5

THE CLOCK IN THE FRONT ROOM OF THE TRAILER IS ticking too loud. It’s like Chinese water torture.

“Ma,” I say. “We have to leave.”

“And go where?”

“Back to Solace River.”

She’s been sitting in her ratty maroon bathrobe staring out the window at nothing all day. Ever since Swimmer’s face appeared on page two of the Jubilant Herald, people have started driving by to get a look at the missing boy’s trailer. Some dickheads in a minivan stop at the foot of the driveway and point at us. I point right back.

Ma sighs. “In the old days, when something like this happened, the neighbours would come over with casseroles and cigarettes, offering to pick up prescriptions or do the dishes. It was like that when I was a little girl.”

I try to close the curtains, but her fingers reach out and tighten around my wrist like an eagle talon. I debate whether to tell her the problem is us, not the town.

“Whatever happened to your friend Bev?” I ask instead.

“When I shacked up with Wendell, I lost all my friends, one by one. They couldn’t sit still around him, kept turning around to make sure their purses were still hanging off the back of their chairs. But not Bev. She used to come by to check on us when your father was in jail. She didn’t want no trouble, though. After those men came out to the house, she brought us to Jubilant, but was scared shitless they were going to show up on her porch next. She always said she had no idea why I hooked up with a man like that, but Tabby, he could dance, and my God, he was so funny. He made me laugh so hard one night I pissed my new jeans.”

“But then the fangs came out.” I summon the nerve to ask her the question I’ve been wondering about for years. “So why did you stay with him?”

Janis looks up. She’s been drawing pictures of Swimmer to put up on phone poles. In every one of them he’s dancing to music notes rising out of a grey rectangle that’s supposed to be the stereo. She waits for Ma to answer.

Ma picks up the cold mug of tea sitting on the window ledge. “I didn’t. I left.”

“No, you lost your home and couldn’t go back.”

“Well, I didn’t let him in here, did I?” She sets the mug down with a bang and I can tell she’s determined to have that tally point.

“But why’d you stay with him before all that? Back when he beat you, beat your kids, took off or was in jail half the time?”

Her eyes drift back out the window where a three-legged cat is hobbling along the ditch. I think she isn’t going to answer me, but then she says, “He used to cry sometimes at night. He didn’t mean to hurt you. He just couldn’t change.” She blinks a few times. “In the old house, the bathroom doorknob was wrong. You had to turn the knob left instead of right. Your father could never keep that straight. Even if he’d just been in there, he’d keep turning it to the right, getting all worked up, hollering that it wouldn’t open, and I’d have to come show him again. He had some damage, I think, from his father.”

“Like Uncle Bird,” Janis says, wagging a brown crayon back and forth on the paper to make Swimmer’s hair.

“Oh my God!” Ma leaps up. “I forgot to feed Bird! Shit! It’s been two days. Janis, fetch my bra!”

“Sit down, Ma. I’ll go.”

“Really?” She sinks back on the sofa. “Would you mind?”

Janis watches me put on my boots. “Want me to come show you where they keep the tuna fish cans?”

“Nah, you stay here and finish the posters.”

I gulp in the fresh air as I step outside. The sky looks like Solace River after a rainfall, clouds curdling into pale green clusters. I cut across the backyards instead of taking the road.

I think about what Poppy said, that if she was me she’d have taken off by now. I don’t know myself what’s holding me here. All I know is that after I got kicked out of Blood Rain, I’d never felt more like an outsider in my life. I started imagining some happy movie ending in which my family had been watching the horizon for years, that as soon as they saw my face they’d shed tears of joy and dig out the good china. We’d feast on ham and scalloped potatoes as they hung on my every word, taking turns refreshing my drink.

I should have at least questioned myself on the good china. I mean, Christ, where would Ma have kept it—in the chest next to the good white linens?

Through the side window, I make out the shape of Bird’s head, and when I walk in, I find all three Musketeers seated at the table.

“Hey, gang,” I say. “You had anything to eat today?”

Three sets of eyes stare back at me.

“I’ll fix you something, okay?”

The fat one mumbles something about it being goddamn time. He’s wearing pants today, thank God. I go into the kitchen and open the cupboards. They’ve got cans of soup, some old crackers, Shake ‘n Bake mixture and mouldy bread. There’s a forty of spiced rum in the fridge, half a bag of onions and three jars of homemade pickles. In the freezer, I find a whole chicken, so I defrost it in the microwave, season it with the Shake ‘n Bake and stick it in the oven.

“It’ll be ready soon,” I say, coming back to the table. “What are you playing?”

“Gin rummy,” the fat one finally answers.

“You ever play crazy eights?”

“Gin rummy,” he repeats.

The one with the eye patch turns to stare at him with his good eye. “Crazy eights.”

I sit and show them the simplest rules of the game. We play a few hands and even Bird catches on, solemnly laying down each card. When the chicken is ready, I serve it to them with fried onions and pickles on the side. I have to cut up Bird’s into little tiny pieces and feed it to him. Sitting this close, I notice how strong his body odour is. I find the washroom, and the bathtub looks as if no one’s been using it. I clean it with dish detergent then fill it halfway.

“Come on, Bird.” I wheel him away from his empty plate. “Let’s get you in the bath.” I park him in the washroom and pull his shirt off over his head. “Can you stand up?”

He sticks his spindly arms straight out. I take them and hoist him up a little out of the chair. I’m not sure that’s the best move, so I sit him back down and pull his pants and underpants down and shimmy them over his feet. Then we try again. Eventually, I have him standing naked, holding on to me. His skin is hanging slack on his bones and he seems so shrunken. In the photograph I saw on Jackie’s fridge, Bird towered over Jackie. Now he’s my height and probably weighs about the same.

He reeks so bad I have to hold my breath while trying to lower him into the tub without dropping him. Once he’s seated, I gently grab his ankles and stretch his legs out in front of him. He smiles as all the warm water wraps around his body.

“How’s that?” I ask.

He points to the taps, so I run a little more hot water. I find a skinny bar of soap, wipe the crud off it with some toilet paper, then use it to lather his chest and shoulders. I clean his whole head and face and then each arm. Then I slap the soap in his hand and get him to clean the rest. I have to tell him in parts: Clean your legs. Clean your knees. Clean your privates. Clean your belly. I watch him and think about how for all these years I was so pissed off about not having a family to take care of me, it never occurred to me I was getting off scot-free of taking care of them.

When we’re done, Bird leans back in the water and closes his eyes. For a moment, he looks like any normal man. I sit on the toilet seat lid and study the war museum of his body. He’s got a crooked forearm from the time Daddy chucked him and Jackie out the window like a sack of garbage, and there are tattoos of his daughters’ names branded on either side of his sunken chest. Up close, the scarred flesh across his face is so shiny I can practically see my reflection in it. For some reason he’s missing half his ring finger. I lean in for a better look and his eyes fly open.

“Tabby got bit by a king cobra.”

I’m stunned for a second. “Yes, she did.” I lift my pant leg to show him the scar.

He blinks at it for a while. Then his tongue rolls out of the side of his mouth as he smiles at me.

SWIMMER HAS BEEN GONE FOUR NIGHTS NOW. MA HAS the police scanner on all the time. Janis had a nightmare about naked vampires lying in bathtubs and now she won’t go pee without a steak knife in her hand. Sitting around doing nothing is making me stir-crazy. I tell Ma I’m going to buy toilet paper and take off in her car.

