After breakfast, Hugh tied a bandana over Sonny’s eyes and the three of us trooped to the lighthouse. A little extreme, though I didn’t say anything. Climbing those steep, slippery stairs, Sonny didn’t complain. He was a good sport.
“You won’t believe it, sweetie,” I whispered into his ear, steering him by the shoulder. At the top, he yanked off the blindfold, blinking in the sun rippling off the water. His face looked pale, almost bluish like skimmed milk. Spying the gig bag, he whipped down the zipper and pulled out the guitar, almost dinging the light’s huge lens. Hugh winced.
“Holy crap!” Sonny kept saying. “Wait’ll I tell Derek.”
“Come here and I’ll show you a G chord,” Hugh said, but Sonny ignored him. He was kneeling by the juiceless amp, twisting knobs then frantically strumming. His fingers thudded the strings like a clawless cat picking a screen, not remotely musical.
“After school, Sonny,” I cut in. “Maybe Hugh’ll give you a lesson then.”
The idea of a party had fizzled; the feeling of being stranded out here, caught in an icy limbo, had that effect. Plans became pilot whales, dark shapes that surfaced and dove, and, if they did come ashore, died out of the water.
“I wanted a go-kart party,” was Sonny’s first comment when I met him coming home that afternoon. Wayne didn’t bat an eye, but that wasn’t unusual. He no longer spoke on our crossings, but he seemed to be keeping score. I could see him calculating Hughie’s tab.
The cake was cooling on top of the fridge.
“Derek’s mother took him and all the grade fives go-karting.”
“The whole class?” I rolled my eyes. “Where were you, then? Ah, Sonny.” I sighed, wiping down his lunch bag.
Hugh had the gear plugged into the outlet for the toaster and was noodling around on the guitar, bending and stretching notes in a tune I recognized. Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire.” He glanced up at Sonny, a guarded look in his eyes as his fingers curled over the strings.
“What birthday is this, again? You won’t learn to play by bitching.”
I looked at him.
“Complaining. When we were kids,” he said, “you got a swat on the arse for each year.”
He took a swing at Sonny. Dodging it, Sonny grabbed the guitar, aiming it like a rifle. He blushed, with the same look as when Charlie had got him the bike. The look I’d had taking Sonny home from the hospital all those years before. Joyful but scared, grateful but not at all sure what to do with the gift. It was then, maybe more than at any other time, that I missed having a mother.
An expression of shame—guilt?—crossed Sonny’s face. Hugh yanked the cord from the outlet.
“Fine, then. My mistake, kiddo. Thought you’d at least act interested.”
I put my hand on Hugh’s wrist. His eyes had a shadowy look.
“I’m just saying. Jesus. I went to some effort here, Alex. Next time I’ll think twice.”
I dug Sonny hard in the ribs, and he blushed a deeper pink. Hugh’s mouth was a flat line.
“C-can you teach me ‘Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog’?”
“Sonny,” I laughed nervously, “where’d you ever hear that?”
“Derek’s,” he said, gazing from me to Hugh. “His mom sings it.”
“O-kay.” I waited for Hugh to laugh. Instead, he slouched away, and next we heard him in the bedroom opening drawers. For one dizzy moment my heart bottomed.
Sonny rammed candles into the cake.
“You could’ve said thank you,” I muttered.
He stared back, his bottom lip pushed out. The candles were burned down, all I’d found stashed at the back of the cupboard. At least there were enough, with four spares: fourteen in all, mostly pink. Saved from some other birthday, someone else’s cake. Someone we’d never know and likely wouldn’t meet. A girl, a teenager, I imagined, with Patty Duke hair and a miniskirt. I pictured somebody sticking those candles, new, into a pink cake. Licking icing off her chapped fingers: a mother. Lighting the candles then carrying the cake across the darkened kitchen; people singing, How o-old are youuuuu? A swat for every year. A big, fat swat across the butt. I thought again of my mother and a time so faint maybe it hadn’t even happened. A time with no swats but coins baked in a cake—dimes wrapped in wax paper—and candles. Three or four. The present was a baby doll with a tiny hole in her lips for a bottle, another tiny one to pee out of. Sonny was hunched over the guitar, glowering at the strings. I squeezed his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, darling.” Not for a second did I think it was enough.
He was on his third slice of cake when the phone rang. After a crackly pause, a voice asked for him, just as faint, and disembodied.
“Charlie?”
Another, brittle pause.
“Put my boy on, would you.” There was a breaking sound like foil being crumpled.
