The Mountain Can Wait (13 page)

One frozen
blue eye, one brown. Like a husky. The picture they showed on the news was a close-up, her head cocked to the side, laughing as if her mouth were full of food, or as if she were about to say something. The police urged the driver to come forward and the reporter spoke about her life. She was nineteen and had younger brothers, she rode horses, she was home for the summer. In a front-lawn interview, wind lifting white hair off a broad forehead, an uncle reported that her parents were destroyed.

“Did you know her?” said Sean, in the dark, eating macaroni and cheese out of the pot with a wooden spoon.

In the blue light of the television, Curtis shook his head, but what he could see was this: Days before, in a bright kitchen full of people, a girl stood in front of him with one blue eye, one brown. She had those bruises on her legs, like a little kid. He gave her a sip of his beer and then he forgot all about her.

And after countless empty hours on the couch, numbed by the marijuana coursing through him, Curtis started to notice the damp of the earth creeping through Sean's basement walls. And though he tried, he couldn't smoke it away. Then somehow, from out of a dream, his dad had punched his way onto the scene. He came and fixed a dripping tap and then he was gone. In the fog of the kitchen, Curtis had told him that he killed a girl, but this was for nothing. When his dad walked out the door, the absence of the tap dripping into greasy water was the loudest and emptiest sound in the world.

He left the apartment early in the morning, after Sean went to the mill, pulled into his dad's driveway, and left the engine idling. He thought again about Tom at the barbecue, grilling chicken. That had been before, when all he could think about was Tonya. He stared at the dark front windows of the house and started in on something he'd been doing a lot since the accident: rolling the
if
s in his palm like dice. If he'd left the party minutes earlier. If he'd taken a different route home. If his tin had been in his pocket. If, when he met her in the kitchen, they'd kept talking, and maybe she liked him a little, and maybe he walked her home.

He didn't have the key to his dad's house, could picture it in the bowl of loose change he kept on his dresser in Whistler. He went around the back of the garage and lifted the bald tire up onto its edge, but the key that had always been there was not. Only a flattened ring of damp yellow grass and a scurry of hard-shelled potato bugs. He tried the back door and the kitchen window, then lowered himself into one of the basement wells, but those windows were locked too. He looked around the backyard for something he could use, but typically, there was nothing, nothing loose or out of place. Other than the old tire and a rusted swing set under the cedar, the backyard was trimmed and organized, no hockey stick or shovel or abandoned tool in sight. He lowered himself into the basement well again and put his boot to the window until it broke, and glass rained into the darkness.

The first dream came that night, while he slept in his old bedroom. There was clear water and she was down deep in it, frog-kicking up to the surface. On the palm of his hand, a deep, perfectly shaped bite, the crescents of each tooth mark welling with thick, dark blood. He opened his eyes and couldn't at first make out where he was, was confused by the bar of streetlight shining through the gap in the curtains. But there was his dresser against the wall, just a bulky piece of furniture he'd never considered before. The top left-hand drawer always stuck. The bottom drawer was missing one of its polished wooden knobs. The mirror was black. The dresser began to tilt. Its shadow climbed the wall as it fell forward and the mirror on its hinge stayed erect. A creak of pained wood, the drip of water. He was unable to move and she was under the bed, scratching softly at the wood panels, the opaque, waterlogged nails having peeled off her fingers long before.

The second night, he dreamt that his mouth was full of eggshells. He sucked and spit out the tiny fragments, tongued the powdery shards from between his teeth, and cleared the back of his throat, only for his mouth to fill again.

He woke at some unknowable hour to blue-glass light in the room and stared at the ceiling, thinking for the hundredth time about the road. On television they could always identify a car by the skid marks made by its wheels. He couldn't remember seeing any in the road, but then he hadn't been paying much attention—he couldn't even remember driving home that night. Now he rolled over and thought that maybe he should wash his truck again. He'd looked, so closely, his nose to the bumper, the hood, the lights. But they had those infrared beams or whatever that could detect even the most minuscule traces of blood. He rolled over again, kicked one jigging leg out from under the blanket. There must have been marks on the road; he had seen them, like shadows. He could smell the burning rubber.

Panic was like a band around his chest, so he wrapped himself in his blanket and went out to the backyard, curled his toes in the cold, wet grass. He dropped his blanket and stood naked, feeling the cool air mostly on his dick, where he wasn't used to it. Long, blue-bodied, reptilian skin in the cruel dawn light. Cruel because each day stretched endlessly ahead of him like the long road, the curve up ahead that he couldn't get beyond.

