The Spawning Grounds (21 page)

“So you let him try to drown himself?”

“No! I only took him to the river to let that thing go.”

“Hannah, we've got to make sure Bran's spirit is still here first, that he can get back, that we can revive him. You can't do this alone.”

“
Revive
him. Do you hear yourself? You
are
asking me to drown my own brother.”

“I'm not asking you to do anything. You came to me looking for help, remember? All I did was tell you what I know.” He looked away as he rubbed his neck. “In many
ways it would be better to let things run their course, allow the mystery to bring down the storm. He's here for a reason.”

“All that is bullshit. Everything you told me, the story is bullshit. If you hadn't told Bran about the ‘mystery' and all that other crap, he wouldn't be sick like this.”

“You know that's not true.”

Hannah waved a hand at the water in exasperation. “He thinks he's some kind of spirit, for god's sake, and that he lives in the river.”

“He is, and he does! Hannah, that boy in your house isn't your brother. Bran's soul is out here somewhere, if he hasn't already left.”

“If he isn't already dead, you mean.”

Alex nodded.

“My brother is very much alive. He's sick, that's all. And he
will
get better. I won't let him end up like Mom.”

“He will unless we help him. And it may already be too late to do anything.”

“Fuck,” Hannah said, under her breath. Then she told Alex, “Dad is right. You need to stay away from our house, from Bran.” She pointed a finger at him. “And you need to stay the hell away from me.”

“You don't mean that.”

“Yes, I do.” She turned heel and strode back upriver.

When she reached the pasture path that led to the house, Hannah looked back. Alex was still standing where she left him. She held his gaze a moment before she continued on her way.

JESSE WALKED AHEAD
of Hannah, carrying an axe, pushing a trail through the snow. They were both bundled up in snow boots and winter jackets. Jesse's wool hat and mittens were a vibrant, unexpected red, so at odds with the white and deep green of the reserve bush around them. Hannah had chosen less festive attire, her grey wool toque, grey gloves.

Jesse had suggested a hunt to find the perfect Christmas tree on this patch of reserve land, and Hannah had gone along grudgingly. Stew had taken Jesse to find a tree here every year when he was a kid, and Jesse had carried on the tradition when Hannah and Bran were young. That first Christmas after Hannah's mother died and Jesse had gone, Stew had tried to lift Hannah's and Bran's spirits by taking them out on this annual hunt, but that had been the last one. The family ritual had lost its magic and was only a reminder of their parent's absence.

Stew was clearly failing in the hospital, and Bran had spent the last couple of weeks back in a ward there as well. Hannah had visited her grandfather only twice in that time, and Bran only once. Her brother wouldn't talk to her. She felt as if he were dead, and her grief was nearly as deep as what she'd endured following her mother's death.

And here Jesse wanted her to find a Christmas tree.

Jesse shook the snow from a small balsam, releasing its sweet scent. “How about this one?” he asked. “Too small?”

“We should wait until Bran comes home. Choose one then. He loved picking out a tree when he was a kid.”

“You know he won't be up to it, Hannah.” He looked back at the tree, holding the thin trunk in one hand. “This one's got a nice shape to it. What do you think? We'll get this decorated and have the lights on when we walk Bran into the house tomorrow. Make a celebration out of him coming home.”

“The band doesn't want us cutting trees here anymore. Remember the sign?” It was posted near the recreational site:
Cut no trees
. “There's so little bush left along the river. The last thing we want to do is take out another tree.”

“It's one frickin' Christmas tree.”

“They'll hear you chopping,” said Hannah. “They'll see us carrying it across the shallows. They'll know we stole it off reserve land.”

“Jesus, Hannah, you're killing me. I'm making an effort here. Can't you see that?”

Hannah nodded but avoided looking him in the eye.

“I know the situation isn't the best, but I wanted to make this a good Christmas.” Jesse pulled out a joint and patted his pocket for a lighter.

“Do you have to smoke that?” She disliked her father when he was high. His bloodshot eyes, his clumsy affection. He talked too much.

Jesse eyed her a moment, then pocketed it and took out gum instead, offering Hannah a piece before unwrapping his. “Can I ask you something?” he said.

“I guess.”

“We used to have pictures on the walls, family photos of you and Bran with your mom and me. There were others, too, of Dad and me with my mom before she died. I looked for them as I cleaned out Dad's stuff in the outbuildings, but I didn't come across them. You know what happened to them?”

Hannah hugged herself. “I tossed them.”

“You threw them out?”

“I was thirteen. I was pissed. You didn't come home that Christmas or visit at all after.” She turned away from her father to look at the river. “Anyway, I didn't want reminders.”

“Reminders?”

“Of the family we had, how I messed things up.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mom killed herself. You left. I drove you both away.”

