The Mountain Can Wait (21 page)

“I thought your mom was going to hurt you, when she took off with you. The stuff that went through her head—it was pretty grim. The things she said scared me sometimes. That's why I couldn't let you guys stay here. It wasn't her fault, though, Curt. She was sick.”

“So why didn't you do something about it?” He pushed his dad's hand away with a shrug.

“I did what I could.” He picked at the moss on the rock.

“You could have put her in a hospital or something.”

“I wasn't much older than you are now. I did my best.”

“Made the most of a bad situation, eh?”

His dad waited a moment before he spoke. “You've got this idea about me.”

“I think it's pretty accurate,” Curtis said, cutting him off. His stomach tumbled again and he dropped his head between his legs and swayed.

“You all right?”

“Nauseous.”

His dad put a hand on Curtis's knee and waited for him to look up before he spoke again. “What I was going to say is, you're right. I didn't want you, not even when I first held you, or even after that. But that day your mom took you away from me, the thoughts that were coming to me on the drive down here to get you? It woke me the fuck up. I knew if things got really bad, you could have ended up dead. She wouldn't have meant to do it, but it could have happened. Everything shifted for me then—my life, it belonged to you. I didn't want it anymore for myself. It was the most incredible feeling.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“I want you to understand. I can't leave this island without you. Never could. What kind of life do you think it's going to be, running from the police? You'll be alone, all the time.”

“Sounds like what you've always wanted for yourself.”

“I know you think that. A lot of people think that.”

“Isn't it true?”

“What's true is, I've never been any good at giving people what they need. I know that. I don't see a way out of it.”

“You never acted like you cared,” Curtis said, and put his head back between his knees.

Bobbie was furious about the loss of the kayak, and in spite of Tom's promises to replace it, she slammed the kitchen door and shut herself into the hut where she cooked up her potions. Curtis was in the bathroom suffering with some kind of stomach thing, so Tom went out to the front porch and sat on the top step. After some time, the screen door creaked open and he felt the porch boards move, and Curtis sat next to him, still wrapped in the blanket. He drank water from a mason jar.

“I can see what it's doing to you, Curt. The guilt.”

“What?”

“Don't you feel guilty?”

“Of course I do.”

Tom's sockless feet sweat and stuck to the insides of his boots. “If you turn around, right now, and tell them what you did, show them you're sorry, it'll all come out better. Better than this, at least.”

“But I'll have to go to jail.”

“You might.”

“And I'll have a record.”

“And you'll have a record? Curt, that girl is fucken dead.”

Curtis retreated into his blanket, and when he looked at Tom, his eyes were wet. “It wasn't ever going to be any different than this. The first few days after it happened, I kept thinking about all these minor details. Like, what if I left the party a couple seconds later than I did? Or a couple seconds earlier? Or what if my bike pump was where it was meant to be? Even if my truck was parked at the other end of the road. But none of those things happened, and when I hit her, I was in the only place I was meant to be at that second, and so was she.”

“Well that's a mighty fine way of looking at it. Pretty much absolves you of any responsibility at all.”

“It doesn't mean I'm not sorry.”

Tom pulled off his boots and tossed them onto the lawn, pressed his hot feet into the warped, rough boards of the steps. “You think this was fate, like the universe designed some kind of role for you to play? You're wrong. There's no script. Universe doesn't give a rat's ass what you do. But it hands you this one chance to be here and you do what you can with the time you've got. You better make it good. For yourself. For no one else.”

They sat together, not talking, long enough to witness several breaks in the clouds, when color bloomed and short afternoon shadows stepped across the lawn for seconds before they all softened and dissolved again into the gray. Not daring to move, Tom watched the clouds flowing east past this small island to the mainland, where they'd collect in the updraft from the mountains. The rain here seemed constant, so abundant that the plants appeared to rise up to meet it and suck it greedily out of the sky, as if to say,
stay, stay.
He had to hand it to Curtis: this was the perfect place to dig in and hide from the world.

“I keep seeing her,” Curtis said. “Sometimes she's alive; she's laughing at me. Or there's bugs all over her, and she's all cut and bruised and bloody. I'm pretty sure I spoke to her, at the party. We were in the kitchen. A couple of weeks ago she was nothing to me, you know? You speak to some girl at a party and then you forget about it. But now, she's everywhere.”

“Were you drunk?”

“A bit. I was pretty high. It was that whole thing with Tonya. I wanted to drive somewhere and watch the sunrise.”

“Any drugs in the truck now?”

“Don't know. Probably.” Curtis looked out across the yard. “Tell me what to do.”

“Come home.”

