardest and was the most swollen.
He continued up Bottom Hill, but his feet dragged. He looked back again, couldn’t see the car. Backtracked a few steps—there it was. Just a glimmer. It was getting dark and he turned towards the bar but couldn’t make himself go forward and cursed. Women. Never knew what they’d do. He turned back, walked quickly down onto the gravel flat and cut an immediate left onto a narrow, rutted road, grassed down the centre and long since left to grow over. He peered at the ground—too much water flooding the tracks to see tire prints. He kept going, tramping near the edging of brush to keep his feet dry, stick branches scratching at his clothes. He came to a clearing that used to be a park, out of the wind, and with swings and picnic tables. The picnic tables that hadn’t been dragged off were rotted now, the swings just broken chains dangling from skewed posts. The wind had proven a better mate than mosquitoes.
He looked about the thickly sodded clearing and saw bits of tire tracks on the drier clumps of nettle and quickweed heading towards the river. He followed them, his boots sinking through muck, and cursed again, feeling the damp seep through to his socks. Gulls squawked irritably above him. Swampy patches of land gave up their rotting smells. The car must have been driven fast to gut through this muck without bogging down. Another thirty feet ahead and to the right was the clump of brush where he thought he’d spotted it. Ruptured mud holes in the soaked sod testified that the car had suddenly been revved up and reamed through the brush. His heart began thumping and he broke into a run. The alders thinned, the wind broke through, cold on his face, and a red slash bled through the thicket. There was the car, back tires bogged down in mud. The back door on the passenger’s side was open, no one inside. He roared out Hello! The river roared back. He hauled and slipped his way up the small embankment in front of the car and looked onto the bloated, fast-flowing water of the river. He couldn’t see farther than a few feet downstream. He tried cutting through the brush. Too thick. He went back to the car, saw the keys dangling from the ignition. He walked away, thought about the young boys and their nighttime drinking parties just over the way, and backstepped, taking the keys and pocketing them. Couldn’t trust them little bastards. He headed back across the clearing and onto the swamped, grassy road, coming out beside Kate’s. Her car was still gone. He started towards Bottom Hill, paused—her blind was partly open. He could have sworn it was closed earlier. He yelled out her name.
Silence. A flock of gulls rose with a cacophony of squawks above the river. He took the scuffed path from Kate’s door, went up to the riverbank, and stood looking upstream. The gulls were spooling, squawking. Seized with a sense of urgency, he ran towards the old ruins and climbed on top
