The Sudden Weight of Snow (20 page)

Sometime along the way, you manage to make friends again. When you were first at home, Anise tried to hook you up with other kids being home-schooled, but they turned out to be either kids whose Christian fundamentalist parents didn’t want them coming to your house or kids who had “behavioural problems” and who you didn’t necessarily want coming anywhere near you. You have been wandering the streets of Arcana looking for something to do. Some of the junior high boys remember you and others have heard of you, know that you don’t go to school and think you’re cool because of this. They ask you what you do all day, if you can hook them up with weed and girlie mags. The assumption is, since you don’t go to school, you have access to things other kids don’t, and to your initial surprise you discover that this is true. Anise and Peter’s supplies of weed are fairly easy to find and there’s enough, in enough different places, that they don’t notice when some goes missing. And the girlie mags. By a stroke of instinct, you ask one of Peter’s buddies – a younger guy who is involved somehow in the conservatory – if he can, um, if he can, uh, okay, get you some, um, magazines? You turn red and falter and he laughs and slaps your back and tells you, “No problem.” He
brings a couple of magazines every time he visits your house, slips them to you when Anise and Peter aren’t looking with a wink and a click-click from the side of his mouth.

You wish you had a normal family, two parents who worked, sisters who went to school. Anise has started AMAHALI – Aware Mothers At Home And Loving It. So far, there are four other mothers in the group and they rotate houses on weekday afternoons. So far, the mothers have sat in the living room or on the deck and drunk tea or coffee while the kids have either run around the yard or watched videos that could loosely be called educational.

You loathe the days when they descend on your house. Someone always gets hurt, someone always cries. The mothers attempt to laugh it off and tell each other the kids are learning social skills. For all of their awareness, the mothers don’t appear to be loving it. They roll their eyes, coax kids out of the living room and talk about things – childbirth, menstruation, tantric sex – that you can’t help but overhear and this embarrasses you. When they are there you try to leave, smiling and asking Anise if you can pick anything up for her at the store. You hear her telling the other mothers what a help you’ve been, how like your father you are.

Your sisters have developed, to your surprise you’ll admit, distinct personalities. The oldest is wilful, stubborn, and sneaky. The middle one is wistful, dreamy, and a whiner. The youngest, your favourite, is a charmer, a ham. She sings and dances and puts on one-girl shows for anyone who will watch. They are six, seven, and eight – ages that you can remember being – and this makes them seem more like little humans to
you, and, in turn, you feel more protective of them. One of the mothers makes a joke about the kids being “feral” – about how free they are, how untamed. You want to tell your dad, Peter, something, warn him, of what you’re not sure. That Anise rarely helps you with your home-schooling and probably won’t help the girls much either. That they should have more supervision than the loud, laughing group of hippie moms that watch the brood now. But, you remind yourself that you are not quite a part of this, that you have a lot of freedom where you are. Freedom you’re not sure you want to give up.

Peter isn’t home a lot. He did start that new business venture, after all, although you have little idea what it is. Anise tells the mothers that Peter has gone into the holistic growth of organic herbs and medicinals. This is news to you. Peter refers to where he goes a couple times a week as “the conservatory.” He loves to use the word, as though what he is doing is so grand, so lovely that it should be set to music. When he is home, Peter is in the shop.

You gain a reputation from the guys as someone who is always able to come through for them. The weed, the magazines, and other things – your house to hang out in on the rare afternoon when Peter, Anise, and your sisters are all out. You have even let them start up Peter’s power tools and point them at each other.

The guys tell you what has happened to girls since you’ve been out of public school. Sure, there were a few years when they all seemed to walk into things – desks, chairs, doors, anything really – when a couple of girls were spotted with burgundy stains on the seats of their pants and some of them cried
for no reason in phys ed. Most of them, though, are through that now and the guys let you know that you should be thankful that you weren’t around for those years. Now the girls have asses instead of butts, tits under thin T-shirts. Almost all of them wear bras, the guys tell you, but there are always a few who think they don’t have to, think they’re too flat-chested. This is good too. If you are ever near one of them when it’s cold, they swear, you will be able to see the ridges of their nipples clean through their shirts.

