Matt comes out of the mall with the same girl, the girl from the house, and they walk along the covered sidewalk. I can only see them from the chest up because of the snow piles. Matt climbs the bank and holds out his hand to the girl. She’s wearing the same short skirt. A car door opens near them and the girl’s father gets out. They all stand staring at each other without saying anything. I have one of those bad feelings you can’t ignore, so I start walking toward them, calling Matt’s name. The dad holds out his hand to the girl, but she jumps away and slips on the ice. Her skirt lifts up and I can see her purple underwear. Matt tries to help her, but she pushes him away and hops off the snowbank. She doesn’t cry or look back at him, but walks to the mall entrance, disappearing into the warm, colourful air. The dad is shouting, pointing his finger at Matt, and I start to run.
“Go home,” Matt says as I stop in front of him, before I even have a chance to speak. He doesn’t look at me. The mall parking lot suddenly feels bigger, like it’s spreading.
“I want you to stay away from her,” the dad is saying. His voice is so shaky I think he might give up. Matt looks away from the father with a smirk on his face. He smirks at the snow, he smirks at the mall entrance, he smirks at the snowplow circling. I step closer to Matt, standing between him and the father. “I don’t need this,” Matt says, smiling at the snow on the ground. His warm breath floats down on top of my head. When he turns to walk away the dad reaches out and puts his hand on Matt’s shoulder. “She’s my daughter.” The words are gentle, but Matt turns and shoves the dad. “Worthless punk,” the dad growls, slipping on the snow. “You’re nothing. You’re a loser.” The words fly out of his mouth. Matt looks down at me, and for a moment, I think he’s going to pick me up and carry me to the car, but instead he punches the dad in the face. It’s not something I expect. One second Matt is standing, arms loose at his sides, the next he is throwing the punch right over my head. The father falls against one of the snowbanks and everything freezes. Matt is breathing hard, his shoulders rising and falling. He looks right through me and then walks quickly to his car, shaking out his hand. The engine revs and his car slides from side to side on the ice, skidding out onto the road, but there’s nothing for Matt to hit even if he wanted to.
The father takes a handful of snow and holds it up to his nose. His glasses fog and there are drops of blood at his feet. “Your brother is a pervert,” the dad says, through the snow. He looks right at me when he says the words, but I don’t blink. I spit on the ground, aiming the glob near the dad’s shoes. I was saving the saliva in my mouth without thinking, swishing it around with my tongue. A shock cuts through my body, breaks me in half, leaving me standing off to the side, watching. I can feel the curl in my lips, hot words in my mouth, ugly and new. “You fuck off.”
“You’re not so different from him, are you?” the father says, shaking his head like I’m a shame. He looks at the bloody clump of snow in his hand and I squint at the parking lot. The man in the snowplow waves at me and I wave back. The dad doesn’t say anything else. He puts new snow on his face and gets into his car. “Go home,” he says, before he drives away.
I stand in the parking lot by myself. The plow is on the other side of the mall. I don’t want to go home, but there is nowhere else to go. I take off running because it’s cold. There’s nothing in the air but the sound of my breathing and the word pervert, pervert, pervert. No one is at the bus stop. The neighborhood houses look abandoned. The curtains are pulled shut like eyes sleeping tight. When I get home my lungs are burning and snot runs out my nose. I can taste it on my upper lip. Matt’s car isn’t in the driveway. There are muddy tracks from the tires, tracks from Matt’s boots in and out of the house. His room is messy, clothes everywhere. In the bathroom, his toothbrush is gone. His gun is gone. His Scarface poster is still there.
I get my box of cereal and turn up the heat.
ONCE, MAYBE LAST WINTER, I watched Matt from the trees and he never found out. He had only been back a while. I came home from school early to see him, the thighs of my snowsuit rubbing. The noise was annoying. I lay down in the snow behind our house, in the middle of all the tall pine trees, waiting for him to come home. There was no snow falling that day. Everything seemed frozen together. I even felt frozen together. Like if I went inside and sat on the heat vent, I might fall apart. I fell back, lying there for a while, trying to see if I could melt snow off the trees by staring at it long enough. It didn’t work. I lay there until Matt came out. The sliding door swished open and closed. He shot three times and hit nothing. I could hear the bullets zip through the trees above me and get lost.
I go lie in the backyard like I did that day. I pretend I’m hunting rabbits. It’s harder than you think. Rabbits turn white in the winter and everything else is white. The sun shines white rays and if you look hard at anything you go blind.
Matt’s been gone a week. Mom called around, but no one’s heard from him. When he comes back I might ask him to take me rabbit hunting. Then we could have rabbit stew for dinner instead of canned soup. I would stand over the stove stirring for hours, and by the time Mom got home from work the house would be full of the smell of meat. We’d all be at the table. The smell would be so good, Matt would have to sit down. We’d be so busy chewing, no one would talk.
I imagine Matt and me crouched down in the snow, our elbows propped up, our guns ready. I’d see it even though everything would be white on white. I would squint my eyes and shoot. Matt would laugh in a good way like he couldn’t believe it was me. I would pick the rabbit up by the ears. The ears would be the softest things. The rabbit would be heavy. I would have to hang on tight.
FISHTAIL
TED CAN SEE THE vague outlines of the girls’ heads bobbing around the foggy car as he stands beside the ticket booth, shouldering the cellphone to his ear, trying to focus on the numbers his client is shooting at him while he waits for the vending machine to finish spitting out its last drops of coffee. Getting away early on a Friday afternoon isn’t normally done in Ted’s office, but it was his managing partner at the firm who suggested the trip. “I have a nice plot of land on Quadra I just put on the market. Five acres,” Jim said. “You should go take a look.” Jim offered his cabin, suggested Ted take Heather and the girls. “Those kids’ll be grown in no time,” he said. “Take a holiday while you still have your hair.” Ted didn’t see any reason to tell him the girls were already grown, Leslie in her last year of junior high and Anna in her first year at Camosun College. Sometimes he finds it hard to believe himself. In the mornings, as he checks his shave in the mirror, he likes to appreciate the clean-cut features he sees reflected back at him, though lately he’s been taking a closer look and finding some unsettling evidence of decline: a softness in the skin under his eyes, a fine webbing of spider veins around his nose, a slackness along the line of his jaw. He’s in the habit of giving his face a couple of brisk slaps in the morning, like saying: Hey, smarten up!