The Sudden Weight of Snow (33 page)

Things keep coming back to you at the farm, as though now that you’ve returned to a place that’s supposed to be “home,” memories follow you there, lodge themselves around you like fence posts. Images are driven into your mind but you resist finding the links between them, don’t want the connective tissue to form a fence around you.

You see the van leaving the land thirteen years before, dust rolling behind it, a vantage point you never would have had. You didn’t know then that you should have been sad, that you were leaving your mother and everything you knew behind. It seems like years passed before you remembered to miss Susan at all. What kind of person are you, you wonder. If you don’t miss your own mother you must be capable of other insensitivities. Even now, when you seek Susan out, it is for appearance’s sake only. You don’t enjoy spending time with her. She chainsmokes, speaks in a string of sarcastic comments, and looks at you with too much need in her eyes, though she will never admit to wanting anything from you.

You see your old house in Arcana, the yard backing onto forest, your legs kicked up on the railing around the deck. In this image, your face is missing. You see your hands instead,
wrapped around a cup, the sight of steaming liquid so authentic that you can smell the coffee. You were allowed to drink it too soon, you now believe. Something was stunted in you, some ability to connect with other people. You set yourself apart from Peter, Anise, and the girls, out on that balcony, your back toward the house, eyes looking into the trees. You try to recall how free those times felt, despite the girls shrieking in the background and the voices of Peter and Anise in various states of disorganization. The rest of your life was still open then. What you thought of, those times alone on the deck, was leaving – the possibility that your life, genuine and waiting to be fulfilled, existed elsewhere, just waiting for you to step into it.

You have always imagined where you are at any given time as a point on a map. In your mind’s eye, the map lies flat, north at the top, and you are simply a speck on the page. You’ve often wondered how other people visualize where they are – if they see it in more than two dimensions, if they can see the land rising up, rolling out around them rather than just paper. You can’t imagine phone lines stretched over landscape so you draw them as straight lines on your mental map. You haven’t talked, really talked, to anyone from California since you’ve been in Canada. Peter doesn’t have long distance calling rights and neither of you is good at writing letters. As for the guys from home, there is nothing you can talk about with any of them on the phone. Yours were friendships that were dependent on place and situation, fuelled by running commentaries that required the assessment of girls, magazines, or dope to keep you going. Anise has put your sisters on the phone a couple of times but it’s as though none of you know what to say to one
another. The worlds that you are all now living in, you on the farm, they in the housing co-op, are different from the place you knew together. The split level on a cul-de-sac, a memory.

Images of Anise and the girls wandering the house in T-shirts and panties seep into the edges of your days. You can see the smooth limbs of your sisters twisted around each other in sleep, piled up on Anise’s bed where they all slept in those weeks before you left. Any of your other thoughts can peel back to expose Anise’s legs crossing and unfolding. You are ashamed to admit that you miss her more than you ever did Susan. You try to convince yourself that it’s the years of her raising you, the years when she acted as your mother, that you miss, but what you remember is the smooth lick of her tongue in your mouth. Thankfully, you have read enough “Letters to Penthouse” to realize that this isn’t unusual. Fantasies about sex with forbidden partners are standard issue, sexy stepmothers up there in that category. But you did more than fantasize, returned to her more than once. Your tongue looked so rough when held out to your reflection in the mirror, all bumps and crevices, but in her mouth it felt wiped flush. You returned just to feel that.

You spend a lot of time thinking about all of this. Too much time. All those images and memories continually shift around you and you are never on stable ground. You like to walk at night, the fields glowing with snow, to regain some sense of your footing. Night seems the right time to do this, everything slow and conceivable then. Days sear with too much urgency. Sometimes you try to sleep through the insistence of daylight, the sky bearing down on you, even through the curtains. Other times it is the sheer mass of clouds that
keeps you horizontal. Brenda, a woman at the farm, tells you that this is natural, you are experiencing SAD, seasonal affective disorder. You have wondered more than once how people can grow up and continue to live in this valley, pushing through banks and banks of heavy grey every winter. Even the sun provokes melancholy. You know it is bound to be marred by cloud cover soon after it appears and it seems to demand something of you in the meantime.

For all the pressure that you feel, no one has actually asked anything of you. Even Harper, who lies beside you at night, asks little. She slides next to you in the bed, arches her back and moans in ways that make you wonder if you’ve hurt her, and turns away satiated by what little you offer. You try to tell her some of this but, because she has asked for so little, you know this would be more than she could be expected to understand.

You had always assumed that adulthood was about discernible burdens, demands. You realize now that pressure doesn’t come in neat packages, distinct and identifiable, easily separated. Instead, pressure builds like an invisible layer on your skin until it forms a membrane. On the night of the fire, you try to break through it. You lash out in an attempt to lose sight, to render yourself blind to everything going on around and inside you. Without this sight, you feel free, as though there is a purity to your actions. There is nothing but your anger and his, muscles and fists tensed. Bone, teeth, skin, blood. Later, you won’t be able to describe how good it feels. Better than sex because that act brings so many other things with it.

W
hen we were evacuated from the farm, we were told to go to Motel 6, where we crowded into the lobby, tired and reeking of smoke at three in the morning. There was a fire department official at the desk with the receptionist, taking our names. “Your whole family here?” he asked Susan when it was her turn at the counter.

“No. My son, Gabriel Miller. I think he’ll be back at the farm now. I don’t know if he knows where to find us.”

“There’re still a few guys there. Fire’s taken care of and it seems no one was hurt. We’ll have them bring him and the others here in short order. And her?” he gestured to me.

