Through Black Spruce

  He looks the size of a child behind the screen, so skinny I wonder if he’s sick. His thinning hair is cut in a bob. His black-framed glasses make him look like he’s a kid trying to act like he’s an adult. Standing now, he walks to the window, still not looking at me but at some pictures he’s taken from his desk. The suit he wears seems very expensive, the white shirt undone a number of buttons. With his left hand he raises the blind further up the window, even more light flooding into the room. Only then does he turn, put the photos on the desk, and glance at me.

  The agent lets out what sounds like a squeak, and sits down again, now staring at me, one hand covering his mouth. He stands then sits again. “My god,” he finally says. He draws out the words in his nasally voice. “Are you—?” He stops. “You must be the sister of Suzanne.”

  I nod.

  “Where is she?” he asks. “Please tell me she is okay.”

  I don’t know what to say. This question is why I have travelled all this way. “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Sit. Please.” He stands and clears more photos off a chair and drags it to me. “Please, excuse this mess. We’ve just moved in. Business has demanded a second office, this one, well, here in Montreal.” I sit, and he does, too, continuing to stare at me. “You don’t have news of your sister?”

  I shake my head. I think I see something like relief cross his face before he covers it up.

  “I reported her disappearance to the authorities,” he says, “as soon as I realized she hadn’t jetted off to vacation or back home. I’ve even talked to your mother once or twice. Suzanne’s boyfriend, Gus … he’s disappeared, too.” He stands but then sits down. “You know, I can’t sleep at night for the worry.” The words slip out of him like he doesn’t want blame for any of this. “Please. Take off your glasses.” I shake my head again. I can’t find the words to explain to him what has happened these last weeks. “Please tell me your name.”

  “Annie.”

  “You look so much like your sister.” He glances at my body. He’s about to say something else but doesn’t.

  We sit for a long, awkward time. He continues staring at me. I look down at my hands twisting on each other.

  “I hoped you might have heard from her,” I finally say. “That you might know something. Anything.”

  He turns his eyes away from me. “I fear. I fear … her boyfriend. I think he was involved with drug dealers. I just don’t know anything. The police came.” He stops, then starts again when I look up. “When I called the police, they asked questions, questions I answered. It is all on the record. They will have it. It’s your right to know. I told them everything I knew, and that’s verified. Go to them, and they will tell you everything they know, that I know.”

  He pauses, as if to catch his breath, to think about what he’s said and still needs to. He sighs. “Such a shame. A giant, dreadful shame. Your sister was on her way. She’d already accomplished more than most young models dream of. And then this.” He stops himself there.

  After a moment he repeats, “It’s all on record with the police.” He talks about my sister as if she is dead. The weight of it crushes my chest. I am shaking before I know that I am. My mouth tastes salty and I realize I am heaving, crying. I take off my sunglasses to wipe at my eyes, not caring anymore. I place the dark frames on his desk and look up at him, at his funny haircut and glasses. This is absurd.

  “What happened, poor girl?” he asks, staring at my face. He looks horrified through my tears.

  “Got beat up.” I stand and pick up my sunglasses. “I gotta go.”

  He stands, too. “Do you need anything?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “If you hear anything,” he says, “please let me know.”

  I walk to the door, but before it closes, he calls, “Miss Bird, Annie.” He waves me back into his office. “I almost forgot. Suzanne left you this. I think she wanted you to have it.” He crouches by a small safe, spins the dial, and opens it. He turns with a large roll of bills in his hand, digs in his desk drawer, and removes a large manila envelope, slips the money inside. “Suzanne never collected her paycheque from her last shoot.” He hands me the envelope.

  I don’t want to take it but my hand reaches out. “She got paid in cash?” I ask. Although I didn’t mean it to sound accusatory, he clearly takes it that way.

  “Of course not, dearie. I keep impeccable records. I know what she was owed. That is part of my job.”

