Smoke River (42 page)

When he opens his eyes, a bright flash from the periphery makes them smart. About twenty metres downriver, a strange flotilla is riding the current away from him. He wonders if he’s hallucinating. Something – a branch? an arm? – reaches up, and light jumps from it like salt crystals on hot oil. Were it not for the fish, Elijah would investigate. And now that it’s farther away from him, he no longer sees anything extending skyward. All the things it could be: a log entwined with discarded drapery, some tinfoil or plastic cradled within, a pyre of misfit refuse. He hates how the townsfolk mistreat the river.

He turns back to the fish he cannot see but knows is there. The nine-foot rod bows over the river, and for a moment he thinks how precarious it all is, using such tools of finesse and deception when a short, harsh blow to the fish’s skull would be more direct and honest. His bait is an ugly deer-hair popper, a newly sharp hook extending from it. He’s added a halo of wire to guard it from weeds. The plunge pool under the willow stirs with a quick movement. Elijah casts too far under the willows on purpose, then pulls at the slack line so the fly bounces back towards him, breaking the surface with satisfying burps before sitting low in the water. As he expected, there’s minimal drift. He flicks the line subtly so there’s the slightest mend in his cast that will allow the popper and fly to meander longer, look natural.

The first tug he feels is half-hearted, and for an instant he’s worried that the hook has snagged some weeds or a ragged filament of willow. But then there’s a pulse of tension, and another. It’s all surprisingly lethargic and sloppy for such an athletic creature. Elijah dips the rod’s tip into the water to smarten up the fish, show him he’s serious. The next pull is so sharp the line nearly snaps. The largemouth’s tactics are guerrilla-like, a bit dirty. Still, it’s the fight Elijah’s been waiting for. On a hunch, he
takes three large steps into the river, pulling up his rod so it arches like a Gothic window, freighted by the fish’s determination at the other end. Then he gives a final tug, and the largemouth comes flying out of the water. Smaller and more darkly pigmented than Elijah expected, it falls into the rocky shallows.

When he finds it, the fish barely beats its tail against the rocks. Disappointment sours Elijah’s belly. The largemouth’s protruding lower lip is slicked with blood. The deer-hair popper and hook have been swallowed. He picks it up – it feels slimy and underweight – and flips the fish over. Elijah lets his rod drop into the water. An oval of ulcerated flesh, grey and putrescent, radiates from the fish’s upper lip towards its mid-body on the underside. Elijah palpates the rotting flesh, and his fingertip hits the barbed ridge of a hook.
Shit!
He pulls it away, and his skin blisters with a single drop of blood. Embedded and rusting inside the largemouth’s necrotic cheek are the hook and fly from their encounter several weeks earlier.

Elijah studies his finger and worries about what will fester there later. He has an urge to toss the fish. He won’t eat such a creature, so much of its flesh already spoiled. He can’t mount it as a trophy – there’s no titanic struggle between him and the fish to retell. If he abandons it, within an hour it will lie dead and bloated on the river’s surface, the sun raising a stink from its flesh. Elijah looks around. There is no one here to witness what he does. He wishes he could see the strange floating lights again. Were they a sign he misunderstood? Then, with his shoulders slumping, he carries the fish – the prize he no longer wants – up the banks of the Smoke to his truck.

The river’s rhythmic nudge forward, the water’s upward lift relax Cherisse. Slowly the murmurs trapped in her head free
themselves to become something beautiful: a humming river-song. The sun paints her cheeks, her torso, her necklace of glass with heat. The water cools what’s underneath. Finally there is nothing but comfort and the gentle, sure pull of the current. Perhaps the rest of it will also wriggle free: the weight of her heart, her history. She’s exhausted from carrying it. A dragonfly hovers by her face. The river smells sweet and rich as maple creams. Somewhere in the distance a dog barks, insistent, playful yaps. She thinks she might be happy. If she floats and floats and never stops, she can relieve her pain and, in doing so, relieve others of the trouble she has caused.

When the current quickens and the river slopes, Cherisse wills her eyes shut and ovals her mouth as if she has only a hollow reed to breathe through. She is ready. The glass jiggles on her skin, and some pieces slide into the water. She feels the first nettles of discomfort in the tensing of her jaw, the soreness of her hip when it grazes a rock. But if she slides off the edge of the world, the sensations will end. So it must be a trickster’s arm, the tree branch that, half submerged, reaches out from the shore and snags the floating hem of her nightie. Cherisse pivots in the water, one foot brushing the fulcrum of wet branch. Suddenly she’s head first, suspended in a part of the river that spills and tumbles over a sloped outcropping of oiled rocks. With her neck yanked back by the current, water lapping into her nostrils, Cherisse sucks in a breath, holds it, and pulls her head underwater. She thinks she might die, will die, can die. She imagines being pinned beneath a piece of moving ice, a small animal for whom submission feels better than struggle. She’d expect her mother to come to her in such a moment: the gingery smell, the way her whispers fizzed against Cherisse’s neck, the indulgence of her smile. Or the white dog with its giving heat, the wonder of its dark eyes and pink tongue.

But it’s Shayna’s face, twisting around a mouthful of disappointment, that parts her memory. Shayna, leaning into the
bedroom door when Cherisse was twelve and both of them knew it wouldn’t be long before she ran away again. Swaddled in the Little Mermaid sheets Shayna had bought her with some misgivings, she’d pulled herself up on her haunches, the bright sheets flowing like raiment from her shoulders, and with great flourishes she retold the legend of the princess, the beaded belt, and the beautiful death on the river.

