Smoke River (11 page)

In second-semester biology class, Nate moved into the seat behind her, and all period she listened to the soft sanding of his charcoal pencil working the paper. The sound lightly tickled the exposed skin on the back of her neck; her cheeks flamed and she found it hard to concentrate. It frustrated her. Being one of the smartest kids in all her classes was one way Stephanie separated herself from the rampant assholism of high school, and especially her brother, Las, who’d scored a windfall of looks and natural athleticism at birth and had coasted on it ever since. She was more frustrated still when it became harder to choose what to wear to school in the morning, now that the back of her outfits seemed to matter as much as the front. She caught herself fancying a beautiful shoulder tattoo peeking out from under her bra strap and winding like ivy up the base of her neck.

For the last few weeks Nate was in school, several times during biology he’d sing her name –
Stephhhaneeee –
in a gentle, beckoning near-whisper. A little sweat would break out on her feet and between her thighs and under her arms, and she would feel thrilled and alarmed at the same time. Only once – she was wearing a light blue cotton scoop-backed T-shirt and she feared being ridiculed for her expanding armpit stains – did she risk turning around to deliver a scolding
Shhh!
But Nate just smiled at her, with a smile that was all eyes and teeth and made her sweat all the more, the wetness spreading in an oblong between her legs. Horrified, Stephanie had to skip photography, her favourite class, in order to slink home so no one could witness the mess he’d made of her.

The last time she’d seen Nate, she passed him leaning against a locker, sitting and sketching. He lifted his head to say simply and clearly,
I like you
. Two girls standing across from him snickered. Stephanie kept moving down the hall, because flirting with – much less dating – a native guy who wasn’t Phil LaForme was a kind of social suicide, and it was hard enough being curvy and smart. So she just kept on walking, though her chest hurt, her head swam, and her tummy was already cramping with the sourness of regret.

Nate never returned to school after that. The rumour was that he got drunk, stole a pearl-coloured Hyundai, and resisted arrest when he was stopped in downtown Doreville. When Stephanie first heard the rumour, she sat in a carrel in the school library for an entire day, missing all her classes and feeling angry at natives for doing those things to themselves, for making it so impossible to reach across the divide and be their friends and, maybe, even more.

After spending six months in the courts and juvenile detention, Nate must have figured there was little point in finishing high school. Last fall Stephanie returned to school and everything was the same for her, except she didn’t sweat and she didn’t worry about the backs of her outfits and she didn’t look forward to biology.

Halfway into her walk home, Stephanie’s feeling of triumph quickly tailspins into dread. Herman, a bulb-nosed Dutchman, is too in thrall to Brittany’s tight shorts to ever take Stephanie’s word over the bronzy glamazon’s, even if it is Stephanie he calls into the small office beyond the lunchroom for lectures on how Indonesian palm oil is killing the Canadian dairy business, all the while eyeing her boobs proprietorially.

The toe of her shoe catches on a ridge of sidewalk. She stumbles, and as she straightens, a telltale
ping
sounds from her pocket. Stephanie fumbles for her cellphone.

Nate has texted her.
THX FOR EARLIER. U AROUND TONITE?

Her heart lifts. Instantly – too instantly – she replies.
SURE, WHEN?

By the time she reaches the long drive of her house, she feels covered with a protective coating, as tough and light as Teflon, that Brittany and Herman cannot scratch.

Because of the barricade, Stephanie’s mother has lost her energy for the happy-family artifice. She eats looking out the window, ignoring her husband’s sullen face, her son’s catatonia, and the cellphone on Stephanie’s lap – a brazen disregard of dinnertime rules. An hour has passed since she replied to Nate’s
THX
text; there have been none since.

The panic Stephanie hopes to hold off until after dinner threatens to mutiny. She wipes her lips with her napkin and peers down at the darkened phone. On impulse she thumbs in
OK. WHEN? WHERE?
hits Send, and immediately feels desperate. Only a loser texts twice in a row looking for a reply.

