The Sudden Weight of Snow (29 page)

I walked to Vera’s after school, having agreed to meet Gabe at the café downtown in an hour. Entering through the front door seemed too formal so I went around the back. Once I got there,
however, I felt presumptuous simply walking into the kitchen, so I knocked first and waited a moment before letting myself in. I almost expected Vera to be at the table waiting, but she wasn’t. I started to take my coat off but decided against it. Then I heard some movement from the direction of the living room and called out.

I could hear Vera get up and walk down the hall toward the kitchen, her steps neither fast nor slow. She stopped inside the kitchen door, smiled, then took a step toward me. “Hello, Harper. It’s good to –” Vera began to reach for me, then let her arm drop. “How are you doing?”

“I’m – are you sure you want me to answer that question?” I asked.

My response must have relaxed her a little. I saw the slight shadow of a smile pass over her face as she shook her head. She moved toward the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. “Yes, unbelievably enough, I really would.” She pulled an empty cup toward her, tilted it and peered in. She looked up at me and asked, “Are you going to sit?”

I considered this, took my hands out of my pockets and held the back of a chair, then pulled it out and sat down. “Okay. I’m doing well at the farm. I like it there.”

“Good. That’s good, really.”

I looked at Vera to see if she really meant it but her expression was wiped flat. “How’s Nick?” I asked.

“As far as I can tell, Nick is fine, although it can’t be good for him to see his older sister walk out on her family.”

Instead of addressing this, I asked, “And council? Have you decided anything about council?”

“No, I haven’t.” Vera looked out the window, then turned back to me and asked, “Has it ever occurred to you that I might have some kind of comprehension of what you’re going through?”

“I knew it would come back to this.”

“Sylvia, it isn’t coming back to anything. Whether you like it or not, you are my daughter. You’ve been very vocal about what you think is wrong with my life. Now it’s my turn to make my observations about yours. Would that be all right?”

“Sure, as long as you’re really looking at me, Mom, and not at yourself.”

“So, you think you have it figured out, do you? You’ve already made your mind up with what you think you know about me. Where does that leave us?”

“Here, I guess.”

By the end of February, the valley had been socked in with clouds thick as gravy for two weeks solid. The temperatures had begun to rise under this blanket, enough that skin didn’t ache when exposed to air, but the clouds shed no new snow. The dirt roads were either mud or frozen mud. The paved roads were gritty with old salt. The snow was yellow and grey and melting. In the fields, leafless plants and patches of brown broke through the snow.

I felt restless, as though only movement could shake off the dormancy of weeks of grey and brown. Having convinced myself it was a fresh start, I hadn’t skipped any classes since
moving to the farm. But one afternoon in February, in a windowless classroom in the belly of the school, the teacher’s drone began to join with the hum of the fluorescent lights and I knew I had to get out. I knew too that I would end up at the Catholic Church downtown, oddly enough.

Before moving to the farm I had skipped class to go to the church on the corner of Pine and Twenty-seventh, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I seemed to be perpetually in need of something and once I had thought it was help. Going through the doors meant crossing over into everything the Free Church had left behind – idolatry, blasphemy, ritual. Our Lady was the only church with unlocked doors on weekdays when I needed a place to sit alone. I went there for silence. The Virgin would welcome me, hand half-opened at her heart, a passing gesture frozen. The Mother of God didn’t mean the same thing at the Free Church and she was resolutely not worshipped. The women who were named in sermons – Bathsheba, Jezebel – were the bad ones. The good ones – Esther, Ruth – were given to girls in Sunday school parables, stories as sweet and tart as powdered candy licked off lips. Esther was my favourite. She was beautiful enough to pass between worlds, smart enough to bring peace to both.

My fascination with the Catholic Church had begun one summer when we returned to Alberta after moving to Sawmill Creek. Then, Vera’s family had still been able to convince her to bring us to services in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Vera explained to Nick and me both, although it seemed to me that my little brother could barely understand English at that age, that this was our relatives’ church, not our own. We didn’t
believe we needed special smells, and chants, and signs to talk to God. It was their church I liked, though. The priest walked down the aisle, swinging a lantern of smoke that smelled both sweet and old. The congregation all knew the same mumbled language and would kneel down and stand up in unison, chant in a low hum. The ceilings were painted with heavenly hosts and on the panels on the walls still-faced, sombre saints all held a hand open at their chest in a gesture I assumed to be a small wave, an acknowledgment.

On one of those Sundays, I had asked God for a sign. It took me most of the sermon to try to think of what I wanted a sign for, and I never did come up with anything specific. I just wanted a sign; that seemed like enough to ask. We had been told that God didn’t like specifics, that He knew best. Ask and ye shall receive. So I asked and received a sudden band of sunlight, like those shafts of light that spill from clouds as though made from the stuff of angels. The band shot through a window, picked up the red from the stain on the glass, and created for a moment a wall of light that wouldn’t allow me to see through it. The priest intoning in Ukrainian on the other side was invisible. That’s all. Eventually, my eyes adjusted and I couldn’t even see the red tint to it. The light became just something else in the air.

On that day in late February, I wanted something. Not a sign necessarily. Even a wash of light would do. But I wouldn’t recognize what did come to me that afternoon.

Though I had seen a lot of Krista, we hadn’t spent much time alone in the previous two months. Before last period I waited outside of her class, catching her before she went in.
“Come downtown with me,” I whispered, as students crowded around us to get into the class.

Krista looked at me without saying anything, glanced into the classroom for a moment, as though considering her options, then she shrugged. I took this to mean she would come. When I smiled, she moved past me, and turned. “Meet you outside in a couple minutes,” she said.

