In the morning, I went down the stairs, more tired than ever. My mother was packing, hurrying about. My father’s truck was gone.
“I don’t have time for questions,” she said. She told us only that we were moving across the Fraser River to a town called Mount Lehman.
My brother sidled close. The strangeness of his gaze shone in a way that made me want to run to the mirror. He said he had something to ask, and I saw from his expression that he’d readied one of the trick questions he used to torment other kids. They often involved World War III, and his favorite was, “If America dumped boxed cereal on the USSR, why would it be chemical warfare?” He then had to explain in minute detail our mother’s lessons about chemical foods.
Now he said, “If a nuclear bomb strikes a mile away, do you run toward it or away?”
I let myself see this. A wall of blinding light approached, melting cars and incinerating Christmas trees and cooking human flesh from the bone. Though I knew he’d fool me, I blurted, “Away! I’d run away!”
“Wrong,” he said, loudly but without inflection.
I went to the kitchen door and outside, over the wet grass, past the apple tree to the waterlogged fields. I stood in the windy silence of the valley.
✴
THE PACKING REVEALED how little we owned—blankets and clothes, worn-out books, and some binders of school papers. My mother loaded the spinning wheel she’d bought in hopes of making everything from scratch. Then she filled several jugs with water. We asked why and she said that the water in the valley was from a spring and we would miss it.
We pulled out of the driveway, each of us holding a shimmering jug in our lap. My sister had her hair pinned back, her forehead high and pale, her chin lowered to her collar. My brother stared straight ahead.
We passed Ten Speed where she’d stopped on the roadside, one foot on the ground as she watched, her eyes full of fear for us, wide and flashing with refracted light as our van drove by.
I made myself stop thinking, just seeing, for later, for the rest of my life. I knew this with an unmoving wisdom that made me feel I would indeed become someone else.
And then I was no longer in my seat, in the van, but on the mountain where my father had once taken me. I could see the entire valley, its fields and streams, the road at its center whose presence alone, each day after school, gave me a sense of certainty. It descended past wet rocks and old, gaunt trees, and then leveled and turned onto the straightaway. Past a few farms and the fields of Christmas trees or sod, it rose back along the mountains and returned to where it entered, beyond rock faces lit with quick, brittle streams.
Just outside was a service station where carpooling parents waited. If we turned right, we headed to my school in Abbotsford or to Vancouver. Left led toward Nicomen Island, that piece of muddy earth where my father got his mail and I was born.
Mountains stood against the distance, larger and whiter than those of the valley, the flat, humid, windy ranges washed down from them over millennia and called prairies by those who’d chosen to stay. This was the shape of the world. As a child, I could have drawn it with a crayon: that damp sheet of alluvial land hemmed in by the horizon.
And now we were gone.
PRAYERS, MANTRAS, AND HOW TO SWEAR
On the paper there was a tree, the trunk split in two, and each of those branches split in two, and so on. At the top were the words Arbre Genéalogique, and on the trunk and each fork stood empty boxes. I’d been trying to act normal, but I couldn’t stop yawning, and now there was this. Other kids were filling in the boxes. I couldn’t concentrate. It had taken me a while even to write my own name on the trunk. In the two boxes on the branches above, I printed Bonnie and André. But the highest boxes were the problem. Mrs. Hand told me to write the names of my grandparents—“your father’s father and mother.” When I said, “Je ne les connais pas,” she just said, “Ta grand-maman et ton grand-papa?” But I couldn’t even remember the names of my mother’s parents. I’d met them years before, but no memories remained. Mrs. Hand told me to take the sheet home and fill it in, but I forgot and accidentally sat on it for hours while reading a novel. The next day I got an F+.
Normally, when I had really bad grades, my mother marched into school and grilled my teacher. Sometimes this embarrassed me, and sometimes it was fun to watch. But when I showed her this grade, she just sighed.
The boredom of school stretched out beneath an overcast sky. Surviving twelve years of it seemed impossible. Without my father, life became as silent and tense as a classroom during a math quiz.
But then, four days after my mother took us to our new home—a brown house at the top of a steep driveway, on a forest road—I woke to find my father eating breakfast, my mother silently preparing our lunches on the counter. He just said hi and smiled. I sat across from him, and he told me about a lobster at his fish store that was the size of my arm, and how he’d saved it so we could eat it together. I asked if maybe it was prehistoric, and he said, “Maybe.”
Over the next few days, I expected fights, shouting, or slammed doors, but he moved in so unnoticeably it seemed planned. Our family was always verging on disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed.
✴
THAT FRIDAY, HE picked me up from school shortly after my mother dropped me off.
“I’m taking you fishing,” he said, his face lined and grim, as if our outing were a form of punishment. “We’ll come back in the afternoon, and I’ll leave you in the playground before she gets here. Just pretend you went to school. You won’t tell her about this, right?”
I nodded, this lie by far the most extreme ever. I loathed the idea of standing in the playground as the other kids stared and wondered where I’d been all day. But I felt guilty for having left him. I also wondered if I might get special treatment, and after a few minutes on the highway, I asked for a lesson in swearing—something I’d requested fairly often—and amazingly, he agreed.
“Fuck,” he said, “well, fuck means a lot of things. Fuck off means go away right now. Fuck you means I really hate you. Fuck just means you’re angry. You know what shit is, and damn, well, damn’s not that bad.”
“What about cocksucker?” I asked.
“You should probably stay away from that one,” he told me and then was silent. Swear words gave me the feeling that good stories did, a sense of disembodiment, of being carried away, beyond rules, beyond everything. But suddenly he said, “Your mother wants to leave, you know.”
I looked at him, but he stared at the traffic ahead.
“She wanted to abandon you guys. I barely convinced her not to.”
He finally glanced over, checking my reaction.
“If she has to go,” he said, “she can take your brother and sister, but you can stay with me. We’ll get a motor home and travel the country and do nothing but fish.”
Maybe this was why he’d moved in with us, because she’d decided she’d had enough and was planning on running away. I tried to console myself with the idea of fishing trips and that he might like me best. He rarely spent time with my sister, and my brother didn’t care for fishing. I wanted to smile, but the muscles of my face tensed up as if they were doing the thinking.
“What about school?”
“You can take a year off. It won’t change anything. You never liked school, and I didn’t either. Look at me. I didn’t need it.” He pushed his jaw forward confidently. “You don’t let yourself get picked on at school, do you?”
“No,” I lied.
“Because,” he said, “if