The spring when he was twelve, he went to Black Pond, in the woods out near Sean's place, with a bunch of older boys to collect tadpoles. It had been raining, and his shoes slipped in mud and wet leaves. At one point he fell and landed on his palms in a rosette of thistles. The pain seared up to his elbows but he managed to keep pace with the others and hold on to his bucket too. When they got to the pond it started drizzling again, the mist collecting into silver beads in their hair. One of the boys lit up a joint and passed it on, and by the time it got to Curtis it was tea-colored, sticky, and soggy. The earthy smoke gripped the back of his throat and he coughed to his knees, thinking the coughing would never end.

He stood alone in the wet bulrushes by the edge of the pond and looked across its rain-cratered surface to the overhanging tree where, the winter before, a craggy hole had opened up in the ice and taken his sister. He'd been scared; he thought she was going to die. It took his dad ages to get her out of the water, and he got angry when she didn't do what he said. And he told Curtis to shut up, as if he was pissed at both of them, as if the crack in the ice was their fault.

When Curtis stood there with his bucket, the edge of the pond was thick with furry clouds of unhatched frog spawn and wriggling tadpoles, heads heavy, budded with legs, as slick and black as drops of oil. He dipped his bucket into the water and then watched them butt their heads against the plastic. He would take them home and feed them lettuce. One of the boys said that's what they liked to eat. The tadpoles thrashed their tails and swam zigzags across the bucket, like shrapnel.

When he climbed back up the bank, he could hear the other boys laughing and shouting somewhere off in the woods. Their buckets were all there, standing in the tall grass. Full of tadpoles. He followed the sound of their laughter and found them crowded around the hollowed-out trunk of a long-dead cedar, its south-facing side covered in thick moss. Five frogs, one for each boy, had been impaled against the trunk with nails. One of them was already dead but the other four still struggled, webbed feet softly hooking the air, trying to swim away. They had taken bets to see whose frog would survive the longest. The boy whose frog was already dead had lost interest and stood to the side, pelting a tree with stones. Curtis watched the other boys and pumped his arms as they did, and made a careful O shape with his mouth and hooted. There was very little blood, but what did drip from the wounds was clumped and snotty. Two more frogs died and then another, leaving one alive, twitching slightly, throat bulging for air, thin white membranes floating over its eyes.

The boy who won took a quarter from each of them and said he was going to spend every penny of his winnings on red shoelace licorice. Before leaving, Curtis waited for the others to go first and then emptied his bucket of tadpoles back into the pond.

Now, shivering in the early morning cold, he inspected himself. One tidy cut at the base of his wrist, from the basement window. Rib bones rising up to the surface of his pale skin. Neck pain with no known origin when he turned his head from side to side.

In the kitchen, with the blanket tied loosely around his waist, he held the two pantry cupboard doors open with his arms stretched wide. His dad kept the place well stocked with cans of beans and meaty soup, tomatoes, peaches, potatoes that tasted only of the brine they floated in. Curtis wasn't exactly hungry but opened some beef and vegetable soup and, leaning against the counter, ate it cold from the can with a teaspoon. Then he went on to peaches, letting the syrup limp down his chin. It was the first food he'd eaten in days. The phone rang until the answering machine clicked on. A friendly voice he didn't recognize echoed down the hallway. Curtis could feel his heart beating in the soles of his feet, where they pressed flat on the linoleum. It was a detective something or other, and could you please give me a call as soon as you get this, it's concerning the whereabouts of your son, Curtis.

Curtis went down the hallway to the small desk where his dad kept the phone and the answering machine, now pulsing a red light. He listened to the message again and tore the phone jack out of the wall socket, flipped up the machine's lid, and removed the miniature cassette from its bed. He went into the bathroom and pulled the silky brown tape from the cassette until it snapped and the end curled up, wilted. He dropped the handful of ribbon into the toilet and watched it snake out of sight with the flushing water.

He got dressed and went down to the basement, where his dad's collection of tents, sleeping bags, thermal mattresses, and flashlights was stored neatly on the shelves by the stairs. Cooking pots and small gas stoves that looked like moon-landing pods. All maintained, looked after, loved. He packed a sleeping bag and tent, a pot, a stove, and a mattress roll. He found some plywood stacked neatly under the stairs and boarded up the broken window.

