The Night Wanderer (20 page)

Still in her clothes from the night before, Tiffany took out her history textbook and started leafing through it. She had some sort of test sometime this week. Maybe, she also thought, the image of her studiously reading might impress her father and reduce his anger—it was a possibility, however limited. No different than buying a lottery ticket or playing the slot machine. Odds are you wouldn't win a dime. It was literally a million to one. But there was indeed a statistical possibility you could come up lucky. So, Tiffany found the chapter they had covered on Thursday and began reading. Right now, a statistical possibility was all she had.

Almost immediately, her door opened and there stood her father. Tiffany swallowed hard but did not speak.

Keith looked at his daughter. He was losing control of her and didn't know what to do about it. But he had to start somewhere.

“Where were you last night?”

“I was out.” Before she even said it, Tiffany knew her answer was insufficient. In fact, if she had thought about it, she would have found a less confrontational way of responding. But it was too late now.

“Don't be smart. Didn't I send you to your room? To stay?” he asked. His voice was oddly calm, almost like they were having a real conversation.

“Yes, you did. But I had something to do.”

“Like what?”

“Tony and I broke up. That should make you happy.”

“Right now, I don't care. I thought I had grounded you.”

“Well, now I have no place to go anymore. So you got your wish. Happy?”

“I just don't want to hear any more of your mouth. You're failing school. You're skipping out on this family. I won't let this happen. When I tell you something, I expect you to pay attention. I'm your father and you will do what I say!”

“Yeah, that worked well with Mom, didn't it?” Both their voices were rising.

“Leave your mother out of this. She's gone and that's history. As for you, you will stay in this room all day, and for the next month, studying and getting those grades up. And just so you know, I'm putting a more permanent screen on that window.”

“What's the point, Dad? It doesn't matter. I'm a bad student. I know it. You know it. My teachers know it. You might as well get used to it.”

“The hell I will. Six weeks then. I won't be raising a lazy daughter.” Keith grabbed a pile of Tiffany's schoolbooks that were scattered around the room and dumped them angrily on her bed.

Tiffany tried to find the right words to express herself, but a stunned silence was all she could generate. Her father had called her lazy. And meant it.

Keith reached in and snatched her jean jacket from where Tiffany had thrown it eight hours earlier. He tossed it to her.

“Here. You're gonna need this.”

“Why? I thought you said I was gonna stay in this room for practically the rest of my life?”

“You have chores. Come with me.” Keith grabbed her right arm and pulled her out of her room and toward the front door. Keith said nothing as they both burst out into the morning sun. There, in the driveway, was her father's aging blue Ford pickup, looking worn and muddy as usual. Beside the truck were a hose, a bucket, and a sponge. Tiffany knew what was coming.

“You can't be serious?”

Keith let her arm go as he jumped down from the steps to turn on the outdoor faucet. “Tiffany, I want you to wash the truck. Now.”

He was serious, Tiffany thought, as she rubbed the circulation back into her right arm. “You always take it to the car wash in town. This is just to be mean to me, isn't it? It's eight o'clock in the morning and it's freezing out. I'll get pneumonia or something.”

“You've got to learn responsibility.” He put the hose in the bucket and Tiffany could hear the water filling it up.

“I'll learn responsibility by washing a beat-up Ford pickup?” Tiffany asked sarcastically.

“Just do it, Tiffany,” Keith responded as he turned to re-enter the house.

“Or what?” yelled his daughter. “You'll drive me away like you drove Mom and—”

“I don't want to hear about your mother!” Keith yelled, half in the house. “Your mother left! I didn't drive her away.”

“Well, something did! She didn't just decide ‘Hey, I think I'll leave my family and move to Edmonton' out of nowhere.”

Granny Ruth quietly appeared in the window of her bedroom. She could see her son and her granddaughter arguing again right below, but they were too preoccupied to notice her. This fight seemed bigger than the other ones, but she knew this moment was long in coming. Though to happen on a Sunday morning of all days, now that was disrespectful.