We walked downtown. When we were at the bottom of the church steps, Krista and I stopped talking and went in. She didn’t ask any questions, just followed me. Not knowing what they were for, I lit some candles on one side of the altar and Krista followed my lead, lit some on the other, then we sat in empty pews across the aisle from each other. I had forgotten what it was like to chase prayers out of my mind. Sometimes when Gabe turned me over and I spread my legs and arms and gripped the sides of the mattress, everything heat and liquid, I heard myself saying, “Oh God, oh God,” but I didn’t really consider that praying.

Something about sitting in a pew brought the words back to me. Words that asked for things to be given, then asked for others to be taken away. Words that implored, then apologized. I wanted to wipe my mind clear of each one. I thought that the absence of thought would be better than trying to sort out what exactly it was that I wanted to believe. I tried paying attention to my breath instead as it passed through my nostrils. Tried to see clouds moving, skies about to clear, waves rolling and abating until the water was smooth as glass but the prayer started anyway.
Our Father, who art
, the Lord’s Prayer started up
like a recording,
in Heaven, hallowed be
, and kept breaking through, even though the Free Church had only adopted it a couple of years before,
Thy name
, when Pastor John had decided that something about the rhythm of those words would bring us closer to God,
Thy kingdom come
, come – I was still uncomfortable with that word for what happened,
Thy will be done
, that word for the liquid we both expelled as though the impact of our bodies against each other forced something out, drained us in small ways,
on earth as it is
.

I opened my eyes and looked across the aisle. Krista was shaking slightly in the pew, arms wrapped around herself. I closed my eyes, opened them and looked again to see her still shaking. Not knowing what to do, I lay down on the pew, stared at the ceiling, and waited.

When I heard Krista get up and walk down the aisle, I followed her out. I touched the arm of her coat in the foyer and we exchanged a glance – one in which I asked
Are you all right?
and she answered
Leave it
.

Back outside, we took runs at the remnants of packed snow on the sidewalks, trying to get a good slide in, in spite of how we both felt, or perhaps to cheer ourselves up. Most of it had already melted and the few patches that remained were grainy with dirt and salt, not great for gliding. Krista coasted a small way, then spun around to face me, breath flowering the air, cheeks bright. “Let’s go to Community Drugs.”

I could tell by the way she raised her eyebrow as she walked backwards what Krista wanted to do. “I don’t know, Kris –” I started.

Krista shifted so she was walking beside me. “You don’t know? I come with you to the Catholic church for no particular reason and now, you don’t know?”

“I just don’t feel like it today,” I answered.

I stopped on the sidewalk for a moment and Krista kept walking, then said over her shoulder, “Well, I’m going. You can do whatever.” She shrugged and headed in the direction of the drugstore. Something about that shrug, her turned back, made me follow.

Perhaps it was our haste or the lack of recent practice but we got caught that day, a clerk hollering at us as we tried to make it out the door and across the parking lot unnoticed. There being little else for excitement in her life, the clerk insisted on calling the police after she got us back inside and had us empty our clothes of loot.

“Cry when the cop gets here,” whispered Krista.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Of course you can. Whatever you do, don’t act cocky.”

“Huh! Look who’s talking,” I shot back in a whisper.

When the officer arrived, Krista cried enough for both of us. He agreed not to press charges but insisted we call our parents to pick us up. I felt my throat constrict and I squeezed out, “Um, officer, I don’t live at home.”

“Okay, then, your guardian,” he said, without missing a beat. He must’ve picked up kids all the time who didn’t live at home.

I tried not to expel my relief too quickly. I called the cookshack and let the phone ring. The officer wasn’t going to let us go until we both had rides. I called the farm again and again. We were trapped in the Community Drugs staff room,
surrounded with positive affirmations, kitten posters, and the smell of perfume samples. When I realized that I wasn’t going to get anyone in the cookshack, I asked to use a phone book and looked up Thomas’s number.

“Uh, hi, Mr. Steele” – I talked quickly – “I was, uh, well I’ve been caught shoplifting – I’m, uh, sorry – and the officer wants you to come pick me up. I’m at Community Drugs, okay?”

Thomas showed up shortly after Krista’s dad, Harley, and we all crowded into the staff room, the clerk smiling and offering them coffee like it was a social event. Both Harley and Thomas seemed to be trying to hide their amusement as the officer spoke to them about the seriousness of our crime. Harley said something about “talking this over at home” and “there will certainly be consequences,” which we all knew wasn’t going to happen, then they shook the officer’s hand.

Harley elbowed us both as we walked into the parking lot. “Little shit-disturbers, eh?” He turned to Krista. “I guess you don’t want me telling your mother about this?”

“Uh, yeah, Dad, you guessed right.”

Harley didn’t ask who Thomas was and why I was going with him. He must have thought he was a member of the Free Church. We got in their respective cars – Harley’s truck, Thomas’s old Suburban – and drove opposite ways out of the parking lot.

“Shoplifting, Harper? Really, I thought you had more class,” Thomas said, no indication of whether he was trying to make a joke or not.

“Are you going to discipline me?” I didn’t mask the edge of flirtation in my voice.

Thomas didn’t say anything for a moment, then asked, “Has Susan talked to you yet?”

“Susan? No, about what?”

“Social Services has been by.”

“What for?”

“I guess your mother – or one of your people – called them.”

“They’re not ‘my people.’ They can’t do anything, though, can they? I mean Social Services can’t actually tell me where I can live.”

“I’m afraid they can, Harper. You are technically a minor. They can’t force you to move back in with your mother, true, but, if you don’t, it’ll be them who’ll decide where you’ll live. Sorry to burst your bubble.”