These same boys are fighting substantial battles with acne. Oil seems to noticeably creep down their roots and along each hair even in the few hours that you spend with them after they’re out of school. By the time you part, a couple of the guys look completely water-logged, skin and hair gleaming. It seems unfair to you that it is these same boys that are able to share classes with the girls they tell you about. They are able to look at them from behind locker doors. To sit behind them in algebra and smell their hair that always has the essence of something sweet, fruity – green apples, peaches. These boys are able to ask if they can borrow a pencil and watch while the girls’ rose-tipped fingers sift through pencil cases, imagining all the while what those same fingers would do to their bodies.

It doesn’t take you long to figure out a couple of things. One, since Peter and Anise trust you and you have had a certain amount of “freedom” for a couple of years now, there is no stopping you hanging around the high school when classes get out, meeting your buddies, running your eyes up and down those girls. Two, that when you do show up at the high school,
the girls are as fascinated with you as you are with them. You are a legend now.

It is Saffron Fraser who lets you in on this. You are waiting for the guys, a few minutes before the final bell, when she appears from around the side of the school. “You waiting for your loser friends?” she asks. You answer that yes, you guess you are. “Don’t then. Come with me, walk me home.” You walk her across the field and down a road that will eventually lead you to her place. “You remember me?” she asks. You do. She was in your elementary school, always in another class, called Saffie then. That’s about all you can recall.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Yeah, well, I remember you too, Mouse. A lot of us do, you know.” You didn’t know, stay quiet, afraid to blow whatever is going on. “You’re so lucky that you don’t have to go to school.” You start to explain that you still have to do schoolwork, that instead of being in class you are in a house with three younger sisters, but then stop. “We’re not –” she continues, then pauses. “We aren’t so lucky that you’re not at school, though. The boys there are, well, never mind, they are your friends, unfortunately. Hey, you should come to one of the dances. You know, the lame ass school dances, I don’t know if you’d want to but –”

You are in front of her house by then and this is when you turn to face her, instead of walking side by side. “Yeah?” you say. “Sure. Just let one of the guys know when.” While you are looking at Saffie, who you’re sure you once chased screaming around the schoolyard of your elementary school, her neck turns pink.

“Yeah?” she says, as a question.

“Yeah,” you say, as an answer. When you do, she takes your hand and pulls you into her carport. There, she kisses you on the lips – your first real kiss – it is fast and wet and your top lip bangs against your teeth. She bursts out laughing afterward.

“Oh, my God,” she says. “No one is going to believe this.” You don’t ask her why not.

This first kiss, that rising pink on her neck, knowing that you can make her laugh for no reason at all, is intoxicating but it doesn’t make you confident, it makes you awkward. Anise notices. She has started directing what she says to Peter instead of you. “Peter,” she yells to him in the next room, right in front of you, “You know, I thought Gabe already went through puberty but there seems to be something else going on now, doesn’t there?” This last question she points at you with her eyes, laughing at the corners. You don’t know how to answer, leave the room. Anise has never been more annoying.

She thinks you’re having sex. This becomes clear after a few of these cross-house announcements to Peter. “I think your son –
our
son – is becoming, well, a man, so to speak. Huh, Gabe?”

“Shut up, Anise,” you tell her one day. It is the first time you have ever said this to her. It is the first time you have seen her look genuinely surprised at anything you’ve done.

You are not having sex but you think about it constantly and Anise seems to pick up on this, which drives you nuts. You discover, however, it isn’t only her. The other women in her mother’s group pick up on it too, although they don’t yell things across your house, thank God. Instead, they poke their
heads into your room on their way back from the bathroom down the hall, ask you how your work is going, and move into the room further. You have twice had mothers sitting on your bed asking you about basic laws of physics, watching your lips move while you explain. One of them tells you that you have lovely eyelashes. Eyelashes? No one will ever believe this. Not even you believe it completely. You don’t know how adults get anything done. Your days are saturated in sexual suggestion and you haven’t done more than kiss Saffie in a carport and wipe the saliva off your mouth when she wasn’t looking.