Her auntie stayed silent in the doorway.
That’s not a Mohawk story
, Shayna said finally. Cherisse was stung.
Sure it is. My mom said so. It’s famous
.

Shayna shook her head.
I don’t know where your mom got that story. She took it from somewhere else, or made it up. It’s not a Mohawk story
. She spoke coldly, plainly, like a school principal or someone on the news.

Cherisse used her auntie’s words to build a terrible kind of smoke inside her, the burning kind.
Shut up! I hate you!
she screamed. She flung off the sheets, jumped from the bed, and slammed the door on Shayna, pushing her out of the way, out of her life. All the while, her auntie’s voice came from behind the barrier, a steady intonation:
It’s not one of our stories. It’s not your story
.

Every part of her is in pain now. The current drums the back of her neck against a flat river rock; her heart’s a panicked animal in her chest. It occurs to Cherisse that death hurts as much as life. She grabs hold of the rocks with her hands, levers her torso up against the slope and the current, coughs and sputters the water out of her nostrils, out of her lungs. The nightie’s cotton tears like used tissue and the branch lets her go. She tumbles backwards down the little slope of rocks, into quieter, pooling water below. And for a second she is floating again, a little stunned. The water smells fetid here. She sweeps fingers across her neck, where the glass was lying and now is gone. An embroidery of scratches tickle her fingertips.

There’s nothing left to do. She stands up. There’s pressure above her eye, hot needles of sting. Cherisse touches her forehead; it comes away covered in blood that is brighter, redder than the berries of summer, redder than petals or lipstick. She’s never liked red much. But this is a pretty colour. She sucks at her fingertips. It’s a sharp taste, neither sweet nor entirely unpleasant. She imagines that truth tastes much the same, and it surprises her to realize that she has an appetite for it.

S
tephanie lets the front door thud behind her. Now that she’s leaving the house forever, she notices what an overbearing
clunk
their front door makes. Seventeen, she tells herself, is not so young. In an earlier century she’d be married, popping out the babies, tilling the fields. There must be nations of adolescents out there right now, making do on their own in places where parents don’t ferry their children everywhere in cars or text them to ask what they’d like for dinner.

She’ll find a job, take her senior year at one of the city high schools, put her first and last month’s rent down on a little apartment, using the savings she’d earmarked for a more powerful computer. Maybe get a cat – she’ll need a cat. And a tattoo, finally. An hour earlier, while packing up her bedroom, she pulled out the
USB
stick with the photos of the girl, the cap and kerchief, and the earring that fell out of her mother’s hand when she’d pulled her away from Las. She will not carry them into
her new beginning, so there’s the matter of who to leave them with – the police, Nate, the mayor? She rummaged and all she could find was a small gift bag, printed with balloons and candles, and a piece of plain tissue, with which she wrapped the cap and kerchief. The earring and
USB
went into a fresh envelope that she sealed. Stephanie thought about the evidence, how it was like words that couldn’t be taken back, and how unfair it was to be left with responsibility for it. After a few minutes she checked the time and scrawled
Make yourself whole
on the envelope, slipped it into the bag, and wandered downstairs, hesitating at the door of her father’s office. She re-climbed the steps to stand by her parents’ shut bedroom door. The door to Las’s bedroom was partly open, but inside it was dark. She took this as a sign, walked the length of the upstairs hall, and snaked her hand around and hooked the bag on the inside doorknob, where it couldn’t be missed.

Out on the street, she struggles with the weight of her knapsack, the camera bag around her neck, a purse over one shoulder that bumps against her arm, and the duffle bag that is pulling her other shoulder from its socket. There is a lot of Doreville sidewalk between her and the bus station. She feels a small wave of panic. It’s a current she must swim against, that and the heartbreak of items left behind – a favourite red wool scarf; the photography manual her father slipped under her door when she was only twelve, because he knew she was different; the vintage dress she wore to prom, the one her mom conceded was “pretty glamorous.”

The street curves. Stephanie stops to readjust her load. She hears the
ding
of her cellphone and pulls it out of her pocket to find a text from Nate.
WHERE ARE YOU? I LOVE YOU. I
’
M SORRY
, it reads. Her heart lifts momentarily. She starts to thumb in a response but reconsiders.
Later
, she thinks. On the bus she’ll be less at risk of running backwards or standing still. She puts her phone
away and turns one last time to look at her house, to see if her parents are on the front stoop. They’re not. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and she repeats it over and over, matching it to the rhythm of her steps, as if it were a Sufi chant, a prayer of expiation.

Ella stays in her bedroom, where it’s dark and she can think. Her hands fold over her belly and she locates for a fleeting moment the things that have gone missing, the happiest times of her life. She remembers Las when he was unnamed, just a bubble in her tummy and yet already special in ways nothing else has come close to. Pregnancy hung on her lithe frame like a pretty frock. It made her so stupendously confident, as if walking around with this child inside her was an athletic achievement, a personal best, a win switch she’d finally located. She and Mitch had moved into this four-bedroom house with the automatic garage doors, the largest in the new subdivision and perched imperiously at the end of a cul-de-sac, its steep front lawn dotted with mature butternuts. She’d wake up at night in a sweat of self-satisfaction – arranging the living room furniture in her head, painting the nursery in a comely, fashionable shade. And all the time her hand would circle over her belly, left to right, right to left, a carousel of contentment.