The Wildfire Season Read online

  ‘You can’t be mad at someone you don’t remember.’

  ‘But you can hate them. You can hate them easier for not remembering.’

  ‘Words of wisdom from Princess Nicey-Nice. What do you know about hating anything? You’re too pure for that.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘I stand corrected.’

  ‘Everybody’s capable of hate. That part’s simple. The hard part is finding the strength to be capable of forgiving yourself, too.’

  ‘That’s really wonderful. What section of the Hallmarks did you find that one in? Sympathy for Burn Victims? That would be it, wouldn’t it? Right there between the Sorry for Your Amputation and God Loves You…Please Don’t Overdose on the Sleeping Pills.’

  ‘Nothing is going to change unless you lose this whole sarcastic—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Alex! Love doesn’t want to spend any time in a shithole like this,’ he says, pulling the sheet down and sitting up all at once. He frames his face with his palms and squeezes the skin into blotchy folds. ‘Love likes it pretty. It always has. Look at me.’

  ‘It’s not about what you—’

  ‘Look at me!’

  And she does.

  Alex sees a ghoul. For the first time, she recognizes Miles’s scars for what they are. She sees their permanence, the wish she has that they weren’t there, the memory of what he looked like when they weren’t. It makes her gasp.

  ‘You see? You see?’ Miles is shouting at her, and she cannot reply because he’s too close, too loud. And because the answer is yes. She sees.

  She tells him of her doctor’s visit in a note she leaves on the pillow next to him as he sleeps. It isn’t long. Half a page of news listed in punchy headlines.

  It’s yours.

  I’m going to keep it.

  I still love you.

  We’ll talk tonight.

  Much later, she wondered how long after waking it took for him to decide.

  He packs in the morning when Alex is away at work. He can’t face the rest of the apartment, so he starts with the bedroom essentials, stuffing a duffle bag with jeans, wool socks, half a dozen bedside-table paperbacks. Then he floats through the other rooms, holding framed photos of themselves to his eyes—kissing in the bleachers at a McGill vs. Queen’s football game, dressed up and drunk at a friend’s wedding—before putting them down again. He rattles through the piles of CDs but can’t remember who bought which one for whom, and discovers he doesn’t want to listen to any of it again anyway. They have collected so much meaningful garbage together that simply looking at it now makes him feel heavy, his veins pumping mercury.

  He means to leave Alex a letter. In his mind he imagines an impossible document, at once less and more than an explanation or an apology or a cataloguing of his thousand unmanageable torments. Something along the lines of a thank-you note, or perhaps the obligatory sentence in an author’s acknowledgements page expressing gratitude for all the help he has received but accepting all errors as his own. He even begins a draft, but it doesn’t survive the first reading. No matter how much he keeps out of it, the words can’t help referring to the kid, the gluttonous melodrama of his own selfpity. His second attempt is yet more minimalist, but ends up saying the same things with even greater force.

  Miles can see the cruelty in leaving no trace of himself behind for her. It would seem intentional to Alex, one last, silent rejection, but he decides he has no choice. In the end he does nothing more than slide his keys under the door after pulling it shut.

  Chapter 5

  Miles has a dog with bad dreams. When he’s home during the day he can hear Stump’s sleep-muffled barks from the end of the bed the two of them share, the three-alarm woo-woo-woomph! associated with visitor warnings. Then something turns for the worse, and the terror that the dog faces brings out unfamiliar barks of distress, each distinct from the rest, as though he refuses to believe this could actually be happening to him, a good boy whose only fault is lifting himself to table edges to clean the plates once the diners have left the room.

  Their arrival saves him from one such nightmare—in-progress. Without even the faintest pause, the dog pads across the brown shag of the living room and begins licking Rachel’s face.

  ‘This is Stump?" Rachel asks, the dog lapping at her laughter.

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why Stump?’

  Miles has to think about this. It wasn’t because any part of the dog was missing. Instead, his name came from the way that, when Miles first spotted him from the side of the road, an abandoned pup sitting on his haunches in a clearcut of forest a few miles outside Teslin, he was nearly the same size and stood with the same square, unmovable silhouette as the levelled stumps of lodgepole pine and tamarack.

