Smoke River (33 page)

Outside the hospital, in the wee hours of the morning, Ella lights a cigarette she found in the pocket of her son’s shorts. She is slipping, she can feel it, under the ether of small things: the extra glass of wine at dinner, the one she takes with her to bed, the lack of exercise. She has not jogged for three weeks, the longest she’s gone without a run since she was pregnant with Stephanie. The oversleeping. This cigarette. Her failure to remain positive when everything is going to hell.

What story is there to explain Las’s troubles? He does not speak – he is too stunned, too confused. The possibility that somebody might have deliberately hurt him fills her gut with such a bubbling molasses that she takes a long suck on her cigarette to calm down. She has set her son up to be the hero of his own life, like a prince unaware of his pedigree. And he is screwing it up on purpose. She can feel it. Ella drops the cigarette to the pavement, squishes it with her foot, and instantly misses its comfort.

C
herisse waits until the risk of visitors, of interruptions, passes. In the dark of her hospital room, she lifts the blade and presses it into her bottom lip. It takes a second to draw blood and there isn’t much, but it tells her the scissors are sharp. The nurses and doctors here have no quiet movements. That is why she has the scissors from the lunchroom and they don’t. These men and woman move against their own bodies – she hears them coming from a distance, skin chafing against skin, rubber soles giving back-talk to each linoleum tile, rings and watches and phones clinking. Her mother told stories about how the best hunters let go of their bodies, give themselves over to something.
Lift your feet like a springtime fox. Spread your arms like a cormorant drying its wings. Quiet, quiet. Don’t scare your prey. This is how you eat, how you live, how you rest. Quiet, watching
, her mother said.

Cherisse was a little girl when she mimicked the storyteller’s pantomime of a soft-footed animal, stayed silent as a rabbit
crouched low in the meadow for hours against her mother’s sleeping body, so they’d never be parted. That is how she got the scissors from the lunchroom with all its windows overlooking the nurses’ station, where two women in pastel uniforms tapped at computer terminals and chatted about what they would do if their lotto numbers came in.

The lights are turned off in the rooms. Cherisse moves the scissors, cool against her palm, under the sheets and positions herself so it appears she is asleep, facing away from the door. She smells the yeasty warmth of the night nurse who looks in on her, hears her shoes squish, the rustle of the woman’s polyester against polyester. The point of the scissors is against her thighs; Cherisse presses harder, without flinching. Her skin punctures and stings, but she does not blink.

The nurse leaves and the scissors come back up to her mouth. Cherisse opens them and licks the edge of each blade. She tastes metal and blood. Lying on her side, she cuts her hair in tidy handfuls, as close to the scalp as she can. She flips over and repeats the hair cutting on the other side of her head. When it is done and she hears no movement from the hall, she is up and out of the bed.

For a week now she has pretended to drift in and out of lucidity and sleep, getting herself ready to leave. Her thefts have been stowed under the mattress, in the pillowcase, the single drawer of the nightstand. She stuffs pilfered pillows under sheets, creates the silhouette of a small figure sleeping in the fetal position. Off comes her hospital gown, and the night air pimples her slight nakedness. She balls the gown and covers it with the cut hair so that it spills over the top of the sheet, across another pillow; in the night shadows it appears to be a face obscured by a long, beautiful mane. All her clothes have been taken as evidence, but Cherisse has stolen a pair of plastic clogs from the lunchroom, clean scrubs and a lab coat from a passing
laundry cart, a headscarf from another patient. She puts them on quickly and smears her cheeks with the cover-up foundation she lifted from a purse hanging from a hook at the back of the staff washroom. She’s ready to leave.

At the last moment she yanks the clipboard from the end of her bed and carries it with authority out of the room. Then she walks out of the ward, off the floor, into an elevator, and through the lobby, still moving quietly, but boldly too.
Some animals aren’t afraid to be seen
, her mother would tell her,
because how they are seen is their advantage. Like the wolf
, she said just before she left for the last time.
Remember, it is good to be a wolf sometimes
. And so Cherisse walks with her head held up, her gaze fierce and direct, the clipboard grasped in one hand banging against her hip. Inside one pocket of her lab coat is a wad of cash, more money than she has held at once in her whole life; the atomizer makes the other pocket sag. A woman smoking outside the hospital doors doesn’t give Cherisse a second look. She continues walking, right into the street, and disappears into the bustle and shadows of late afternoon.

The time she ran barefoot over a rusty nail and it sank deep into her heel, it took Joe forty-five minutes to speed to the hospital’s emergency room. He would have been travelling at top speed – 120 klicks at least – since her father couldn’t bear the sound of a woman’s whimpers. Cherisse walks and works out the calculation with her smoke-shack math. She puts the distance between the hospital and the reserve in the ninety-kilometre range, a big walk at the best of times. And she is not at her best. Her head is high, but already unsteadiness is working its way into her gait.
Fifteen hours more of this
, she thinks,
at least
. For a moment she is fearful.

But she’s also free. And it feels good to be moving, to look back and see the hospital become a shoebox on the horizon, and then just a line. She walks at the bottom of steep ditches
that hug the road, where she can’t be seen. After three or four hours, the early evening’s warmth disappears. Cooler air gets past the thin hospital cotton, her own thin flesh, inside of her. She climbs up the embankment to check the road signs. Soon she will reach the edge of territory she recognizes. By then the light will be gone, but she won’t need it; she can abandon the asphalt tributary she follows now. The fields – canola, corn, tobacco, potatoes, ginseng – will be her way-finders to the river, and the river will take her home.

