The Snow Falcon (5 page)

Jamie appeared and went to the refrigerator to help himself to milk for his Cocoa Puffs.

“Want some hot chocolate?” she asked him.

He nodded, then Bob came to the door and jumped up against the window, slobbering all over the glass. Jamie went over to let him in.

Susan shook her head. “Uh-uh. Not until he’s cleaned up, okay?”

Jamie turned to her and pointed back at the dog, making an exaggerated shrug.

She shook her head. “No way, buddy. You heard me.”

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Jamie pointed back again, and frustration flashed in his expression. It was clear he was telling her there was nothing to clean up, which she had to admit was true; whatever it was he’d been rolling in outside must have been frozen enough that it hadn’t got caught in his fur. All the same, she made out she didn’t understand him; then she knelt down in front of him.

“Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”

Immediately he frowned and went back to the table. He was getting wise to her, she thought. It was no use trying to fool him anymore. He knew when she was playing dumb when he was signing, had worked out that it was a ruse to get him to a point of frustration that he’d just talk without even thinking, and he wasn’t falling for it. She glanced over at him as he picked at his eggs listlessly, his expression morose. Now who was fooling who? He knew how to get to her, how to make her give in, but she turned away and looked out the window, resolving to stay firm. Dr. Carey cautioned her that she had to be tough. “Make it too easy for him and he’s got no incentive to speak,” he’d reasoned. She knew this was good advice, but then, he wasn’t Jamie’s mother. It was she who had the lump come to her throat every time she put him on the school bus in the morning. He looked so small and alone, and it made her want to hug him, to tell him everything would be okay. Being tough wasn’t such an easy thing.

Outside she saw Bob run across the snow in front of the window and head for the trees. Automatically she started to go to the door to call him back, and then she saw Jamie looking at her, his eyes making a silent plea. She sighed, acknowledging defeat.

“Okay, okay. Go and bring him inside.” She shook her head as he went, then glancing at her watch, said, “Jesus, look at the time,” and hurried from the room.

She was just finishing getting dressed when she glanced from her window and saw something that stopped her dead, her fingers poised at the top button of her shirt. Jamie was below, standing close to the house, and he was facing a figure who had come from the trees, his hand gripped through Bob’s collar. He wore blue jeans with a fawn-colored coat, and he had thick hair that made her think of overripe corn gone from yellow to deep burnished gold. For a second she didn’t know who it was, then suddenly she knew and was heading for the door. She ran down the stairs and outside, bursting onto the front

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porch with such haste that both Jamie and the man she knew to be Michael Somers looked toward her in surprise. She faltered, suddenly uncertain.

“I found your dog over at my place,” Michael said, indicating the way he’d come. “At least I thought he was yours.”

He sounded unsure of himself, and Susan guessed he’d been asking Jamie, which of course would have elicited no response. As he stood there, unmoving, she couldn’t help thinking about the stories going around about him, and the fact that she and Jamie were alone. It made her acutely aware of how isolated they were out here.

“I was just asking your son here—

“It’s our dog,” she said quickly, cutting him off. She hadn’t meant to sound so abrupt, and he seemed taken aback and halted midstep toward them. “Bob, get over here,” she said, and after a second Michael let go of the collar. She turned to Jamie and said, “We have to go. We’ll be late for the bus. Go inside and get your things ready. Take Bob with you.”

He did as she asked, looking at her curiously as he went past, and she put a hand on his shoulder to hurry him. When she turned back, Michael was looking on with a strange expression. He looked almost angry, she thought, which caused a flutter at her throat. She pushed a hand back through her hair.

“We have to go,” she said. He nodded wordlessly, and before she could say anything else, he turned away and went back toward the trees. She felt a moment’s regret for the brusque way she’d sounded and belatedly called after him.

“Thanks for bringing Bob over.” He didn’t respond, and as he vanished into the woods, she wasn’t even sure if he’d heard her. “Damn,” she said quietly. “Nice work, Susan.”

SNOW WAS SETTLING on the road that led into town. A solitary pair of tire tracks in the oncoming lane was evidence that this was a country road, little used except by people whose properties were accessed by it or by logging trucks heading up into the forest. Jamie hugged his bag to his chest, looking out the window at the falling snow. His gaze was distant; he was absorbed in whatever thoughts were going through his head. Susan wondered, as she often did, what they were.

At the stop in town, the school bus was waiting, chugging soft clouds of exhaust fumes into the cold air.

“Don’t forget what day it is,” she said as Jamie started to get out. “I’ll pick you up at twelve, okay?”

She leaned over to kiss his cheek, but he avoided her. She watched him walk over to the bus, where some other kids about his age were milling about at the doorway, jostling one another to get on. Jamie hung back from them, shuffling his feet in the slush, and waited until the way was clear before he climbed on. She imagined him walking up the aisle to find a seat by himself somewhere. All the kids would be noisily talking over one another, arguing about a hockey game or something on TV, and Jamie would sit by the window, tracing patterns on the glass with his finger.

She waited until the bus moved off before driving to her office on Main Street, across from the diner. Depending on her mood when she drove in each day, she found the town either instantly depressing or comfortingly familiar. That it was small and that she knew just about everyone who lived here struck her as a good thing on some days. On others it drove her crazy, and she dreamed of being anonymous, in the flow of a city.

Occasionally over the past year or so, she’d thought about moving away, thinking it might be good for both her and Jamie. Sometimes when she was taken with an urge to evaluate her life, she made lists on a sheet of paper: everything positive down one side, the negative down the other. It was supposed to be a technique for figuring things out logically. The idea was that if the negative side was disproportionately long, then you had a problem, but at least you could see it there in black and white, which provided a focus. She didn’t know what conclusion a person was supposed to reach if the result was the other way around, but she imagined it probably never happened that way. People whose lives were so good didn’t feel the need to analyze why.