They left
the island on the first ferry in the morning, and checked into a motel in Nanaimo. Curtis got into the bath and Tom drove to a drugstore and bought scissors and a pack of disposable razors. Next he went to a strip mall and bought a dark-blue polo shirt, a pair of khaki pants, socks, and underwear. He stopped at a drive-through for two breakfasts of egg and sausage burgers, black coffees. Curtis sat in his towel in a straight-backed chair in front of the bureau mirror while Tom cut his hair. They didn't speak much.

Bobbie had been hopping mad when they left, partly because of the kayak, but mainly, it seemed, because who in the hell was going to do the shingling on the neighbor's shed? With his hand on his heart, Tom promised that as soon as he could, he would come back and honor her end of the bargain. He had, after all, eaten half the fish.

Curtis drank the coffee but left the food. As he sat there in his towel, the extent of his bad health was a hard thing to look at. His skin was pale, the freckles stark. The muscles in his back seemed to sag; the knobs of his spine poked angrily against the skin. Every now and again he began to shake, and Tom would put his hands on Curtis's neck or shoulders until the shaking stopped.

Carolina would have something to say about all of this. She would be able to put into words what Tom couldn't. There was some kind of exchange happening here. Petals of Curtis's wet hair fell onto his shoulders and onto the floor, where they dried to fluff and would be left. Tom felt a lightness from being close to this boy, to his pale skin with the last drops of water slowly drying on his neck.

When Curtis was dressed in his new clothes, his hair clean and cut, his face shaved, Tom sat with him on the edge of the bed until the boy stood and went for the door.

They passed a baseball diamond, a liquor store and a pub, two boys on bikes in a scrubby, empty lot, and pulled into the parking lot of the RCMP office. A two-story, pale-blue and white clapboard building, it looked more like a travel agency or a dentist's office than a police station.

A small, clean room with a breeze coming through an open window that caught the edges of a weighted stack of paper. Blue carpet, the hum of fluorescent lighting, a row of metal chairs by the wall. Tom's arm protective around Curtis's shoulders.

The officer behind the desk, a woman with tight silver curls, wearing a white button-down shirt and a blue tie, smiled at them warmly. Curtis told her why they were there.

She knew who they were—everyone up the shore did, she said—and she advised Curtis to remain silent until he could be transferred to the investigating officer from Whistler, and that he ought to call an attorney. Evidently unsure of what to do, she first locked Curtis in a back room alone but then invited Tom to sit with him. Curtis fidgeted and bounced his knee and started to shake so Tom knocked on the door and asked for a blanket. The woman came in with two coffees and a rough wool blanket and told them that the officer would be with them in a few hours.

“Is that Brendon?” Tom asked.

“I wouldn't know his first name.”

“What about that attorney? I don't know who to call.”

“I'll get you a number,” she said.

“I'd like it to be someone who's been referred by somebody I know.”

“It doesn't matter too much for the interview,” she said. “As long as you've got someone present.” She glanced at Curtis and asked him if he needed anything else.

He shook his head.

Through the heavy door came the muffled sounds of an office waking up, phones and footsteps and doors opening and closing.

“I think we've made her day,” Tom said.

“Who's Brendon?”

“He's the guy who's been looking for you. He came to see me.”

Curtis licked his lips. “I'm so sorry, Dad.”

“No, I'm sorry. I messed up. I should have thought of the lawyer.”

“It's okay.”

“It's not okay. We've got to keep our heads screwed on right.”

Brendon arrived in the late afternoon, apologizing. He'd been in the city. The signs of haste were on him, blown hair and a trickle of sweat at his temple. He propped open the door with a small end table and sat in a chair opposite Curtis and introduced himself.

“You don't need to be scared,” he began. “I'm going to read you your charter rights, and your only job then is to keep quiet. In fact, you try to say anything to me without an attorney present and I'm gonna plug my ears. You got it?”

When a lawyer eventually arrived from a local firm, she and Curtis went into a room with Brendon and another officer and closed the door. An hour later Brendon came out and filled three cups with water from a cooler, and went back in and closed the door. Tom went outside and sat on the steps. Dusky-blue sky, cloudless, the air still as a pause. A cicada buzzed in the cedars on the far side of the road. From the other side of the parking lot came the hollow crack of an aluminum bat hitting a leather ball. Cars passed and all the drivers seemed to glance at the man sitting alone on the police station steps.

He traced his fingers along a knife scar at the base of his palm and tried to remember other times in his life when his world had changed so entirely. Always had to do with these kids: when he first heard about them, when they were born. When, one morning, he went into the bathroom for a piss and found a note propped up against the mirror.