His first thought was to go west into Alberta, hike up Mount Robson to the alpine meadow and pitch his tent by the side of Berg Lake, where the water was the milky blue of a throat lozenge. He could stay there until the snow came. Nothing but mountain pine and waterfalls, marmots and the odd trekker. He could sit out on the shale beach and listen to the thunder of ice calving off the berg, chunks the size of cars, of houses, splashing blue into the lake in apparent, slow-motion silence until the sound of their fall caught up to the light.

He made it down Highway 16 and was getting close to the Alberta exit. Here the steep and striated granite of the Rocky Mountains prodded the faultless blue sky. Topped with summer snow, brush cut with pine. Any other time, these mountains made him feel as though he could fly, but now they folded in on him. The curves and undulations in the road seemed to breathe; they played tricks. He had no confidence that the asphalt continued beyond the bends, and he half expected to either plummet into the valley or plow head-on into the mountain. With fingers gripped white on the steering wheel, he drove past the turn to Robson and continued southwest on Highway 5 toward flatter land, where, if something was coming, he might have time to react.

That night, he pitched his tent next to a cattle fence in the dusty hills around Kamloops—hills so old and worn they were like great piles of dirty bedsheets. He lay awake most of the night, sweating. Could smell the sour yeast of pulp mill, which made him think of home. The next day, while drinking black coffee in a greasy spoon in Merritt, it occurred to him to go to the island where his mother had grown up. It was small, and hard to get to. The islands down there were overgrown with dense rain forest and sometimes banked with fog. It would be like crawling into a hole, or under a blanket. And maybe his grandmother was still there. He knew from his father that she was twice as crazy as she was mean, and Curtis hoped that this was true.

Curtis couldn't
leave his Suburban in the ferry terminal because if the police really were looking for him, they would find it there and know he was on the island. So he left the truck on a residential street in Nanaimo and walked north the short distance to Nanoose.

The small passenger ferry moved slowly and heavily through the water. Curtis sat on the upper deck with his bag between his knees, his head down. The sun beat on his neck and the voices of the people around him swung with the wind, so he only caught patches of what was said: something about film for the camera and a bike pump and what had been packed for lunch. Seagulls screamed in retreating loops and somebody was laughing and a girl asked what time the last ferry left the island because she didn't want to be trapped for the night. As if any of this mattered. They had everything they needed for a picnic but they couldn't see the dirty membrane that divided their world and his. They didn't even know how free they were. The sea air settled like a shell on his skin.

When the ferry docked at Owl Bay, Curtis disembarked last. He had a feeling that little had changed since his mother lived on the island, and could picture her waiting by the passenger ramp for the outbound sailing. A few buildings clung to a horseshoe of rocky land sloping up from the bay: a bed-and-breakfast, cabins, a coffee shop. Walking up the one road that led from the terminal, he came to a small kiosk selling cold drinks, sandwiches, and island maps. He bought a bottle of water and looked at a map. It showed a campsite at the opposite end of the island on the southeastern tip, a few kilometers' walk from the road.

A farmers' market occupied a clearing at the top of the slope. The food was all handpicked, home-cooked: carrots with dirt still clinging to hairy tendrils, bulbs of garlic like hard little fists, hand-butchered meat, cakes of strange combinations like ginger and zucchini. Curtis chose food randomly—a bag of apples and plums, bread, ground coffee, and cured ham—not because he was hungry but as an act of duty to a body that, each day, seemed more remote, like something he was tethered to.

He caught a lift in the back of a muddy flatbed, huddled next to a pallet of cedar shingles, and got out at the campsite trailhead. Tightening the waist strap on his pack, he started at a hard pace, estimating that he had to cover three or four kilometers. The Douglas fir, tall and spongy with moss, grew thickly, and under this the rocky track stayed cold and dark. The way was straightforward and easy to follow, and without thinking, he fell into a rhythm that the girl could quietly invade. Under a high white sun, he could see her walking on the side of the road where he had hit her. The light was so bright that he could barely make out her form. She was there on the road ahead of him, a slender figure shimmering in heat. In this dream he wasn't in his truck but instead on his feet, working his legs to catch up to her and then walking by her side, matching his step to hers. Maybe she looked a little bit like Tonya, a little bit like his mother. Hard to tell. Her hair was long and dark, at least. But not soft. It was wet and clumpy and didn't flow over her shoulders when she turned her head and stared at him with eyes like the open mouths of dead fish.

The trail petered out and he scrambled over lichen-covered rocks and mossy logs to find it again, where it rose over more rocks up a steep incline. In his life before now, this would have been a decent trail to ride, and he counted how many days it had been since the accident. Twelve. Hardly any time at all, considering how much had changed. The ghost of his bike materialized under his body, and he watched himself pump the pedals up the incline and disappear over the top.

