Alone at 90 Foot (15 page)

We talked about my new puppy, Emily. She was all excited about that. I told her about Jennifer Reid and how Dad seemed quite happy these days. She smiled and said she was glad. She told me Dad is a very good man. He deserves someone like Jennifer who can make him feel like that.

She hoped that Nana Jean was well and that I made a point of calling her now and again. I said that I would. We continued walking, until we came to a branch in the path. I knew she had to go a different way than me. I knew I had to continue on toward the wooden bridge all alone.

We stopped. She took her arm from around me, but still she held my hand. Somehow, in my dream, I knew I had to speak fast. I told her how much I missed her. I told her how much I loved her. I told her how I couldn't believe she was gone. Just gone from my life like that. I told her how much I wished that she would come back.

She smiled again and stroked my cheek. “I love you too.” And then, she let go of my hand. She began to move away from me. “But you're doing just fine, my little girl. Just fine ... just fine ... my little Pam ... “

“Mom!” I was awake in my bed.

August 15th

Danny Kim is sort of a hero. It was because he discovered Krissy's sweater that her body was found late that night. She had made it all the way to the end of the canyon. To where the houses back onto it. But there is a cliff she had to climb in order to get out. She tried. But, perhaps too weak, she stumbled. Her sweater snagged on the blackberry bush where Danny found it. She fell back to the canyon floor, hitting her little head on a rock on the way down.

It seemed like half the city turned out for her funeral. I saw it on the news. Her family and classmates and teachers. The many, many people who searched for her. And many who didn't know her at all. There were piles and piles of beautiful flowers. Mrs. Marshall was brought to the funeral in a wheelchair. The rest of the family looked like they could hardly stand up. I fell to pieces watching them. It was impossible not to.

I have tried to imagine what Krissy's final few hours were like. All alone. Just her tiny self against this canyon. What a tough little girl she must have been. Being lost and cold and hungry is one thing. But this place — it is a terrifying place if you let it overwhelm you. It is wild and wicked, with things snarling in the shadows. Things creeping from the mossy forest floor. The sound of water crashing against granite. From hundreds of feet above. And Lynn Creek always roaring. All day. All night. All year. Always. We are nothing compared to these two giants of nature — the water and the rock. Yet despite this, Krissy almost made it out. She is another victim of Lynn Canyon. Her family are victims of Lynn Canyon. Like Mom. Like me. Like Dad. Victims, and maybe, in a way, heros, of this terrible, beautiful place.

I'm trying to get Emily to sit on the rock beside me. Down here at Ninety Foot. But it's not going
to happen, I can see. She keeps pulling at the leash, digging at this root, yanking me down this path, sniffing at the slugs. This is Emily's favorite place in the whole world. She nags me to come down here every day. I knew she was smart the moment I saw her. You should see how she drags her leash from the peg where it hangs in the hall when she wants to come down here for a walk. Matt usually comes with us in the afternoons. Quite often, he brings Swat. But he's working today and Joanne's gone shopping with her mom. So I'm all alone. That's alright. I don't mind just this once.

I've been seeing Matt since the night of Mike Ortega's party. He apologized for days after the party for what Danielle said to me. He's still apologizing.

“Matt. Quit it,” I told him a week ago. “You are hardly responsible for what came out of her mouth.”

“I should never have let her talk me into going that night. What she said was horrible. She was horrible.”

“Yes, you're right, she was. But, you know, looking back on it, maybe it wasn't all bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it made me begin to fight back.”

Matt looked puzzled.

I glinted at him. “Swat wants you to throw the stick again.”

Joanne and the rest of my friends were real proud of me. They said it was just the best comeback they'd ever heard.

“It was just so ... so ... goofy, it cracked us up! I mean, like, in light of the tenseness of the situation and everything. It was perfect. Doofus!” Joanne wiped a tear from her eye, leaving a long black smudge across her face. “Pam, nobody but you could have stayed so cool.”

Yeah, right. I was totally cool. At ease. If they only knew.

I'm just glad this year is over. I feel somehow that I'm awakening from it. That I'm standing up and shaking myself off. Opening up a bit. Beginning to move on. But then, maybe like the seeds popping open and the leaves unfurling, it's been happening all along.

Our graduation banquet was held at the Hotel Vancouver. Matt and me and Dad and Jenn all went together. We sat at a table with Joanne and Tony and both of their parents. Dad gets along real well with Matt. They started talking about sports cars, which it turns out Matt knows a lot about, and nobody could get a word in all night.

Oh, and Dad and Jenn gave me the coolest grad presents. They bought me my own copy of Emily Carr's journals. And get this — a print of “Mountain Forest.” Jenn had it framed and everything. It's
beautiful. I hung it on the wall so I can look at it when I'm lying on my bed.

“How did you know?” I asked her.

“You spent a long time looking at it in the Art Gallery. It must mean something to you.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “It does.”

Matt also brought me a present. When I opened the door the night of the banquet, he was standing there with, like, this real coy look on his face. He shifted his feet and moved his hands, which were hiding behind his back.

