Blackfly Season

29

THE BLINDS WERE ALL SHUT; the house was in the dim, lightless grey of limbo. Terri was sitting on her jacket, but even folded up it couldn’t soften the hardwood floor. Run, run, run. The words reverberated in her head as if they had become the soundtrack for her life.

She stared at the red-brick fireplace and its sooty interior. Whoever had last lived in this house had certainly cleaned the place up before shutting the door for the last time. She wondered who they were, and if they had been happy. There was nothing special about the house itself. There were a hundred just like it in the neighbourhood, but Terri had been happy here.

How odd that she should be so unhappy now, because as a child she had been completely sunny. She had got along fine with her parents, got along fine with Kevin, her kid brother. But then disaster had struck, and Terri and Kevin had had to go out to Vancouver to live with an aunt and uncle whom she didn’t much like. She remembered the stink of her uncle’s pipe, and how her aunt had always thought everything was just “precious” or “darling,” words that set Terri’s teeth on edge. That was her mother’s sister, but she couldn’t have been more different. Her aunt and uncle hadn’t been bad people, but they couldn’t replace her parents, and that made Terri resent them.

This house had been the last place she had been truly happy—carefree, the way a kid should be. She remembered how the fireplace had glowed on cold winter nights. It used to have a glass screen, and she and Kevin used to fight for the patch of carpet just in front of it, lying on their bellies to watch television. The TV had been in the corner—except at Christmas, when they moved it to make room for the long-needled tree they always got.

Terri got up and walked again through the dining area. Her parents’ dining set, Swedish modern, had been too big, and if you sat at the end of the table opposite her father you were actually sitting in the living room. In the kitchen, a peculiar memory assailed her: She had been drying the dishes, and fainted clean away while drying the carving knife. It had stuck in the floor where it had fallen and was still there when she woke up moments later with her parents’ worried faces looming over her. A touch of anemia, the doctor had told them.

Her bedroom was much bigger than she remembered. Of course, back then, it had been crowded with bed and dresser and desk, with clothes and CDs and a computer and a skateboard and a huge stuffed tiger that her father had bought for her once when she had been sick. Now it was just an empty box with a cheap window and gouges in the floorboards. She lifted a corner of the blind. Some years, the snowbanks had come right up to the bottom of the glass. There was a swing in the backyard that hadn’t been there when she’d lived here, one of those black-strap swings that look like instruments of torture.

She let the blind fall. It sent up a cloud of dust that made her sneeze.

Down in the basement she had no trouble finding the main water valve. When she had been about twelve, a pipe had burst and her father had had to shut off the water. She had been down there at his side in Wellington boots, the little tomboy helping Dad, while Kevin, five years younger, floated a toy destroyer on the flood waters, making bombing noises. Upstairs, she turned on the cold water tap. It gasped and clattered before water, brown and disgusting, jetted into the sink. She sat down on the floor and let it run.

One good thing about coming to this abandoned house and its swamp of nostalgia: It kept her thoughts—for a few minutes, anyway—off the more recent memories, which ran through her mind like movie trailers.

Trailer number one: Sunlight beating down on the camp, so fierce Terri thinks she is going to be sick. She is taking a stroll on the pebbly beach, past what seems to be the edge of the camp property. But as she cuts through the woods on the way back, blackflies swarming around her, she comes across another cabin. This one is smaller than the others, and someone has bricked up the single window. On the front door, a heavy brass padlock gleams. There is a terrible smell, and she veers back toward the water.

Trailer number two: She and Kevin are in town together. It’s the one day they have any fun, strolling down Main Street and then walking along the lakefront. Hanging out at the public wharf, and then a visit to the farmers’ market. A diamond of a day, bright and clear, and Kevin behaves like the old Kevin—funny, mischievous—the nonaddicted Kevin she grew up with. He drives her around in the old, beat-up Nissan he calls a car, and they take a spin along the lake, then back to the highway. The happiness pierces the armour Terri has lately been wearing in order to deal with Kevin’s drug problems. She can’t remain silent.

“Why don’t we just leave?” she says. “Why not just take off and go back to Vancouver? You say you’re having a good time here, but I can tell you’re not.”

“Aw, Terri, don’t start.” Kevin gives her that wounded little-boy look. “We were having such a great time.”

“I know. And I want you to keep having good times, Kevin. I don’t want to wake up some morning and find myself going to my little brother’s funeral.”

“Lay off, will ya? I’m not little any more, all right? I realize, after Mom and Dad died, you kinda looked after me. Moving to a new family, new city, you were really great. But I’m not a kid any more.”

