‘My mother.’
‘She lives here?’
‘No. She doesn’t know that I’m here either.’
‘You don’t visit?’
Alex places the queen down on the board again. There’s a darkness under her eyes now that Miles remembers, clouds gathering over the crest of her cheekbones.
‘I went down there once a couple years ago. It wasn’t very—’ He stops, shrugs. ‘I just think it’s better if I stay up here.’
Miles tries at a laugh but nothing comes out, so that there is only his opened throat for Alex to look down.
‘How do you play?’ she says.
‘She sends me a postcard with her move on it, and then I send my move back to her. It’s slow, but you can really think out the options. I’ve given her a post office box number in Whitehorse and they forward them up to me. There’s less to worry about if nobody…’
‘If nobody knows where you are.’
Miles nods.
‘The postcards are almost as fun as the game,’ he says, sensing that it’s better to speak than not. ‘It’s not easy finding something new in Ross River, once you’ve gone through the dog sled team and northern lights photos, and then the cards you can get anywhere on the planet, the bikini babes and the joke Yukon at Nights. I’ve been forced to make some of my own.’
‘Your own postcards?’
‘Cut and paste. A photo of George Bush’s head on top of Stump’s body. The Welcome Inn with a Royal York letterhead underneath it. Arts and crafts.’
‘You make your own postcards?’
Miles can see that Alex is about to cry, and while he doesn’t feel any particular sadness at the moment, he is more intensely humiliated than he can recall. Once more the smell of last night’s moose steak reaches him and he is sure he cannot meet Alex’s eyes again so long as the two of them remain in this room.
‘The winters are long,’ he says.
Rachel is in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers that Miles knows contain little aside from rolling mouse turds. As she moves, Stump follows her, tapping his nails over the linoleum.
‘Honey? It’s time to go,’ Alex calls to her.
‘Why?’
‘Just come here.’
Rachel trots into the living room and clasps her arms around Alex’s legs, the dog plopping down in front, so that the three of them form an instant portrait.
Halfway through the current breath he is inhaling, Miles feels a wave of fatigue so great he thinks he might fall before he gets a chance to breathe again.
‘You’re going to need a place to stay,’ he manages.
‘One with a shower would be nice.’
‘The Welcome Inn’s the only place for fifty miles. Talk to Bonnie.’
‘And tell her Miles sent us?’
‘If you want. But it won’t bring the rates down any.’
For Miles, the room is now a sickening carousel, rotating slowly, unstoppably, the different shades of brown carpet, furniture and panelling smearing together. He throws a hand out and finds the dining-room chair that his chess opponent would sit in if she were present.
‘You have to go now,’ he says.
The idea of having to bend and slap the cheeks of a passed-out Miles on the floor of his dingy cabin makes Alex turn her back to him. She takes Rachel by the hand and strides out the cabin’s open front door.
Even now, the solstice sun has not wholly surrendered to the night, so that the trees are cloaked figures against the sky. Alex has the strange sensation of being at once here and not here. Ross River. A name like a hundred others she has passed on signs hammered into the soil at town boundaries. It’s impossible to believe that this place—these ragged power lines, this gravel street—is any different. She doesn’t know what she expected of it, if she expected anything. All this time and she had never considered the place she would find Miles standing in, only Miles himself. What’s more unsettling is that now she’s standing in it with him.
It took less than an hour’s walk through this weedy, broken-hearted nowhere to forget most of what she expected he would have become. All she’s certain of is that he’s in worse shape than even her most malicious scenarios. It’s what allowed his talk of postcards and the sight of his big-eared dog to make a momentary dent. But even as she feels a brush of pity come and go, what remains is her desire to spray kerosene over the half of him the fire missed, toss a match his way, and watch. Not only for the pain it would cause, but to leave a tattoo that would forever mark his cowardice, his uncorrectable failure to the world. She has thought about this for longer and in greater detail than she would ever admit.
Alex is strangely glad to find that she still hates him. As much now that she’s found him as she had the evening she’d come home to their empty apartment and looked for the note he hadn’t bothered to leave. She’s grateful that the sight of him has done nothing to alter her fundamental judgments. Her planned retributions.
What she hadn’t seen coming is how much he frightens her. One of the things she hadn’t told him about her past four summers was that a couple of the people she’d shown his photo to had recognized him, or at least had a story to tell. A mechanic in Dease Lake said the scars made him sound like a guy ‘way far up,’ one that had nearly killed a man for looking at him and asking if Halloween had come early this year. A hardware store clerk in Telegraph Creek claimed to have heard about someone with burns down one side of his face ‘like a line of shade’ who hunted solo, living on grizzly meat and firing his shotgun at anyone who came within a half mile of his camp. Alex didn’t believe these stories, nor did she dismiss them. She simply added them to the composite portrait she was assembling in her mind. One that took hideous shape as she added a murderous grin, jellied eyes, blood-soaked teeth.
The first summer had been something of an accident. A weekend drive out of the city after the end of term. She spent her first night in a creepy motel near the marina in Parry Sound, and found herself enjoying the creepiness, the foolish thrill of being a young mother on the lam. In the morning, instead of heading back, she turned north, then west. At lunch, she bought a half-dozen identical postcards showing a row of oiled men’s torsos frying on a beach and sent them to the people who might be wondering where she’d gotten to. ‘I’m taking our show on the road,’ she wrote. ‘We’ll be gone for as long as the credit card and Pampers hold out. Please don’t worry.’ She signed each of them ‘Love, Alex and Rachel (a.k.a. Thelma and Louise).’
She bought a tent and sleeping bag in Dryden, a camp stove in Medicine Hat, matching toques for her and Rachel in Jasper. Even as far as Fort St John she still wasn’t looking for Miles in any concerted way. And yet, more and more, Alex found herself glancing through the windows of roadhouses, waiting for heads to turn her way in convenience store lineups, judging each town she passed through on its merits as a hiding place.
The next year, once
