She grew up in Canmore, high up the Bow River, inside the first ranges of the Rocky Mountains. When her mother baked an angel food cake or a tray of cupcakes, she always adjusted the recipe, changing the baking times according to a faded pencil chart on an index card she kept taped to the inside of a cupboard door.
‘The altitude,’ she told Audrey. ‘They write these recipes at sea level. Things change 4,500 feet farther up in the air.’
She remembered mornings growing up when the sky dropped down. White puffs of cloud pulled themselves down and roamed low in front of the mountains. White puffs floating past the green pine trees, their wispy edges made real by the contrast.
Some mornings the mountains vanished altogether. The sky dropped and the town and the mountains surrounding it disappeared in white.
Audrey looked out a window at the Crash Palace into a white Sunday morning. The sky had dropped and taken everything away. Somewhere east the sun must have risen, east of Red Deer, east of Alberta. Outside her window, a little of the light that the rising sun made found its way into the dropped sky and the snow inside it. She watched the flakes swirl in the wind one way and another. White snow to join the thick white sheath skinning Two Reel Lake, the valley around it, the stones and trees inside. She was inside the sky now. The earlier snows had been only the open mouth and teeth, inverted, widening around her. This was the interior, through and down the throat. Inside the white belly of the sky.
§
She pressed buttons on her phone and it didn’t say anything because the battery was dead. She sat folded over on the mattress, forearms resting on her knees, looking unfocusedly at the dead phone.
‘Kitten,’ she said. ‘Kitten, it’s Sunday morning and I left home Friday night and it’s still snowing.’
Her head hurt. A full sinus-choked hurt that ran from the back of her throat outward and up. She felt her glands. She pinched the bridge of her nose. Her neck ran sore from the base of her skull down into either side, the linkages between each set of muscles strained and wrong. Where her head had snap-stopped by the Audi seat belt. Under her arms and shoulder blades where she fit improperly on the couch.
Her nose was too clogged to tell but she knew she must stink. Woodsmoke and sleeping in the same clothes. Hard work and no baths. Her hair was thickened and tangled and stood out sideways when she ran her hands into it.
The rack beside the cold fireplace was empty, all of the wood turned into ash and smoke. The cold now all the way inside the room, radiating from the floors and windows, out of the chimney flue, oblivious to her dead-sometime-in-the-night fire.
Someone must have noticed all the smoke, she thought. Surely they’d see the smoke, and when they did their plow route they’d come to have a look.
They’ll call to make sure everybody’s all right and we’ll tell them that we’ll be all right.
She put the Dungeons & Dragons books into the fireplace and lit a fire. Muscled barbarians with longswords, floating disembodied eyes, women with black Vampirella hair in slinky dresses, holding green-and-blue flames in their hands. Caught quickly and the pages burnt and curled. She opened a can of chickpeas and ate it watching the little fire. The books burned fast, too thin to keep a flame, curling and twisting into ashes. Smoked and went out before she could finish her cold breakfast.
‘Kitten,’ she called out into the empty room. ‘Here, Kitten. We’ve still got a fire here. Still got a fire. Come on out, Kitten.’
She went upstairs and looked into rooms, remembering her tour yesterday. Found a dirty old quilt and a fuzzy Hudson’s Bay blanket. She found a balled-up University of Alberta sweater and pulled it over her head. Then she came back downstairs and tore up the other paperbacks, feeding the cheap paper into the fire. Blew at the embers to try and save a match until they caught.
‘The snow can’t last all day, Kitten. We’ll stay here, stay warm, wait for the weather to break.’
She tried to remember if there was a restaurant in the village. They’d sell hot coffee in the gas station. Plastic-wrapped submarine sandwiches: egg salad, ham and Swiss. They’d let her make a phone call.
How’d you get out here anyway without a vehicle? they’d ask. She tested answers in her head, chewing cold chickpeas.
She picked up one of the wooden chairs. Not too heavy. She carried it up the stairs to the second floor. She lifted it onto the railing. Balanced it for a moment, then let it fall over the side. The chair fell and crashed into splinters on the hard floor.
She turned the chair wreckage into a fire. Sat feeding the flames and watching the wood blacken and slowly turn to cherry-red coals.
Audrey watched the fire, thinking about when she’d need to break up another chair.
