The Mountain Can Wait (16 page)

“He hasn't been in here,” Tom said.

Across the hall, Erin's room. He pushed her door open against a pile of clothes and stuck his head in. He didn't know if anything had changed, if Curtis had taken anything or slept in there, because he couldn't remember the last time he had actually stepped beyond her doorway.

“This is your daughter's room?”

Tom nodded. “You got kids?”

“Hell no.”

Tom moved past him in the narrow hallway and checked the bathroom, clean as he'd left it, except for the towel hooked on the back of the door. He looked at Brendon and shrugged, as if he were still unsure. “Nothing wrong with a boy coming home. Only thing you learn from him being here is that he's been here.”

Brendon took a deep breath. “You can understand, I need to find out what happened to this girl. No stone unturned, eh?”

“I can understand that.”

Curtis's door, opposite the bathroom, was open. In his room, some clothes on the floor, the curtains drawn, the bedsheet twisted at the foot of the mattress.

“Would that be his blanket on the floor in the living room?” Brendon asked.

Tom nodded. They went back through the kitchen and down the basement stairs. When Tom switched on the light, the room felt darker than it normally did, and then he saw that the window at the far end of the basement had been boarded up.

Brendon stood by the workbench, the shadows on his face elongated by the overhead light. He pushed the hammer on its hook on the wall, watched it swing. “Ditching your job, not getting in touch with anyone—this is the behavior of someone who is running. You can see that, right?”

Gaps on the shelves by the stairs, where the camping gear was stowed.

“You could say he's prone to drop things, I guess. But he's twenty-two years old, you know?”

“That about the age you were when you had him?”

“I was nineteen.”

“Same age as Lindsay.”

“Who?”

“The girl who died.”

“That's a hell of a thing. I don't know what to say about that. Hard to even think about. What about her parents?”

“You can imagine.”

“I can.”

The moment of death—he'd seen it enough times. A buck's or a bird's or a dog's eyes dulled and half open. He'd dreamt it of himself. It was a sigh, an exhale, a pulling from underneath black water. And when it was you, he wondered, was there this thought?
My last breath, my last touch.
All those thousands and here is my last. When Elka did it to herself, when darkness pulled at the edges of her eyes and her breath began to fade, did she grapple for more? Was she conscious of the end? This girl, alone—there must have come a point when she knew it was happening. She must have been so scared.

The smell of burnt coffee hung in the kitchen, the room now blue with dusk. Tom sat alone with his elbows on the table and rested his chin on crossed fingers. He stared at the card, propped against the pepper pot
, bearing Brendon's number, the address of his office. Tom would find the boy himself, before they did. Make him turn back before they could catch him from behind.

With no light on in the kitchen, the blue gradually darkened, and the percolator on the stove, the magnets on the refrigerator, and the two clean cups on the counter first lost color, then definition until everything blended into one plane. Out the window, one star pricked the purple sky, and then twelve and then forty and so on.

The familiar sound of the front door rubbing against its frame surprised him and he sat up.

“Curtis?”

“Nope,” his mother called. Lights switched on in the living room and Samantha's head appeared in the doorway. “I've been calling you for the last hour. Why didn't you pick up?”

“The phone didn't ring.”

She disappeared, her voice retreating down the hall. “I don't know what to make of all this, Tom.”

Erin came into the kitchen and turned on the light and sat across from him. She picked up Brendon's card and read it and carefully leaned it back against the pepper pot. She looked startled, and full of color, and very beautiful.

“Did you see Curtis when he was in town the last time?” Tom asked her.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Am I sure that I didn't see him? Let me think. Yes.”

“It didn't ring because it was unplugged,” Samantha said, coming into the kitchen. She opened the lid of the percolator and sniffed inside, dumped the grounds into the sink and turned on the tap. “He could be trying to call.”

“He's the one who unplugged it.”

Samantha turned and leaned against the counter, crossed her arms under her chest.

“How'd you know I was here?” Tom asked.

“I called the camp. How do you know he unplugged the phone?”

“He's been here.”

“That detective seems okay, doesn't he? He keeps a cool head.”

“He's convinced Curtis hit that girl, all right.”

“He is.”

Erin shifted in her seat.

“You know anything at all?” Tom asked her.

“Last time I saw him was when he was here, Dad. Right before you went to camp.”