“Come back on after. I want to … there’s something I’ve got to say.”
Saaaaayyyyyy, the word echoed with squirrelly feedback. Another pause.
“How are you, anyway?”
“All right,” I murmured, thrusting the phone at Sonny.
Hugh was licking chocolate from his thumb, about to cut himself more cake. He gazed up at me, haunted.
“Yup…Yeah, sure…Uh-huh. Okay…Not bad. Sucks…You too. Yeah, okay…Okay!” Sonny mumbled, his lips pressed to the receiver. He kept turning his back, then every few seconds glancing over at me with this funny look, as if checking to see if his answers added up.
“His dad,” I whispered to Hugh, my throat tightening. The blood rose to my cheeks. Then Sonny handed me the phone.
“Your turn.” His voice was bright with hope.
“Charlie,” I said, avoiding Hugh’s gaze. Forcing myself to sound calm, measured, though my heart was pounding. My eyes roved, then flicked away. There was a clatter as Hugh dropped the knife.
“Willa.” A windy sound came over the line, like dry leaves shifting.
“Good of you to call.” I couldn’t keep sarcasm from creeping in. “Where are you?”
“Kuwait; some sort of—” the line crackled. “—the blessed land of sand.” He let out a parched little laugh and sniffed. “I can’t stand this,” he said, and I supposed he meant the desert. I thought of the heat, and Sonny’s need for a parka. This seemed as good a time as any to raise it.
“Now, about Sonny—there’s things he could use,” I began, remembering boots, jeans. “You should see, he’ll soon be taller than—”
“I miss you,” he interrupted, and there was a crackling silence.
Hugh stared from the table. In the yellow light his face was pale and there was chocolate on his mouth.
Me too, part of me wanted to say, cupping the receiver.
“Well,” Charlie’s voice faded in and out. “So long then. Oh, and the cheque’s in the mail.”
If he said goodbye, it got lost. A piercing zing split the air. Dangling the guitar by its neck, Hugh raked out another crashing chord before shoving it at Sonny. Sonny chewed his lip, his hand freezing over the fret board.
***
The guitar ended up hardly leaving its case. It could’ve been a Lego man forgotten under the bed. God knows, with winter locking down there was loads of time to practise. Once or twice, nights when you couldn’t see the breakwater for blowing snow, Hugh got out the sax and tried getting Sonny to play along. There was no predicting. Curled over Sonny’s shoulder, Hugh showed him chords, his fingers guiding Sonny’s on the frets.
“Try this,” he said, running through some old Zeppelin, “Stairway to Heaven” or “The Immigrant Song,” things my brother and I listened to as teens in the basement. Either the songs were too hard, or Sonny didn’t like them.
“Show me some Wham! ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’.”
Hugh rolled his eyes. Then, to please us maybe, Sonny picked out a jingle from the radio.
“Not bad.” But then Hugh disappeared to the bedroom. We sat there in the kitchen, Sonny and I, listening to notes through the wall as he blew something on the sax, no competition against the wind and the foghorn. Snow worked like a megaphone, or a blanket pinning the noise close to the rocks and the pitching swells. We felt it rattle the floorboards, watched it shake the dishes. Hugh’s music was no match at all.
Maybe it was the cold, the boredom, but he played less and less, and when he did he barely moved his body; forget that wrestling dance. It was as if he’d fallen out with the sax; as if he’d won, and it had given up. Like someone he’d grown tired of.
With a sickening tug I thought of Julie; imagined myself picking up the phone and spilling my suspicions. But love—that icy inertia—prevented me. Who’d have believed? He’s not right, I’d have explained. But who would’ve listened? He’s suffering, and doesn’t know it. But what then? It was like walking the island’s edge backwards with no choice but to fall or leap off. An avalanche of ocean flooding over as I sank, filling every cavity with its freezing effervescence. Burying me alive.
***
The first week of February it snowed every day, not just dustings, but a couple of feet. School got cancelled five days straight. Drifts piled so high against the doors that one morning we coaxed Sonny to climb out a window and shovel off the stoop. Then Hugh went out and tunnelled paths to the shed and the lighthouse.
I tried to cut a pathway to the front door.
“What for?” Hugh hollered from the angled shade of the house, as the clouds cleared temporarily and the sun sparkled down. The snow-covered boulders made me think of the Rockies set against dazzling sky; the delineation of land and sea as crisp as a blue and white flag, not a shade in between.