‘Kitten, the cold is in here with us but you’ve already lived through worse, right? The cold is in our blood and it’s making me slow and stupid. But you’ve survived and so will I, right? I’m going to get confused and slow as I get colder, Kitten. That’s what happens. But we can’t make that walk in this snow. We’ll get you to Shelly and she’ll be so happy to see you. But we can’t leave yet. Not until the wind dies down. So we’ll just keep the fire burning. Right, Kitten?’
She got on her hands and knees and looked under the couch for the little reflective eyes.
‘I thought I saw the Skinny Cowboy, Kitten, who is a shitty junkie who reminds me of this other shitty junkie and that got me thinking about other shitty people I’ve met and all those step-by-steps that make up life and you mostly just coast downhill in neutral not thinking about these things, Kitten, because what happens if you do? You coast downhill not thinking too much about any of it and any given time there’s enough happening out the window to keep your mind away from it all. Most of the time.
‘I’ll get home and I’ll tell Mom all about it. She never asked but I’ll finally tell her all about it when I get home.’
She turned around and sat on the cold floor with her back against the couch. Reached into her pocket and took out the key. She held the front-door key of the Crash Palace in her cupped-together hands. Just an old key with a smudged-black square of masking tape on it that someone left for her in an envelope. Came to her house and gave to her mother. Came to give to her.
‘I know, Kitten,’ she said. ‘What did I think was going to happen?’ She put the key back into her pocket. ‘We’ll just keep the fire going until the wind stops, Kitten. Then we’ll start walking. Then we’ll get you home to Shelly, Kitten.’
§
She went upstairs then to the fifth floor, down the other hall to the bedroom. Opened the door and stood in the doorway, leaning on the jamb. A big room, much bigger than the little rooms on the third and fourth floors. Big windows looking out westward across the valley. On a clear day up here you could see the easternmost tips of the Rockies poking up above the pine-covered ridges of the high foothills. Today they were inside the white belly of the sky though. Just white snow blowing across the frozen white lake top.
There was just an old king-sized bed frame and a couple of wooden chairs. Everything else – even the mattress – gone. No dresser, no mattress, no bedsheets. No lamp, no clothes, no books on the bookshelf, no bookshelf. No flowerpots, with no dried-up little stick remains of the plants she’d brought up from around the building over the six months she’d lived here. She turned around and closed the door.
She brought down all the paper from Alex’s office. Mostly it was loose in cardboard filing boxes. She burned all the paper in the fireplace.
At first she read while she burned. Receipts for liquor, groceries. Case of vodka, six 750 millilitre bottles at $18.99 per. Six 700 millilitre bottles of blended Scotch at $24.99 per. Twelve cases of twenty-four beer bottles. Invoices for boxes of soda syrup and invoices for the bottled gas to blend and deliver it. Lemons, limes, oranges. Four-inch straws, eight-inch straws, square napkins, kraft paper napkins. Contractor bills for painting, dropped-ceiling installation, plumbing.
Audrey sat there with paper in either hand. It was just boring. She hadn’t expected that it would all just be boring.
She opened a box and it was full of little notepads. She knew right away: the exact size and shape. She took one out and opened it. A little graph-paper notepad. Each page the same five columns: a date; initials; a column of letters – C, H, CM, MDMA; then a quantity in grams or milligrams; and then a dollar amount. Anywhere from twenty to a few hundred dollars for each item. All crammed in the same tight, messy pencil printing.
There were dozens of little graph-paper notebooks, all the same. The earliest date she found was in 2001 and the latest she could find was for 2007.
She looked for names. But they weren’t that stupid. No names, not Alex’s name, not Gurt’s name. Certainly not any name that might have been the Skinny Cowboy’s. Just quantities, grams and milligrams.
She stopped reading and just fed the notepads into the fire. She burned all the notepads and then started burning all the other paper, staff schedules, band-booking calendars, pages of phone numbers, lists of email addresses. The paper crumpled and burned quickly and the thin ash it made blew up the flue and piled in the hearth.
Her fire smoked up the chimney, and outside the smoke disappeared into the snow.
‘Kitten,’ she said into the empty room. ‘Kitten, it’s all boring and it must have always been boring and everything it turned into is boring and I’m dying of hypothermia a long way from my daughter. My daughter doesn’t know where I am, Kitten.’
The kitten wasn’t around and Audrey cried for a few minutes, sitting on the cold floor. She cried softly sitting there, sniffling, and felt the cold climb up into her legs and feet. Then she hauled her tired body up off the ground and stood in front of the fire that was already dying down.
She dropped another chair from the top floor.