Keith turned around. This was dangerous territory, they both knew it, but they were there. There was no off-ramp.

“She left because she wasn't happy. I tried.”

For the first time in a long time, Tiffany stood toe to toe with her father. They were equals in pain and anger. “She wasn't happy. You just sat there, watching television. You still just sit there watching television. Yeah, I hate her for leaving, but she wouldn't have left if there was a reason to stay!”

“I gave her every reason to stay, but instead she ran off with that white guy.”

“He wasn't a part of this till after she left. You know that. Mom wasn't like that.”

“You're defending her?”

Tiffany paused for a moment. After so many months of blaming her mother, here she was defending her. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Yeah well, I don't care. She made her choice. I don't wanna talk about this anymore. Now for once in your stupid life, do what you're told.” Keith was desperately angry. So was Tiffany.

“There it is again. You think I'm stupid, don't you?”

Keith stopped moving. He didn't say anything. Tiffany was silent too. All that could be heard was the bucket overflowing with water.

For a second, it seemed like all the animals in the forest paused to see where this confrontation would end up. It was Keith who broke the silence. His voice was cold and measured. “Tiffany, as the guy who feeds you, and clothes you, and puts a roof over your head, I think I have a right to expect a certain amount of proper behavior. Running off in the middle of the night to meet that white boy isn't very respectful. If you don't show me any respect, then I've got little reason to show you any.”

“Like you said Dad, it's a two-way street. Kids are supposed to learn from their parents. Yeah, I'm learning lots.” Tiffany jumped down, grabbed the garden hose. She put her thumb over the opening and sprayed the truck.

Keith watched her for a moment before commenting coldly, “You are so much like your mother.”

Barely acknowledging him, Tiffany continued to blast away at the dirty vehicle.

“She didn't know when to be quiet either.”

Granny Ruth held her breath. That had come out of nowhere but had landed as a bull's eye. Silently she prayed their guest downstairs was sound asleep, missing the unfolding drama.

Keith paused, realizing he had crossed some invisible line. But it had been said and nothing could take it back. All the king's horses and all the king's men . . .

Tiffany dropped the hose. It fell at her feet and lay there. Off in the distance, a crow cawed, as if laughing at them. “I guess we know why she left, huh?”

Before he knew what he was saying, Keith responded, “Best thing she ever did. Now finish washing the truck.”

Tiffany raised her eyes to look directly into her father's. “Dad, I am sick of all this garbage. Everywhere I turn something is always happening to me. I'm just sixteen years old and I've got probably another fifty or sixty years of misery ahead of me. And right now, the only thing I'm sure of is I can't take it. Anymore.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” asked Keith.

Tiffany started walking away, leaving the dirty truck, Keith, and the rest of her crappy life behind. “I'm tired and pissed off. And frustrated and mad, and everything else. I just want it all to go away. I wanna go away.”

Fearing it might be some sort of emotional ploy to gain sympathy, Keith was reluctant to back down. “Don't talk like that. You're just overreacting.”

Without looking back, Tiffany ran to the wooded trail, her voice hanging on the early-morning mist. “You'll be sorry, Dad, grades or no grades. You and Tony and Mom and everybody else can all compare notes at the funeral. Just chalk it up to me being stupid.” She disappeared into the forest wall, leaving behind a few swaying branches she'd brushed against in her flight.

Hearing her words, and understanding their meaning, chilled Tiffany's father to the bone. He jumped down off the steps and went running toward the path, yelling, “Tiffany! Tiffany!” But it was too late. She was gone, off on one of the little side trails. He spent the rest of the day searching for her without success.

In her room, Granny Ruth sat on her bed, fretting and worrying about her granddaughter. She tried to knit but couldn't concentrate. She quit after making too many mistakes, and went back to looking out her window.