  He steps back and places his hand on his chin, scanning me up and down. “The world of high fashion is a tough one. But it can be a very lucrative one. He smiles a smile that seems to want to make me feel better. “If you ever had the desire.” Again he runs his eyes up and down me like he might an interesting rifle or boat. Is he really saying this? “If you wanted some work, we can talk.” He smiles again, looks me in the eyes. “If you want serious work, just a little weight to lose. Hardcore diet and exercise regimen. In three months, who knows? Your face will heal fine. The world, maybe.” He laughs like he wants me to be in on the joke. He’s assumed my taking the money means I’m up for this. He thinks I’ll actually buy his crap.

  “Did Suzanne model alone?” I ask.

  He looks confused by the question.

  “Did she have friends other than Gus?”

  The agent’s eyes narrow with understanding. “Most in Toronto. No one here.”

  I continue to stare at him. My red eyeball will suck something useful out of him. The envelope of money is warm in my hand.

  “There are a few girls on a shoot in town from Toronto right now who knew her,” he finally says.

  I smile. It isn’t a nice one. He scribbles names and phone numbers on a sheet of paper and walks me to the door.

  “If you decide you need money, if you decide you might like a taste of a world you’ve never dreamed of—if even for a short while—do call.” He leans as if to kiss my cheek but stops.

  I’m so lost in the remembering, in the talking, that it’s too late before I realize someone else stands in the hospital room. I turn with a start and see Eva at the doorway, pretending to be busy, reading some papers in her hand.

  “Sorry, Annie,” she says. “Don’t mean to interrupt, but I need to change the drip and do my charts.”

  How long has she been standing there, listening? For a second I want to be angry with her. “That’s okay,” I say. “I need to go get Gordon at my mum’s. They’re best friends now.”

  As I pick up my parka and my snow pants, Eva busies herself with my uncle. “I’ll see you soon, girlfriend,” I say.

  “You’re doing good,” she says.

  Outside, a billion stars twinkle in the clear night. The first breaths of cold air make my lungs hurt. I let my snowmobile warm up and smoke a cigarette, staring up at the stars. My bare fingers holding the cigarette ache badly in the frigid air. I’m not as tough as I once was. It’ll come back with time.

  At Mum’s, I stumble in with a blast of foggy air. Mum and Gordon sit watching TV, drinking tea. She asks me if I want one. I nod, frozen. A ten-minute drive across the river and I feel like I’m freezing to death.

  We sit and watch a show, home videos of idiots doing stupid things. It’s pretty funny, really. Gordon actually makes a huh-huh sound when a particularly goofy clip plays. I look over to him, amazed. Mum doesn’t notice.

  “Why don’t the two of you stay here tonight, Annie?” she asks. “It’s so cold out. The cabin will be miserable.” She’s right, and I’m tired. “Take your old room. Gordon, you can sleep in Suzanne’s.” So Catholic. I want to tell her we’re not a couple. Instead, I just sit and watch the TV, my face and hands and feet warming, and I begin drifting away to somewhere I hope no words need to be spoken.

  13

  I’D LEAVE THIS PLACE, TOO

  For a while, the run-in on the bridge felt a sort of victory. Marius and his little sad army of baggy-pants boys. But I’d come up with any excuse I could not to leave my house after that. Mornings
so early the sun wasn’t up yet I’d go out for a jog, my rifle bouncing on my back. I was getting my wind, and I’m sure the weight of years of good living was starting to come off. I called Lisette when I needed groceries and Joe or Gregor when I needed a bottle and some smokes.

  The cops, they called and told me Marius had an alibi, four or five people who swore he was with them the night he threw the Molotov cocktail through my window. The cops said they’d keep a careful eye on him. The cops didn’t seem to care too much. I tried to push them to do something more, and suddenly I became the bad guy, was told I was unreliable due to a drinking problem, that I ruined any possible evidence by putting the fire out. This is the way my world goes.

  I was surprised when Dorothy Blueboy called me, concerned for my safety. She invited me over to her house on the island for dinner. I told her I couldn’t, but before we got off the phone, I asked which night was a good one for her. This was a date, I think. Me, I didn’t think I could do this.

