ALSO BY DONNA MORRISSEY
The Deception of Livvy Higgs
What They Wanted
Sylvanus Now
Downhill Chance
Kit’s Law
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Donna Morrissey, 2016
First published in the Canada by Viking,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
Penguin Canada Books Inc., 320 Front Street West,
Suite 1400, Toronto, Ontario M5V 3B6, Canada.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 057 3
Export ISBN 978 1 78689 058 0
eISBN 978 178689 059 7
FOR MY BROTHERS, TOM & GLENN,
AND OUR BELOVED FORD
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes withthe first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yetknown what it is to have suffered and be healed,to have despaired and to have recovered hope.
—GEORGE ELIOT
Contents
ONE
The river’s pulse was sluggish, wearied with winter’s run. He laid aside his fishing rod and dropped beside it, equally wearied with too much thought from rambling through his father’s house. Gawd-damnit, Kyle, stop chewin’ them fingers, Sylvanus was always grumbling. He shook off his wool mitt and chewed now at a hangnail that was sending slivers of pain through his thumb. There’s people who cut themselves to escape the pain in their heads, his friend Kate had said the other night, strumming her guitar beside the bonfire. That why you chewin’ your fingers, Kyle, to escape a pain in your head?
Gawd-damn. Least it was his fingers he chewed. If Kate was right and his mouth was big enough, he’d have his head gnawed down to a stump. He looked upriver to where his father was likely staggering to catch up. Too many swallows of whisky too late in the day. He was usually drunk and sobered up by now.
His own mouth was dry from drink. He’d broken his own rule back there, drinking before dark. He scooped river water into his mouth, sloshed it around, and then spat it out and sat back. Across the river, massive wooded hills of the northern peninsula sighed through the fog. A long flagging reach downriver and the water buckled against the northern cliff wall, pooling itself into dead black depths before elbowing out of sight through a thicket of still leafless alders and drowning itself into the sea just beyond.
He glanced upriver again, listening for his father, Sylvanus Now. They’d heard a few hours before from some of the boys angling for trout that Trapp was back for another of his infrequent night visits when he visited nobody and spoke to nobody and then vanished again before sun-up. Trapp. Weird, feral Trapp. Prowling through the darkened places where he’d once lived. Then vanishing with the light of dawn, leaving nothing in his wake but raised brows and the hackles of folks from the Hampden outport. Trapp. Aptly nicknamed, for he carried the dark, disagreeable, secretive ways of all the Trapps. Bad blood, outport people said of the two Trapp brothers who’d relocated there during the government’s resettlement program. And thank God the rest of the Trapp clan had gone forty miles farther down the shore in Jackson’s Arm. They—the two Trapp brothers—had kept to themselves on the wooded hillside above Kyle’s home. They’d started up a sawmill and bad-mouthed anyone who set foot over their property line. Everyone had applauded the mysterious burning of the screaming sawmill just two years ago and the Trapps’ subsequent packing up and moving with no forwarding address. Except for this younger Trapp. The prowler. He was from the Jackson’s Arm side of the clan. Never did live in Hampden, simply visited his uncles regularly and buddied around with Ben, the nicest fellow in Hampden, who always let Trapp hang out no matter his sly looks and his creeping and skittering about like something untamed. He’d gone to university with Ben until they both mysteriously dropped out mid-semester and vanished into the oilfields of Alberta.
Trapp. One of the last to see Chris alive. He’d been working the rig alongside Chris when the accident happened. And each time Sylvanus heard that Trapp had been seen squirrelling about he’d lean greedily into the news, into the concreteness of something that linked him to the last minutes of his son’s life. Like a lost Christmas package found, mouldy and dank with age. Holding something that might soothe him, bring him peace.
Kyle felt nothing. He remembered a yarn about a monkey’s paw that granted an old woman her wish that her son, dead for a number of years, would be returned to her. He was. The stench through the wooden door saturated the house and the old woman fainted, knowing he’d been returned as he was—ten years dead. Skin dried, shredding from husked bone. Nope. Kyle Now was done with wishing. He was settled into the hollowed ache of his brother’s death, and if this ache was the closest he could feel to Chris, he’d suffer it through till his own demise.