And in the basement where the improvised guest room sat occupied, all was silent. Like a tomb.

TWENTY-ONE

G
RANNY RUTH WAS frantic. Twelve hours had passed and no sign of Tiffany. Keith and his mother had phoned everybody they knew and who knew Tiffany, desperately searching the community for a sign she was all right. But nobody had seen her, and as the hours passed, their apprehension increased. Especially since there had been some disturbing gossip about the disappearance of Dale Morris and Chucky Gimau. Though she had never had any fondness toward the two boys, they were still part of the community. And like a domino effect, if something happens to one person, it can happen to a lot of other people. Her granddaughter was one of those other people.

Dale and Chucky's car had been found abandoned down by the lake, near the landing where fishermen put their boats into the water. There was no sign of them in the vehicle except for some chewing tobacco and saliva residue on the front dash and steering wheel. Plus pee stains on the driver's seat, for some bizarre reason. That was the night before last, and the police officers had been to their shack, and other than some bagged pot, the place looked abandoned. Everybody knew these boys would never leave either their car or the grass to be found so obviously. Something was wrong. And now Tiffany was missing too, though her disappearance was powered by her own legs.

Keith was feeling guilty and Granny Ruth knew it. Several times during the day she had tried to soothe her son but with little luck. He was practically out of his mind with worry.

“She'll come home, my son. She's got a temper, runs in the family, but she's also got a good head on her shoulders. Maybe she just needed a good cry. I sometimes wanna run away and have a good cry, but these old legs just won't let me.” But she, too, was worried by her granddaughter's implied threat. “Maybe when it gets dark and she gets hungry . . .”

It had been dark for more than an hour, and both lunch and dinner had come and gone without Tiffany's presence. Granny Ruth had repeatedly placed calls to all of Tiffany's friends, but they swore up and down they had not heard from her and would call as soon as they did, regardless of whether Tiffany wanted them to or not. So there she sat, looking out the window, wishing desperately to see a certain Anishinabe girl running up the front path. Angry or happy, they'd accept her any way.

She thought of her son, in his truck, driving up and down all the roads in the reserve, as he had been doing all afternoon. It was a big region, sparsely populated in some places, and there was plenty of room for an opinionated and stubborn teenager to hide if she wanted. A man in a pickup truck randomly driving the backroads was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. This needle did not want to be found.

Granny Ruth had seen her world go from growing up in a house where only Anishinabe was spoken and the outhouse crawled with spiders and flies, to a school where the teachers tried to beat all the Indian ways out of her, to today where anything Native was at a premium. People were even being paid good money to do all sorts of Native things. She knew people who were always being interviewed or asked to speak on all things Native. And it was mostly those who didn't really know that much who seemed to get all the attention. Life truly was a circle. Granny Ruth was old, and she knew it. But she had few regrets, and few remaining dreams. Drained by the worry and the anxiety of the day, she was drifting off into an uneasy slumber as the door to the downstairs opened slowly.

In her sleep, she dreamed of faraway times, and times closer to now. As always, the people in her dreams talked in Anishinabe. Her parents, her beloved husband, and her two departed children, Paula and Philip, all speaking the language of their ancestors. Her sleeping mind drank in each and every indigenous word it could. It was the only time she heard the language anymore, in her dreams. As often happened, she talked back to them in Anishinabe too, mumbling in her sleep, barely coherent. She was a little girl again, being told by her own grandmother about the bad and impish things roaming out in the forests: the nodweg-creatures from the south that steal bad little children (though secretly she thought it was just another word for the Iroquois, long-ago mortal enemies of the Anishinabe), the wendigos—monsters from the north that were cannibals with insatiable appetites who grew and grew the more they ate, the little people—mischievous beings to be wary of who lived in the forest, meadows, or along lake shores, and other assorted creatures. The mythology of the Anishinabe was full of them.

A shadow fell across her sleeping form as she twitched in her chair. It hovered there for a moment, watching her.