  ‘Stump!’ Miles had called to him when he pulled over in his truck, and the dog had understood that this was his new name and came trotting over to have his side thumped.

  ‘You’re a Stump,’ his master said again, simply, as though Miles had finally discovered another living thing that was as much a Stump as he was.

  ‘Because that’s his name,’ is all Miles tells Rachel now.

  Miles thinks of Stump as the Mr Potato Head of dogs, his disproportionate features assembled with apparent malice, or perhaps humour. His nose as long as a ratter’s (though he fears holes of any kind, and requires some coaxing to warm Miles under the bedsheets on hungover mornings). Oversized ears that stand rigid atop his head in a kind of victory salute. Eyes as dark and bulbous as chocolate chips. For all of these handicaps, Stump made friends easily, a talent due in no small part to his indiscriminate distribution of kisses, the pink waterslide of his tongue reaching out for the faces of all who know his name, scratch his silver goatee or simply bend within range. He is so generous with these compensations that some call him ‘handsome dog,’ although it is clear that handsomeness is about five crossbreedings removed from his present appearance. Still, he’s not without his prejudices. He has never liked Wade Fuerst, for example. This for obvious reasons, even to a mongrel simpleton like Stump.

  ‘Comfy,’ Alex says, running her fingers over the varnished log end tables and peering up at the oil painting of a wolf howling at a too-yellow moon over the wood stove.

  ‘I don’t need much,’ Miles says.

  He leaves the door open behind him, but the air inside the cabin remains laden with a combination of uncirculated scents: the gamy moose steaks that Miles has been thawing and eating for his dinner four nights out of seven ever since Margot started dropping them off, the mildew of the hall bathroom that no amount of ammonia scrubbings could entirely get rid of. Now, with Rachel and Alex in the room with him, Miles smells the cabin as a visitor would, and he’s embarrassed by what it says about his life. The bachelor’s neglect. The sockfarty aura that likely follows wherever he goes.

  Alex circles the room, stopping to pull back the curtains and looking out at the picnic table with beer bottles sprouting up around its legs like mushrooms, and beyond it, the wall of forest that borders the backyard and marks the end of Ross River itself. She puts her cheek against the glass and looks both ways, but the cabin is far enough from the rest of town that no neighbours are visible. Even here, Alex thinks, Miles has chosen to live on the outside of things.

  ‘Momma! He’s following me!’ Rachel shrieks, walking backwards down the hall with Stump wagging after her.

  ‘He sure is,’ Alex says, pulling away from the window to study the dining-room table next to it. A plate smeared with egg yolk, three half-filled coffee mugs, and at the opposite end, a chess board with a game laid out over its squares.

  ‘Who are you playing?’ she asks, picking up the white queen by her crown.

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘She lives here?’

  ‘No. She doesn’t know that I’m here either.’

  ‘You don’t visit?’

  Alex places the queen down on the
board again. There’s a darkness under her eyes now that Miles remembers, clouds gathering over the crest of her cheekbones.

  ‘I went down there once a couple years ago. It wasn’t very—’ He stops, shrugs. ‘I just think it’s better if I stay up here.’

  Miles tries at a laugh but nothing comes out, so that there is only his opened throat for Alex to look down.

  ‘How do you play?’ she says.

  ‘She sends me a postcard with her move on it, and then I send my move back to her. It’s slow, but you can really think out the options. I’ve given her a post office box number in Whitehorse and they forward them up to me. There’s less to worry about if nobody…’

  ‘If nobody knows where you are.’

  Miles nods.

  ‘The postcards are almost as fun as the game,’ he says, sensing that it’s better to speak than not. ‘It’s not easy finding something new in Ross River, once you’ve gone through the dog sled team and northern lights photos, and then the cards you can get anywhere on the planet, the bikini babes and the joke Yukon at Nights. I’ve been forced to make some of my own.’

  ‘Your own postcards?’

