17

APRIL 1994

The TV is on in the break room, and most of Stan’s employees are huddled in front of it, watching coverage of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. A couple of grunge girls are crying. It’s always shocking when an icon dies young, especially in a culture like Stan’s, where everyone is obsessed with music. Upstairs in the store, they’re playing Nevermind on a loop. It’s all anyone can talk about.

Véronique shoves a flat bag of popcorn in the microwave and watches it pop. Dinner. She’s got the night shift tonight. She prefers the later shifts these days, can’t stand being home alone at night. It’s the loneliest time, where she feels James’s absence most profoundly. They haven’t officially ended things, but they haven’t spoken in a couple of weeks. She’s giving him space and giving herself time, too. The incident with Callahan is still fresh—in her mind, on her body. Some of the bruises haven’t fully healed yet, and the thought of having sex still makes her uneasy.

She hasn’t told anyone what Callahan did, including her uncle and Pierre. She was worried Callahan would retaliate and blow up her uncle’s operation, get them all arrested and thrown in jail. Or that her uncle would simply murder Callahan—which wouldn’t be so bad—but what if Camil got caught and spent the rest of his life in jail on account of her?

She did stop smuggling. In some ways, the timing worked out. At the end of February, the government slashed the taxes on cigarettes, basically putting the tobacco smugglers permanently out of business. Her uncle was prepared for it and switched seamlessly to smuggling marijuana and booze, but it gave Véronique a plausible excuse to take a break. She told Camil she wasn’t sure she wanted to get involved with dope and that she needed time off to think about her future. In some ways, it’s the truth. Not that she cares whether she’s selling cigarettes or weed—she doesn’t give two shits—but she does need time to regroup.

Pierre and Camil are not pleased with her. They want her back in the business, handling the Ottawa colleges—specifically Callahan’s clientele. Callahan makes a ton of money for them, and they need her as much for her popularity with men as for her English. They don’t understand her hesitation around selling weed.

“What’s the difference?” Camil said, yelling at her over the phone. “Weed is probably better for them than tobacco anyway!”

She held her ground, and they haven’t spoken to her since. It’s the longest she hasn’t spoken to Pierre since they were kids. They’ve never had a real falling-out before, but she figures time will heal both their resentments. Besides, Pierre has a short attention span.

What Callahan did scared her. It scarred her. She misjudged him, thought of him as a harmless frat boy. Worse, she trusted him, which has left her doubting herself.

“Hey, Véronique. Your parents are here.”

She looks up from the microwave, where she’s become entranced by the popping corn, the bag puffing up before her eyes like a self-inflating balloon. She turns to the stairwell, where Encino Man, the cashier manager, has thrust his head into the lunchroom, his wild black frizz of hair throwing lion shadows on the wall.

“My parents?”

Encino Man shrugs. Véronique lets her popcorn finish popping and removes it from the microwave. She opens it, the steam rising into her face, and reaches in for a handful. She goes upstairs, starving, wondering what the hell her parents are doing here. When she spots them standing by the front counter, her mother ever so slightly leaning on her father, she can tell right away something is wrong. They both look shell-shocked, their skin bleached. As she approaches, her mother’s mouth is trembling.

“What’s wrong?” she says. “What happened?”

“Let’s go outside,” her father says.

She follows them out wordlessly, heart rushing, cheeks hot. “What is it? What happened?”

“Are you cold?” her father asks her. “You don’t have a jacket.”

“Why are you here? What’s happened?”

Her mother reaches for her hand. “It’s Pierre,” her mother says, her voice cracking. “He died in a boat accident this afternoon.”

“No—”

Pierre dead? It can’t be. Her mother tries to pull her into her arms, but Véronique pushes her away. “How?” she wants to know. “In broad daylight? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It was a collision with another boat. Everyone died.”

Véronique is shaking her head. Her father pulls her into his arms, and she buries her face against his chest. He strokes her hair. Lisette is sobbing. They stay huddled together like that for a long time, ignoring the world rushing past. Pierre is dead. Pierre is dead. She repeats this to herself, to see if it will make it feel more real. It doesn’t.

“How’s mon’onc Camil?” she asks, lifting her face from her father’s jacket.

“What do you think?” Lisette says. “He’s devastated. He blames himself. We’re going there now.”

“I can’t.”

“Véro . . . You have to come.”

“I can’t. Not today. I just . . . I can’t go there today. I’ll drive up tomorrow.”

Lisette purses her lips.

“You shouldn’t drive,” Léo says. “Come with us.”

“I want to be alone. Can you just take me home?”

Her father nods, and she goes back into the store to get her jacket and backpack, and to let Encino Man know she won’t be back for a few days. “My cousin died,” she tells him, and it comes out as a question, as though she isn’t sure. She goes downstairs to the lunchroom in a trance, her limbs moving as slowly as if she were underwater. Kurt Cobain is still on the news. No one even looks up at her.

At home, she opens a bottle of wine, puts on R.E.M., and curls up on the couch. She should have been driving the boat. She should never have walked away. Pierre would be alive. He handled the shotgun and kept lookout; she drove. She let them down. How will she ever make peace with that? Who will take his place in her life? He was her brother. Her twin cousin.

