The Wildfire Season (8 page)

‘Mmm-mmm,’ Rachel says, licking her lips. ‘Chicken fingers!’

Alex is wearing a Clash T-shirt that Miles recognizes, the
London Calling
one with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. It allows him to see how tanned she is relative to the white cotton, as well as the strength in her arms. He had not come here to admire her, or to indulge the nostalgia brought on by raggy clothes she hasn’t gotten rid of, but he finds that he feels both. He makes the decision to fight these things directly. And if they break through his defences, he can’t allow himself to be surprised.

‘Momma?’ Rachel says, craning her head back to face Alex. ‘Can I go outside?’

‘If you promise to stay on the grass here, or in the back.’

‘I won’t go far.’

‘It’s not about far. It’s about being where I can keep my eyes on you.’

‘I won’t go far from your eyes.’

Alex lifts her hands from the child’s shoulders and she shoots out past Miles. There’s a quaking in the wood as she runs away.

Miles stands at the door with arms folded high on his chest. He feels prissy and miscast, but now that he’s here, he can’t do a thing about it.

‘Just leave it open behind you,’ Alex says, stepping back. ‘I like to listen for her.’

He steps inside and can smell the steamy mix of soap and shampoo from Alex’s shower along with the more historical traces of cooking seeped
through from downstairs. He slides over the cigarette burns in the carpet, past the two single beds and rabbit-eared TV, to stand before the small window at the opposite end. It’s bright outside but the light stops dead at the frame. Despite this, a daddy-long-legs roams the other side of the glass, searching for a way in.

‘Why here?’

He turns. The room is much smaller now that the shadows have pulled away to show the walls.

‘The only other hotel’s in Faro, and that’s—’

‘Not us. You. What was it about Ross River that made you stay?’

‘The land is good. As good as any place in the Territory. And the town is—’ He stops to remember what he was about to say, and realizes there’s nothing there. ‘The town is nowhere,’ he goes on finally. ‘I suppose it’s somewhere for the people born here. And for the Kaska it means all sorts of things, good and bad and other stuff I don’t have a clue about. But for me, it’s the best nowhere I was able to find.’

‘I knew that’s what you’d be looking for.’

‘And that’s how you found me.’

Alex shrugs.

‘I tried the easy ways first,’ she says. ‘But there was no phone number under your name anywhere. I even tried looking up your mom, but she’s totally off-line, too.’

‘She got rid of her phone when she realized the only person she has to call anymore is me. And
we’ve already made our own arrangements on that count.’

‘So what did that leave me with? Fifty thousand miles. I would come to a road that ran off whatever road I was on and I’d follow it to the end. When I couldn’t go any farther on the last one I could find—that’s where I knew you would be.’

‘Nowhere.’

‘Nowhere’s nowhere,’ she says. ‘Not when you’re in it.’

Miles doesn’t agree—he’s living proof that she’s wrong—but he doesn’t contradict her.

‘How long did you plan to keep it up?’

‘This was it,’ Alex says, clapping her hands together once, hard. An everybody-out-of-the-pool sound. ‘August first. Ten days from now. Four seasons rolling from Eugene to Pink Mountain to Spokane and I’m finally ready to quit. Then you’re right there. A bogeyman on a bar stool.’

‘It must have cost a hell of a lot. And your parents can’t be giving—’

‘To look for
you
?’

Alex releases a nasty laugh and sits on the end of the bed. The mattress screeches in protest. When she settles, however, her body is unnaturally still, as though something had switched off inside of her.

‘A tent, a cooler full of hot dogs and bananas,’ she goes on, sliding her hands down the front of her jeans. ‘The rest is pretty cheap, really. Buy a used pickup at the beginning of the summer and
resell it on Labour Day. The rest of the time it’s driving and stopping. Showing a picture of you to everybody I meet, like a cop in a TV show.
Excuse me, ma’am, have you seen this man?
And they would look, and make a sad, oh-poor-dear face and shake their heads. I’d tell them to look again and imagine half his face scarred. Because it’s weird, you know, but I never took a picture of you after you came back from the fire. Have you ever noticed that people only take pictures when they’re happy? Anyway.
Anyway
. I’d show the old photo of you for a second time and tell them to add in a scar. Sometimes they wanted to help so much that they’d lie and say yes, they thought they saw somebody like that around last week. At the back of the pool hall, asking for spare change outside the liquor store—one of those places where you’d expect to come across the sort of person you wouldn’t want to take a good look at. But I became an expert at detecting the sound of wishful thinking, and move on. Drive and stop and out comes the picture.
Excuse me, sir
. Drive and stop. When it got to the end of August, we’d turn around. That was it. That’s the whole itinerary for four years running. Our annual adventure. The only summer holidays Rachel has ever known.’