  ‘Cut and paste. A photo of George Bush’s head on top of Stump’s body. The Welcome Inn with a Royal York letterhead underneath it. Arts and crafts.’

  ‘You make your own postcards?’

  Miles can see that Alex is about to cry, and while he doesn’t feel any particular sadness at the moment, he is more intensely humiliated than he can recall. Once more the smell of last night’s moose steak reaches him and he is sure he cannot meet Alex’s eyes again so long as the two of them remain in this room.

  ‘The winters are long,’ he says.

  Rachel is in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers that Miles knows contain little aside from rolling mouse turds. As she moves, Stump follows her, tapping his nails over the linoleum.

  ‘Honey? It’s time to go,’ Alex calls to her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just come here.’

  Rachel trots into the living room and clasps her arms around Alex’s legs, the dog plopping down in front, so that the three of them form an instant portrait.

  Halfway through the current breath he is inhaling, Miles feels a wave of fatigue so great he thinks he might fall before he gets a chance to breathe again.

  ‘You’re going to need a place to stay,’ he manages.

  ‘One with a shower would be nice.’

  ‘The Welcome Inn’s the only place for fifty miles. Talk to Bonnie.’

  ‘And tell her Miles sent us?’

  ‘If you want. But it won’t bring the rates down any.’

  For Miles, the room is now a sickening carousel, rotating slowly, unstoppably, the different shades of brown carpet, furniture and panelling smearing together. He throws a hand out and finds the dining-room chair that his chess opponent would sit in if she were present.

  ‘You have to go now,’ he says.

  The idea of having to bend and slap the cheeks of a passed-out Miles on the floor of his dingy cabin makes Alex turn her back to him. She takes Rachel by the hand and strides out the cabin’s open front door.

  Even now, the solstice sun has not wholly surrendered to the night, so that the trees are cloaked figures against the sky. Alex has the strange sensation of being at once here and not here. Ross River. A name like a hundred others she has passed on signs hammered into the soil at town boundaries. It’s impossible to believe that this place—these ragged power lines, this gravel street—is any different. She doesn’t know what she expected of it, if she expected anything. All this time and she had never considered the place she would find Miles standing in, only Miles himself. What’s more unsettling is that now she’s standing in it with him.

  It took less than an hour’s walk through this weedy, broken-hearted nowhere to forget most of what she expected he would have become. All she’s certain of is that he’s in worse shape than even her most malicious scenarios. It’s what allowed his talk of postcards and the sight of his big-eared dog to make a momentary dent. But even as she feels a brush of pity come and go, what remains is her desire to spray kerosene over the half of him the fire missed, toss a match his way, and watch. Not only for the pain it would cause, but to leave a tattoo that would forever mark his cowardice, his uncorrectable failure to the world. She has thought about this for longer and in greater detail than she would ever admit.

  Alex is strangely glad to find that she still hates him. As much now that she’s found him as she had the evening she’d come home to their empty apartment and looked for the note he hadn’t bothered to leave. She’s grateful that the sight of him has done nothing to alter her fundamental judgments. Her planned retributions.

  What she hadn’t seen coming is how much he frightens her. One of the things she hadn’t told him about her past four summers was that a couple of the people she’d shown his photo to had recognized him, or at least had a story to tell. A mechanic in Dease Lake said the scars made him sound like a guy ‘way far up,’ one that had nearly killed a man for looking at him and asking if Halloween had come early this year. A hardware store clerk in Telegraph Creek claimed to have heard about someone with burns down one side of his face ‘like a line of shade’ who hunted solo, living on grizzly meat and firing his shotgun at anyone who came within a half mile of his camp. Alex didn’t believe these stories, nor did she dismiss them. She simply added them to the composite portrait she was assembling in her mind. One that took hideous shape as she added a murderous grin, jellied eyes, blood-soaked teeth.