The more she drinks, the more the memories come. When they were eleven, their parents—her mother and his father—decided to send them to sleepaway camp just outside the reservation. It was meant to be a sort of boot camp to keep them out of trouble for the summer, but it had no effect whatsoever on Pierre. The camp was housed in a convent off the highway, set back on the edge of the woods. They did archery, rope courses, pellet gun shooting, and pottery. Every night, around the campfire, Véronique earned a green feather for good behavior, which all the green-feather kids would tuck into their headbands. Pierre always got yellow, as a warning. He never wore his in his headband. At the end of two weeks, Véronique earned an eagle feather and Pierre nothing.

The ceremony to become a warrior was the grand finale. Only the boys were allowed to participate. Girls could not become “braves,” which outraged Véronique, especially after she’d worked so hard for all those green feathers. She challenged the “elders,” who were only about sixteen, pointing out the unfairness of their sexist rule, the infuriating lopsidedness of it, but they just said that was the way it had always been done. Instead, the girls had to spend the night in a tepee, and for this, they earned another measly eagle feather. The boys, on the other hand, were dropped in the middle of the forest by themselves, and had to find their way back to camp in the pitch-black dark.

Pierre, facing the forest alone, looked uncertain. Véronique had never seen him scared before. She gave him a nod of encouragement and watched as one of the counselors wrapped a blindfold around his head and led him behind the convent into a different part of the woods. They had flashlights to guide them in, but the boys would be left deep, deep in the woods with no light at all.

Véronique lay awake most of the night in her tepee, worrying about him. As the sun began to rise, she peered outside. That’s when she heard a loud whoop from the woods and recognized Pierre’s voice. He came charging through the trees, his arms above his head, waving a stick. Everyone started clapping. Véronique’s body relaxed. He looked exhilarated. She was proud of him. Two of the counselors picked him up, one by the feet and the other under the armpits, and they passed his body over the flames of the fire, chanting their traditional chants. And then they gave him a beautiful eagle feather and declared him a brave.

She thought he would be different after that, thought he would be more mature, maybe straighten out and get into less trouble, but nothing changed. The eagle feather was lost, and his pride over surviving the night alone in the woods was first exploited, and then quickly forgotten.

Véronique curls up into a tight ball, thinking about the time they ran over a raccoon in Camil’s truck and Pierre insisted on burying it instead of leaving it on the road. Or the time they put scoops of flour on every blade of Lisette’s kitchen ceiling fan because Pierre wanted to understand the air-circulation pattern by creating a wind tunnel effect. Another time, Pierre had the idea to trap a skunk with a hot dog and a milk crate, but when the crate fell on the skunk’s back, it sprayed them both in the face.

She can’t believe he’s gone. It’s surreal. She pours more wine, rolls a joint. Impulsively, she reaches for the phone and calls James. Screw being tough and prideful and shutting him out. He answers on the second ring. “V,” he says, and she can hear the relief in his voice.

“Pierre’s dead,” she tells him, and starts to cry.

Within fifteen minutes he’s at her place, holding her. He feels so good. They stay like that for a long time, hours. He says nothing, no mention of what happened between them last time. She loves him for that.

Around midnight, he gently tugs her off the couch and walks her to her bedroom. She’s drunk, grief-stricken, hollow. He lies down beside her and holds her until she falls asleep. The next morning, she wakes up in his arms. Her head is pounding, there’s a moment of confusion—a split second of oblivion—and then she remembers.

“I’m so glad you quit smuggling,” James says, when she’s still half asleep. “Promise me you’ll never go back to it. Please, V. You see now how dangerous it is.”

He’s probably been waiting all night to say that to her.

“It was an accident,” she says, rolling over. “A collision in broad daylight. He wasn’t smuggling.”

“We both know that’s not true. If it happened during the day, then he was bringing the cash to the reservation or he was on his way back—”

“It was a random accident,” she says, raising her voice. And if she had been there to rein him in, to drive the boat responsibly, Pierre would be alive. He didn’t die because he was trying to outrun bandits on the lake. He died because he was reckless and cocky, probably high, and because Véronique had abandoned him. “He’d be alive if I had been there,” she says.

“V, that’s not true.” He grips her by the shoulders and gives her a firm shake. “Do you hear me? It’s not true.”

She looks away, thinking about Callahan. If it hadn’t been for him, she would have been on the boat with Pierre. Callahan is the reason Pierre is dead.

“V, if Pierre hadn’t been killed on that boat, he would have wound up in jail. I don’t want to sound harsh, but there is no happy ending to this story. I don’t want you to be next.”

They’ve been locked in this battle since the beginning. She lives by her principles, he by his morals. When does one outweigh the other? she wonders. When you get caught? When a life is lost?

“I know you, V. I know you feel guilty right now and you probably think you should go back to smuggling to help out your uncle—”

“He’s going to need me.”

I need you,” James says. “I see you grappling with this—”

“I’m not the one grappling with it, you are.”

Léo always says you have to be willing to cross the line, that there shouldn’t even be a line. Pierre is dead. How far is too far?