Troy’s house is a beige, two-storey rectangle up on a hill at the end of a long paved driveway empty of vehicles. I park at the bottom and walk right up, heart pounding. I peek around back and see a swimming pool that no one’s been looking after. I try not to think of Swimmer wandering out there and falling in. There are some empty booze bottles and cigarette butts in a can on the deck. I knock, wait a few minutes, then try the doorbell. I can’t see anything through the curtains. I’m just about to leave when a window slides open on the second floor. A hard-looking woman in a pink bathrobe sticks her head out.

“You get your ass off my property,” she yells down. “And tell Jackie if he drives by here again, Troy will slit Bird’s throat.”

I bite down hard on my tongue. “Our nephew’s gone missing,” I say, tasting blood. “We’re talking to everyone. He’s only three years old and has medications he needs to be taking. He can get real sick with the runs.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You haven’t seen all the posters or turned on a television?”

Her mouth tightens. “I said get your ass off my property.”

“I want to talk to Troy.”

She slams the window shut. I try the doorknob, but it’s locked. I bang on the door and the window opens again. I see the barrel of a rifle sliding out.

“Okay, okay.” I raise my hands. As I retreat down the driveway, I spy some jelly beans amongst the rocks. It rained overnight, but their colours are still vivid. I pause, look back over my shoulder, and she’s still pointing that thing at me.

I peel out of there and drive straight to the police station. When I barge into Detective Surette’s office, he’s on the phone. I have to sit and listen to him order a deer antler chandelier from some catalogue. He tucks his credit card back in his wallet and scratches the loose skin under his chin before hanging up.

“I don’t investigate missing persons.” He closes his door. “You have to talk to Detective McNeil.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

He sits on his desk and cracks each of his knuckles. “Then what can I do for you?”

“We own land in Solace River. If there’s taxes owing, I want it taken care of. And I want the old house bulldozed. We’ll sleep in a goddamn lean-to if we have to.”

“That’s a tall order.” He puts his glasses on and flips through a Rolodex.

“So’s asking us to leave. We’re about as welcome in Solace River as we are here.”

“You’d be taking Jackie?”

“All of them. As soon as we get Swimmer.”

He plucks one of the Rolodex cards. “I’ll make some calls.”

“There’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

I think back to the other day when I fed Bird. He kept biting the spoon and when I swatted his arm, he screeched and wrenched away from me so fast his wheelchair almost keeled over.

“Tell me why you didn’t go after the people who almost killed Bird.”

Surette removes his glasses and places them on the desk. A MedicAlert bracelet on his wrist catches the sun as he folds his hands. “We’re pretty sure we know who did it. But they had solid alibis, every one of them. We had nothing on them. Couldn’t get a decent footprint, no weapon recovered, no witnesses.”

“So he’s no dummy, this Troy?”

“Not when it could send him to prison.”

A few seconds pass in silence before he returns to his Rolodex. I snatch the catalogue and flip through it till I find the chandelier.

“Eight hundred dollars is a rip-off. Jackie could shoot a buck and rig you up one for a hundred.”

Surette looks at me over the rim of his glasses. “He wouldn’t need to shoot one. Antlers fall off.”

“Sure, if you want to follow it around the forest waiting for the magical moment.” I stand up. “I guess that’s how it goes down here at the station. You all sit around expecting everything to tie itself up in a big fucking bow.”

I slam the catalogue on the desk and walk out.

I HAVE TO DRINK THE DREGS OF A BOTTLE OF SHERRY TO work up the nerve to call West. I half expect him to tell me to take care and have a nice life, but instead he says everyone in Solace River is talking about Swimmer.

“Are they saying it serves us right?”

“Christ, no, Tabby. Give people a little credit.”

I balance the telephone receiver in my neck as I open a can of chili, not sure what to say next. “Was the tavern locked when you got back?”

“I locked the register, but not the door. Weird enough, no one was in here. This town is getting lazy.”

I dump the chili into a pot. I can’t find a clean spoon, so I stir it with a butter knife. Then I grab the receiver in both hands and press it to my ear. I hear West toss a beer cap at the garbage can and miss. Then there’s a long creak and I know which chair he sat on.

“You want me to come get you?” he asks.

I’m so stunned, I don’t answer.

“You there?”

“Yeah.” I reach over and turn down the burner as hot brown bubbles jump in the air. “I can’t go anywhere. I’m the only one feeding Janis and Bird. Ma won’t even leave the house or take a bath because she’s afraid she’ll miss a phone call. She’d kill me if she knew I was tying up the line right now.”

On cue, Ma barges in and putters around the cupboards, muttering that there’s a pay phone down the frigging road.

“Listen,” West blurts. “I got my divorce papers ready to serve. Abriel thinks she’s entitled to half the tavern, but the lawyer I talked to says there’s no way.”

I drop the phone by mistake and Ma picks it up, tells West goodbye and hangs it back on the hook. My heart pounds in my ears as I transfer the chili to a bowl and cover it with foil. I cart it over to the Musketeers, and I’m so distracted feeding Bird I don’t notice he’s wearing a bolo tie until I’m about to leave. When I get back to the trailer, Ma’s standing outside. She’s wearing a nice blouse and combed her hair a different way. Janis is sitting on the stairs behind her with a little pink sequined purse slung over her arm.

“I just got a call from the hospital,” Ma says. “They don’t think your father will make it to the end of the week.” She won’t look at me. “I was going to go up there anyway to see Poppy. She’s asking for Janis.”

“Are you going to say goodbye to him?”

She won’t answer, just gets in the car and checks her teeth in the mirror. When we get to the hospital, she walks in ahead of Janis and me. We follow ten feet behind her as she goes up to the second floor and into Poppy’s room.

“How are you doing, Poppy?” Ma asks the wall. She looks around the room and fixes her gaze on a stock painting of a basket of wine and cheese.

Poppy sits up limply and holds her arms out for Janis. Janis doesn’t budge, unzips her purse and pulls out a folded homemade card. Poppy opens it and her face breaks into hard lines. She puts it on the nightstand and I lean back to read what’s printed inside. It says, I STIL LUV YOO, BUT YOO BETUR SMRTAN UP.

“Daddy’s almost dead,” Poppy says. “I think seeing me made him sicker. He just started shutting down. First he couldn’t walk, now he can’t chew his food.”

“Is he still talking?” Ma asks.

“He was last night.”

“What did he say?”

“That he’s not ready to go.”

“That it?” Ma fidgets with her glasses. “Did he ask for me?”

“Just go up there,” Poppy says.

Ma stands and walks out of the room. The three of us stare at the empty doorway for a minute.

“Why is there two beds in here?” Janis asks.

“I asked for another one so you can sleep over,” Poppy tells her.

It’s a lie. The nurse told Ma Poppy’s been having withdrawal nightmares and tried to attack her roommate in her sleep. They had to move the poor woman to the other end of the hospital.

“No, thanks,” Janis says.

Poppy clenches her jaw. “Go play in the lounge around the corner a minute. I need to talk to Tabby.”

Janis sits down and picks up a barf tray instead, turns it over in her hands trying to figure out what it does.

“Janis Jean,” Poppy warns. “What did I just say?”