  On an early-summer evening, the air almost sweet with the cooling heat of day, I climbed into my freighter canoe and cut along the Moose River, tide coming up so that I made the shortcut over the sandbar. The moon rising on one side of me, the sun setting on the other. A good sign. My hand vibrated on the tiller. I felt my hairdo getting messed up in the wind, my hair longer than it’d been in years. I used to wear a long warrior’s braid, but then cut it off in my twenties. Now it was getting long again, long enough to pull back off my face and tie in a short braid. Grey showed at the temples. I’d even slipped in my partial so that it looked like I had two front teeth again.

  I drank a couple of stiff ryes for courage before I left, and I’d considered bringing the half-full bottle along, but that would be tacky. Dorothy’s house lay just a short walk up from the hospital, not far from the school. I picked a few wildflowers on the way and tied them with a length of grass. Classy. Perfect.

  “You look good, you,” she said to me when she opened her door. “Have you lost weight?”

  “Took up jogging,” I said to her as she led me through the house to the back porch.

  “I heard.”

  Photos in frames sat on doilies on the table. One of them was of her son who fell through the ice many winters ago and drowned. We’ve both had losses, us. A dream catcher kept guard on the livingroom window.

  We talked on her porch, screened in against the mosquitoes and flies, and looked out over the road that leads to a cut of the river, the roof of our old school peeking out over the treetops. We sipped glasses of white wine. It tasted like apple juice gone bad, but I didn’t say it. I sneaked looks at Dorothy as she talked, her hair long and black, greying a little, too. Whenever she laughed, something deep in me glowed warmer. When she leaned to me over the table to pour more wine, I could smell the clean smell of her, like laundry dried in the sun. She’s skinny for an Anishnabe woman, but I remember her so skinny as a kid. My first crush. She talked freely of her three living children, grown now and gone, two to Toronto, one to Winnipeg.

  When I asked why her kids moved away, it sounded rude, as if I’d made some kind of judgment about her already.

  She answered pleasantly, though. “If I was young again and had the chance, I would leave this place, too.” She smiled at me. So pretty. “Not much to offer young ones here, unless you want to become a nurse and help ease the old ones into death.” I nodded.

  We drank and ate well out on the porch. She made chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy, homemade bannock with jam.

  “So what is going on between you and Marius?” Dorothy asked as we drank more wine, the plates cleared, each of us smoking a cigarette. I’d offered her one after dinner, and she said she didn’t smoke but took it anyways. I looked across at her.

  “I don’t mean to be nosy,” she said.

  “He’s a drug dealer,” I told her. “Everyone knows he’s mixed up in bad business. With bad people.”

  “But what’s that got to do with you?”

  “He thinks I’m a police informant.”

  “Are you?”

  I looked at her like she was crazy. “Me, I don’t know anything about his business. I think he’s angry because his brother ran off with my niece.” I felt the back of my head tingle where I’d hit it on the road.

  “Will,” Dorothy said, looking at me serious, “does that all add up to him doing what he’s done to you?”

  I didn’t know. “Sometimes people hate other people so much they just want to see them dead. Him and his biker friends, they think a different way. I seen documentaries on biker gangs. They live by a different code.”

  Dorothy shook her head. “It doesn’t add up, Will. You got to figure this one out. Something bad is going to happen. You know that.”

  She got up and got more wine, poured us big glasses. “I haven’t drunk this much in a long time,” she said. I believed her. “You’re a bad influence.” She took another cigarette out of my pack and smiled sexy.

  I was getting drunk on this white wine. I said as much. The night, the darkness, was full on. I pushed Marius away with the assurance to Dorothy that the troubles would pass. They always do. She gave me the look, the one that says you think? and that was that.

  She talked about her ex-husband, how he left her for a young thing down in Timmins when he was working there four years ago, and then how that relationship went belly up fast and he came sniffing back around.