Alex stops now, a little breathless, and feels a blush heat her cheeks at how long she’s spoken. It’s been a while since she’s talked to anyone aside from Rachel, and Alex knows that Miles can hear it as clearly as she can.

‘I thought of changing my name,’ Miles says, turning to face the window again. ‘But I figured I didn’t have to. For the natives, names are sacred. For the rest of us, we just feel better off not knowing.’

‘So it was easy.’

‘There was a time you couldn’t get away from things as easy as I did. You were born someplace and you died there. If anybody asked who you were, you knew what to say. Your family name. Your church. Your trade. Nobody talked about finding or reinventing themselves. You were only who you were.’

His face has drifted so close to the window that his nose has grazed its warm surface, leaving a print behind. He pulls back an inch. Behind him, Alex waits for him to complete his thought, and only now does he realize he had one.

‘It’s different now, though,’ he says, and watches the patch of steam his words make against the glass. ‘People move around. Try whole new lives on for size.’

‘I guess that’s freedom.’

‘Oh yeah. Free as birds.’

‘Is she there?’ Alex asks after a time.

‘I can see her,’ he says, and realizes he’s been half watching Rachel for as long as he’s been standing there.

Miles forces his eyes to focus. He looks out across the tall grass of the Welcome Inn’s back lot to the yards of mobile homes beyond it. In one of
them, a bunch of Kaska kids play on a trampoline. Rachel is there, her strawberry dress lifting wide and sucking back against her legs with every jump. Miles is amazed how quickly they all have gone from introductions to holding hands, screaming in made-up terror. Without instruction they have worked out a pattern where only one pair of feet connect with the elastic tarp at a time, sending them into the air and the pink rubber bubbling up after until the next bare toes push it earthward again.

As Miles watches them he places three of his fingertips against his scar and draws them down. He does it so delicately that, to Alex, it appears that he is searching for something in the marks, reading his face like Braille.

‘Do you have somebody here?’ she asks, and her voice pulls his hand away from the burn.

‘You mean like a girlfriend?’

‘You can choose the term you’d like.’

‘No, I don’t have somebody.’

‘I’m a little surprised.’

‘You shouldn’t be. I’m not looking. And even if I was, there’s nobody here to look for.’

‘There’s that girl in the bar last night.’

Alex isn’t smiling, but her voice is. Viciously amused. Miles has forgotten it. The tone of accusation, mocking and inescapable.

‘What girl?’

‘The pretty one. The
only
one. The one who gave me the once-over and then burned her eyes right through your forehead when you walked out.’

‘Margot,’ he says. ‘She already lives with an asshole, she doesn’t need two.’

‘From what I saw of her, I’m sure she thinks that’s too damn bad.’

‘Listen to you. You’re here for twelve hours and you’ve got everybody’s secret motives all figured out.’

‘Not everybody’s.’

Outside, Rachel looks up at where Miles stands and raises both her arms in a jubilant wave. With a start, he realizes not only that she can see him but that she could for as long as he’s been standing where he is.

‘You must be lonely,’ Alex says behind him.

‘I suppose it’s a matter of getting used to something to the point that you don’t even notice it anymore.’

‘Oh, it’s still there.’

‘You’re not telling me that you don’t have guys sniffing around.’

‘I’ve gone out,’ she admits. ‘They come to
me
, you know? It’s unbelievable. Pushing the stroller or wiping snot off Rachel’s lip, wearing track pants and searching for the cheapest laundry detergent in the dollar store—they come to
me
. And not just the damaged goods, either. Some of them are cute, and/or rich, and/or sweet. Oh yeah, definitely, I’ve gone out.’