Her own columns always came out evenly balanced. There was nothing startlingly bad about her life, nothing that gave her a compelling urge to change, but still she felt an undercurrent of discontent.

On this day she pulled up outside her office with its sign painted on the window that read LITTLE RIVER BEND REALTY and switched off the engine. She paused for a moment to look along Main Street. Most things she needed could be bought in town; there was a drug-

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store, some clothes stores, a grocery store, a hardware store. Everything was covered so long as having a wide choice wasn’t a priority. If a person wanted to go out at night, there was the Valley Hotel, which was about the only place that served a decent meal, or there was a bar called Clancys that served food, but mostly just stuff that could be heated in a microwave.

Richard Wells from the bank came by and saw her sitting in her car. He paused, then came and tapped on her window. “Everything okay there, Susan?”

She came to, aware that she’d been daydreaming, and wound down the window. “Fine, Richard. I was miles away, I guess.”

He smiled. He was a friendly guy in his fifties with a wife and three kids, all at college. He looked up at the sky. “Think this is going to get any worse?”

The weather was a constant topic of conversation in winter, though around Little River they missed the worst of it. They were in a protected valley at the edge of the Cariboo Mountains, the Columbia ranges beyond and the Rockies still farther east. This winter had been mild compared with others she’d seen in the time she’d lived in the town. The lack of severity was being attributed to the El Nino effect, but all the same, there had been some heavy falls already that month, and more were expected.

“The weather report said there was a front coming in,” Susan said.

“Is that right?” Richard stamped his feet. “Looks like we’re in for a cold one, then.”

They chatted for a minute, then he checked his watch and said he had to be going. “Bye now.” He raised his hand and moved on, snowflakes settling like a shawl across the shoulders of his heavy dark coat.

She watched him go, then went into her office. Things were quiet this time of year, and she wasn’t expecting to be busy. She planned to make some calls to people who she knew were thinking of selling their houses, and later she’d go over and have coffee with Linda Kowalski, who as well as being her best friend owned the diner across the street with her husband, Pete.

The morning passed quickly, and at eleven-thirty she switched on the answering machine and hung a sign on the door. Outside, the snow had stopped falling, but it felt colder, the breeze cutting to the bone. She scraped snow from her windshield and drove to Bakers-

town, where she picked Jamie up from school. He was waiting for her inside the entrance hall, and when she pulled up, he came out and climbed sullenly into the passenger seat. Before heading toward the highway, she turned around and went back toward Little River. On the edge of town she stopped outside the church and reached into the backseat for the flowers she’d bought earlier.

“Jamie, are you coming?”

As usual whenever she brought him here, she might as well have been talking to herself. He continued looking out the window as if he hadn’t heard her.

For a brief second she was angry, but it passed. The frustration got to her sometimes, but getting upset was pointless. She had been down that road before. She had been down every road. With a resigned sigh, she climbed out and walked back through the snow.

The headstone was a simple granite marker, with his name and the dates of his birth and death carved into it. Underneath it read BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER. She often thought the words were inadequate, but at the time she hadn’t known what else to put. He’d been thirty-six years old when he’d been killed in a hunting accident, of the sort that happened regularly, if not in epidemic numbers, throughout the country. Just a moment’s carelessness, and the man she had loved for eleven years was dead. There had been a stage afterward when she’d felt bitter that he could have let it happen and left her all alone to deal with the aftermath. It hadn’t lasted, but sometimes she still felt a trace of it when she came to his grave. She looked back across the cemetery toward her car, where Jamie was still determinedly looking the other way.

She remembered the morning she’d waved from the window as they’d left. Jamie had been alone to witness his father’s blood leaking away into the ground, his life ebbing with it into the forest floor. It wasn’t clear exactly what had happened, and as Jamie hadn’t spoken a word since, it had remained mostly a matter of conjecture. It seemed, though, that David had simply tripped, and somehow or other the gun had gone off, blowing a hole in his chest. When Jamie had been brought home, he’d been soaked in his father’s blood, as if he’d taken a bath in it. The sheer volume of it had shocked her deeply; the sight of her eight-year-old boy, red from head to foot, still came back to her sometimes at night and numbed her with horror.

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She turned away, her eyes stinging. She wiped them and took a breath, blinking up at the sky. She missed David with a deep physical ache that gripped her inside. At night, sometimes, she still hugged a pillow to help her sleep, forming in her mind a picture of his face to carry her though her dreams.

Overhead the cloud was clearing, revealing brief glimpses of blue sky. The ground around the church was covered with a few inches of white snow; the forest beyond rose up the mountain, a green canopy of spruce that in summer would be broken up with patches of dazzling green willow. Right now it appeared dark, above a gloomy interior. The country looked big and empty, as empty as the bare glacial slopes above the tree line high in the mountains. She wanted to put David behind her now and she knew she ought to, but with Jamie it was difficult. Perhaps, she thought again, a new start somewhere else, maybe in Vancouver or even in the East, might be the best thing for both of them.

As she turned and started back toward her Ford, a vehicle came along the road from the direction of town, and as it got closer, she saw it was Coop. He pulled over, the engine of his RCMP Chevy cruiser idling with a throaty rumble. She always thought it incongruous that the Mounties kept the rider-on-horseback motif on their motorized vehicles. The big truck with its fancy yellow, red, and blue flashing on the sides was about as far removed from a horse as it was possible to get. Coop had the window down. The police lights on top of the roof bore a cap of frozen snow.

“Going to Prince George today?” He looked over at Jamie and raised a hand, but got no response.

Susan frowned. She hated the way Jamie simply blanked out anything he didn’t want to know about; but then, that was his whole problem.

“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “You know how he is.”