  “I told him to fuck off,” Dorothy said, and the words didn’t sound right coming out of her mouth. She sensed it, too. “That’s the first time I ever swore at someone, and he knew it. Knew what he’d done was final.” She looked away.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I haven’t been with anyone”—she rubbed the stem of her wineglass and looked down again—“with a man, in four years.”

  My stomach, something inside me jumped. “Did you get me over here for sex?”

  “Will! Sorry, that came out wrong. No, I didn’t. I …” She smiled shyly. “We were each other’s darlings as kids. I’m comfortable around you. I just wanted the feeling of a man around again.”

  I felt like I was supposed to share something special. “This wine is good,” I said. “It’s a different buzz than whisky. Makes my head feel light. Not heavy like when I drink rye.” I studied Dorothy’s face for a second. Disappointment. “I haven’t been with a woman, except for my sister, in twenty years.”

  Dorothy looked at me, her eyes open wide.

  “No, no. I don’t mean that. Lisette is the only woman company I’ve kept for years. I’ve not been with her. I’ve not been with any woman. I’d never be with my sister that way. What I’m trying to say is I’ve not been with a woman in twenty years.”

  “Do you think a person forgets how to do it after that long?” Dorothy asked.

  “I don’t know, me. I hope not.” I drank a long drink, and we went silent.

  I lit another cigarette. Tension in the air now. But not the worst type of tension I’d ever felt. I could feel stirrings in my dress pants, between the nice pleats.

  “You don’t talk about your wife,” Dorothy said. “Your children.”

  I stared at the heater of my cigarette, burning red in the darkness of the porch. “What’s there to say? They are gone.”

  Dorothy didn’t answer. We sat quiet in the darkness, and I felt the presence of others, my others, now around me. My stirrings departed back to the ashes.

  “Do you want to take a walk with me?” I asked. “Walk me back to the docks?”

  Dorothy’s head nodded in the darkness. “I’d like that, Will.”

  I helped her do up the dishes in the brightness of her kitchen. I felt old and tired under the lights. Wine makes me sad, I realized. My hand brushed Dorothy’s as I passed her dried plates, and we smiled at one another.

  “I’ve made friends with a bear,” I told her as we walked down the dark road to the docks, turning left where the hospital squatted by the shore.

  “You what?”


  “I’ve made friends with a bear. An old sow, a dump bear.” I reached out and took her hand. “She’s been coming around my house, so I’ve taken to feeding her. She’s on her last legs, won’t make it through next winter. I, I just felt like showing it some kindness.”

  “The great James Bay hunter has taken to making friends with the animals? We better not let anyone know about this, Will.” We laughed. “Maybe you’re feeling guilty for all the animals you’ve killed in your life.”

  “That sounds like something Lisette or Oprah would say.”

  “Aren’t you putting her in danger by doing that?”

  “Probably,” I said as we got to the dock and stood on it, rocking slow back and forth. “But she is not long for this world. I’d want someone to do the same for me.”

  Dorothy hugged me then, and I hugged her back, hard. Something made me feel like crying, bawling like a baby in her arms. I could feel her thin back through her sweater, smell her perfume, the tickle of her hair on my face. A good feel, like something I missed, something I lost a long time ago. We held on for a long time, neither of us moving, just feeling the other through our clothes, our hearts beating.

  She lifted her head up to me for a kiss, I think, and I leaned down to her. Natural. Perfect. Our lips brushed, testing each other, then pressed harder. I sensed the others around me, though, my lost ones, and pulled away, trying not to offend, timing it like I was coming up for air.

  “You going to find your way home in the dark?” Dorothy asked.

  “I could get home blindfolded,” I told her. I climbed into my freighter. She untied the ropes for me as I pulled the cord and the silence of the night broke. I idled the motor down to a gurgle and smiled up at her. She smiled back and tossed my lines into my boat. I reversed out and waved, drove off watching her fade into the night.

  My world sometimes feels like a world of loss. Let me know if I’m sounding like a whiner. It’s hard to tell from here. It’s hard to tell when I want to get the whole story out and I don’t know how much time I have. I’ll just say it.