He never, never wished death on her. And the thought of her curled up in a snowbank, eyes half shut to the world—that still hurt. He supposed she was the love of his life, if you bought into that kind of thing: first, euphoric, tortured. But now, after a lifetime without her, he could only thank her for leaving, for the hurt of that abandonment was worlds less than what she would have caused if she'd stayed.

When the interview finished, Tom was invited back into the room with Curtis and the lawyer. Curtis had stopped shaking, but his eyes were sunk in, as if the story inside him was like air in a balloon and now that it was told, here was the wilted rubber left over.

“He did really well,” said the lawyer, smiling at Curtis. Her hand was on his shoulder.

“What happens now?” Tom asked.

She took a deep breath and sat up straight in her chair. “In light of the time that's passed since the accident—we're going on three weeks now—and the amount of forensic evidence the police have collected from the scene and from the vehicle, along with Curtis's confession, they'll be processing him into the system and lodging him at the police station in Whistler, where the offense occurred. They'll keep him there while they file their charge to the Crown counsel. You can apply for bail, but I think, once he's charged, they'll release him home to you on his own recognizance.”

“What exactly is he being charged with?”

“We don't know yet. The thing that's going to harm you the most, Curtis, is that you failed to offer assistance to the injured girl and left the scene and, on your own admission, went into hiding. That carries the heaviest penalty.”

“I thought she was already dead,” he said.

“Legally, I'm afraid, that doesn't matter. The point is, you left.”

In the
autumn of the following year, Erin started at the university in town and decided that she wanted a new dog. A big dog, one that would knock over lamps with its tail and shed hair all over the house. One that could take you out at the knees, leave muddy prints on your thighs, hot breath and warm tongue. Tom found out about a guy who bred German shepherds up near Hook Lake, so on the first Sunday in October he let his daughter drive him up there, both of them eating burgers out of paper bags in their laps. Early snow had fallen the day before, filling in the holes and divots and cracks in the landscape, like preparing a wall for fresh paint. Tom pumped the heat and Erin kept her window open a crack because, she complained, she couldn't breathe: she was choking on the smell of the diesel.

She was excited. Wouldn't say so, but he knew. She told him stuff about people she'd met at university, and pointed to the burned-out husk of a barn—look at that! She offered him the last of her fries. In the space between them, between the lines of everything they said, there was Curtis and the girl who was dead over a year now—this thing had become a part of them.

They missed the turn to the breeder's farm and had to double back, adding ten kilometers to the trip. Erin drove faster.

“Lighten up, girl. The puppies aren't going anywhere.”

“What if someone else gets there first? And they pick the one that I would've picked? I'll always know I've got the wrong dog.”

“Not true.”

“But you don't know.”

“Whatever dog you get will be your dog.”

“Is this the road we want?” She braked and swung onto a dirt road that crossed a field of tall grass and goldenrod.

“And if you're right, and someone else does get there first and pick the dog you would have picked, one day soon you'll be glad they did.”

“You're talking shit.”

He grabbed her knee and squeezed it and she swatted his hand away. He watched her profile racing across the blue October sky and the yellow blur of goldenrod. His kids were the best part of him.

The kennel was comprised of a pair of low, long sheds at the back edge of a plowed field. When they got out of the truck, a gang of dogs, all different breeds, bounded across the yard toward them. A man in work boots with the laces untied came around from the back of the single-story brick house and shook hands first with Erin and then with Tom. He took them to a chain-link cage at the far end of the kennel, where a tumble of shepherd puppies yelped and sprang and took one another's ears in the grips of their soft muzzles.

“You said over the phone you wanted a bitch? That black-faced one in the corner—she's the only one of the litter. You want to have a look at her?”

“What's her nature like?”

“It's early to tell but her parents are beauties. I've had the mother six years—best dog I ever had. You be firm with this one right from the start and she'll be a good dog to you.”

“Same's true for most dogs,” said Tom. He looked at Erin, who was on her knees in front of the cage, pulling on the jaw of one of the dogs through the links.

On the drive home, Erin sat in the backseat next to her new dog, the animal whimpering in a slatted box. She caught Tom's eye in the rearview mirror and thanked him, then they drove without speaking.

After some time, she said, “This is my dog.”

“Yup.”

And a little while after that, she said, “She'll be grown-up by the time Curt gets out.”

“She will.”

The moment Curtis saw his dad standing on Bobbie's front porch, that familiar, strong neck with the neatly clipped red hair, those shoulders, he thought he'd been saved. His dad, with deeply calloused hands and the heart of a bear, had found him and everything was going to be all right. He would fix it, because that was what he did. But as soon as his dad announced his intentions, Curtis saw the road ahead clearly, saw himself as a stone caught in the tire of some heavy-load truck.