“You’re still my brother. I still care about you, even if you don’t.”

“Terri, I’m not doing that much dope.”

“You haven’t got a job, so I assume you’re dealing to pay for it. Think about what’s going to happen when you get caught. Do you know how many years you’ll get this time?”

“I just want to stay with this till I have enough money for a couple of years. Then I’m going to get clean for good and go somewhere—Greece or somewhere—and do nothing but write and get sunburned.”

Sometimes it’s Tangiers. Sometimes Marrakesh. He got the Greece idea from Leonard Cohen, she knows. He’s been carrying around a Cohen biography for ages.

“Can you honestly say you’re not frightened of Red Bear? You don’t think he’s dangerous?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. He’s not that bad.”

“I think he’s crazy.”

“I know how to handle him.”

“Red Bear is not a person anybody handles, Kevin. Haven’t you noticed his eyes? Those eyes are dead, Kevin. There’s nothing behind them—no heart, anyway. Nothing real. That’s why he wears sunglasses all the time. He doesn’t want people to see his eyes.”

Kevin looks over at her, slowing a little for a Wal-Mart truck.

“Look, Terri. You’re my sister. You’re not my mother. You can’t be doing this. You can’t be telling me what I should do. How I should run my life.”

“I want you to have a life, Kevin. Do you think I enjoy chasing after you? Do you think I want to be like your chaperone or your maiden aunt or something? I’m missing work, I’m missing acting class, I’ve got two auditions coming up—believe me, Kevin, I have better things to do than follow you across the bloody country trying to pull a needle out of your arm.”

“So, do them! Terri, please! Go back to Vancouver and do them! Just leave me the fuck alone!”

“I can’t leave you alone. You’re killing yourself—whether by accidental overdose or by getting caught up in some idiotic turf war with Red Bear and his friends—you’re killing yourself. And I’m not going to stand by and watch it happen. Why are you pulling over?”

There they are on the highway and he’s pulling over onto the gravel shoulder. Several cars shoot by, horns blaring.

“Kevin, what are you doing?”

“Take the fucking car. I’m going back into town where people don’t fucking tell me what to do.”

“Oh, don’t do that. Kevin, wait!”

She jumps out of the car and follows him a little ways, highway grit stinging her eyes. Kevin is walking fast, stalking away from her, back stiff, shoulders raised. Talk about armour. When he gets like that there’s no talking to him.

Trailer number three: She isn’t sure if this was later that same day or a couple of days after. She’s in the “guest” cabin stuffing things into her backpack. Her heart is pounding, and all she wants to do is run. Kevin has gone somewhere and she knows she has to get out of this cabin, out of the camp, instantly. Her hands are shaking so bad she can’t make the backpack zipper work. The door opens, no knock or anything, and she lets out a scream.

Red Bear is standing there, a black silhouette against a rectangle of light. She drops the backpack, stoops to pick it up, drops it again.

“It’s time for you to leave,” Red Bear says, his tone not unpleasant.

“I know. I know. I’m packing right now.”

She takes a step behind her bunk, instinctively wanting something between her and Red Bear. “I’ll get a ride into town with Kevin.”

“Kevin is not here. Kevin is not going to be back for some time.”

“I’ll catch a bus, then.”

“There are no buses for miles. I will have someone drive you.”

“No, that’s okay. I’ll just hitchhike.”

“I can’t allow that.” Red Bear doesn’t take his sunglasses off, but she knows he is looking her up and down. “You might get raped. Have you ever been raped, Terri?”

Terri has nothing to say to that. The answer is negative, but an answer is not required.

Red Bear remains a motionless darkness in the doorway.

“I didn’t see anything,” she says. “I have no intention of talking to anyone.”

“Of course not. That would be bad for Kevin. And neither of us wants to hurt your brother, right?”

Then he is gone from the door.

But what had she seen? And who had driven her away from the camp? Terri could not recall. Her last memory of the place was that empty doorway. Now, she got up from the floor. The water was running cold and clear in the sink. There was no hot water, and no electricity to heat this with. But it still felt good to splash it on her face, almost as if she could wash away the fear that Red Bear had stirred in her. How was she going to get Kevin away from him? The first few threads of a plan were beginning to form in her mind, and she stood for a few moments in front of the sink, letting the water run, hoping they would soon become something she could hold on to.

She would get this plan together, and then it would be run, run, run, all right. Only this time it would be the two of them.