“She’s with us.”

I was put in a room with Susan and Brenda. They shared a bed. Susan sat on top of the covers, completely clothed, not saying a word or glancing in my direction. I watched as she opened the drawer in the bedside table. She slid out the Gideon Bible and pulled pages from it, folded them into small origami cranes, her fingers moving quickly. I watched as she drew the
crease delicately through her pinched nails. Sometimes her nails would catch the fine paper and it would rip. She would curse and toss it aside. I fell asleep watching her hands move, attempting to guess how many cranes made for each page ripped.

Gabe must have come in sometime during the night. I woke in the morning to a warm place beside me in the bed, the sound of Susan and him talking on the other side of the motel door, Susan’s voice slightly raised. A pile of crumpled paper and origami cranes, tattooed with words, spilled over the bedside table and onto the floor. Gabe came into the room at the same time that Brenda emerged from the bathroom.

“Love motel bathrooms,” she announced. “Little soaps, little shampoos, everything folded and white – like your life can be so compact and manageable here.”

“Susan’s gone to the diner for breakfast. I think they’re giving it to us for free,” Gabe said to Brenda while he looked at me. I looked back, saw his cracked lip, the cut above his eye.

“Little shampoos, free breakfast – what could be better, hey?” Brenda said as she left the room.

Gabe sat down on the side of the bed. I reached out to touch his face, the places where he was cut, then stopped. “May I?” Gabe just shrugged and looked away. I let my hand drop.

“They started the fire, didn’t they?”

“Those two assholes? Yeah, who else would’ve? Jerks. Went to a party in town and bragged about it afterward, no less. Susan’s pretty pissed off that they ended up at the farm.”

I sat up in the bed and asked, “Where were you last night? I woke up in the shed alone.”

“I was giving Krista a ride home,” he answered evenly.

“Oh, my God – is she okay?”

“Krista’s fine. Her boyfriend’s a total psychopath but she’s fine – I got her out of there before the fire even started.”

I tucked the bedspread under my arms and smoothed it across my chest. “Oh, well, I’m glad you were looking out for one of us.”

He paused, his eyes on me for a moment before they settled in a corner of the room. “Listen, she was really strung out. I can’t be everything for you, Harper.”

“I didn’t know you were trying to be,” I said and then realized how far I was already from my original intent. “Are you okay?” I asked.

When he shrugged and continued to look away, I asked, “What happened? What made you blow like that? I’d expect that kind of thing from Mike but –”

“What happened?” Gabe’s eyes were back on mine. He shook his head and said, “Well, I guess I could ask you the same question. Last night was fucked up, right Harper? And I’m not talking about just the fight, or the fire, although those certainly both qualify.”

“Oh. I get it – change of subject. What are you talking about then?”

“Harp, you can’t keep falling back on this innocence thing.”

“Okay, Gabe, I’ll fall back on the ignorance thing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He gave me his best cold stare. I mirrored it back. As I did, I could feel it slip, could feel the heat of the sauna, the smooth path made by a soaped palm on my back. I looked down at my hands, then at the pile of paper cranes.

When I didn’t say anything else, Gabe said, “Yeah, right. Okay then, Harp.” After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Look, do you want to go for breakfast?”

“No. I’m not hungry. I’m just tired, so tired.” I slid back down to the pillow.

He turned and looked at me, and I when reached my arm towards his face, he leaned in. I touched the cut above his eye. I let my fingertips rest there, feeling the heat under his skin. Gabe watched my face, then brought his hand down slowly to my temple, pinched pieces of my hair between thumb and forefinger. Without a word, he folded back the sheets, got into the bed with me. It was what I had wanted him to do the night before. I let him wrap around my body from behind, closed my eyes and tried to create warmth, forget everything else.

Susan and Brenda returned from the diner and woke us from our brief sleep.

“Well, they’ve fed us, now they’re giving us the boot,” Susan said. “Seems they’ve caught the little bastards and I guess there’s not much else they can do for us now.”

Gabe got out of bed and dressed as though no one was there, not me or Susan or Brenda. I dragged the sheet from the bed, wrapped it around me, trailing paper cranes as I went to the bathroom. I adjusted the water so it was as hot as I could bear, then stood under the spray without washing. When I got
out of the shower, the room was heavy with steam, and I could hear Susan and Gabe talking.

“She hardly even knows them for God’s sake. Mike is Krista’s boyfriend. Get off this already.”

“All I’m saying is that not everyone belongs at the farm – I mean, not everyone chooses to live like us and we don’t choose to live with just anyone.”

Brenda interjected. “We just can’t ever know how things will turn out. Who’s to say they wouldn’t have been there? Who’s to say that someone else wouldn’t have started the fire? Maybe it was simply supposed to go. We never know why these things happen.”

I chose this moment to emerge from the bathroom and they each turned to look at me. Without saying a word, I crossed the room to the bed, picked up my clothes, dropped the towel, and got dressed.

I called Vera from the motel, knowing she would hear about the fire soon. I told her that I was fine, that I was going back to the farm and she shouldn’t worry, though I knew those two things were no doubt mutually exclusive. We drove back to the Pilgrims without speaking, Gabe, Susan, myself, and Brenda, who sang along to the bits of lyrics she knew on the radio. We all listened when the news came on. “… While it is now safe to return to their homes, many of the residents have lost belongings in the fire. Needed are food and kitchen supplies as well as building materials. Donations can be dropped off at the Sawmill Creek Community Centre. Two local youths are being questioned in connection to the blaze.”

Susan snapped the radio off, laughed once and said, “Local youths,” nothing else.