I stood my shovel in the snow and flopped onto my back, moving my arms and legs, grinning at the sun. Its brilliance made my head ache. “Sonny?” I yelled. Come make an angel, a child voice urged inside me. Hugh’s shouts, Sonny’s laughter sifted from around back. The dog’s yapping. Ka-POW! Geronimoooo. Suckerrr.
Wading through waist-high drifts, I tried rolling a ball for a snowman, without any luck. The snow was so powdery it squeaked.
The barking rose as I pushed to the back of the house. Hugh was crouching by the porch, a mitt over his eye. Oreo yapped even harder when he saw me. Sonny skulked by the shed.
“Nearly took my fucking eye out,” Hugh muttered as I peeled his hand away. The skin was pink with the start of a bruise.
“Sonny!” I screamed. But he disappeared behind the shed then clambered towards the boulders.
Oreo flicked snow with his snout, nipping at the sparkles. His tail was a plume.
“Sonny!” I yelled again, setting off more barking.
Paying no attention, Sonny started climbing the boulders, sliding into crevices.
“Get back here!” But it was no use.
Hugh’s eye began to swell. I pressed a handful of snow to it.
“I’m okay.” He beat snow from his mitts. “Why don’t you go on in and put some coffee on? That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? I’ll be in in a bit.”
“God, Hugh, I’m sorry…I’m—”
“Not your fault,” he cut me off. His eye looked like a boxer’s and his toque had ridden up, perched now on top of his head. Awful, but his appearance made me want to laugh.
“Really, Hugh, I know he didn’t mean to. Sonny wouldn’t—”
“That kid of yours is a piece of work.” He smiled saying it, but his tone stung me. Pushing down my scarf, I looked at him.
“Sonny?” I bellowed. “Mind those rocks! One slip and—”
“Doesn’t know his own strength,” Hugh said through his teeth, still smiling. His eyes the same spitting blue as the water. “Tea’d be just as good—whatever.” He stumbled, reaching around to goose me.
He came inside a little while later, stomping snow into the porch. I spooned the last of the coffee into the filter; he shook in salt. His cheeks were rosy, the eye flaming now. His breath smelled metallic.
“Where’s Sonny?” I said over my shoulder. “Not on the rocks, I hope.”
“Nah.”
“Did you get him back?” Trying to make light of it.
“Huh?” He winced. “Oh yeah.”
Oreo was still yapping out there.
“Quit teasing the dog,” I muttered under my breath, pouring the water.
Hugh poked a split of wood into the fire and went to change. I hadn’t had a chance to do likewise, and the knees of my jeans were stinging wet. Squatting by the oven door, I warmed myself while the coffee dripped, then put on a couple of eggs and tuned in the radio, waiting for them to boil.
Oreo’s barking got louder. Maybe there was a ship coming in, or he’d spotted a whale. As I went to the window, there was a tinkling, a chime of icicles breaking. Glass. Moving to the porch, I glimpsed a hand poking from the shed window, the top of Sonny’s Canucks toque.
Wobbling into my boots, I ran outside. The wind bit through my sweater, the yard stretching like a field. Closer, I saw blood—Sonny’s hand reaching through the shattered pane, groping for the padlock. His pale wrist, the spikes of glass glinting blue. Everything dazzled—the sun blazing off whiteness and the sparkling crush of sea and a little spill of red on the snow. For a split second I lost myself, falling backwards, breathing salt. Then, as if it were somebody else stumbling up, I called his name. His face was pale and frightened; his hat kept slipping over his eyes. The key—it took a second to realize—was there in the lock. It turned without a hitch and as the door swung to, Sonny fell outside. His nose was running, his breath coming in jerky sobs as he sucked at his hand, at the gash below his thumb. His mouth looked red. Dripping to the snow the blood was as bright as the lantern.
Sonny’s sobs turned to whimpers. “It stank in there, Mom! Like, like—fish. Like an outhouse. It was so—dark. Dark as a hole. I hate him. The fucker!”
My watch your mouth leapt idiotically, fizzled. Tears jiggled from his lashes. Something inside me stiffened, as if enfolding a lump of shale.
“He tried to bust my arm. He did! Mom! He grabbed me, like this. Shoved me against the wall. He tried to kill me, he did!” It tumbled out, his voice rising. “He’s—such—a—fucking—asshole!”
“Sonny!”
“He could’ve, he could’ve busted my arm.”
I got him into the kitchen, ran his hand under the tap. The water ran pink. I glimpsed, or thought I did, the paleness of bone. Grabbing the dishtowel, I wrapped it and held it tight. Red oozed through.