Janis pretends not to hear, so I tell her I saw a book about bats in the lounge.

She looks up. “What kind of bats?”

“The gross kind.”

She sighs, but then she gets up and stomps out of the room.

“That was some trick pushing Daddy in here,” Poppy says. “He wouldn’t let them take him back to his room. He never shut up, talked until I passed out cold. Then he made his nurse bring him back down the next morning and picked up right where he left off.”

“What did he have to say?”

“He went on and on. Why he is who he is, how Grandpa Jack used to torture him. He talked about how his teacher always called him stupid, how he got fed up one day and told her he wasn’t stupid, he was just hungry because Grandpa Jack was on a world-class bender and there was nothing in the house to eat. The teacher made him stand up in front of the class and eat a jar of glue for talking back to her.” Poppy tucks her greasy hair behind her ears. “He said he learned to hate from birth and couldn’t unlearn it, blah blah blah. It was a load of horseshit.” She reaches under her pillow, pulls out a map scrawled in blue ink on a piece of foolscap. “He only gave this to me when he realized he ain’t walking out of here and not a moment before. So don’t go thinking it was meant for us.” She covers it with her hand and motions for me to tuck it in my purse. “You know what else? He asked me to get him a priest, said it had to be a black man or a Mi’kmaq because he don’t trust white men in robes.”

“Did you tell the doctor?”

“Who’s going to find a priest near Jubilant that ain’t bleached as toilet paper, let alone one that would stand in the same room as Daddy? Fuck him. He don’t deserve saving.”

Maybe there’s still time. I walk out and go find Janis. She’s stretched out in the lounge, taking up a whole sofa.

“Look,” she says, holding up the book. “These bats will rip your eyes out of your head.”

A little blond girl on the opposite sofa burrows her face into her father’s shoulder.

“They bite your eye out of your head,” Janice says, louder, “and you have to wear a pirate patch like Bird’s friend.”

I confiscate the book and put it back on the shelf, but Janis snatches it back. I can’t be bothered to fight her, so I let her take it.

“Come on,” I say, steering her by the hood of her jacket.

When we get up to Daddy’s room, Ma is seated at his bedside. She nods for us to come in. Daddy looks just like one of the bats Janis just showed me, all shrivelled and small-faced.

“He can’t talk, but he can hear you,” Ma says.

Janis points to herself. “JAN-IS.”

Daddy grabs his elbows, moving them side to side like he’s rocking a baby.

“That’s right,” Ma says to him. “You held her once when she was a baby.” She turns to Janis. “He sang you songs.”

“What songs?” Janis demands.

“Probably the one about the drunken sailor.”

“How does it go?”

Daddy wheezes and grunts, trying to sing it for her.

I have only two good memories of my father and one of them is him teaching me this song. It was a summer day in Solace River and he and I were sitting on a blanket at the secret lake, right where I sat with West.

I start the song and Daddy tries to hit the bed rails in time. He’s too weak and collapses against the pillow. I sing the verses that start “Put him in the longboat till he’s sober” and “Shave his belly with a rusty razor,” and then Janis makes one up, “Kick him in the head until he’s sorry.”

After we run out of stuff to sing, Janis reads Daddy the entire bat book, inventing most of it. I have to admit her version is pretty entertaining. There are spitting contests and midnight birthday parties. A sort of bat tribunal decides whether a captured creature lives or dies. Most of them die. Daddy seems to enjoy it very much for someone at death’s door himself. Poor bastard, I think, watching the little red-rimmed eyes fly around our faces. He’s going to die with his dirty soul all clogged up with glue and nobody really cares.

We all look up as Jackie appears in the doorway. He seems as startled as we are, shuffling to the corner without a word. After a while Ma asks him if there’s something he wants to say. He takes off his ball cap, holds it in front of him with both hands.

“I’m about to be a father,” he tells the floor. “I fucked it up three times already, but I’m trying to do better. That’s something you never done, Daddy. I’m going to do right by every kid I bring into the world. I ain’t even got a clue how, except to do the opposite of everything you did. You’re a piece of shit,” he says hoarsely. “But I forgive you.”

Daddy is swallowing non-stop during this speech, the hard grooves of his cheeks sinking deeper into shadow. I glance at the phone. We could call for a priest, or a shaman. Or an exorcist.

Jackie leans in as Daddy beckons, and we watch Daddy kiss his own palm, reach up and press it to Jackie’s face. Jackie’s lower lip twitches and he walks out of the room so fast he knocks Daddy’s chart off the hook on the back of the door. It hits the floor with a bang and Ma flinches.

As I bend down to pick it up, I realize Poppy’s right. Daddy doesn’t deserve it.

MY FIRST WEEK AT RASPBERRY, I GOT PUNCHED IN THE face for not passing the salt fast enough. When I didn’t start bawling or rat anyone out, the bitches backed off. But soon they got bored again, and I noticed these three girls eyeing me, talking about how I deserved to bleed for what I said about Arlene the lunch lady. Everyone loved Arlene because she’d give second helpings of home fries. Of course, I hadn’t trash-talked anyone; they were just looking for any excuse. As I walked past them to leave, I said, “I never ribbed Arlene. The poor woman’s just trying to get through the day without her buns sticking together.”

They looked at me blankly.

“She’s got enough on her plate without me stirring the pot.”

Nothing.

“If you carrot all about Arlene, go let off steam somewhere else.”

When they finally got my puns, one of them chased me down the hall and demanded I come back and be funny some more. She looked like Danny DeVito, but I decided I better not start there. After a few more jokes about how I’m on a roll but I butter stop before I milk it, I told them my last name was Smith and invented a whole backstory, complete with dead parents and a loyal pit bull with whom I wandered the city streets. I was practically Little Orphan Annie, except with hickies and a cigarette behind one ear.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that all the girls were from families no better than Saints. We were all trying to hide it, but it seeps out of our pores and stinks up the air around us. Sometimes, when a girl was going to be sent back to her family, she’d freak out and beg to stay. It must have been contagious, because every time I thought about Solace River I saw Daddy’s swinging fist.

The counsellor assigned to me at Raspberry was in his late twenties and not bad-looking. He let me call him Pete instead of Mr. Chambers. He was stocky and pale with ice-blue eyes and nice shirts. After my tooth got fixed, he started writing me little notes about how he thought I was cute and more mature than the other girls. I’d never had a boyfriend before, and I kind of liked the attention. One day he brought me into the gym storage room and whispered that he wasn’t allowed to touch me so I’d have to touch him. After that, all my “counselling sessions” were about him getting off. I found out later he was the main reason they kept me at Raspberry for so many years. He wrote in my record that I was a danger to the public, that I’d told him in detail all the violent crimes I intended to commit once I was out.

Apparently, this kind of stuff was happening all the time. Everyone from janitors up to parole officers was getting action off the girls. I found out when I started hanging out in metal shop with the senior girls who spent all their unsupervised hours making knuckle rings and slim jims. For forty bucks of Barbara Best’s money, they told me everything there was to know about Raspberry. For another twenty, they cut me copies of every key for the building.

When I told Counsellor Pete I was done shining his shaft, he freaked out, thinking I was about to tell on him, and locked me in the basement. The first thing I did when he let me out was break into the kitchen and gorge myself on anything that wasn’t locked up. Then I went back to the basement to get this industrial stapler I’d seen down there. I used my keys to get into his room later that night and woke him up with my mouth. As soon as he relaxed and closed his eyes, I pulled that heavy thing out from under my sweater and drove three or four metal staples straight down into his balls.