“Oh, Jesus, Hannah. Is that what you think?”

Hannah turned back to Jesse. “Isn't that what happened?”

“It's not your fault; you didn't drive me away.”

“But I said all those things, about you and those women. About Gina, Fern. I was so angry at you.”

“You had every right to be.”

“But I pushed you away.” Hannah glanced at the reserve village, at Alex's small house. “Just like I push everyone away.”

“That wasn't why I left. You can't blame yourself for that.”

“You blame yourself for Mom.”

“That's different.”

“Is it?”

Jesse gave the tree another shake. “Are we taking this damn tree or not?” he asked. “Or do you want to look for another?”

She shook her head. “This tree is as good as any. Let's just get it over with.”

Jesse lifted the axe and Hannah stepped back to watch the blade bite into the trunk, throwing out shards of wood and releasing another wave of balsam scent into the air. In motion, Jesse was the younger man, the father she had known before her mother died. He had driven her around the valley in her car seat until she fell asleep each night. He had hammered together a wooden dollhouse for her one Christmas, a gift she'd kept. It sat in her closet, hidden beneath a bag of unused clothes and forgotten until this moment.

Hannah
.

She turned to the sound of her name ringing between the axe strikes.

Hannah
.

A woman's voice, her mother's voice, calling to her from across the river. She searched the far shore.

Hannah!

Hannah stepped out of the bush and walked to the river's edge, expecting,
willing
her mother to be there, on the other side. But where she would have found her mother, there was only a crow hopping in the muddy gravel along the shore, cawing. The bird cocked its head to look at her, across the water, and cawed again. But now it sounded like any other crow.

After a time Jesse came up to Hannah, carrying the axe and smelling of balsam. “The tree's down. I'll need your help carrying it out.” When she kept her eyes on the far shore, he asked, “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.” She paused. “A crow.”

Jesse looked at the crow for a moment with her, then turned back to the fallen tree. Hannah watched the bird a little longer as it raked the snowy gravel with its beak, turning over pebble after pebble, as if looking for the perfect stone, then she went to help her dad.

HANNAH LED BRAN
from the kitchen, where they had all just eaten Christmas Eve dinner, to the living room, hoping to park him in front of the television. The TV was one way to keep Bran from attempting to escape the house. After Jesse brought him home from the hospital this time, Bran had kneeled right in front of the TV to run his fingers over the flickering screen. Evidence of the influence of the drug he was on, Hannah hoped, something that might pass with time. This evening, though, when she clicked to the Space channel, Brandon's favourite, he hid his face and cowered from the laser fight there, two spaceships gunning it out. He appeared genuinely afraid. So Hannah switched channels and found
MythBusters
. Brandon had rarely missed an episode: the roll and boom of slow-motion explosions, the nearly invisible energy wave spreading outwards from the ignition point in all directions. But now, when a car was blown to bits on the screen, Brandon stood in alarm and called out.

“Okay, okay!” Hannah held out a hand to get her brother to sit down as she switched to
The Simpsons
, Marge and Homer at the dinner table. Brandon settled into the couch and calmed, apparently engaged by the simple lines and colours. He watched beside Hannah for a few minutes, then stood and made his shambling way to the living-room door that led to the deck. When Hannah rushed to get in front of him, Brandon swept an arm out to push her back, nearly knocking her into the Christmas tree. Exhausted, frustrated, Hannah grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him back to the couch. She wrestled with her brother until he finally tired and slid sideways to lie down.

“Jesus,” she said, sighing.

The Simpsons
ended and the news came on. Brandon blinked as if the glare of the television, or its content, bothered him. He covered his head with his arms and made animal noises of fear or confusion. Hannah turned off the TV, and when Brandon squinted at the light above them, she flicked the switch on that too and sat with him in the glow of the white LED Christmas tree lights.

After a few minutes, he fell asleep. His body was so still—his arms over his head in an odd, unnatural position—that Hannah touched him on the shoulder to satisfy herself that he was still alive.

The snap of static on her fingertips sparked her fatigue and she broke down and sobbed. Hannah had been sleeping on this couch since Brandon came home, so she could hear her brother coming down the stairs and stop him from
reaching an outside door. She hadn't had much sleep since he'd been home.

Jesse came into the room, flicking on the light. As soon as he saw Bran sleeping on the couch beside her, he flicked it off again and came to sit on the couch armrest. “Hey,” he said. “What's going on?” He didn't lay a hand on her shoulder or rub her back. She knew that he was being respectful of their strained relationship. Still, in that moment, she wished he would try to comfort her.

Hannah wiped her face with her sleeve. “Just tired, I guess.”

“Let's get him into bed.”