Stephanie steals a look at Las, hunched over his food like a bored zoo inmate. What kind of cosmic overlord made things come so easily to a guy like him? When she was an already well-endowed fourteen-year-old, her brother looked at her one day and said,
You’re no beauty but you’ve got big tits. That’s the only way you’re going to get a guy, Steph. Might as well get used to it
.

She’d adored Las before that, bought the fiction of older brothers, reached adolescence still hoping he’d deliver. Then he started hanging out with creeps. She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve his cruelty, only that it began after Gordo found her asleep in front of the basement
TV
one night when Las was upstairs raiding her parents’ booze stash.

She awoke with a frightening pressure against her body and a hand across her mouth, her lips stinging from potato chip shrapnel and salt. Gordo reeked of uric acid, cheap cigarettes, and stolen liquor. She thought she was going to suffocate, screaming into his
rough skin. She pushed her hands into Gordo’s chest, but there was no give against his weight. His unwashed face was crushed into the crook of her neck, his fingers pincer-like at her breasts. Stephanie closed her teeth against the callused hand he shoved against her mouth; it tasted of solvents and burger grease. His other fingers were pulling at her waistband. He bit into the tender flesh above a nipple. Gordo’s hips were shoved against hers; she could feel his erection against the thin material of her pyjamas.

The door at the top of the steps opened. When Las came down to the basement, Gordo jumped up, brushed his pants. Stephanie gasped for breath and started to whimper. Las looked at both of them. Tears were running down her face. There was a moment of silence between the two friends. She waited for her brother to be her big brother.

Then Las spoke.
Found whisky. Let’s get out of here, shithead
. They turned and left her alone in the basement, damp with tears, greasy with intrusions. Something no tougher than a new blister crackled and broke inside her.

She remembers all of this while watching her brother’s blond tendrils move as he eats, hiding, then revealing a strong brown neck, an unbreakable clavicle. Stephanie wills herself not to look at the phone.

“Are you losing weight, Las?” she asks, feigning a hint of alarm, her voice loud enough to startle her parents out of their thoughts, make them look up from their plates.
Bingo
.

Her mother pushes out her chair, leans over the table, and brushes aside her son’s hair. She grabs his chin. “Whoa, honey, you
are
looking thin. What’s going on?”

Las swats her hand away with an “I’m eating, Ma!”

But it’s too late. Stephanie knows the idea will be like a burr to her mother; she’ll scratch at it until its excised. Parasites! Anemia! A convergence of unseen threats worming their way through the young prince’s bloodstream.

“You’ve barely touched anything on your plate.” Her mother shoves the tray of grilled sausages, a bowl of macaroni salad towards him. “Are you taking your supplements?”

He glowers. Her mother reels out of the kitchen towards the first-floor bathroom, yelling, “Where are the multivitamins?”

Her father shakes his head, refills his glass of wine, and leaves the table with it, muttering something about policing at the barricade. Las decamps as quickly, brushing roughly against his sister, muttering, “Nice fuckin’ going, Steph.” And Stephanie can’t help herself; she smiles, delighted at the distraction.

When her mother returns, holding a supplement bottle, Stephanie is clearing the plates. “He took off, Mom.”

“Oh dear. Do you think …”

“I’m guessing he lives.”

Her mother heads to the hallway. Stephanie hears her knock on his bedroom door. “Las … Las.”

Now the phone is on the counter beside the sink. She picks it up and checks the charge, then places it down. As she rinses and stacks each plate, her eyes flit back to the phone to see if it is winking at her, offering to save her from a loveless adolescence and an evening stuck in the oppression of her home. At seven-thirty the dishes are stacked, the table wiped, the floor swept. She thumbs in
WE STILL DOIN SUMTHIN?
to Nate, hits Send, and vows not to check the phone for a whole half-hour. After which she checks every ten minutes, sitting on one of the kitchen stools, leaning into the black granite island, slumping over the phone, lifting it up and placing it face down, lifting it up again. Could she text Nate a fourth time without it being cyberstalking?