Not all the staff at Raspberry were criminals. There was one teacher I liked, Mrs. Dunphy, who taught us sewing and cooking. She wore steel-toed boots with long denim dresses, threw F-bombs around even more than we did. After I cracked her code for multiple-choice tests (the first four answers always spelled ABBA and the last four ACDC), she asked me if I came from a family of geniuses. I told her about the time Daddy put on a thrift store tie, drove to another town and impersonated a member of their school board. He purchased a hot water heater on the board’s credit account, even had the store employee load it onto his truck before he promptly drove out of town, changing his licence plate on the way. Mrs. Dunphy laughed till she had to thump her chest with her fist to get some air. But then she sat me down and said I should find a way to use my powers for good.

So I did. The girls at Raspberry were always complaining that they couldn’t talk to their boyfriends. We were only allowed sixty minutes’ phone time per week and you could only use them to call designated family members. One night we were all sitting around the common room watching MuchMusic and the VJ announced that fans could phone in to the show, speak into an answering machine, and the message would be converted into type that ran in an ongoing stream across the bottom of the screen. I pointed out to the girls that they could receive messages this way. Soon enough, during music videos, we saw a string of fake gushing about a certain band followed by the instructions: R.S. meet L.J. back field at 7pm 05/03. We could barely hold in our cheers in front of the supervisors on duty. They didn’t catch on for almost a year, and by then there had been eight covert conjugal visits.

IT TAKES A WHILE TO CONVINCE MA OF THE PLAN. SHE tells me that she and the kids nearly froze to the chesterfield last winter and she’s saving Daddy’s money for the oil tank. But she finally forks it over.

I walk into Jody’s Garage and Lyle Kenzie starts toward me with a wrench in his hand, tightening his grip like he might hit me with it. I haven’t had a whiff of him since the police warned him to stay away from Poppy’s trailer, but I can tell he’s still looking to collect.

“You ain’t no cop,” he says.

I hand him an envelope containing the cash and watch him count it.

“Fuck is this? She owes me a grand. If I don’t get the rest, I’ll go to the hospital and shoot her in the face.”

“Bet you won’t get caught doing that.”

He yanks his pants higher, trying to think of a comeback.

“I’ll give you double what she owes, cash in hand. All you have to do is talk to the people who have Poppy’s kid.”

“What?” He sniffs the air.

“We’re leaving.” I hand him the deed. “Poppy’s trailer. Tell Troy he can have it.”

“Who’d want that piece of crap?”

“It’s the only way to show him we’re serious. He can use it as a meth lab for all I care.”

Lyle stares at the paper so long I wonder if he’s just pretending to know how to read. Finally, he rolls it up and sticks it in his back pocket. “What the fuck do you want me to do?”

“Bring Swimmer to the trailer. We’ll tell the police he came wandering back on his own and that’ll be the end of it. We’ll drive away in moving trucks and Troy can be king of the castle again.”

Lyle smacks the wrench against his hand. “You better not be playing games.”

“Don’t fuck it up.” I turn to leave. “By the way, your barn door’s open.”

“Huh?”

“The wiener’s leaving the bean pot.”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

He turns back to the workbench muttering and I finally hear his zipper go up.

THE LAST THING DADDY SAID TO POPPY BEFORE THEY stuck the tubes down his throat was, “I was born on a Friday, going to die on a Friday.” He should have put money on it.

Nobody was with him when he went. A nurse just casually mentioned it to Poppy, which pissed her off to no end. Then she turned around and did the same thing to us.

“Daddy’s dead,” she barked into the phone. “Can someone bring me down a bag of ketchup chips? The vending machine ate my fucking loonie.”

Ma slammed down the receiver and called the main switchboard to ask what was going to happen to his body. They said if no one claims him, he’ll be cremated after the weekend, so we wait it out. First thing Monday morning, Jackie and I take Ma down to the room where families are allowed to sit and watch the cremation fire through a window. Jackie puts his arm around Ma, settles in like he’s at the movies.

After a few hours, the furnace man pokes his head in the little room to tell us it’s taking longer than usual.

“The crisper’s got to work extra hard to get through that tough black heart, hey Ma?” Jackie grins.

The furnace looks like a big pizza oven. I picture the flames devouring Daddy’s hands and feet, his soft grey belly and jackal smile. After we run out of things to say, I slowly tune out all sound in the room and search my heart for the only other good memory I have of my father.

It was January and all of us kids were home sick with the flu. My and Poppy’s beds had been moved into Bird and Jackie’s room, where the radiators worked better. Ma was sick too and couldn’t do much for us. It hadn’t snowed all winter, but that morning the whole house shook with what sounded like a giant whip crack and snow started pouring out of the sky in heavy tufts. We could hear the little thuds on the windows, but none of us had the energy to pick up our heads to look. Daddy’s feet came pounding up the stairs and we placed fast bets on who was going to get it. But Daddy said, “Come on! Get up!” and in two trips he peeled the four of us out of our beds, blankets and all, and parked us on the old sofa in front of the picture window.

“Wendell!” Ma called out from her bedroom. “Why are them kids out of bed?”

He banged around near the kitchen door and then there was silence. Four-year-old Jackie rolled himself into a sweaty ball, muttering, “I didn’t do nothing.” I copied Bird, pressing my hot forehead to the cool glass, and suddenly Daddy appeared before us in the yard. He had on two pairs of pants, a goofy-looking hat with earflaps and wool socks over his hands.

Baby Poppy giggled as Daddy started strutting back and forth. We all sat up straight as he spun around in circles, jumped up and kicked his heels then hopped like a rabbit, wriggling his nose, all the while sneaking glances back to the window to catch our reaction. He stuck out his tongue to catch some flakes then pretended he caught too much and was choking. He wrapped his hand around his throat and mouthed, “Help me.” Now we were all giggling. Finally, he spread his arms, fell backward and made a snow angel. It was beautiful, except the flask of whisky in one hand made his wings uneven.

I close my eyes and freeze the memory in my mind into the shape of a plastic snow globe. I trap a tiny man inside that looks like Daddy and gently lay him on his back atop the drifts.

A green light comes on above the furnace and Jackie opens the retort door.

“He’s gonezo.” Jackie pulls his head back out. “Must have cased the joint and escaped before they fired it up.”

“Funny,” Ma says, putting her coat on. “Let’s go. The police may be trying to call.”

The furnace man delicately tells her he still has to pulverize Daddy’s bone fragments and she rolls her eyes. Finally, we’re called into a backroom where the man pours the remains into a cardboard box and places it in Ma’s hands. She stares at it, then sticks it under one arm.

“That ain’t right,” Jackie says. “We can’t let him go home in that.”

“Those fancy vases are a rip-off,” Ma says, already walking out. “Your father don’t care. He’s dead.”

Back at the trailer, she sorts through a bag of his effects the hospital handed over and calculates how much she could pawn it all for. I watch her put Daddy up on the shelf next to her mother and stick her tongue out at him. Daddy hated Grandma Jean ever since she spiked his coffee with horse laxatives to stop him from taking off on Ma while she was pregnant with Poppy. He went anyway, drove off slurring curse words with shit running down one leg. The police told us later he ended up smashed up in the ditch with a deer in his passenger seat. He was taken to the hospital, but he snuck out, hitchhiked down to Maine, came back home a month later with a truck full of contraband cigarettes and a Newfoundlander named Ghoulie. The cops tried to get Ghoulie to rat Daddy out, but the man had a bay accent so thick the judge couldn’t understand a word he said.