Prison cells were pretty much as he'd expected them to be. The rivets in the slats of the bunk above, creased photos stuck to the wall with powdery gobs of toothpaste, a pair of institutional brown work shoes neatly placed under a small desk.

He could have pretended for months, for years, even. Because Aguanish Island wasn't real. He was beginning to wonder if Bobbie was even real, or if he'd been living in that little cottage with a ghost. That island was a bubble in the ocean where people hung crystals and bones from their windows and meditated to drums and bartered cedar-weave baskets for clay pots of honey. Honey so raw, it was speckled with flakes of wing and segments of leg. They would have hidden him there; they would have forgiven.

Today was day one oh seven locked up. His cell mate told him not to count, and Curtis tried, but every morning the new day's number woke him like an alarm. It was impossible to forget.

His cell mate was all right. In his fifties, skin and bones, a long face and watery blue eyes rimmed by hanging pockets of skin. He'd been in prison for most of twenty-five years and told Curtis what he could trade for x number of smokes, how to scam extra bread at lunch, how to get a hand job on a visit.

“The thing you've got to do is,” he said to Curtis one night while they watched TV on their small set, “you've got to forget your life outside. Forget you're not a con like the rest of us, because no one's going to treat you special. You think you don't belong here. But you're here, so you belong. You understand what I'm telling you? Any of these boys get wind that you think you're above them, they'll knock you flat. This place doesn't pick and choose. We're all the same.”

His cell mate was tidy as a pin, hung his regulation coat from the knob of his top bunk and lined up his canteen on the windowsill and desk, so the cell looked like a commissary. One perfect row of bottles of hair gel, one row of deodorant. Boxes of juice, cocoa, instant noodles, pens, matchbooks. All ordered, inventoried in his head to the last sachet of sugar. Curtis's dad would've loved him. He told good stories, and when the lights went out and the cell was black (though on some nights silver with the light of the moon), he talked about warehouses he'd robbed, telemarketing scams, mail fraud. Curtis listened and tried to hold on to the words, but when sleep took him, it took him hard, as if he'd been pushed from behind. It took him down a tunnel that spit him out onto a mountain road lined with pines, and up ahead a curve, and if he could just keep running, he'd get to the other side of it, where memories died. And no matter his speed, she was there, keeping pace, inch for inch like the mirror shadow that fell between the glass and the silver surface painted behind it. Sometimes she was on the far side of the road, her faceless face trained on his. And then within a step she'd be inches away, locked in. The curve was always just ahead, and she was always there, making sure he didn't get any closer.

His dad visited every two weeks. Drove from Prince George every other Sunday night and visited on the Monday morning. That was just like him, to come every other week just because he said he would. Sometimes Erin and Samantha came, or one or two of his friends. He and his dad didn't always talk; they just drank coffee from the tuckshop. His dad would read the paper as if they were sitting in the kitchen at home. Mostly, Tom told him stuff about what he was doing, bidding for contracts for the next season, cleaning out the garage. He wasn't going to sell the company now; he couldn't anyway—not after the thing with Sweet. He'd let the place in Smithers go. While Curtis was in jail, his dad said, he wasn't going anywhere.

And he worried too. That was new. About the color of Curtis's skin, or his weight, or how he was being treated by other people. Curtis told him that it wasn't like on TV, with guys getting done in the showers. They showered alone, and he spent most of his day in a classroom, and the evenings playing pool, or reading. In time, he would be moved to a corrections center closer to home where they worked at fish hatcheries and fruit farms. These were the things he told his dad, and his dad would look at him, and wait for him to say more. And what he couldn't tell Tom was this: that the hardest thing about being in prison wasn't the being there at all. It was what he'd left outside.

He was on the news again the day he was sentenced. They showed a clip of his handcuff walk from the courthouse to the transport van. And then an interview with the girl's parents, out on the street. The father, bearded and tall, stood a little behind the mother, who did most of the talking, her clear voice strong and defiant. He got a good look at her on the screen; he hadn't been able to during the time they'd shared in the courtroom. The family was satisfied, she said, that the judge had passed the maximum sentence. They appreciated Curtis Berry's admission of guilt, and that he had waived his right to appeal, but beyond that, she said, they didn't care what became of him. He was inconsequential. He broke something in their lives that would never be fixed.

Yep.

He would never talk to his dad about these things, the fact that the hard part was this revelation about who he'd become to the people he knew and also to people he'd never met. That there was Curtis Berry who people hated so deeply they had wiped his existence from their minds. There was Curtis in sweats behind the metal door, being very careful not to take a step wrong. And he couldn't tell him, and this was the worst thing about being in jail, that there was also Curt, whose dad was serving his sentence with him, all for nothing. Because, after all this, not a single thing was better, and he was still running.