When her father comes in, she makes no attempt to hide her compulsion. She feels him watching her.

“Thanks for cleaning up, hon.”

Stephanie nods, her eyes still on the phone.
Please go
, she thinks.

Mitch pours himself a generous measure from the bottle of red wine he opened at dinner and then takes out another glass, fills it halfway, and slides it towards her. “It’s summer. Enjoy yourself.”

Stephanie looks at the glass, looks at her father, and wishes he didn’t understand her as much as the offer suggests. Her eyeballs burn. He squeezes her shoulder, which means he wants to leave before tears fall. And after he does, she drains the wine in two swallows, reaches for the bottle, admires the label with its vaguely Latin name, its promised tastes of cassis and smoke, and pours the remainder into her glass.
Why not?
she thinks, carrying her newly full glass into the living room, turning off all the lights, and falling into her Nan’s puce wingback chair. She lifts and lowers her phone for the next ninety minutes, twice getting up to assure herself that the time on her cellphone is the same as on the kitchen clock.
Letting somebody hope is a cruel sport
, she thinks.

When she has finished the wine, she returns to the kitchen, finds a three-quarters-full bottle of Gewürztraminer tucked into the refrigerator’s side door. After the sourness of the red, the white tastes so cool and sweet it makes her cry.

Ella feels like a ghost haunting what was once an enviable family life, a busy, productive contentment. The frustration of the barricade has made them subject to public sympathy, private isolation. Behind the door of what was to be her dream room is her husband, Mitch, hiding away, yelling, begging, cajoling into the phone at all hours. Las is lost to his headphones, too upset by everything to allow her to minister to his hurts, and losing weight. In the face of their helplessness, they’ve all gone mute with embarrassment. And now, after ten p.m., Ella wanders in and out of the darkened rooms of her house, not up to the energy of bright lamps, their suggestion of activity, of occupancy.

She leans into the living room, wondering if she should fire the housekeeper, return to vacuuming and dusting, when she notices a shadow awkwardly sprawled across the ugly pink-brown wingback Mitch insisted on bringing home, giving a place of honour in the living room, after he moved his mother to a retirement home. There is a small aureole of electric light from an open cellphone, casting in silhouette her daughter’s small nose, her bottom lip protruding in a quiet exhale.

“Stephanie?”

The cellphone clicks off. Ella cranks the dimmer switch and the room brightens with clarified-butter light. Her sixteen-year-old daughter’s dark head, streaked with fluorescent pink, is bent over the phone in her lap as if in prayer. Ella has only to close her eyes to see the child Stephanie once was, a toddler blameless and soft as catkins, with black hair and lashes auguring future charms. How not to feel constantly disappointed? It was so easy to love the girl then.

“What are you doing here in the dark?”

Stephanie lifts reddened eyes to her mother, umbrae of dissolved mascara beneath them.

Ella wishes her cramp of maternal protectiveness had lasted longer. But Stephanie’s perpetually wounded glance, the soft distension of those lips, only reminds her of the girl’s truancy from soccer camps and swim lessons, the pockets stuffed with Caramilk wrappers and emptied Frito-Lay bags. It makes her wonder where she went wrong. With Stephanie she’d started off cajoling, progressed to helpful suggestions, and ended up threatening, forcing protein shakes on her, withholding her allowance, and, on one horrible spring afternoon when Stephanie was twelve and not yet immune to her mother’s disapproval, demanding she jog. Stephanie’s flesh had shuddered, her chest had heaved with sobs and protests, until Ella was so rattled, so embarrassed, that she yelled,
You have nobody to blame but yourself, young lady,
before she ran ahead and out of sight; she could no longer be implicated in this thing her daughter was, so different, so far from her. When she returned alone, Mitch took the car to fetch Stephanie and found her on a side road, bawling. He refused to speak to Ella until she apologized to the child, who was by then buried under Hello Kitty pillows on her four-poster bed and wouldn’t acknowledge her mother’s forced contrition.