In the middle of the night, I awake and think I hear Ma crying. I wonder if she’s worrying about Swimmer or sad about Daddy, or both. I knock lightly on her door.

“You all right, Ma? Can I bring you anything?”

“Like what?”

“Tissue? Cigarette? Glass of water?” She doesn’t respond, so I keep going. “Valium? Tequila shot? Chocolate sundae?”

I rack my brain for things she used to like. I remember asking her once what she’d wish for if she had three magic wishes. I wanted her to wish us away from Daddy, but she wished for twenty minutes alone with Rod Stewart. I asked what her second wish would be and she said twenty more minutes with Rod Stewart, then twenty more for the third wish. I threw my hands up and asked her why the hell she didn’t just take an hour with him on her first wish, and she said she’d probably need breaks in between to keep up.

I knock again. “Rod Stewart?”

“Oh, yeah, right.” She loudly blows her nose. “I suppose he’s just standing out there in hot pants.”

I’M NOT SURE MA’S CAR WILL MAKE IT ALL THE WAY TO Solace River, so I convince Jackie to pick me up in the Tercel. It isn’t hard once I tell him why I’m going.

The days are warming up and the car has no air conditioning. Jackie undoes another shirt button every hour. He squirms in the heat and rolls his sleeves up.

“What’s that?” I ask, pointing at the scab on his forearm.

Jackie turns his wrist so I can see the tattoo: WENDELL SAINT R.I.P.

“What the hell did you do that for?”

He shrugs and I want to reach over and slap him. I haven’t told him I went to see Lyle and I’m not going to. The fact that Lyle didn’t turn down my deal on the spot pretty much fingers Troy as Swimmer’s kidnapper. If I tell Jackie and he goes after Troy, he’ll mess the whole deal up.

“Answer me one question,” I say. “Why is Troy out to get you?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.”

“Oh, give me a break. I grew up in Raspberry. Everyone in there was innocent.”

“Fine.” He tightens his hands on the wheel. “I knocked up his cousin and said it was someone else. She was a goddamn liar, though. First she says she’s on the pill, then when I dump her she says she’s pregnant and wants an abortion. I didn’t believe her, so I wouldn’t give her the money to go to Halifax. She was asking for way too much. I know what those things cost. Anyways, she got one from some woman in Amherst and wound up with an infection.” He takes a big wad of chewing tobacco out of his jacket and sticks it under his lip. “I went to see her in the hospital. Troy was in there and starting shoving me right in the room. He pulled a knife and the doctors kicked us out. I tried phoning to tell her I’d help out with money if she needed it, for losing work at the diner. I felt like shit, Tabby, I really did.”

“Good. You deserve to. She probably can’t have kids now.”

Jackie goes pale, like he hadn’t thought of that. “Troy went after Bird because I was expecting it and Bird wasn’t. He hates Bird anyway.”

“If jumping Bird was supposed to even things up, why did Troy take Swimmer?”

Jackie spits out the window. “I ratted out his brother for robbing vending machines and he did time.”

“Jesus Christ. You realize everybody’s fucked sideways, except for you and Troy? This is some game you’re playing.”

“Shut up, Tabby. You weren’t here and you don’t know shit.” He pauses. “I’m supposed to give a squirt about his brother after what he did to Poppy? She could have been the only one of us to go to college and do makeup on stiffs. Now she’s a ninety-pound junkie with half her teeth rotted out. You telling me anything I did compares to what those fucks did to Bird? I know it should have been me, all right?” He pulls over to the side of the road, drops his head to the steering wheel. His shoulders heave and he starts bawling like I haven’t seen since he was a little kid and Daddy would kick him for no reason. “You should have seen Bird after,” he manages. “They beat him with pipes and everything. Now they’re all shooting pool and fucking women and laughing at the retard in the halfway house that can’t even wipe his own ass. Bird ain’t even a person anymore. What kind of brother am I if I don’t do nothing?”

“But it’s done. You can’t change it.”

“When Josie was born, Bird said, ‘Jackie, I didn’t know I had it in me to love like this.’” Jackie wipes his eyes hard with the backs of his hands. “He ain’t never going to see those girls again.”

We sit in the thick heat. A log truck blows by and rocks the car side to side. Jackie leans his head back and lets out his breath in a shaky stream.

“How did this whole thing start?” I ask.

“Nobody wanted us in Jubilant, same as nobody wanted us in Solace. People were planning on running us out before we even got there.”

“Why? It was just Ma and you kids.”

“Because there ain’t a man or his dog that Daddy didn’t rip off between here and Charlottetown. I don’t even think we know the half of what he done. Ma was a mess. All she could talk about was the house, her kitchen, how she’d lived in Solace River her whole life.”

“What did you do?”

“We couldn’t let them make her run again.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I’m not proud of everything we done, but we had to start with Troy because that little inbred hick was getting all his punk friends together to—”

“What did you do?”

“Jesus, Tabby! Nothing! We got him piss loaded and took pictures of him passed out with some hobo’s hairy balls sitting on his face. We made photocopies at the library and put them up all over town. Then Bird started screwing Troy’s girlfriend all the time in public where everybody would see them. Nothing. Kid stuff.”

I sigh. “Sadly, the only part of that story I don’t buy is that you and Bird were ever in a library.”

Another truck flies past, honking at us for being so close to the pavement. Jackie starts the car and merges back onto the highway. He snaps on the radio, but I turn it back off.

“You have to get out of Jubilant. I’m working on us getting the old land in Solace River back.” I let that hit him with a smack. “And by the way, I can go to college if I want to.”

“What?”

“You said Poppy was the only one who could go to college.”

“I meant the only one of us.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Jackie sticks a fresh batch of tobacco under his lip instead of explaining, so I spark up a cigarette and blow the smoke over to his side. WELCOME TO SOLACE RIVER appears ahead and I remember Daddy bragging to me once that back when the sign was made of wood, Grandpa Jack shot two nipples onto the curvy W with his Remington. I bet Jackie would get a kick out of that, but I’m too pissed off to share.

Ten minutes later, we pull up in front of our old house. Jackie sits glaring at it while small birds chirp in the trees. He gets out and slams his door, but it only makes them sing louder, like the Whos down in Whoville.

We enter the house and wander through looking for anything worth salvaging. In the cellar, I find an old crate of Garnet’s Saint’s Elixir, but the contents of the bottles have evaporated.

Jackie takes a framed picture off the wall of Grandpa Jack and Daddy taken back when Daddy was a little boy. Both of them are shirtless with the exact same scowl on their faces. The house is in the background, but the paint isn’t peeling yet and the grass is freshly mowed. Grandpa has tattoos all up and down his arms. Daddy’s got a pickaxe in one hand.

“I don’t get why Daddy named me Jack. Heard he never spoke a good word about the man till after he was gone.” Jackie sets the picture on a window ledge. “Did you hear there was a big party in town when the body washed up? I guess everybody knew he fell in the river, but the cops didn’t even drag it to find out. Jack was in there so long that when some farmer tried to pull him out by the ankles, the skin slid off his feet like a pair of socks.”