Together they helped Bran, still half-asleep, up the stairs and to his room. Jesse stood at the doorway, watching as Hannah tucked him in. Then he stepped out of the way as she closed the door.

“You sleep in your room tonight,” he said. “I'll take a shift on the couch.”

“No,” she said. “It's okay. I don't want you to get tired.” She waved a hand. “I mean, I don't want you to get fed up with all this.”

“Hannah, I'm not going anywhere.”

“For now.”

He didn't respond to that. He had always told her he wouldn't make promises he couldn't keep. Instead he said, “You need a break. I'll keep watch tonight.”

“If he leaves the house—”

“I won't let him.”

She looked down at her father's scarred hand, the way he smoothed his thumb over his fingertips, one by one and back again. She had forgotten the restlessness of her father's hands. They were constantly moving, rubbing the fabric at the bottom of his shirt or, on a summer night, smoothing the bare skin on her mother's shoulder as they sat together watching TV, as if he wished to make sure Elaine was still there. When she wasn't there any longer, his fingers had worried the corner of the armrest of the couch. He had slept on that couch in those final weeks of her mother's illness, just as Hannah did now.

“I
will
keep him safe,” he said.

“Okay.”

Jesse stared at the empty screen of the television, which reflected the Christmas tree lights he had left on for the night. He couldn't sleep. Who
could
sleep on this couch? This ancient, filthy couch that his mother had chosen almost forty years earlier. The clock on the wall read 2:25 a.m. The tick, tick, tick in the night. He had read in some Sunday newspaper that before the invention of the light bulb, before the industrial era with all its glittering lights, people were accustomed to this period of wakefulness in the night, in which the mind was at once alert and scattered with the remnants of dreams. He wondered if there was some natural purpose to this altered state. Perhaps here was a meeting place where the living met the dead, as in those Victorian
stories of hauntings, where the deceased visited the living in the small hours.

As a child, Jesse had hungrily researched the subject of ghosts and the various methods of contacting spirits. He had read that seeing the dead within a reflected surface in a darkened room was a feat anyone could accomplish, a trick of the human mind that would project memories of a beloved into a mirror or window of a darkened room. He had tried to find his mother in this way, within his bedroom window, but without success.

Jesse called his mother now, into the ancient, warped window of the living room. Perhaps if he looked long enough into that dark, shining surface he would see his mother, and not just his own reflected face. But eventually it was Stew's face he saw superimposed over his own. The old man seemed to be on the outside of the glass at first, looking in, but then he stepped forward and Jesse turned to find his father standing behind him.

“What the hell?” Jesse stood up from the couch to face him. “Dad?”

Stew turned and walked towards the stairwell, slowly, methodically, taking his time, as if expecting Jesse would follow, though he didn't look back. Jesse trailed him up the stairs and into Brandon's room, but when he stepped into his son's space, his father was gone and Brandon kicked in seizure on the braided oval rug by his bed like a fish landed in the bottom of a boat. Then his thrashing stopped and he was suddenly awake, looking up at Jesse, wild-eyed. He let out an animal howl and repeatedly hit his own head against the floor.

“Jesus, Bran. Stop! Stop it!” Jesse grappled with his son until he got him sitting upright, holding him firmly in a bear hug, so he couldn't hurt himself further. “It's okay,” Jesse whispered in his ear. “It's okay.”

Hannah appeared at the door in her jammie bottoms and T-shirt. “What's going on?”

Jesse lay Brandon gently on the floor. “A seizure, I think,” he said. He stood and took Hannah's hand so she would listen to him. “We've got to get him to the hospital, have him checked out. No arguments.”

She released his hand and crossed her arms, but nodded. “Okay.”

“Help me get him dressed.”

Hannah handed him a pair of sweats and Jesse slid them on his son. “I just saw your grandfather,” he said, without looking at her.

“Here, in the house?”

In the kitchen downstairs, the phone rang, and Hannah and Jesse exchanged a look. There would be no other reason for anyone to ring at this hour. The phone stopped and then started up again. Hannah hurried from the room to answer it. Jesse heard her muffled voice through the heat grate in the floor as he slid shoes on his son's feet.

When Hannah came back, she held the door frame on either side of her as if to stop from falling. Jesse stood to face his daughter. “It's Dad,” he said.

“The nurse said he won't last the night,” she said. “Everyone leaves—everyone leaves me.”

Jesse studied his daughter's face in the half-light, searching for some remnant of the girl he'd known, the child he had lifted into his arms every night on his return from work.

At Jesse's feet, Brandon arched and stiffened. His eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled back in his head, the whites staring up at him.

“He frightens me, Dad.”

“I know. I'm scared too.” He held her gaze, hoping she would understand that he had felt as helpless facing her mother's illness. Jesse went to his daughter and pulled her close. For the first time since her mother's death, she let him hold her.