“I have something for you. It's not much. But I was thinking of you.”

“Thank you.”

He continued to stand there.

“Well, what is it?”

He brought his hands out from behind his back. With a grin, he held up a baby-food jar. It was full of water. “Ninety Foot. You don't have one.”

I took the jar from him. Holding it in my hands, feeling its coolness, I almost started to cry.

My sniveling made him nervous.

“Well, like I said, it's not much. I just thought if you ever move away from here ... you know, you'd want it.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Matt. I do want it. I want it very much.”

Jenn says I have every right to be angry. She says I've suffered more death in my fourteen years than anybody should. She says very few people have to deal with what I'm dealing with, and if people stumble around me, it's only because they don't know. “Golly, Pam. Nobody can see the part of you that's been ripped wide open. Nobody can know how much it aches. You have every reason in this world to feel hurt and abandoned. You have every right to cry whenever you want.”

Golly, Jenn. Thanks. What you said just now really kind of helps. Now I don't feel like I'm so weird. Like, when I do have a moment, I'm not just some kind of wimp that can't cope. And I still have them. I have them a lot. I suppose I'll keep on having them, for who knows, maybe even the rest of my life. I can't imagine this kind of hurt ever completely healing. Not without some kind of scar. You know something else, Jenn? You're okay. In fact, I like you quite a lot.

It was good I had that talk with Dad after the party. It was the first time we'd really opened up. We had been so concerned about upsetting one another that we had avoided talking about Mom. Each of us afraid that even mentioning her might cause the other to really crack. What frightened us most, we agreed, was shattering the fragile order of our existence. The order we had created to make it from
one day to the next.

I'm glad he told me about how Mom is really a part of me. I don't come down here to Lynn Canyon to visit her anymore. Now, I bring her with me. I will always try to remember she's a part of me. When I'm missing her. When my friends go shopping with their moms. When they're standing next to them, hugging them, crying at their graduations or their weddings. I'll try real hard to remember that my mom is inside me. I won't need her there in body. I'll just know what she would have thought or felt or said. Rats. This is going to be so hard.

Mom taught me so much in our time together. But there's one thing she taught me that she didn't even know. From her death I have learned it. I have learned that no matter how bad, how really rotten your life gets — I mean, like, it just couldn't get any worse — there is always hope. Things will always get better. I know that now. I know that they will. They are. I only wish someone had taught
you
that, Mom.

I have been thinking about my future. I've pretty much ruled out becoming a shiftless drifter. I'm keeping my options open. I'm taking both arts and sciences in high school. Mr. Bartell helped me decide on that. “Never limit yourself, Pamela. Keep all your doors open. You just never know what life's
going to throw at you. Take me, for instance. I'm one fabulous English teacher. But if English teachers go the way of the dinosaur, man, can I ballroom dance!”

Right. Whatever you say, Mr. Bartell.

Whatever I do with my life, I'm going to be good at it. I've made that much of a decision. I'm going to live life and love life. Like you did, Mom. I'm going to stand up on this white rock and yell orders to the canyon. I don't care if it can't hear me. I'm going to plunge deep into the frigid waters of Ninety Foot. I'm going to climb these purple mountains. I'm going to breathe in, suck in, all this heaving earth around me. I'm going to grab onto a wing and fly high up there — way up there — with the peregrine falcons. With you, Mom. No kidding. You and me are going to do it. You and me. We will.

Born in Toronto, Katherine spent her early years in rural Southern Ontario. She later moved to Vancouver where she fell in love with the west coast rainforest, the setting for
Alone at Ninety Foot
.

Growing up in a family of six children, Katherine discovered early that privacy could be found in the solitary delight of reading. She read zealously: mysteries and anything with animals or gutsy heroes.

Today Katherine works in a busy high school library in Edmonton, escaping as often as she can to Gardner's Cove on nearby Lake Wabumun where she continues to read and write. She lives with her husband and two sons.

Katherine's second novel,
Last Summer in Agatha
, (Orca, 2001), explores the world of teen voilence.

Watch for Katherine Holubitsky's new novel

When fifteen-year-old Rachel Bennett leaves Vancouver to work at her uncle's veterinary clinic in Agatha, a dusty prairie town, she predicts an uneventful summer. But the reality turns out to be quite different. When she falls for sixteen-year-old Michael Bell, the attraction is mutual and immediate. The boring summer she's been expecting suddenly looks quite exciting.

And then her new beau's painful past begins to get in the way. Michael's life has been torn apart by the death two years earlier of the older brother he idolized. Depsite his affection for Rachel, he can no longer hold his frustration and anger inside and he begins to strike out at people around him.

For years, Michael and his friend, Scott, have been at odds with Cory and Taylor. In the past, the four boys have amused themselves by exchanging insults. But this summer, things begin to spin out of control, and Rachel finds herself caught in the middle of a series of increasingly violent pranks that threaten the stability of the small community and force her to question the boundaries of friendship and trust.

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