I cringe. “What do you think made him so hard?”

“The war, I guess. Daddy said Jack was afraid of the dark. He’d go hunting early in the morning and leave before the sun fell instead of staying out in that cabin. The other men used to rile him up about it until he broke a whisky glass on someone’s face. That shut them up.”

On the way upstairs, Jackie trips over a cat and it claws his leg. “Motherfucker!” he yells, trying to kick it. “Can we get the fuck out of here before we get fucking rabies?”

“Just a sec.”

I make him follow me to get Ma’s jewellery box. He pries it open, but there’s nothing inside except some cheap plastic bracelets. I slide her dress off the hanger, but it’s a mess. No point in taking it, but I do anyway. I grab one of Daddy’s shirts too. Jackie helps me over the holes in the floor, then we head downstairs and outside to the garage. A crow swoops down from the old power pole and caws for backup.

As we squeeze into the stuffy garage, my mind rewinds to the day I arrived. I wonder what might be different if I’d turned around and left town right then. Poppy would still be gone, which means Swimmer would still be safe at the trailer with Ma. I shiver in the sweltering air.

“Map.” Jackie snaps his fingers.

I take the paper Poppy gave me out of my purse and unfold it. Daddy made a grid of the dirt floor and drew a compass rose at the top to show direction. He marked an X then shaded in the old freezer right above it with a question mark. He told Poppy that if anyone had moved it, there should still be an indentation in the dirt where it used to sit. But we can tell it hasn’t been messed with. It’s full of old farm machinery parts that Daddy used to weigh it down, with more piled on top. It takes us forever to slide the thing to the other end of the garage.

“Five feet,” I read.

“Five feet? Christ. This better be worth it.”

Jackie goes out and grabs a metal shovel from the trunk of Jewell’s car. I find a rake to break up the dirt and use it to poke and claw around the bottom of the hole each time Jackie lifts his shovel. After forty-five minutes, we stop talking. Jackie tosses his shirt aside and I twist my hair up out of my face. I wish we had some water.

“Shit. I feel something.” Jackie drops the shovel.

I tunnel my hand into the dirt until I feel a plastic casing. I try to pull on it, but it’s stuck, so I trench all around it with my fingers. Jackie pushes me back, gets a hold of an edge and hauls it out of the dirt with the veins popping out of his neck. He drops it at our feet and we stare at a clear industrial trash bag wrapped around something the size of a stone brick.

Jackie hoists himself out of the pit then jumps down again a minute later with an old fish knife. He tears into the plastic with the blade, dumps out all the debris that’s seeped inside and starts pulling out filthy stacks of bills tied with twine. He holds them in both hands, gauging their weight.

“Suffering Jesus.” His eyes meet mine. “That’s a fuckload of money.”

WE WALK INTO THE FOUR HORSES GRINNING LIKE JACK-o’-lanterns.

“Whoa.” West puts down the newspaper. “Where’d you two come from?”

He asks us what we’re so happy about and I pull back a corner of the blanket in my arms to show him the money. He nods toward a couple of guys in the corner and Jackie takes the hint, grabs the bundle from me and shoves it down at his feet. We make small talk while the two men stare up at the TV trying to figure out who we are. Finally, they get bored, pay their tab and leave.

I tell West that Daddy died and he mixes the three of us a stiff drink he calls the Soulless River. I sneak a few glances at him while he’s pouring, wondering if he served those divorce papers yet.

“When’s the funeral?” he asks, pushing two glasses toward us.

“We’re not having one.”

“Your mother don’t want a service?”

“My mother played a Game Boy during the cremation.”

“It’s weird being in here,” Jackie says, looking around. “Nothing’s different.” He knocks his drink back without even making a face, pushes his cap back on his sweaty hairline and scans the old photographs of the tavern. He starts asking West all kinds of personal questions, like how much money the place rakes in now compared with when Clutch Kelly owned it.

“West’s from Cable,” I tell him. “He wouldn’t know.”

“How’d you wind up here?”

“I heard the Four Horses was for sale cheap,” West says. “I started out in the Labatt’s warehouse then worked my way up to the brewery. I learned a lot, and after a couple years I was sick of having a boss, started thinking about starting my own label. Anyhow, circumstances changed and I wound up with this dump instead.”

Circumstances being, I’d like to add, that he married a selfish fucking bitch.

“Your mother name you West?” Jackie asks.

“Jackie!” I shove him on his stool.

West refreshes Jackie’s drink. “West’s my last name.”

“Wait.” I slap the bar with both hands. “Say what?”

“Never mind. I go by West.”

“No, not never mind. Don’t make me jump over this counter, Ronnie or Gene or whoever you are.”

“Gene?” He cringes.

“He don’t look like a Gene,” Jackie says thoughtfully. “More like a Rick.”

“Rick?” West folds his arms across his chest. “Christ. Really?”

The door opens and an old woman in a plastic yellow sun visor comes in. She hangs up her sweater and waddles over to the bar, stares at Jackie as if he’s behind glass.

“You’re Mary Saint’s boy,” she says. “I heard your father passed.”

Jackie drains his drink in one swig, turns his glass upside down on the bar and starts turning it in circles.

She reaches over and puts her hand on his shoulder. “You tell your mother we’re praying for her grandson.”

Jackie’s face flushes crimson. “Thank you,” he finally mutters.

IT’S DARK BY THE TIME WE GET BACK TO JUBILANT, BUT Jackie insists we show Bird the money. While we’re sitting in the drive-through ordering burgers, he admits he hardly ever steps foot in the blue house.

“I can’t stand to see Bird like he is,” he says. “He can’t stand to see me, neither.”

When we pull in the driveway, Jackie waves to Bird in the window and Bird gives him the finger. It’s the wrong finger, but Jackie gets the message.

“See,” he sighs.

Bird smells the food as we’re coming in the door and wheels himself to the table. The three Musketeers rip the bag of food apart. Bird gets mustard and pickles all over his face and won’t let me wipe it off.

“Bird, I got something to tell you,” Jackie says. “Daddy’s gone. He died.”

Bird keeps chewing.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? Daddy’s dead.”

Bird swallows the whole burger, looks up and swings his head left to right.

“Okay?”

Bird picks up the cardboard tray that held the drinks and rips it in half. He lets the pieces fall on the floor and stares at them. Then he starts rolling his wheelchair over them, back and forth, saying, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

“You know he loved us, right? Even though he was an asshole. You know how I know? He left us a whole pile of money. Look at this.” Jackie pulls out one of the stacks and dangles it in front of Bird’s face.

Bird stares at the money, drooling.

“We can do anything now. We can go fishing again like we used to. Me and you. Whatever you want to do.”

Bird wheels over to the wall and rips off some wallpaper. “Josie.”

“She’s with her mother,” Jackie tells him. “Remember? She’s with her mother and her sister in Alberta. They moved to the country so they could have a horse to ride. They got a yard so big they can run in a straight line till Tuesday.”

“Josie and Michelle.”

Jackie hands me the money. “I can’t do this.”

I can feel the heat rising off his back.

“It’s all right,” I tell him. “I’ll stay.”

He heads straight to the door and a second later I hear the Tercel peel out. I sit with Bird until he forgets about Josie and Michelle and wants to play cards. I get the others seated at the table with him and we play a few hands.