The campsite was on a pebbly beach in the bend of a small inlet. There was an outhouse, a freshwater creek, and a painted sign on a wooden money box asking for two dollars a night. Three other tents were pitched close together at one end of the beach, alongside three sea kayaks. Milling around the tents was a trio of guys who were hanging clothes on a line, building a fire.

It was close to six o'clock when Curtis finished pitching his tent under a latticed stand of flayed arbutus, the bare, smooth wood of the trees the color of a bull's tongue. He walked down to the water where the sea gently licked at the pebbles, falling back under a lip of white foam. To the east, the coastal mountains on the mainland floated on the horizon. Those were his mountains, and now they were losing their hold too. The thought of it overwhelmed him and he sat down and covered his face with his hands, the pebbles biting into his backside.

The guys with the kayaks were calling to one another about the orcas they had seen—unexpectedly in this part of the strait in June. For one of them, this was his first time seeing a killer whale, and he announced, inviting laughter from his friends, that his life would never be the same again.

Curtis unrolled his sleeping bag and pulled on a sweater. He ate an apple, sparked up the camping stove, and boiled water for coffee, which he brewed in a sock. Gnawing on a hunk of bread, he went scavenging for wood to build a fire and found a neat stack of logs behind the outhouse. Another painted sign and money box, asking for payment for the wood. He filled his pockets with kindling and stacked the crook of his arms with five or six chunks of wood, promising the sign that he would pay later.

Carefully, he built a small pyramid of kindling and stuffed it with the paper bag that had held the plums. He lit the paper and blew at the pulse of fire until the whole structure caught. He sat back and surveyed his setup: tent ropes pegged tightly against the rain, a pile of dry wood, this fire built the way he'd been shown as a child. His dad would be proud that Curtis was well enough equipped to live like this.

When the kindling was going steady he balanced two bigger chunks of wood on top of it, careful to set them at the right angle, and then the girl came back again, nestled into the base of his fire. With her knees drawn to her chest, she sat and pulled savagely at a fistful of bread as if she were desperate for the last strands of meat off a bone. She asked Curtis what he knew about her and he told her what he'd learned on the news. She was three years younger than him and eldest to a couple of brothers. She went to a university at the top of a hill in Vancouver and was home for the summer, working for her parents. Something to do with furniture. She was unexpected in this part of the strait in June.

He lit a stale, flattened joint that he'd found in one of the pockets of his backpack and watched a troupe of wood mites sprint in panic over the burning logs. The smart ones made their way to the edge of the pit while the dopey ones ran in circles and back into the flames, where they burned to white ash.

The guy who had seen a killer whale for the first time came over and asked Curtis if he wanted to have a beer and join him and his friends at their fire. He was saying something about orcas, but Curtis was thinking about the thing the guy had said earlier, about his life being changed forever. The guy had no idea. What if Curtis sat with them now, under the watch of stars, and told them everything? Maybe they would tell him that it was her fault for walking next to an unlit road at three o'clock in the morning. Yes, they would tell him that an act was bad only if you meant it to be. In fact, they would say that none of it mattered, none of it, because fate had had it in for him all along. But he didn't think he could stand it, sharing the soft glow of their fire, while the blood pumped so healthily through their bodies that it bloomed in their cheeks like flowers. They might have decided he'd done a terrible thing and he wouldn't be able to stop himself from crying, or screaming, or from booting the embers of their fire to the wind.

“Maybe next time,” he said.

Sleep that night was angry, prodding. Rain began to fall steadily; it fell and fell until the tent, filled with the damp smell of mildew, lifted from the ground and pitched toward the sea on a slide of mud. Ice-cold water rose around the edges of Curtis's body, creeping into the spaces between his fingers, rising up his neck, one hair at a time, and spilling over his shoulders into the ditch of his collarbone. He brought his hand up close to his face and saw that the skin was covered in maggots. His whole body was writhing with them, milk white and pulsing. Now he hovered at the apex of the tent, watching the larvae consume a body that had become the girl's, the skin so tight over swollen limbs that if he were to touch her, she would explode like a blister with congealed, black blood.

He woke and, not wanting to sleep, sat up. Some comfort could be found in the pattern of rain drumming the tent, a chorus of fingers. If he listened closely he could keep her out of his head, and wait, almost in peace, for dawn.