“Tom,” Samantha began, her voice thin, “if that kid hit a young gal with his car, on my life he would have stopped to help. He just would. All day since that policeman came I've been slipping into this panic, thinking, oh my god he's killed someone, and I let the thing take ahold of me right around the neck, and I imagine headlines and courtrooms and Curtis in a prison cell all alone and I can't breathe. And then I stop. I hit the reset button and I just stop. Think about it. This is Curtis here. He could never do that.”

“Things happen. You don't know what you'll do.”

“You think he's responsible?”

“Well, where the fuck is he?”

“He's taken off somewhere. That's all. Some poor girl died in a ditch and my grandson is missing. That's all we've got.”

But Curtis had confessed to him and he'd missed it entirely: there was no one there, and then there was.

Erin watched him from across the table and he looked right back at her. Looking at this seventeen-year-old girl, with his eyes exactly, and the thin, white scar at her brow from a goat hunt she hadn't been ready for—he knew he was a fool. He thought he'd stuck around just about long enough, but he hadn't, not by a mile. Your kid could be the one driving or the one who was hit, and you would never know it was coming.

The first
morning at Bobbie's, Curtis crawled out of his tent after he'd lain restlessly, watching the light change from blue black to the color of stone. He stood just inside the back door of the house and found Bobbie humming in the kitchen, standing at the sink. The night before, she had gone to bed without offering a meal. He'd searched the cupboards for crackers or bread or an apple, at least, maybe a bottle of home brew, but found only baggies of dried mushrooms and jars of grains and powders.

Today a multicolored scarf twisted her hair into a nest on top of her head. Her dress sleeves were rolled up and she plunged her arms up and down in some kind of liquid, elbow deep in the sink.

“The funny thing is,” she began, her back to him still, “I used to have a recurring dream about you.”

“Oh ya?” He wondered if he'd missed the first half of a conversation he was supposed to be a part of.

“Mind you, it was you but it wasn't you. Because I could only guess what you looked like.” She continued to plunge, her wide back rolling. “You're much better-looking than I'd hoped, by the way. I always imagined you to be more like your father, all rusty-haired and hard knocks. He's attractive to some, I guess—that was half the problem—but you are a Sirota.” She looked at him over her shoulder and smiled.

She lifted a mass of something dark and hairy out of the sink and twisted it tightly. Purple liquid cascaded from it and down her strong forearms. She carried it dripping over to the stove and dropped it in a deep aluminum pot. Wiping her hands on her dress, seemingly unconcerned about the watery streaks of purple she drew across it, she finally looked at him. “You'll eat some eggs, won't you?”

His throat tightened at the thought of eating an egg, but fear of displeasing her overcame his disgust. He nodded and sat at the table, looked out the window. Outside, the grass grew unchecked, choking a rotting stack of roughly chopped logs. A metal chair lay on its side, rusting into the ground. “Have you thought of anything I could do around the place?” he asked, fiddling with a clay bowl of peppercorns. “I can paint. I can do pretty much anything in the yard.”

She lifted an iron skillet from its hook on the wall and set it on the stove. “What's implicit in your offer, you realize, is that my house is a dump. And my land has gone to seed.” She flipped butter into the skillet and palmed three eggs from a bowl. “Before I met your grandfather, I taught on a reserve near Prince Rupert. Did you know I used to be a teacher?” She stared at him and he was about to answer but then she turned away and cracked the eggs into the skillet, then wiped her fingers on her dress. “I lived up there for the better part of two years, taught grade one in the new schoolhouse they built after the original one was burned to the ground. They were great kids. A bunch of rapscallions, but tough as nails. Independent little buggers. Some of them dirt-poor, and they'd come to school in patched-up clothes, shoes falling apart. I was a stupid fool and when I think about this now…I just burn with shame. I started a clothing drive in Prince Rupert—you know, for the kids. I had this vision of myself presenting the clothes to their parents, like I was some kind of saint. Like I knew better than them. One of the fathers—he was a band councillor—he came to the classroom one day after school and he sat down and at first he didn't say anything. Just stared at me until I was this close to tears.” She pinched a centimeter out of the air. “Then he said, ‘We all got a job to do. My job is to fish, and when I'm not fishing, my job is to stand up for the people of my community. My kids' job is to go to school and my wife's job is to look after me and my kids. Your job is to teach, and I suggest that's what you stick to.'”

