WHEN THE END OF AUGUST CAME, we had to leave the well-equipped house in Dultso Lake, the records and games and the foreign smell of someone else’s life. I wasn’t sad to go, but Jenny grew anxious as the time approached.
“Where are we going to go?” she asked at least three times a day, sometimes asking me, sometimes Mom.
“First we’re going to camp,” Mom said. “We haven’t really had a holiday this summer. We’ll find a nice spot and settle in for a couple of weeks.”
“I don’t want to camp,” Jenny said. “It’ll be too cold. I want to go home.”
“Well,” Mom said, then smiled tightly. She didn’t say what we all knew—that we had no home anymore. She had given up the house in Duchess Creek because she didn’t want to pay the rent on it for the summer, and we had left our most important possessions in a shed at Rita’s. Anyhow, there was no work for her in Duchess Creek, and she needed work.
“Will I be able to go back to my old school?” Jenny wanted to know.
“We’ll see,” Mom said.
“ ‘We’ll see’ means no,” Jenny muttered.
In a way I suppose I blamed Jenny for what happened next. All through the bright cooling days of an Indian summer, our gypsy life—sleeping out, fishing for trout in the river, frying them crackling in a cast iron pan over the fire, even learning to shoot with Dad’s 30.30 and, once, helping to bring hay off a field for pay—was soured by Jenny’s constant questions about school. Mom grew tired of trying to reassure her, and the lightness went out of our adventure. We drove the dusty back roads in silence, each of us occupied with our own worries.
Once September came and school had started, Jenny became sullen and stayed in the station wagon all day with Cinnamon, reading and rereading old Archie comics, chewing her nails to ragged nubs and staring out the window while Mom and I fished or made camp. About the second week in September, Mom drove down the Nakenitses Road to Rita’s, and Rita came out on the porch and hugged each of us tightly and made a fuss over how much Cinnamon had grown.
There was a school at Nakenitses Lake, but Jenny didn’t want to go to it. “I want to go to my own school,” Jenny demanded. “Why should I start school here and be the stupid new girl if we aren’t even going to stay? Then I’ll just have to do it over again somewhere else.”
I didn’t want to go to school at all, and at first Mom, distracted and irritable, let it go. She left us with Rita some days and went off in the car, returning late. I watched for the station wagon headlights swinging into the driveway and sweeping across the living-room wall. Rita didn’t like it when Mom was gone, I could tell. She grew testy and tried to play the parent with us, which she hadn’t done before. “Don’t you think you should clean that litter box?” or “You better turn on the lamp or you’ll ruin your eyes.” One evening after Mom had been gone all day, I was doing the dishes and broke a glass trying to get the milk ring out of the bottom. I cut myself, only a little, but blood seeped into the hot water. It looked like a lot and Rita, who was drying, snapped, “Oh for Christ’s sake. Now what?”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s just a cut.” I put the two pieces of the glass in the garbage, feeling my face flush with shame. It was all I could do to stand there at the sink.
“I’ll finish them up,” said Jenny, coming up beside me. I felt tears well up in gratitude. I dried my hands and went to the bathroom to get a strip of toilet paper. I sat on the couch with my hand wrapped and stared out the window, trying not to cry. The dishes clattered in the awkward silence.
“It’s only a glass, guys,” Rita finally said. “We’ll live, right? Will we all live?” She looked over at me and I nodded, trying to smile.
That night we were in bed when Mom got back. I don’t know what time it was, but I’d had long enough to imagine the various horrible accidents that could have befallen her. She came into the room and kissed Jenny and me on our foreheads. “Sleep tight, my sweets,” she said, and relief coursed through me.
I had drifted to sleep when Mom and Rita’s voices woke me.
“I think you should send them to school,” Rita said. “At least Jennifer. She’s thirteen—she’s at that age when she just wants to belong. You’re a conformist at thirteen.”
“When I was her age my mother had already died and I was only three years away from being pregnant with her.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Silence.
“Have you been drinking?” Rita asked.
“ ‘Have you been drinking?’ What are you, my mother?”
“Well, it seems like you could use a mother.”
“Ha. I’ve been managing just fine for many, many years. If anyone is going to remember what it was like to be thirteen, it’s me.”
“I’m just giving you my opinion as your friend.”
“Rita, I’m tired.”
“Here’s an idea—come home earlier. It’s not like I don’t worry.”
“I appreciate what you do for us, I really do.”
“I’m afraid you don’t get it, Irene.”
Jenny and I started school in Nakenitses Lake the next Monday. I was in grade six and in a room together with the grade four and five kids, and Jenny was in grade eight and in with the sevens and nines. Because the fall weather had turned warm, the teacher had us outside collecting leaves for a project. After school I wandered far along a creek and out to the lake, looking for more leaves. At Rita’s, I used the iron to press yellow aspen leaves, red maple, the heart-shaped cottonwood and paper birch between two sheets of wax paper. I labelled them with name and habitat. I got the project back on Friday, A+.
Mom wasn’t there when I got home. I waited on the porch, the leaf project in my lap, until Rita called me in and wordlessly placed bowls of canned spaghetti on the table. Jenny read at the table as we ate, and Rita didn’t tell her not to.
I kept the leaf project beside my bed all through the night, woke up to touch it, check the colour of the light coming in the window and listen.
When Mom drove up on Saturday afternoon, I was sitting on the porch waiting. But when she kissed me lightly, I was too overcome with relief to show her my project.
“Did you miss me?” she said on her way in, as if being gone all night was nothing.
Jenny came out a minute later and the two of us sat and listened to the argument going on inside.
“What am I, your babysitter?” Rita shouted.
“You’re my friend.” Mom’s voice, calmer, but still insistent.
“And what does that mean to you?”
“What does it mean to you?” Now her volume rose, too. “You’ve got some rigid formula of debits and credits and every time you do something for me I feel as if you’re waiting to see if I fill in the matching thing on the ledger. I’m always just a little in the red with you.”
“A little?”
“See. This is pointless.” Mom came outside, letting the screen door slam behind her. The three of us sat there gloomily. Through the trees, the afternoon light shadowed the mountains. We had nowhere to go—the porch, the car, that was it, the safe zones. I picked up Cinnamon and went and sat in the car. Its smells and warmth cocooned me in familiarity. I might sleep in it if Mom would let me. That way I wouldn’t have to worry about her slipping out of my sight.
Sometime in the middle of the night the car door jerked open and a blast of cold air rushed in. Mom began throwing in blankets and pillows. Jenny climbed in on top of them, groggy with sleep, her eyes barely open. The two of us sat in a stupor as Mom made several agitated trips in and out of the house, piling armloads of our possessions into the back of the station wagon. She slammed the hatch and got into the driver’s seat, all without a word to us. Then she started the car, revved the engine for minute, and drove out onto Nakenitses Road, ribboning out in front of us in the moonlight. I don’t know how long it was—maybe twenty minutes, half an hour—before Jenny spoke. “Why was Rita crying?”
“Never mind, honey.” Her tone said that was the end of it.
Rita crying was such a bizarre and improbable thing that I couldn’t even imagine what it would look like. A long time later I asked Jenny about it. She told me Rita had sat in a kitchen chair with her face in her hands and cried like her heart was broken.
We drove all night. I woke up once when the car stopped and saw Mom outside, leaning against the car smoking a cigarette. The northern lights sent fingers of green light creeping, retreating, shooting up into the night sky. Cinnamon sighed and stretched in the nest of blankets, then settled herself again. Mom climbed back in and put her hands on the wheel. For a moment I felt intensely happy. Everything I had was in this car and safe.