The first aid box was on the fridge, unopened since Oreo’s run-in with the fox. Gripping Sonny’s hand, I rooted out a dingy roll of gauze, the last, battered-looking alcohol swab. He cried and flinched as I cleaned the cut, then staunched it with gauze, wrapping it and winding on adhesive tape.
He put his head down, cradling his thumb, sniffling at the bloom of pink through the bandage. The tears left salty streaks and he rubbed them away.
Footsteps sounded overhead. The toilet flushed. The eggs knocked together in the pot, steam spitting on the burner. The radio cackled, and Sonny blew his nose on his sleeve. Suddenly Hugh filled the doorway. Without speaking he strode over and lifted the lid off the eggs. He’d put on jeans that needed washing. His T-shirt sagged as he spooned an egg into a shot glass. “He needs stitches!” I cried out.
He set the egg in front of Sonny. “Try Wayne, then.”
The shot glass had a devil’s face with googly red eyes that seemed to follow you.
“It’ll be healed by the time we get there!”
Hugh’s eye was red as Mars. “He shouldn’t’ve cut himself. Shoulda been more careful.” Hugh whacked the egg open with a knife.
“It could’ve been his wrist.”
“So? He shouldn’t’ve—”
“What? Thrown a snowball?”
“Butter, Alex? A speck?” His voice was cheerful. I thought of our very first night, Hugh offering “A speck of tea?” and Sonny saying, “I guess so. What the heck’s a speck?”
“Alex?” he said. “You were s’posed to pull a Houdini.”
Sonny gouged out the yolk. Hugh mixed powdered milk in the yellow juice pitcher, and set down a glassful next to the egg. Sonny pushed it away.
“You need your protein, Alex. Bones and teeth. Right, Ma?” His tone made my blood go cold.
He smiled, his teeth stained. He needed a shave, and as if reading me, he rubbed his jaw. His skin looked transparent, a tiny blue vein pulsing at his temple. The whites of his eyes the very liquid blue as the light at the window.
I clenched my mug as if we were riding a round-bottomed lightship tossing to tunderation, as he’d joked once. “Sonny didn’t lock himself in there. He didn’t do this to himself.”
Hugh fixed me with a gaze, puzzled, haughty, then glanced at Sonny. “Drink up, kiddo. You been dreaming, or what? Got to be careful on those rocks, Alex. I told you, didn’t I?”
Sonny started to cry again, his mouth full of egg.
Hugh went over and hiked up Sonny’s sleeve, roughly, I couldn’t help thinking, compared to how he’d cradled a gull that’d washed ashore once, its wing broken.
“Hmmm,” he said. “We could try stitching it dog-style. Eh, Tess?” His expression the same as when he searched for the right note on his sax.
“If you go near him again, Hugh—I swear—I’ll tell.”
“What. Tessie?”
I could smell his hair, the wood smoke scent of his skin. “I’ll tell. What happened to Julie—”
“What about Julie?” His eyes were the bottom of that rocky shingle. “Go ahead, say it. What happened to her?” His hand moved to my shoulder. His fingers felt like gears. “I can’t believe it. Can’t believe you’d think—” Then he lifted Sonny’s hand, inspecting the bandage. Brushing Sonny’s arm as if brushing off sand.
Sonny shoved his milk away and ran upstairs.
“I’m serious.” My voice as tiny as the shudder of a pilot boat.
Hugh cracked an egg on the counter, started peeling it. “You tell, Tessie, and you know who’ll be sorry.”
My stomach clenched as he reached for me.
“A speck of egg, Willa?” His voice had a lilt—regret caught there?—a smugness, as he flicked a bit of yolk onto a saucer, no bigger than a bead. “Here, sweetie.”
I gave the dish a little push.
“Lay a finger on him, and I’ll leave.” The words hissed like the spray that rides whitecaps. Covering my mouth, I fled to the bedroom.
***
If birth is an act of self-immolation, then so must be love. You don’t choose to throw yourself into the sea—or into the ring of fire. But sometimes, maybe you have to sink—or burn—before anything can save you. Before you can save yourself.
That night was clear and cold; the kind of night when stars beam an icy perfection and all the world seems out of reach. The wind died, leaving the drifts and our snowy paths carved against blackness. Just before dusk, the crows came. Frightening at first, then mesmerizing. The noise started a long way off, a ruckus from the woods: a fevered cawing, croaks and chirps. Then it closed around the house, a veil of sound echoing over the marsh till the radio’s warble was a breaking thread and in disgust Hugh switched it off. He wasn’t speaking; he moved about sullenly as if the place had been taken over by squatters.
