The Spawning Grounds (24 page)

GINA LIFTED THE
hummingbird feeder from its hook in front of the kitchen window and carried it down the stepladder. The feeder was covered in snow. The Anna's hummingbird hadn't been around for weeks. She had watched for it, kept the feeder thawed and fresh, available during the bird's usual feeding times, but now she had to admit it was gone. Dead. Likely frozen within some tree in the night when temperatures dipped. It would have died alone, huddled under the branches. The thought made Gina weep. She wiped the tears from her face as she carried the feeder to the kitchen door. She had been too emotional in recent weeks, and sleep was hard won. The change coming on, she thought. It had hit her mother early too.

As she reached for the kitchen doorknob, she heard the front door close and saw Grant jog down the deck stairs and cross the snow-covered lawn as he left for work. Avoiding her. He had kept his distance since Hannah's visit the day
before. She assumed Grant had taken Hannah's appearance as a sign that she had continued to visit the Robertson house either for Jesse or for the kids. She hadn't bothered to correct him, if that was in fact what was bothering him. He was a man who resorted to cold silences rather than outward rage. His unwillingness to talk things through, to argue, used to bother her. She had once peppered him with questions until he finally opened up to her, revealing the source of the wound he nursed, but in the last few months she had lost energy for it. She realized she no longer cared. Nevertheless she raised a hand to Grant when he glanced back at her as he got in his truck. But he didn't say goodbye.

Gina crossed the road to the Robertson driveway in the dark, the yard light by the old farmhouse guiding her way. The snow squeaked underfoot and flakes continued to fall, as they had for most of the evening. She loved these winter nights, snowflakes drifting, collecting in the shaft of light from the farmhouse.

Hannah was in the living room. Gina could see her through the window, sitting on that old red couch. Brandon was in the room with her, perched, as she so often saw him now, in a chair in front of the main window. He sat where Elaine had sat, leaning forward, eyes staring straight ahead with a similar intensity, though what he was looking at was anyone's guess. The river beyond was dark. Only the street lights of the reserve offered light.

As Gina reached the outbuildings, Abby barked once from the machine shed, but then only wagged her tail. The dog knew her. From her house across the road Gina had seen the spray of sparks leap from the shed and out into falling snow. So she knew Jesse was out here working late, as he had since Stew's death, keeping his distance from the house, from Hannah, from Bran.

Gina waited outside the round metal shed as Jesse finished up his weld. She shielded her eyes to watch the blue and white sparks, and not the brilliant glow at the heart of the weld, fearing welder's flash. She had nursed Jesse through an episode during Elaine's illness. He had groaned with the pain and had been all but blind for a day after he'd stupidly worked without his mask. Jesse lifted the shield on his helmet to inspect his work and startled a little when he saw Gina there, waiting in the snow outside the shop. “Gina,” he said.

She stepped inside, brushing the snowflakes from her hair. “I didn't want to interrupt,” she said.

He took off his helmet and welding gloves, placing them on the workbench beside him. “I was just finishing up for the night.”

“You've been working late a lot. A rush job?”

“No, just a bit of fabrication. Stairs and railings for the mill. I've been picking up work from them now and again.” He turned off the MIG welder.

“I bet they would hire you back.”

“I suppose. If I wanted the job.” He unbuttoned his leather shirt and turned off the valve on the tank. “So, what brings you here?”

Gina noted the distance in his voice. She had talked to him only once in the last couple of months, for a few minutes stolen at Stew's funeral, when she had offered her hand in condolence. There had been others waiting to talk with Jesse, his father's old friends, farmers from the valley, and she'd had to move on.

“Hannah came by yesterday.”

Jesse shrugged off the leather shirt and hung it on a hook by the door, then took down his coat. “Does Grant know you're here?”

“She tells me you're leaving, heading back to the coast.”

“Once I get Bran set up.”

“He'll need ongoing care. You can't just house him in some ward or group home and leave.”

“I have a life I left behind, Gina. A business. A house.”

“You have a life you left behind here. Your kids.”

“Hannah is a grown woman. I said I would help her pay for a place while she's in school. Brandon needs more care than I can give him.” He put on his jacket. “Look, we gave it a shot. Keeping Bran at home is just too much for us. It's not fair to Hannah either. She should be in college, making a life for herself, not playing nurse to Bran.”

“You're right, of course.” Gina looked out into the snow. The flakes shining in the shop light like sparks from a welder. Then she turned back to him. “Would it make a difference if I stepped in to help?”

“You made it clear that wasn't going to happen. Grant made it clear.”

“Would you stay if I did?”

“I don't know.”

Gina took his hand. “You're burned,” she said, circling her thumb around the edge of the fresh wound on his finger. There was a bandage on the palm of his hand where he'd suffered another burn, evidently that evening.

“I got lazy,” he said. “Welded without my gloves.”

She kept holding his hand, inspecting, and rubbing a thumb over the many recent and healed burns that covered it. “I've missed you,” she said.

He pulled his hand away. “You made your choice.”

“I said we needed to cool it. Things were moving too fast. And you had other things to think about. I haven't made a choice, Jesse.”

“You're still in that house, aren't you? You're still with him.”

“We've slept in separate bedrooms for months.” Gina felt a twinge at this half-truth. They did sleep in separate rooms, but she and Grant had come together a handful of times on the couch, out of need, familiarity, grief.

“You said you weren't ready to give everything up. Him. The house. Your place here.”

“I said I wouldn't give it up if I had nothing to go to.”

“So, what? You want to live
here
? With me and the kids?”