W
hen Gabe and I got back to the cookshack, it was one in the morning and the truck that we had left running had stalled. We had missed the countdown. Krista was dancing, stripped to long johns and a shirt like most of the other people in the room. I didn’t want to stop her.

“You can spend the night here, you know,” Gabe offered. And we did, Krista and I both sharing Gabe’s double bed with him in a converted shed. I slept in the middle. Gabe and I kissed until Krista kicked me, saying, “Would you two cut it out.” We stopped, and Gabe fell asleep first, as Krista and I whispered to each other about what fates awaited us for not returning home. When I finally did fall asleep, I was too happy to care.

The next day, after dropping Krista off first, Gabe took me home. I went into the kitchen and poured myself some cereal, listening to the Cheerios hit the bowl as I tried not to think of what was coming next. No new snow had fallen. The ground
shone, sun off a tight skin, and I didn’t close the blinds, squinted into the glare.

They arrived home with a cough, a splatter of keys, boots dropping. Nick pounded up the stairs and Vera came into the kitchen, reached for the coffee maker, registered the sight of me sitting at the table, then walked back out. When she came in again, she did nothing but stare, tight-lipped. I looked back at her; she was only a silhouette while my eyes adjusted from the light out the window. When she finally spoke, what she said was this: “Well.” She said this quietly, straight at me.

“Hi,” I said.

“Well, yes, hi,” she responded, poured herself a cup of coffee and slammed it into the microwave. “You were with him last night, weren’t you?”

“You already know I was at Pilgrims last night and yes, I was with Gabe. It’s not what you think, though.”

“Sylvia, I trusted you to spend the evening there, not the night, and I’m trusting you now to tell me the truth.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Well, you certainly must have been doing something. I just hope you know what that was, or what you think you’re looking for.”

“Looking for? Is that what this is about? And what did you think you were ‘looking for’ when you moved us here and joined the Free Church? Tell me that.”

Vera stared at me without saying anything, then sighed. “Speaking of which, I met with Pastor John yesterday. Matthew was there. I went to talk about the possibility of being on the council, and instead we ended up talking about you. They’re
concerned that with me being responsible for you and Nick on my own, I won’t have enough time to focus properly on the church, and I can’t say you’re helping matters any.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You know it’s hard for me, Sylvie. I can’t keep track of your every move. Do me a favour and don’t play innocent with me now.”

“I’m not playing at anything. Did you ever consider that? What are you trying to say?”

“I’m talking about that farm, the drugs, the New Age nonsense that they’re feeding you.”

“New Age nonsense! Yeah, they’re brainwashing me, Mom, stripping me naked and painting me with menstrual blood. What did Matthew tell you, anyway? What do you think is going on?”

“I don’t know, Sylvia, but I don’t think you do either. Why don’t you try to explain to me what
you
think is going on.”

“Well, for one thing, Matthew is lying to you.”

“I understand, you confided in him, but let’s not talk about Matthew, let’s talk about you.”

“What about me? It was New Year’s Eve. I got tired. I didn’t want to face coming home and going to church
again
. We went to church all last week. I didn’t want to face you and your accusations, all the Friends’ fake smiles, the self-righteousness. I can’t believe that you would take Matthew’s word over mine. I’m not even going to repeat some of the things he said to me.”

I refused to let my emotions misfire and make me cry. I realized that Matthew, hypocrite that he was, had been counting
on me not saying anything that would implicate my brother. Without even being there, he had me pinned. Anything I said now would come off as an attempt to protect myself. I wanted to tell Vera that the pastor’s successor was dealing dope to her son. Instead, I blew. “You are so self-righteous. Why don’t you ask some of your so-called friends exactly what they think of you and then see if you still want to take all this out on me. Mom, open your eyes.”