“You were only trying to help.”

“Balderdash! You think you care about other people's needs, but mostly, you're only acting on behalf of your own. Altruism's for the birds.”

He pushed the peppercorns around the walls of the bowl, grinding them into the pottery with his thumb.

Steam rose from the big pot on the stove and she stirred its contents with a wooden spoon. “Can you forage?” she asked.

“What, like, pick stuff?”

“Your mother was a little wood urchin when she was small. I used to send her out alone and she would come back with her skirt full of the most useful things. Watercress and sheep sorrel. Oh gosh: peppergrass, pickleweed, burdock. She'd be out in those woods or combing the beach for hours.”

“I might pick the wrong kind of mushrooms or something, and poison us.”

She scoffed. “I hope you like scrambled.” She handed him a plate of phlegmy eggs. “After you've eaten we'll go to the beach. I need kelp.”

He followed her through to the back of her land onto a well-worn trail that climbed gently through low-lying juniper before it sloped down to the sea. She walked, panting, her fist white-knuckled over the head of a walking stick. Wisps of hair grew wet against her neck, and every now and then she stopped and put her hand against a tree and rested.

Curtis tried to imagine Elka as a child, creeping along this trail, gathering nettles or mushrooms or whatever it was she hunted for. But it was hard to picture. Memories of his mother amounted to very little: burying his face in the warmth of her lap; standing on the toilet lid in a steaming bathroom while she was in the shower, throwing toys over the top of the curtain that she threw back; crawling over her sleeping body and prying open her eyes with his fingers, saying,
Don't sleep.
And her thick reply:
I'm just resting my eyes.
The soft curve of her earlobe, the punched hole where the earring went.

What he remembered about her leaving was sitting in the grass in his grandma's backyard. Samantha had just cut the lawn and there were clumps of wet grass everywhere, and his knees were stained green. His dad came and stood next to him, and then knelt down and pulled Curtis into his lap, and crossed his big arms together over Curtis's legs.

“Mom's gone,” his dad said. “And I don't know when we'll see her again.”

“Where'd she go?”

He didn't remember there being an answer to that question, or if he'd even asked it in the first place. He assumed he must have, as that would have been the natural thing to say, but mainly he only remembered being angry. Angry because there had been the promise of a sleep-out in the tent, but then there was something wrong with Erin and she wouldn't stop crying and everyone except him forgot about camping out.

The beach here was exposed and windy, crisscrossed with driftwood logs as smooth and rounded as old bones. Carpeted with blue and yellow and purple stones, it was littered with knots of dried kelp. Curtis picked up a rubbery tangle of the brown, tubular tentacles, each attached to a spongy head, disturbing a horde of sand flies living in its folds. They rose into his face, bounced against his eyes and lips. The kelp smelled like wet sand and rotting fish.

“Is this what we want?” he called to Bobbie, puffing the flies away from his mouth. She was making her way down the back of the beach toward a driftwood hut that had been constructed up against a shrubby bank. Suddenly the tired old woman from the trail was agile as a fox, almost leaping from log to log. She ignored him and disappeared behind the side of the hut. He followed her, clumsily, to where she stood next to a tubby, faded red kayak leaning against the log wall. A long crack that had been scabbed over with amber-colored epoxy resin ran the length of the scratched hull. She was smoking and tossed him a lighter and a small leather pouch of her cigarettes. He took one and lit it. “Is that the kelp we want?” he asked again, holding up a reeking strand.

Smoke blew back into her face and one eye squinted against it. “Only if you want to produce a mother lode of shit,” she said. She pointed with the cigarette between her knuckles at a small island beyond the mouth of the bay, six or seven hundred meters out. It was no more than a swipe of land and looked as if it were moments from being blown for good from the face of the sea. “That's Stoney Island. Other side of it there's a small bay. In that bay there's a bull kelp bed so rich in gold it would make you weep. There's a knife in that bag. It's all you need.”

Curtis looked out at the waves, not high, but galloping white-capped and misty up the beach. Together, they dragged the boat over the lattice of driftwood to the water. The kayak was heavy and he worried that she might twist an ankle, but the wind off the sea seemed to steady her.

“How do you do this when you're on your own?” he asked after they had finally cleared the driftwood and laid down the kayak just short of the wet tide line.