I’ve got a bad feeling rolling around my insides, and after twenty minutes of trying to ignore it I tell Bird I have to go check something. I get up from the table, grab the money and beat it down the road to the trailer. All the lights are off and a note on the fridge says Ma and Janis are at the hospital visiting Poppy. I pick up the phone and dial Jackie’s place. Jewell answers.

“Is Jackie there?”

“He’s not here. I thought he was with you.”

“Jewell, I need you to come pick me up at the trailer.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Right now!”

“I can’t. Jackie has the car.”

“Shit!”

“I’ll borrow my neighbour’s car. Stay there.”

I hang up, stash the money in a loose ceiling tile above Janis’s bunk. Then I lock up and wait down at the curb. After fifteen minutes, Jewell comes roaring up in a pink Mary Kay car.

I jump in and she swings the car around, accelerating so fast we dip into the oncoming lane.

“He grabbed Grandpa’s guns from the garage this afternoon, said he was going to try and sell them. I can’t imagine they still shoot.”

“There’s a Ruger in the Tercel,” Jewell says. “Jackie duct-taped it under the seat.”

The last Soulless River I drank sloshes in my stomach as she picks up speed. She doesn’t even have to ask where we’re headed, guns it to the other side of town, cuts the headlights and idles up to the foot of Troy’s driveway.

“Call the police,” I tell her. “Use the pay phone at Frosty’s then come right back.”

Before she can argue, I get out and sprint up to the house, trying to remain in darkness. Through the front window, I see broken glass all over the living room carpet. Jackie must have busted in. I climb over the windowsill, avoiding the jagged shards, then crouch low and make my way to the kitchen.

There’s a small mound of marijuana sitting on a scale out in the open. Above it on the wall is that “Footprints” story printed on a plaque, the one that reassures shitheads like Troy that Jesus always has his back. I hear voices and slide a knife out of the wooden block on the countertop. I follow the sounds up the carpeted staircase to a lamplit master bedroom.

As I reach the doorway, I see the woman who turned the rifle on me seated on the floor. She’s wearing the same pink bathrobe. Next to her is a tattooed man with buzzed blond hair. Troy. The wiry little prick is nothing like I pictured. I step into the room and there’s Jackie standing over them, holding a pistol to Troy’s head.

“Jesus Christ, Jackie!”

They all look up in alarm. Troy’s grey eyes are working the angles of the room, flying through possibilities. His white shirt is unbuttoned and the thin, pale chest is rising up, down, up, down. The woman leans forward like she wants to take her chances, stand up and make a run for it, but Troy puts his hand on her leg like it’s all under control.

Jackie cocks the trigger. “Go find Swimmer,” he tells me.

I race around the upstairs, checking the closets and under the unmade beds. I trip going back downstairs, pull myself up using the wall and limp the rest of the way down. I check all the first-floor rooms then open the door to the basement and call Swimmer’s name. It’s quiet. I find the chain for the light bulb and hop down on my good foot.

There’s a pile of dirty laundry on the concrete floor next to the washing machine. I see a little striped sock in the mess of towels and sheets and drop to my knees, rummaging wildly through the pile, tossing things aside until I uncover a child-sized T-shirt. I stare at it a second before I grab it and hold it up to the light. Smurfs. I stumble to my feet, half crawl back up to the main floor and scream, “Jackie! Let’s go! The cops are on the way!”

No response. I put my weight on the bad foot and let the pain shoot up my leg as I run upstairs to the master bedroom.

Troy and his woman are breathing fast and shallow, like dying animals. Jackie has the gun pressed hard to Troy’s temple and Troy’s eyes are squeezed closed, head turned away from the barrel. There’s a large tattoo on his neck of a snake eating a bird.

“JACKIE, DON’T DO IT!”

A horn honks once outside and I run to the window. Jewell sees me waving and lays on the horn. Jackie grabs my arm and pushes me out of the bedroom. My ankle throbs as we sprint downstairs and out the front door. There are sirens in the distance, getting closer. I suddenly remember I had a kitchen knife in my hand. I don’t know where I dropped it. I should have wiped off the handle.

“Get in!” Jewell screams.

Jackie and I dive into the back seat, slam our doors as she starts backing down the driveway, fishtailing on the rocks. Just before the nose of the car swings out onto the road, Troy runs out of the house and hollers, “THE KID AIN’T HERE, JACKIE, ‘CAUSE I FUCKING BURIED HIM!”

Jewell struggles to stay under the speed limit. “I told the cops I heard gunshots coming from Troy’s address. Then I hung up.”

“Stop here and let me and Tabby out,” Jackie says. “Go straight to the hospital and find Poppy’s room. Pretend you were running an errand in town and dropped in for a visit.”

“Ma and Janis are there now,” I tell him.

“Good.” Jackie grabs Jewell’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Tell Ma to head back to the trailer, and keep Janis with you. If the cops show up looking for me or Tabby, tell them you’ve been at the hospital all night and that as far as you know both of us are in Solace River.”

“What happened back there?” Her voice breaks.

“I’ll tell you later.”

Jackie and I get out and skulk along the woods to a dark side street where he left the Tercel. He drives us back to the trailer and we sneak inside, keeping the lights off.

“Call West,” Jackie says. “People saw us at the Four Horses earlier. Get him to tell the cops we had too much to drink and crashed at his place.”

West barely says hello before I spit out what Jackie just said.

“Tabby, what are you getting me mixed up in?”

I give him the short version.

“You have to tell the police you saw Swimmer’s shirt.”

“How can I? Jackie and I will get charged for break and enter.”

West lets his breath out. “This can’t be good. I mean, why’s the kid not wearing his clothes?”

“They must have put him in clean ones. Think about it. If Troy did something to hurt Swimmer, he’s not going to leave the evidence in plain sight.”

“Maybe he ain’t that smart.”

“He’s smart enough to have gotten away with this so far, smart enough to get away with what he did to Bird.”

Ma walks into the trailer and I hang up without saying goodbye. Jackie starts to tell her what’s going on when two police officers pull in and knock on the door. Ma waits for Jackie and me to hide in the bathroom before she answers the door. We hear her ask the cops if they’ve come with news about Swimmer. They say they’re looking for me and she tells them I’m with my boyfriend in Solace River, asks why on earth they’re looking for me when they should be out searching for Swimmer. I forgot Ma had to lie for Daddy so many times she got pretty good at it.

When the cops leave, she draws the curtains, lights a few candles then opens the bathroom door. Jackie tells her he broke into Troy’s house, but leaves out the part where he had a gun to Troy’s head. I retrieve Daddy’s money from the kids’ room and drop it on the table. Ma takes one look at it and trails off mid-sentence.

“Daddy buried it under the garage,” I tell her.

“For Christ’s sake,” Ma says, holding a hundred-dollar bill close to a candle flame. “There’s dried blood on this one.”

“He probably just cut his hand,” Jackie says. He guides her into a chair and divides the money into three rough piles. “Let’s count it up.”

We add in silence, the exaggerated shadows of the stacks growing ever higher on the wall.

“Fifty-eight,” I announce after half an hour.

Ma pushes two piles into the centre. “Fifty-six.”

Jackie punches all the numbers into Janis’s Hello Kitty calculator.