Alex pauses now, arms crossed and her index finger tapping against her biceps as though taking an accounting of these men, summoning their
positives and negatives to her mind. It takes her a while.

‘It doesn’t sound like loneliness to me,’ Miles says, and snorts.

‘The test isn’t whether you go out on dates, or have friends, or even get laid from time to time. The test is whether what’s going on around you breaks your heart or not.’

The idea of Alex being broken-hearted takes Miles by surprise. He had always thought of her as too lucky for real suffering. Who can know sorrow who has grown up white, semi-affluent, free of the multiple varieties of childhood abuses?

She could, of course. And he had been its cause. This comes to him as a belated revelation. After he’d run, and left her with his child—without a word, just as his father had—surely it was
she
who had the more valid claim to heartbreak than he. What did he
think
followed from his leaving? As unlikely as it strikes him now, he’d assumed a quick recovery. Once he was gone, she would have eventually come to realize her good fortune that he’d fucked off before he had the chance to do any undoable damage, as he certainly would have had he lingered on. Alex would be rid of him. But he would never be rid of himself. He calculated the latter as being the greater burden of the two.

He knows he’s only being selfish with his victimhood, but he indulges this line of thinking for a moment. He studies Alex now and grafts onto her skin the veil of her fortunate youth.
Home-video years spent in Stratford, Ontario, a leafy, postcard town of moneyed retirees, a repertory theatre, ball bearing factory and gift shops. Her parents still lived there. Retired now themselves but keeping up the family home, a Tudor monster on one of the broad streets of competitive landscaping and gardens in which beloved Labradors were buried.

Miles liked Alex’s parents, but before he’d ever met them he’d developed an idea of them being smug and humourless Tories, and even the discovery that he was wrong couldn’t stop him from needling Alex about them. The truth was he admired her father, the county solicitor who went to Harvard (and told deflating jokes about the place every time it came up), and his knockout wife, whom Miles got very confessional around and was half in love with. It was a home to spend Christmas in. Every December he and Alex had taken the train to the big cherry-smoke and Eggs Benedict house in Stratford, and every year he felt roughly awakened from a dream when it was time to go back. Alex always offered to go with him to Vancouver Island to stay with his mother over the holidays, and Miles would remind her of how much plane tickets cost at that time of year. But the real reason he didn’t go back was to be with Alex’s family instead. A home without missing people, the tinnedsoup smell of unrecoverable losses.

Outside, the jumping game has turned into a kind of crazy tag, all the kids running around the
trampoline and then back the other way, a Keystone Kops routine that ends with them piling up against each other.

Then, all at once, they turn their heads in the same direction. Someone that Miles can’t see has called to them, and now they stand as he stands, waiting for whoever it is to come into view.

‘Were you planning on saying anything to her?’ Alex says.

‘I don’t think I was.’

‘I suppose the wording would be a little awkward.’

‘I wasn’t worried about the words to use,’ Miles says, turning to her. ‘I just don’t think what I might say would make any difference.’

‘I get it. You leave and let everyone else figure out why. Keep your mouth shut and you can pretend you’re not a liar.’

‘She’s not mine, Alex. Not in the sense that matters.’

‘And what sense is that?’

‘Belonging to her.’

Alex purses her lips, and with an abruptness that makes him stiffen, leaps up from the bed and turns on the TV. The room is shattered with studio audience laughter. She twists the knob, turning the channels, which offer nothing. The screen seething with black-and-white maggots.

‘One channel, huh?’ she says.

‘That’s one more than I usually get.’

She keeps turning until the dial is back to where
it started. Another round of false hoots and hollers.

‘You know where she got her name?’ Alex shouts.

‘From the apartment. Above the bagel place.’

‘Very good! Not everything has been erased from the tapes.’

‘Nothing’s been erased. That’s part of the problem.’

She lifts a cigarette pack from the bedsheets and lights one. She didn’t smoke before. But Miles can tell it’s not a new habit, either.

‘I always liked the name of that street,’ she says. ‘
Rue Rachel
. There’s a connection for me, I guess.’

‘Between me and her?’

‘Between then and now.’