  The first summer had been something of an accident. A weekend drive out of the city after the end of term. She spent her first night in a creepy motel near the marina in Parry Sound, and found herself enjoying the creepiness, the foolish thrill of being a young mother on the lam. In the morning, instead of heading back, she turned north, then west. At lunch, she bought a half-dozen identical postcards showing a row of oiled men’s torsos frying on a beach and sent them to the people who might be wondering where she’d gotten to. ‘I’m taking our show on the road,’ she wrote. ‘We’ll be gone for as long as the credit card and Pampers hold out. Please don’t worry.’ She signed each of them ‘Love, Alex and Rachel (a.k.a. Thelma and Louise).’

  She bought a tent and sleeping bag in Dryden, a camp stove in Medicine Hat, matching toques for her and Rachel in Jasper. Even as far as Fort St John she still wasn’t looking for Miles in any concerted way. And yet, more and more, Alex found herself glancing through the windows of roadhouses, waiting for heads to turn her way in convenience store lineups, judging each town she passed through on its merits as a hiding place.

  The next year, once school was out, Alex had plans to spoil herself for a change, a splurging on cheap good-for-you treats. She would catch up on the prize-winning novels she’d seen praised in the paper for their ‘affirming’ and ‘meditative’ qualities, start jogging again, plant tomatoes in her building’s communal garden. To steal a few hours of freedom during the week, she enrolled Rachel in a daycare downtown. The girl’s resistance, however, became apparent almost immediately. The daycare workers called with reports of her clawing at the fence around the Astroturfed playground. When asked to come inside with the other kids, she would only stare up between the surrounding buildings at the postage stamp of blue above.

  The daycare people suggested it was homesickness, but Alex recognized the real cause of the girl’s protest. After the long, indoors winter, Rachel had taken Toronto’s warm sun as a broken promise. In the stifling evenings of their apartment, she would uncharacteristically cry, refuse favourite foods, fuss before being put down to sleep. She wanted out.

  In the middle of June, overheated and underslept herself, Alex rented a car and took Rachel up to Algonquin. The idea was for the girl to sleep on the drive and be rewarded with a swim in one of the park’s thousand green lakes. As soon as the hazy suburbs’ brew-yer-owns, discount warehouses and twenty-four-screen multiplexes shaped like UFOs had
given way to regrowth forests and grazing fields, the girl was quiet. Not asleep, but tranquilized, her fingers splayed against the car’s window like an antenna receiving signals that had been unreadably scrambled in the city. Once at the park, Rachel’s mood was wholly transformed. Alex hadn’t realized how much she missed seeing her child smile, and how long she had gone without.

  When they returned to the apartment two days later, it was only to buy a used truck, pick up the tent and camping gear and leave messages with family and friends. They were heading west again. Looking back on it now, Alex sees the last thing she brought along as almost an afterthought. A photo of Miles she’d slipped in an envelope and stuck in the glove compartment.

  She’d done it for Rachel. She’d done it for herself. She swung between these justifications from day to day, often between the hours. Both were true. Alex had vowed from the beginning not to keep Miles’s existence a secret from the girl. And letting her see him at least once might help put some of her brewing questions to rest in advance.

  Alex had her own dark wishes. More than anything, she wanted Miles to hurt. There was little she would be able to do all alone on this count. But with the girl, there might be enough left in him that could still be poisoned.

  Yet now, as she walks with Rachel, her pink sneakers skipping over the stones, she feels the careful plans she’d devised shift an inch under her feet. Miles ran away. She chased him down. Other than this, all she’s sure of is that whatever is going to jump out at her, she won’t turn away from it. That’s Miles’s trick. Hers is to sink her teeth into the truth of a thing and not let go until she’s tasted it.

  ‘I like him,’ Rachel says.

  ‘Oh yeah, baby? You like Miles?’

  ‘Miles?’ The child stops and stares up at her mother. ‘I like Stump, Momma. Stump licked me.’

  Chapter 6

  All of Ross River has gone to bed, though many, tonight, cannot sleep.

  Some wonder about the woman and girl who had come all the way here only to walk with the fire chief around town like tourists with a guide. One sees an animal’s eyes peering out from the closet. One wishes the self-pitying child’s wish to never have been born.