“How much is it?” Ma demands.

Jackie shows her six digits on the little plastic screen.

“Oh, Lord.” Ma stands up, sits, stands up again and walks around to double-check the curtains are closed. She sinks back down on her chair and stares in shock at the filthy hundred-dollar bills spread out over the tablecloth.

Jackie puts his hands on her shoulders. “Let’s buy you a house. You can take the kids to live there. We’ll get a place big enough for Bird to have a room too, get him out of that shithole.”

Ma takes his hand in hers, then reaches across the table and grabs mine. Even by candlelight, I can see that all of our fingers are soiled black.

THEY’VE UPPED POPPY’S SEDATIVES AND HAVE HER ON suicide watch. She told Ma she’s going to stay alive at least long enough to murder whoever took Swimmer. They had to remove her TV because she kept seeing Swimmer’s face on the news. She had a conniption when Jewell tried to wake Janis to leave, so Jewell let Janis stay sleeping in the extra bed. I go over in the morning to pick her up. When I enter the room, Janis is feeding Poppy a doughnut by hand.

“Would you tell me what the hell is going on?” Poppy asks me.

“Later.”

A nurse is ordering people around in the hallway and Poppy says, “Hear that dog barking out there? If she steps foot in here, she’ll be walking out without a face. She was Bird’s nurse. I caught her forcing food down his throat, yanking him in and out of bed like a fucking rag doll.”

“Don’t say that word,” Janis says, picking crumbs off Poppy’s chest. “Jesus is listening.”

“What word?” Poppy says. The skin underneath her eyes looks scaly. “No, he ain’t.” She watches me limp over to an armless chair. “What happened to you?”

“Fox-hunting accident in the countryside,” I say in a bad British accent. “My steed and I took a rather nasty spill.”

“Hilarious.”

“I’m just trying to lighten the mood.”

“Well, don’t.”

“Fine.” I sit and put my ankle up on the metal bed stool. “Then I won’t tell you we found the money. Or that we’re going to move you to a nice hospital in Solace River.”

“There ain’t no nice hospital in Solace River.”

“Then we’ll get you their best private room and redecorate.”

“You going to redecorate the food too?”

Janis pulls the doughnut away. “Stop your complaining or we’ll leave you here.”

“You sound just like Ma when you say that,” Poppy tells her.

“That’s who takes care of me all the time,” Janis says. “Swimmer talks like Grandma when he says ‘goddamnit.’ I bet he’s saying it a lot if the bad people won’t let him in their fridge to get string cheese.”

Poppy’s face constricts, and I push myself back up.

“How much money was there?” Poppy asks me.

I start gathering up Janis’s stuff.

“Tabby, give me twenty bucks for smokes.”

“Let’s go, Janis.”

Poppy tries to grab hold of my jacket as I usher Janis off the bed and out of the room. Janis ignores Poppy’s yelling, asks me if she can have some chocolate milk from the cafeteria. I buy her some breakfast and take her to the playground in back of the hospital. She doesn’t play, though, just sits on the little wooden bridge in her sunglasses with her arms dangling over the ropes. I notice she’s got two different sneakers on and it makes me feel like shit.

“So, guess what?” I say. “You’re going to live in a brand new house with a big bedroom.”

She perks up, but then her shoulders droop again, as if she’s heard this one before. “I don’t want to go live in a new house if my mother gets to live there too.”

“Your mother doesn’t want to do drugs, you know.”

“Then why does she?”

“They change her body so that she feels sick if she doesn’t take them.”

Janis swings one leg. “One time I had a wedding to my big teddy bear, Lippy, that I won at the fair from bonking a frog on the head. Swimmer was the ring boy and Mama was the judge, and then we had a party after with Cheezies and danced. But that was before, when she was nice.”

I see my face reflected in her sunglasses as I ask, “Did she ever hurt you?”

“Nope.” Janis rests her chin on the rope. “But she set the oven on fire and I had to call the fire truck because she forgot how to use the phone.”

Two little girls in matching purple cowboy boots race each other to the slides. I watch Janis eyeball the boots.

“Want to go over there and play with those kids?”

She picks at the hole in the knee of her jeans and doesn’t answer.

“Come on.” I grab her feet and slide her underneath the rope, set her down on the ground. “Let’s go look at the Sears catalogue and see what kind of furniture they have for your new bedroom. I bet you want one of those beds shaped like a race car.”

“Do they have any shaped like a pineapple?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you going to live at our new house? You can sleep in my new bedroom with me and Swimmer if you want.”

“Maybe I’ll live at West’s house with him,” I say, feeling myself blush. “It’s not far from your new house.”

“Are you going to have a wedding to West? I will, if you don’t want to.”

“Hands off, you already got a husband.”

“Lippy the bear? Not no more. I broke it off when he cheated around.”

“Who’d he cheat with?”

“Swimmer’s baby girl doll, Wendy. I poked a fork through her forehead.”

“You’d marry West, huh?” I bend down to zip her coat, but she pushes my hand away.

“Grandma thinks he got a nice rear end on him, but I like his truck.”

When we get back to the trailer, I tuck her in for a nap and recline on Swimmer’s empty bottom bunk. I stare up at the sagging bump in the mattress where her body lies, too tired to fall asleep myself. One of the photographs she showed me the first night I stayed here is lying on the floor. I reach down and pick it up.

Daddy was right: I do look like him, eyeing the camera like I want to punch it, sunken cheeks even at that age. That was probably the summer Bird and Jackie started stringing up cats to use for target practice. The same summer Terry Profit slid his wet tongue around in my ear.

I toss the photo back onto the floor and stare at the rectangle of grey sky framed in the small window. There are dark forces attracted to us Saints like the tide to the moon. Even when I was far away pretending to be somebody else, everything I tried to grab hold of wound up getting me in trouble. I’m sure if I’d tried to dodge this whole snakepit by turning on my boot heels and leaving Solace River the same day I arrived, the darkness would have just followed me wherever I went next. I can almost feel it shape-shifting around me sometimes. If it ever finds a way in, I’ll wind up just like Daddy and Poppy, with eyes like two dead fish and carnage strewn for miles.

Swimmer’s pillow smells sour. There’s something lumpy stuffed beneath his covers. I reach down and pull out a woman’s tank top and blouse. He must have been cuddling with Poppy’s clothes like a security blanket. I stuff them back where they were, feeling oddly sheepish for invading a three-year-old’s privacy.

On the low dresser there’s a plaster imprint of his hands like little monkey paws, and beside it a photograph of him and his sister standing in one of those cheap wading pools. Janis is flexing her bicep while Swimmer grins up at her. “He can’t even swim,” Janis tells everyone. Poppy told me she named him Swimmer because he was conceived through a condom. If his father doesn’t know he exists, maybe he should. Janis told me Swimmer’s father is named John. Probably more of Poppy’s sick sense of humour.

Nobody’s trying to find Swimmer except for us. That’s the sad truth. It’s why I want out of here and why I can’t leave.

I close my eyes and try to sleep, but thoughts keep banging around my head like boots in a clothes dryer. We have to drive the darkness out, and it’s not something a priest or shaman can do for us. If we’re ever going to stop biting our tails, we have to outrun Daddy’s ghost back to Solace River, slide into that dried-up husk of a life and start all over. It’s the only way to trick the devil: hide in the one place he’d never look.