think of what to say, a feeling of loneliness, still beyond words, dawned.
“I got in a fight today,” I told him.
“You did?” He raised his eyebrows but then yawned, lifting his forearm to hide his mouth. “That’s good. I’m glad you’re standing up for yourself.”
I’d been trying to be tough at school, using fuck and goddamn to swear kids to tears and run them off. When Matthieu had pulled on my jacket, I’d called him a fuck banana. He’d appeared so dazed that I’d taken the opportunity to punch him.
“Good. That’s good,” my father said, eyeing me. “You really let him have it, huh?”
“Yeah, I let him have it pretty good.” Hearing myself, I felt that my victory was far grander than it had seemed.
My father leaned against the doorjamb and yawned again. He went into the kitchen. The fridge door opened, bottles clinking.
“Goddamn it,” I heard him say, “there’s nothing to eat.”
I closed my book. I had to make up my mind. Maybe I should leave with my mother.
He came back, anger all around him, like the smell of cigarettes on a smoker’s jacket. He sat and put the peach-colored phone on the armrest, and then lifted the receiver. He pushed his jaw forward and began to dial.
Seeing his expression, I knew that he was going to swear at someone. The sadness eased from my throat, and an odd feeling of lightness came over me. No one could swear like him! It was his gift. Each insult came from his stomach, not like a belch but like the sudden act of vomiting, a sound that caught in the throat and burned in the sinuses like bile.
The faint ringing from the earpiece reached me, and a tired tinny voice said, “Hullo.” My father didn’t even introduce himself. He shouted, “Don’t you fucking play games with me!” Then he took a breath so deep I could see all his teeth and the lines of his many fillings and the red of his throat.
“Motherfucking cocksucking piece of shit, I’ll kick your stupid fucking ass!”
Without realizing it, I jumped up and began dancing on the carpet in victory.
He grabbed his address book and threw it at me.
✴
THE END WOULD be like a fishing trip, a long drive through night mountains and washed-out roads, to a dawn over a river where all that mattered began.
I went into the woods and closed my eyes and turned in circles with the intention of getting lost. I had to hone my survival skills. Wandering, I searched for tunnels under bushes or magic portals beneath the low branches of trees.
And then I just sat. There was something I couldn’t understand, that made it hard to breathe, my throat thick with sadness. My father had always told me I was like him, and I did my best not to cry in front of him. But my mother watched me sometimes, her brow furrowed, a wetness in her blue eyes, as if just seeing me race through the door might make her cry. She liked it when we talked or read books, but he wanted me to be crazy at times, quiet at others. I never knew which.
In novels, something bad happens so that the hero has to travel and change, but my life just dragged on. Only when I read did the pressure in my chest go away. As I turned pages, I felt a rush of vertigo, tingling along my arms and face. Even telling stories at school, I became transfixed, lifting into the air, toward the sky, more and more distant from the truth. And once I’d told a story, no matter how outlandish, how embroidered with magic, I knew it was true.
To my classmates, I bragged about the immense salmon and steelhead trout that my father reeled from icy rivers, standing deep in the current, almost swept away. They listened, but at some point—when the salmon bit his leg or gashed his hand or wrapped the line around his boot and tried to drag him downriver—someone snorted and called me a liar.
What they didn’t realize was that their stories stank because they thought too much about time. There was too much walking, too many opening and closing of doors. They didn’t see that two shocking events years apart, on opposite ends of the country, longed for each other the way a smiling girl across the room made me want to sit next to her. Hearing my father, I forgot the slow march of minutes. A dog had once tried to bite him, and he’d also reeled in a forty-pound salmon, so it seemed natural that the injured fish would bite him too. Minutes and hours had to be done away with, the thrilling moments of life freed from the calendar’s prison grid.
Soon, I told myself as I walked home through the forest, my life would be a story, and I’d be free.
✴
SCHOOL LET OUT for Christmas. The autumn had been mild, but the weather finally changed. Snow fell in the naked forests and turned the ditches to ice.
We moved again, to a smaller farm, this time to be closer to the city and my father’s stores. My mother barely unpacked. She no longer paid much attention to food, making slapdash sandwiches and rushing off to meet friends from the psychic church. Though she still had two horses, the years of goat home brew were over.
On Boxing Day, she once again took us to the mall so she could return her gifts. My father had given both my brother and me a hundred dollars in loose change. We’d spent Christmas counting, huddled like misers over stacks of coins, but at the mall I noticed that my brother didn’t buy anything.
I sidled up to him. “What are you going to get?”
“Nothing. I gave my money to Bonnie.”
“You did? Really?”
“She needs it. It’s important.”
I shuddered. In my backpack, I had rolls of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, and I couldn’t believe that my parents’ stupidity might deprive me of the pleasure of spending them. As I bought a book of mystery stories, my mother stood off and watched with the expression of a kid enduring classroom humiliation.
As I walked back across the parking lot next to her, she stared into the distance, searching for something, an answer from her own invisible friends, a way to bridge the annoying, relentless minutes in which nothing at all happened, so that she could connect two pieces of her own story. I knew she’d need the rest of my money to do this, and that I’d give it to her.
When we got home, my father’s new cargo minivan was in the driveway, and he was back on the farm preparing a burn pile. He’d been busy closing his lots and wasn’t around more than a few hours on Christmas. He began walking toward the house. I went to my room and lay on the bed with my new book.
The fighting began just outside, and I rolled off the bed and went to the window. I wondered what they’d said to start the argument, but I was getting angry too, and yelling might have felt good.
“I’m sick of this nonsense,” he tried to bellow, but to my surprise, the unlit fields didn’t care, and a wind blew through his voice, hollowing it.
“It’s none of your business,” she shouted back, drowning his words. She spoke with his force, as if she’d put on his boots and jacket and glared at him with his brown eyes.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “You talk to … to some psychic and now you think Vancouver is going to be destroyed by an earthquake.”
“I’m