There are two cigarettes in the pocket of her lab coat and a pack of matches, last-minute thefts. She did not think to bring water or food. Her growing dizziness tells her this was a mistake. But Cherisse breathes low and even and matches the pace of her breath with her steps. Her mother told her that hunters smoke to numb their hunger and fatigue and enter the minds of their quarry. When she turns a corner, she sees a field of canola on the horizon, fluorescent yellow against the darkness, and beyond it the moonlit waters of the Smoke blinking. She pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and takes a long suck without breaking stride.

Into the deepest hours of morning she clings to the eastern banks of the river, holding branches to keep herself steady, stubbing her plastic shoes on fallen logs, scratching her forearms on brambles, avoiding boys hooting from truck windows and parked cars steamed with hushed conversations, dodging late-night dog walkers and the watchful back-porch lights of elegant old riverfront homes that will lead her to the bridge and the highway.

By the time the sun flares in a smoky sky and makes her face flush with new heat, Cherisse’s lips are crackling dry and she can feel her heart beating against her sternum like a boxed swallow. She wants to lie down. But she is close now. She cuts through the
o’tá:ra
at its periphery, out of view of the sleeping
blockade, and reaches the meadow that will take her somewhere safe. She takes the wad of money out of her pocket and holds it so loosely in one hand that the bills slip out, fluttering away from her like milkweed silks. Wildflowers and grama grass rub gently against her shins. It is a comfort to be touched when that touch can never be other than warm and soft.

Helen thinks she might never go back into the snack shack to help Ruby. Her patch of sun is too good – warm but not hot. She is tired from shuttling between the shack and the blockade, and now to Coulson Stercyx’s farm to cook breakfast and dinner for his small crew. As a little girl, she would curl up on the kitchen floor in the horn bell of mid-morning sun. Her mother’s steps around her smacked – the tiles were tacky with spills. Helen would pretend she was a child at the beginning of the world, when the dark and the light were twins who fought and then compromised. Her dead grandmothers ground quartz into sparkling dust, threw it into the light to keep her happy. Eventually her mother would lift her up, cradle and nuzzle her as if she really were a newborn, then set her on the back stoop, where the sun had moved. There was nothing more whole than warmth.

Ruby has no such memories. She is only two years younger, but it’s if they grew up in different families. The demons got to their mother even before her daughters were taken away, one by one. The quicksand of memory pulled Lena in, pulled her down. The horror of her schooling: priests with rough hands, nuns with leather belts, food that was sour and pushed her near the edge of starvation. Helen reminded Ruby that there were moments of sunshine, that their mother was good in those moments, full of tenderness and indulgence for a child luxuriating in a patch of warm light.

In the snack shack there has been no talk of the blockade. Ruby refuses and Helen is happy to avoid the conversation. A sense of responsibility and failure makes her eye twitch. On the back stoop in the sun, she has an unfamiliar yearning for a cigarette, if only to work her mouth around something, to extend the comfort of the sun with another warming sensation.

The doctors said it was cigarettes that killed her mother in the end, but Helen knows better. The cigarettes were what kept her mother alive: the comforting rush, a thing to occupy her shaking hands, the small cylinder that made it easier to talk. Smoking was a long inhalation of hope, of the desire to keep moving, keep breathing, keep aiming for something better, even when all the evidence suggested it wasn’t coming.

Sure, Helen wants a cigarette, if only to remind herself of the ashy kisses her mother once pressed onto the top of her head. She stretches around, sees Ruby through the shack’s back door, cleaning the windows with a towel soaked in white vinegar. Funny, that. Helen is a wiry slip of a thing, but Ruby is her mother remade, round and billowing, with an unexpected lightness and vigour in her movements.

The blockade has changed business at the snack shack. There are two or three mad rushes of customers buying tray-loads of tacos and french fries, followed by long hours of quiet. Ruby wants her to come only for the lunchtime rush. During that busy time she and Ruby brush up against each other by the small kitchen’s grill and fry baskets, reaching over and under and around the sister flesh, smelling each other’s damp heat, hearing the grunts of effort, exasperation. They anticipate each other, too familiar to require words. But in the long periods of quiet that follow, Ruby attacks every grease splatter with a spray bottle of diluted vinegar, renews herself by renewing order. And Helen feels her sister’s hostility, how her mere presence obstructs this renewal. She is happy to quit the shack, to feel the
tug of sun, to shut her eyes and open the spigot of the past, to wait for the sound of trucks wheeling onto the gravel and booted feet landing hard on the soft pine plank in front of the order counter.

An inconsequential shadow makes her open her eyes. There is no sound, really, only a presence, delicate as a lit match. Helen cannot take it in at first, this visitor from the spirit world, this two-legged coyote-woman with its hungry, mottled face, its dead green eyes. The shadow does not move and Helen pulls herself up, shakes the blurring brightness from her old vision. Then she focuses. It is a girl with sallow skin and pale, dry lips. Helen notices the hospital stamp on the hip of a pair of baggy cotton pants. She stares hard at the face, the shorn scrub of hair. Finally, with her hand over her mouth, she lets out a wail.