At supper. Sonny’s eyes were crows about to peck out mine.
The noise—the real crows—drew me outside, from the deadly silence of the house into the frozen air. I tried coaxing Sonny to come too, but he holed up in his room. Even before reaching the pond I could hear it, a rustling muted by that racket; the birds’ descent like nightfall, from that distance a gleaming shroud settling over the trees. They seemed to be waiting—for the island’s snowcap to slide away? For a party somewhere in bird heaven? For a famine? I wondered. More than a murder of crows: harbingers of something. Plague?
As I punched through the cardboard snow the sound of cawing and of ice grinding against the breakwater moved through me, instilling a cold worse than any weather. But the rustling drew me like a silky thread through a needle and before long I spied their hooded shapes in the branches. There were hundreds of them, perhaps a thousand: a shifting, swaying blanket of feathers. I thought of those bodiless sick people, cholera victims, and black-veiled nuns; as if all had risen and were calling from every branch and twig. The noise swallowed me, and the sky became feathered; the tarnished indigo of wings, alive with hooded eyes. I’d have given anything to have run back and found Hugh—my Hugh, not the false one in the kitchen—and to stand with him witnessing this visitation, as if every crow living and dead had come to roost. I thought of Minamata and crows falling from the sky. The snow burned through my jeans as I watched, bedevilled, till the moon rose and one by one the birds shut up and melded with the woods. Then, pressed by the weight of snow and a gnawing, hungry fear, I trudged back to the point.
A fire spat in the stove as I crept in. Hugh and Sonny were sitting at the table, the Scrabble box between them, unopened. Hugh turned the pages of a book, barely glancing up. Holding up his bandaged thumb, Sonny doodled on a paper bag, a cartoonish figure in a cape and mask, dragging a spiked ball and chain. Neither looked at the other. Neither spoke, as if a shatter-proof wall had risen between them.
“You won’t believe it, what I saw.” My voice scratched the poisoned silence.
Hugh didn't look up. “Okay.”
A feeling of suffocation swelled inside me, as if I had to struggle for air, still clinging to the wonder of those wings fanning the sky.
“One crow sorrow,” Hugh slowly turned a page. “Isn’t that how it goes?”
The tightness inside me opened. Something seemed to slip. “So many. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Every winter. Good nesting spot, nothing odd about that.” His voice was like wet felt. “No big deal.”
Sonny creaked his chair out to lean down and stroke Oreo, who’d nudged his empty bowl across the floor.
I said nothing. It was all I could do to keep myself together. Hugh closed his book and went to the bedroom, slamming the door. Shutting my eyes, I stood there, rocking slightly as the dog leapt up. He could smell them, maybe: lost souls.
“How cold is it, upstairs?” I whispered.
Sonny looked baffled.
“Two in the room might help, would you say?”
He made a face, wary.
“Our breath, darling,” I said as brightly as I could. “We’ll warm it up with our breath, okay? Two is always better than one.
We found ourselves lying upstairs, a frigid gulf of floor between us. Sonny in his bed and I in the spare one that smelled and felt as though an age had passed since it’d been slept in. We whispered to each other in the dark, our voices crossing that chilly divide, mine so false and cheerful. As long as he responded, I felt pinned between those musty sheets. As moonlight scaled the wall his breathing turned whispery, but I persisted. “School tomorrow, betcha any money. Back to it. No more sleeping in, mister.”
“No.” His drowsy protest breached the chill. “They can’t make us go back…yet.” He seemed to sleep-talk, then his breathing slowed to that shallow snore that made me want to huddle close and keep watch, like some sort of fairy, or angel.
***
I woke sometime later in the dark. There was a strange smell in my nostrils and sweat traced my skin, though the room had got colder, so cold my hands trembled pushing back the covers. But the mattress beside me felt warm, as did the stretch of pillow beside my head, even as I shivered. There was a warmth, lingering somehow even as it evaporated, as if someone had just risen, yet hung back, watching me.
“Hugh?” I called out, my tongue thick with sleep; the presence was so strong I almost felt something stroke my shoulder. My breath clouded the air, and it was so cold. Of course there was no one there at all, only Sonny sound asleep in his bed. But—I’d felt it. The silent hum of somebody in the room, somebody besides Sonny. From somewhere downstairs I heard the clink of glass, creaking footsteps; where that sudden, chilling warmth had been now there was only emptiness.
Sometime before dawn the temperature must’ve risen and the rain started. But it fell only long enough to melt the top layer of snow, until the cold bit down again to glaze it silver.