treats. She would catch up on the prize-winning novels she’d seen praised in the paper for their ‘affirming’ and ‘meditative’ qualities, start jogging again, plant tomatoes in her building’s communal garden. To steal a few hours of freedom during the week, she enrolled Rachel in a daycare downtown. The girl’s resistance, however, became apparent almost immediately. The daycare workers called with reports of her clawing at the fence around the Astroturfed playground. When asked to come inside with the other kids, she would only stare up between the surrounding buildings at the postage stamp of blue above.
The daycare people suggested it was homesickness, but Alex recognized the real cause of the girl’s protest. After the long, indoors winter, Rachel had taken Toronto’s warm sun as a broken promise. In the stifling evenings of their apartment, she would uncharacteristically cry, refuse favourite foods, fuss before being put down to sleep. She wanted out.
In the middle of June, overheated and underslept herself, Alex rented a car and took Rachel up to Algonquin. The idea was for the girl to sleep on the drive and be rewarded with a swim in one of the park’s thousand green lakes. As soon as the hazy suburbs’ brew-yer-owns, discount warehouses and twenty-four-screen multiplexes shaped like UFOs had given way to regrowth forests and grazing fields, the girl was quiet. Not asleep, but tranquilized, her fingers splayed against the car’s window like an antenna receiving signals that had been unreadably scrambled in the city. Once at the park, Rachel’s mood was wholly transformed. Alex hadn’t realized how much she missed seeing her child smile, and how long she had gone without.
When they returned to the apartment two days later, it was only to buy a used truck, pick up the tent and camping gear and leave messages with family and friends. They were heading west again. Looking back on it now, Alex sees the last thing she brought along as almost an afterthought. A photo of Miles she’d slipped in an envelope and stuck in the glove compartment.
She’d done it for Rachel. She’d done it for herself. She swung between these justifications from day to day, often between the hours. Both were true. Alex had vowed from the beginning not to keep Miles’s existence a secret from the girl. And letting her see him at least once might help put some of her brewing questions to rest in advance.
Alex had her own dark wishes. More than anything, she wanted Miles to hurt. There was little she would be able to do all alone on this count. But with the girl, there might be enough left in him that could still be poisoned.
Yet now, as she walks with Rachel, her pink sneakers skipping over the stones, she feels the careful plans she’d devised shift an inch under her feet. Miles ran away. She chased him down. Other than this, all she’s sure of is that whatever is going to jump out at her, she won’t turn away from it. That’s Miles’s trick. Hers is to sink her teeth into the truth of a thing and not let go until she’s tasted it.
‘I like him,’ Rachel says.
‘Oh yeah, baby? You like Miles?’
‘Miles?’ The child stops and stares up at her mother. ‘I like Stump, Momma. Stump licked me.’
All of Ross River has gone to bed, though many, tonight, cannot sleep.
Some wonder about the woman and girl who had come all the way here only to walk with the fire chief around town like tourists with a guide. One sees an animal’s eyes peering out from the closet. One wishes the self-pitying child’s wish to never have been born.
Another cannot believe it was only this morning. Both his waking mind and dreams confirm it. Only this morning he was thinking the firestarter’s thoughts. Whether he lies with eyes open or closed, he lives through the same hours. When he comes to the end he can only return to the beginning to live them over again.
He lies awake through the night, certain he can smell it. A lick of heat. Barbecued pine. Sulphur curling his nosehairs. A memory of fire in place of fire itself. He knows this even as he sits up all at once and fights to reshape his gasp into a yawn.
He assumed that creating the firestarter would be a convenience. A temporary alter ego that would allow him to return wholly to himself after he was finished with it, cut free like a booster rocket once gravity has been defeated. Instead, the firestarter clings to him. In fact, he can feel the beginnings of a struggle, another’s hand on the wheel. It is still weaker than he. Thoughtless and mute. But it has a desperate tenacity he hadn’t expected, an unmanageable weight. It threatens to take him down with it like a drowning dog.
He thinks of what he would give in dollar terms to sleep without dreams until morning. Starts at two-fifty and soon approaches everything he has.
It’s not guilt. Not exactly. It’s not yet worry, either. Tonight, what denies his rest is what the firestarter would say to him if it ever learned to speak.
Even from four miles off, during the few hours of a July night’s darkness, the bear can smell Ross River before she spots the orange glow of its homes. Melted lard, yeast, the generator’s dizzying fumes. All of it attracts her, so much stronger in its promises than the highbush cranberries and wild sweet pea, the only other food she can detect in the vicinity. They have been moving continuously for a full day without eating, and now hunger sharpens her senses as do the distant traces of smoke that have been pursuing them the whole time. She allows her cubs to rest, rolled back on their haunches, chewing at air. The three of them have made their way to the top of a rock outcropping that pokes through the treeline, midway up the slope of the Tintina Trench.
The sow has been here before. Last autumn, with her mate. It’s how she knows that, in daylight, they could see the entire Pelly valley from where they are. Now, with the dawn only a blue thread atop the horizon, the killing ground is a field of shadow. Below them, the town throbs in electric flames.
She doesn’t fear the people she knows to be there, but unless she has to, she will go no closer. It would be easy to push through one of the many breaks in the fence around the dump and feast on whatever spilled out of the piled bags she gutted. During the summer her mate stayed with her (far longer than other wandering, rutting boars), they would come here from time to time. The decision arose less out of necessity than as an addiction to the landfill’s exotic pleasures. On the rare occasions that the dump manager came by to throw the beam of his flashlight over one of them, the other would bark from the opposite direction, diverting his attention. The beam leapt blindly in his hands. In seconds the sow and her mate would be through the fence.
But there is only the cubs with her now. They have never been close to people, and she wonders if their curiosity would cause them to pause, blinking at the light. She has seen this hypnotism used on other animals by hunters in the woods at night. No amount of barking could wake them once the dazzling bulb had captured their eyes.
They will not go closer to town. They will not run any farther away either. Over the other side of the range to the south is a river that, by now, will be running with easily scooped grayling and trout. And here, in the St Cyr foothills, they are the only bears. Whatever food is available will be theirs without competition. She looks at her cubs. It will be another year before they will begin to make these calculations on their own, and for a moment, the thought of the time ahead exhausts her.
She lifts her snout and turns to the east in the direction they have come from.
