Vanishing and Other Stories (6 page)

In the kitchen, one of the windows was broken and shingles from the neighbour's barn had embedded themselves in the wallpaper. My wife sat at the table and stared at two hailstones that sat like a centrepiece. Maybe she or Edith had picked them up from the yard. Maybe these were the stones that had broken the window. They were as big as my fists.

“You're both all right,” I said, and maybe I sounded too rough about it. Maybe I sounded like a businessman checking his stock, a cattleman counting head.

That's when Nina said it: “I hate this place.” She pressed her forehead against her hand. “I hate it here, Braden.”

I figured it was shock. I figured it would blow over. “Come on now,” I said, and started to unbutton my shirt. Water glued it to my chest, and now that I knew my family was safe, my body let itself feel the cold.

“I can't stay here.” Her voice was like that moment after the storm, so quiet it spooked me.

The hailstones were soaking into the tablecloth, and I don't know why that made me so angry. I picked them up and threw them out the broken window. Some glass dropped into the sink and Nina flinched.

“I'm going to check the field,” I said. My wife didn't answer, so I turned to Edith, put my hand on her shoulder. She looked at me like she hated me. “Stay here,” I said. “Keep your mom company.”

 

 

DURING THE STORM
, my mother pushed me against the kitchen door jamb and held my hands. I could feel the house shake against me, and I remember thinking this must be hard on her. I have my father's bones, my father's flesh, and even at thirteen I was taller than her. She could be wild: she was always dancing to the Rolling Stones in the kitchen, or speeding along the highway. But right then she reminded me of the sick calves my father nursed, the ones he kept in pens and bottle-fed warm, glutinous milk.

I felt the house creak against the wind, and my mother's sweaty hands. Then there was a crack and the front door blew off its hinges. I watched it float and waver in the air, then drop to the grass. My mother squeezed my hands until her knuckles went white. Her face was empty. It was like something my father once described, a blankness he'd seen on some animals. An injured horse determined to stand and survive, or a calf too scared to wail before slaughter.

 

 

AFTER SHE FINISHED
her first cup, the girl didn't even bother with coffee. Just spooned sugar into her mug, poured milk on top, and ate it like soup. The sun was rising, and Edith was still asleep.

“I should take you home,” I said. “You're going to make yourself sick.”

“I feel fine.”

I didn't want to sound fatherly, because I didn't feel it. Whispering like this, ignoring work and the radio, I didn't feel like me at all.

She reached across the table and tapped my hand. “Show me where you were,” she said. “When it hit.”

So we left the kitchen. Midsummer, but the grass was crisp with frost, and you could still see the moon through the clouds. I pointed out the silvery birch that blocked some of the wind. Then I took her to the pond where geese land every spring and she picked some water-parsley. I showed her the three hundred head of cattle, the morning air rising out of their big soft nostrils. All the things that charmed my wife, at first. The things Edith used to love too.

When we got to the fence that's separated my property from Jerry's for nearly thirty years, I said, “That's all she wrote. Might as well turn back.”

But she squinted and walked forward. She'd seen the lush place where we throw the bones, and the white glint of them.

“It's just the yard,” I called out. My wife had always hated it there. The high grass, the smell.

She stopped a few feet away from a bull's rib cage and I stood behind her, back a ways. I watched her neck, her shoulders. Tried to imagine the look on her face. “It's not much to see.”

The girl nudged a piece of the bull's torso with her toe.

“I throw them here for the coyotes,” I said. “Feed them so they don't bother the herd.”

She stepped forward again, her sandalled feet disappearing in the green and yellow grass. She knelt, almost facing me, full of bravery. Then she lifted a cow's skull that was old enough to be picked clean. So heavy it strained her arms.

“I don't take people out here, normally.”

She slid her pinkie finger through the bullet hole I'd had to make, can't remember when. Must have been a few years ago, maybe a calving that went wrong.

“Come on. I'll drive you home.”

She ran her hand along the forehead. Feeling the rough bone, I guess, against her palm. This is when I figured out she was beautiful. Something about how calm her face was, how curious. She held up the enormous head, looked it right in the hollow eyes.

 

 

SHE NEVER INTRODUCED ME
, but I'm sure that every one of her boyfriends was an idiot. I called them all by the same name: Kyle. That was the one she was with when I first met her. The one who dropped her off outside my door, some miracle working through him.

How's Kyle? I'd say, and she'd reply, His name is Joel and he's not my boyfriend.

Bullshit.

You're bullshit.

Then she'd smile in a distant way and I'd know her life was made up of endless possibilities, her life was complex and golden. This was while we were flipping through one of her magazines, or while I braided her hair so it would be wavy the next day. I adored her tangled, complicated hair, so many shades of blond and brown all at once.

 

 

I OFFERED TO TAKE HER HOME
. “You need some sleep and a shower,” I said, and we walked to my truck. We climbed in, and the bench was already warm from the sun. There was still a web of cracks through the windshield, and light splintered through it.

From what I can tell, most city people think it's boring to talk about the weather. But here, it's important. Every morning, Nina and I used to look out the kitchen window to see what was coming: heat, sudden cold, or the possibility of worse. Talking about the weather, you talk about everything that matters—what you want, what you're scared of.

There was a pause—after I turned the key in the ignition, before the diesel engine turned over. The girl and I stared straight ahead, through the cracked glass.

“Beautiful day,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant.

 

 

ONCE, I ASKED HER
to tell me what it was like.

No way, she said.

Please? Since you've done it uncountable times?

She slapped my face then, but not hard.

Okay, listen. She pressed her forehead against mine and I smelled the nicotine on her breath. It's different every time, she said. Sometimes it's passionate, and sometimes it's sweet, and sometimes it's just sad.

I tried to imagine having direct contact with those: passion and sweetness and sadness.

But I'll tell you one thing, she said. It's not like it is on TV. People don't actually scream like that.

 

 

I ALWAYS KNEW
what that girl felt about me, even if I didn't get it. I've known since she came into my kitchen wearing my wife's shirt,
and that gold material caught the light from the fixture above the table.

It took me a few seconds to recognize it, to understand what she'd done. To understand that the girl had been in my closet, handling my shirts and pants and belts. Clattering the hangers as she searched through my stuff for the one thing that would catch my eye. The one thing that would make me look at her, look at her different. Then she put it on, knowing exactly what I would feel, exactly how it would hurt. To see that shirt filled out, to see a body move and breathe inside it.

And then one night, so late it was almost morning, she came into my house. She walked up the stairs, through the hall, then opened my door. She stepped into my room.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

She sat beside me on the bed and I smelled rain on her, exhaust.

I didn't look at her, just asked, “What are you doing here?”