“I've got no one in this world, boy. I can do most things you can do with one hand tied behind my back. It's slow and it isn't always pretty, but I've scraped through this far without killing myself.” She pulled a white fiberglass paddle out of the kayak's cockpit. “I gather you can swim? My life jacket blew out to sea years ago.”

He took off his shoes and socks and rolled his jeans up to his calves, and walked into the aching cold water. Bobbie waded into the low-breaking waves to hold the boat for him while he attempted to get in, and was pushed back toward the beach as a bigger wave broke under the boat. He offered the crook of his arm to her and she took it, her dress heavy and dragging behind her, and held on until she'd regained her balance. Then she let go of him and held on to the boat with both hands, at its widest point behind the cockpit. She kept it pointed into the waves while Curtis wedged the tip of the paddle into the stones for leverage, and clumsily sat in the cockpit. He pressed his knees against the sides to center himself and gripped the paddle with both hands.

“Cut no more than a meter off each strand,” she called. “Take more than that and you'll kill the plant. And harvest as much as you can fit into the boat.”

The waves pummeled him sideways, whitecaps like obnoxious birds. He tried to paddle. Seawater sprayed coldly off the blades into his face, into his mouth. The principle seemed easy enough: left side in the water, then right, then left. But the two blades of the paddle were set on the shaft at different angles, and every time he paddled on the left side the blade sliced uselessly into the water, like stepping onto a step that wasn't there. He would lose his balance toward that side, arm submerged to the elbow. The boat drifted broadside to the waves, pushing him back onto the beach. He threw his leg over the side to stop rolling over but the boat capsized, coughed him out like meat stuck in the throat. The cold water took his breath and he ground the balls of his feet into sharp rocks trying to right himself. It was futile. The kayak bobbed away from him hull side up, a dead thing.

Bobbie splashed ankle deep up the beach, her laugh a deep brass horn. “I assumed you were made of greater stuff than this!” she boomed. “Goddamn mother of earth I wish I had a video recorder.” She clasped her hands together at her chest. “You were flailing around like two retards in a pillow fight!”

She waded out and grabbed the kayak by the tip of its stern, and again pointed the boat at a right angle to the waves and then held it by its middle. “Come here and help me turn it over!” They flipped it, heavy with water now and sunk to the gunnels. She directed him to take hold of the stern with both hands and push the end under, and then, in one swift motion, lift it out of the water and flip it so it could drain. She didn't stop laughing throughout the whole procedure. “You need to twist the paddle, child. Twist it with your right hand just before you take the left stroke. And keep your goddamn knees together for balance. Press them up against the gunnels like that and you're finished. You can do it. All you need to do is point your nose into the waves, keep readjusting, anticipate where the next wave is coming from. You'll be fine.”

Shivering, he got back in and gripped the paddle. He tried the twist and this time caught the water strongly on both sides. He paddled hard on the left side to turn the kayak into the waves, and when he got it right, the boat cut steadily through the water. When he got beyond the break and into the calmer swell, he turned to see how far he'd gone. The boat bobbed gently now, the water clear to several meters down. Back on the beach, Bobbie was making her way determinedly toward the driftwood shack, her scarf unraveling into a plume blowing off the top of her head.

The bay on the other side of the small island was protected by a soft arm of lichen-green rock. Curtis paddled into the glassy calm water, where the swell was no stronger than a deep breath. Creamy yellow ribbons of kelp swayed with the motion of the current, so densely that once he reached the bed, the plants twisted around his paddle and stopped the boat. He stowed the paddle and took up the knife, then grabbed a stalk of kelp by the throat and estimated a meter from its end. The boat jerked under him with the first cut and he almost lost his balance, but it didn't take long to get a feel for controlling the movements, and soon, his head empty, the work became easy, the boat steady.

Bobbie was a trip, like a highway or a river or something, and he could either merge or be lost. She didn't seem to care. There was no empty kindness or small talk or making up for lost time. There was only this new existence—him in this red kayak in the Pacific Ocean. And maybe he'd figured it out. Maybe if he kept readjusting, a little to the right, a little to the left, always a few steps ahead, the dead girl, bloated black as a plum, would go away.

He continued to cut and stuffed the lengths of kelp between his legs and in the hollow space behind his seat. It was smooth and rubbery, and plastered itself wetly to his legs and back. The sway of it under the surface of the water was inviting and also forbidden, like a sacred place from which you couldn't come back.