Sweep me up. Words scrawled in acid paste on one of the school’s north windows, the acid marker trembling a little in Vincent’s gloved hand. She was thirteen years old and this was Port Hardy, British Columbia, a town on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island that was somehow less remote than the place where Vincent actually lived. Paul came around the corner of the high school too late to stop her, but in time to see her do it, and now the three of them—Vincent, Paul, Melissa—were silent for a moment, watching thin trails of acid dripping down the glass from several letters. Through the words, the darkened classroom was a mass of shadows, empty rows of desks and chairs. Vincent had been wearing a man’s leather glove that she’d found who knows where. Now she pulled it off and let it drop into the trampled winter grass, where it lay like a dead rat, while Paul stood useless and gaping. Melissa was giggling in a nervous way.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Paul wanted to sound stern, but to his own ears his voice sounded high and uncertain.
“It’s just a phrase I like,” Vincent said. She was staring at the window in a way that made Paul uneasy. On the other side of the school, the bus driver honked his horn.
“We can talk about this on the bus,” Paul said, although they both knew they wouldn’t talk about it at all, because he wasn’t especially convincing as an authority figure.
She didn’t move.
“I should go,” Melissa said.
“Vincent,” Paul said, “if we miss that bus we’re hitchhiking back to Grace Harbour and paying for a water taxi.”
“Whatever,” Vincent said, but she followed her brother to the waiting school bus. Melissa was sitting up front by the driver, ostensibly getting a head start on her homework, but she glanced up furtively as they passed her seat. They rode the bus in silence back to Grace Harbour, where the mail boat waited to take them to Caiette. The boat careered around the peninsula and Paul stared at the massive construction site where the new hotel was going up, at the clouds, at the back of Melissa’s head, at the trees on the shore, anything to avoid looking into the depths of the water, nothing he wanted to think about down there. When he glanced at Vincent he was relieved to see that she wasn’t looking at the water either. She was looking at the darkening sky. On the far side of the peninsula was Caiette, this place that made Port Hardy look like a metropolis in comparison: twenty-one houses pinned between the water and the forest, the total local infrastructure consisting of a road with two dead ends, a small church from the 1850s, a one-room post office, a shuttered one-room elementary school—there hadn’t been enough children here to keep the school open since the mid-eighties—and a single pier. When the boat docked at Caiette they walked up the hill to the house and found Dad and Grandma waiting at the kitchen table. Normally Grandma lived in Victoria and Paul lived in Toronto, but these were not normal times. Vincent’s mother had disappeared two weeks ago. Someone found her canoe drifting empty in the water.
“Melissa’s parents called the school,” Dad said. “The school called me.”
Vincent—give her credit for courage—did not flinch. She took a seat at the table, folded her arms, and waited, while Paul leaned awkwardly against the stove and watched them. Should he come to the table too? As the responsible older brother, etc.? As ever and always, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. In the way Dad and Grandma stared at Vincent, Paul heard everything they were all refraining from mentioning: Vincent’s new blue hair, her plummeting grades and black eyeliner, her staggering loss.
“Why would you write that on the window?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly.
“Was it Melissa’s idea?”
“No.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking. They were just some words I liked.” The wind changed direction, and rain rattled against the kitchen window. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it was stupid.”
Dad told Vincent that she’d been suspended for all of next week; it would’ve been a much longer suspension, but the school was making allowances. She accepted this without comment, then rose and went up to her room. They were quiet in the kitchen, Paul and Dad and Grandma, listening to her footsteps on the stairs and her door closing quietly behind her, before Paul joined the other two at the table—the grown-up table, he couldn’t help thinking—and no one pointed out the obvious, which was that he’d ostensibly come back from Toronto to look out for her, which presumably should ideally involve not letting her write indelible graffiti on school windows. But when had he ever been in a position to look out for anyone? Why had he imagined that he could help? No one brought this up either, they just sat quietly listening to rain dripping into a bucket that Dad had placed in a corner of the room, Vincent represented by a ceiling vent that Dad and Grandma seemed not to realize was a conduit into her bedroom.
“Well,” Paul said finally, desperate for a change of scene, “I should probably get started on my homework.”
“How’s that going?” Grandma asked.
“School? Fine,” Paul said, “it’s going fine.” They thought he’d made a noble sacrifice, leaving all his friends behind in Toronto and coming out here to finish high school in order to be there for your sister, but if they’d been paying more attention or were on speaking terms with his mother, they’d have known he wasn’t going to be allowed back to his old school anyway, and also that his mother had kicked him out of the house. But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself. Just because you used your stepmother’s presumed death to start over doesn’t mean that you’re not also doing something good, being there for your sister or whatever. Grandma was giving him a flat stare—could she possibly have spoken to his mother?—but Dad was gearing himself up to say something, a gradual process that involved shifting around in his chair, some throat-clearing, lifting his tea halfway to his mouth and putting it down again, so Paul and Grandma broke off their staring contest and waited for him to speak. Grief had lent him a certain gravitas.
“I have to go back to work soon,” Dad said. “I can’t take her with me to camp.”
“What are you suggesting?” Grandma asked.
“I’m thinking about sending her to live with my sister.”
“You’ve never gotten along with your sister. I swear you and Shauna started arguing when you were two and she was a baby.”
“She drives me crazy sometimes, but she’s a good person.”
“She works a hundred hours a week,” Grandma said. “Wouldn’t it be better for Vincent if you got a job nearby?”
“There are no jobs nearby,” he said. “Nothing I could live on, anyway.”
“What about the new hotel?”
“The new hotel will be a construction site for at least another year, and I don’t know anything about construction. But look, it’s not just…” He went quiet for a moment, staring into his tea. “Financial considerations aside, I’m not sure living here is really the best thing for Vincent. Every time she looks at the water…” He ended the thought there. And Paul thought it went in the good column that he thought of Vincent first when Dad said that, that his first thought wasn’t of the goddamn haunted inlet that he was trying not to look at through the kitchen window, but of the girl listening upstairs at the vent.
“I’m going to go check in on Vincent,” Paul said. He liked the way they looked at him—Look how Paul has matured!—and disliked himself for noticing. At the top of the stairs, his nerve almost failed him, but he did it, he knocked softly on Vincent’s bedroom door and let himself in when he heard no answer. He hadn’t been in this room in a long time and was struck by how shabby it was, embarrassed for noticing and embarrassed for Vincent, although did she notice? Unclear. Her bed was older than she was and had paint chipping off the headboard; opening the top drawer of her dresser required pulling on a length of rope; the curtains had previously been sheets. Maybe none of it bothered her. She was sitting cross-legged by the vent, as predicted.