When he crouched out of his tent into fine morning rain, the kayakers were already gone, their camp tied tightly against the weather. He packed up his wet tent and the rest of his gear. Today he would look for his mother's old house, where possibly his grandmother still lived. The little he knew about his grandmother had come from his dad in small, torn pieces. Her head was in the clouds, he often said. She lived like a hermit and made her own soap. She was selfish, and incompetent, the latter an unforgivable flaw in his dad's book. She had come to Prince George to meet Curtis when he was born, and had, for some reason, rubbed his infant body with weeds from the backyard. She came again a year later, and then after that, Elka didn't want to see her anymore. In his life, he hadn't given his grandmother much thought. But now, looking for her was the one thing keeping him from chewing his own fingers to the bone.

On the trail, the rain had freed the smell of earth and rock into the humid air. Water dripped heavily onto his shoulders from the lofty fir boughs and from the engorged leaves of maple saplings and birch, while the undergrowth, mainly fern and stinging nettle and something tall with salmon-colored flowers, slapped wetly at his thighs. Once he reached the road it was easy to find a lift back to Owl Bay, where he hoped someone would be able to tell him where the house was. He stopped first at the marina coffee shop and sat by the window, looked out over the ferry dock and the boats in the choppy bay. A fishing boat with a blue wheelhouse and crane-like arms at its stern nosed heavily through the waves. On deck, a man wearing a dirty yellow raincoat walked expertly with a coil of rope over his shoulder, and Curtis envied him his balance, and the simple, purposeful weight of a coil of rope. A fresh downpour pelted the window and he looked out beyond the bay into the Georgia Strait and watched the gray water shifting under rain and wind. He ordered a black coffee and asked the girl who brought it if she knew Roberta Sirota, his grandmother, and where she lived. She didn't but suggested he try the art gallery on the north end of the bay. The man who owned it, she said, had lived on the island for decades. Curtis swallowed the hot coffee and left a few dollars on the table. He circled the top of the bay to the gallery, head down against rain that was now driving in horizontally from the strait.

The gallery was housed in an old cottage of warped, silvered cedar and half hidden by fir trees. He peered through the wide front window into a room with an empty desk and a tabby cat sleeping on a sofa in the corner. Picture frames hung from the walls; a lone plinth in the middle of the room displayed a wooden sculpture. Curtis leaned in closer to look at the sculpture, and it occurred to him that if he did find his grandmother, he wouldn't have a word to say to her. And she would want to know what he was doing on the island. He squinted, couldn't make out what the sculpture was supposed to depict. Interlocking waves were carved out of a deep-red wood into a tall, slender figure that could have been a woman. He let his focus drift from the sculpture to the cat to nothing, and stood motionless with his hand cupped loosely over his mouth, unsure of what to do next. When he focused again on the room, there was a thin, bald man standing in the middle of it, smiling and beckoning for him to come in.

“It's so fluid, isn't it?” said the man, nodding toward the sculpture as Curtis came in and shucked his wet bag to the floor. “The artist is local. He knows wood like you wouldn't believe.” The man, in his sixties, wore jeans and a light-blue t-shirt printed with a picture of the earth and the words “Love your mother.” He was so skinny that the t-shirt swayed like a curtain from his bony shoulders. “You look like you've been sleeping rough, man. You down at the campsite? Can I get you a tea?”

“I'm all right.”

“You sure? I make it with lots of milk and twice as much sugar. Good energy.” He nodded at the paintings. “These are all done locally too. I've got more in the back.”

“I'm actually trying to find someone who lives here. The girl in the coffee shop said I could ask you?”

“Who are you looking for?”

“Roberta Sirota.”

“You a friend of hers?”

“I'm her grandson.”

The man leaned forward and searched Curtis's face for a long time, and then smiled slowly. “That's beautiful, man,” he said. “You look just like your mother.”

“You knew her?”

He smiled warmly. “I knew Elka well.” He made a frame around his eyes with his fingers. “It's all here, just the same.”

This was something he had been reminded of all his life, mostly by his dad's mother. His dad must have seen it too, but never said. Samantha, though: she would stop Curtis in the middle of things, like when his fork was halfway to his mouth, and point out that the set of his jaw was just like Elka's. Or she would knuckle his dark hair when he let it grow and accuse him of looking more like his mother than he usually did. Sometimes he thought she was trying to be kind, as a grandmother should be—sneaking him pieces of Elka like candy before dinner. Other times he felt as if he were being blamed for some shameful thing.

This man was the first person he'd ever met who, at the mention of Elka, didn't look angry or uncomfortable.