“No.” Gina raked both hands through her hair. “I don't know.”

“You tell me you want me to make a commitment, and yet you won't make one yourself.”

“Can't we just take some time to figure it out? Together, I mean?”

“But you'll live in that house, with him.”

“For now.”

“And we sneak around, behind his back.”

Gina crossed her arms and stared out into the night. “Or I move out,” she said finally, without looking at him. “So I have a place you could come to, when you can. So we can see how this goes.”

“You would do that? Move out?”

“If you stayed.” She nodded slowly as she worked things through. “I could get an apartment right away, but it would take me a while to unwind everything here. Grant won't want to sell the house. He'll want to come to some kind of settlement. I'll have to figure out what to do with the animals. They'll have to stay on the place for now.” She looked at Jesse. “I would have to stop in daily to care for them. I know Grant won't.”

“Am I just an excuse for you to leave him?” Jesse asked.

She took his hand again, touching the many scars there. “Maybe. I don't know. I'm not sure of anything at this point, except I don't want you to leave.”

They stood there together saying nothing for a time. Then Jesse turned her hand and shook it firmly as if they were making a deal. “Okay, but no guarantees,” he said.

She smiled. “No guarantees.”

Jesse pulled her close to study her face, and she felt him growing against her. He smelled of heated metal and sweat. His face appeared sunburnt, and flushed. Sometime that night he had welded without his mask. Stupid, stupid man, she thought, and, perversely, loved him for it. He would risk
injury, blindness, but not love. Well, maybe he was risking it now.

He kissed her and his lips were hot, as if he were feverish. She felt feverish herself. She had come to convince Jesse to stay with his children and yet, in this machine shed, she had chosen to leave her husband. But then, she had left him months ago. Perhaps Jesse was right; that was the reason she had come here all along. She was surprised to find that this time she experienced no guilt, no remorse. It was done.

Abby shifted and whined from her spot under the overhead heater. Somewhere close, a coyote cried and another took up its call, echoing off the hills, filling the narrow valley with a chorus of yips and howls.

THE BOY SAT
in the chair and looked out the living-room window to the river and cliff above. There was still a skiff of snow on Little Mountain, but on the valley floor the fields were brown and leaf buds had appeared on the trees. The sockeye young, the alevin, had hatched from their eggs over the winter and now waited for spring within their gravel beds, restless after their long sleep. In a month they would burst up into the river as fry. Not long after, they would be ready for their journey to the lake. He had so little time to prepare.

The boy placed his hands on his thighs, breathed in deeply and began. But then the girl, Hannah, entered the room with pills and a glass of water. “Here,” she said.

He glanced up at her but didn't answer. He never answered now. Nor did he fight her. He simply placed the pills in his mouth and swallowed.

Hannah watched him carefully as he did so, then turned and left the room, carrying the glass. As soon as she was
gone, the boy fished the pills from the side of his mouth and slipped them into the pocket of his jeans. He spit the bitter taste of the medicine into the lone wilting plant in the corner. Later, when he was alone in his room, he would hide the pills with the others in a pair of shoes beneath his bed, as he had for over a month now. His mind had almost recovered. He felt clearer, stronger. He was ready.

He listened to be sure Hannah was occupied in the kitchen, attending to her chores, and he wouldn't be disturbed. Then he sat in his chair, focused on the image on the cliff face and, once again, began.

THE SALMON FRY
had escaped their gravel nests and now darted in the shallows of Lightning River, waiting for the spring freshets that would wash them to the lake. They scattered from Hannah's path as she sloshed through the water. She had seen Alex heading back to the reserve and had raced down the path after him.

“Alex,” she called. “Wait!” He stopped on the other side of the river, as if deciding whether to acknowledge her or not, then turned and walked back to her. They met in the shallows.

“Brandon is missing,” Hannah told him. “He left without a coat or shoes sometime in the night. I checked on him at about three. He was in bed, asleep. Dad and I walked the river at five-thirty, as soon as we realized he was gone.” Hunting for Brandon's body in the early morning light. She couldn't say it out loud, but she knew Alex understood. “We searched all the outbuildings. Dad just left with Gina to drive the roads. I don't know where else to look.”

“Have you phoned the cops?”

“Gina called Grant before they left. Grant said he would get out here as soon as he could.”

“Okay.” Alex took out his cell as he led her to the shore near the development site. “I'll get the word out.” Hannah watched him make call after call to relatives and friends on the reserve. She could think of no one to phone herself. Alex ended his last call and shook his head. “No one has seen him. As soon as your dad gets back, we'll put together a search party and comb Little Mountain. Brandon has got to be hiding here somewhere.”

“Or he's in the river.” Tangled in the branches on the river bottom. Hannah covered her mouth. “Oh, Jesus.”

“Hey, hey. Come here.”

Alex took her into his arms and she buried her face in his chest. He smelled of cigarette smoke and oranges, and as he rocked her back and forth, she calmed somewhat.

“I found a stash of pills in one of Brandon's shoes under his bed,” she said. “He's been making like he's swallowing them, but when I'm gone he spits them out.”

Alex released her. “For how long?”

“I don't know. A few weeks.”

“The mystery has gained strength then. Listen, Hannah, it's no coincidence Brandon has gone missing right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“The salmon fry. They're ready to head to the lake, and the mystery is free to bring down the power of that storm. I think he may have already started.” He pointed at the thunderhead above them, which had taken on an eerie
green cast. The clouds had begun to circle at a frightening speed. Alex gauged her reaction, then said, “You still don't believe me.”

Hannah was uncertain what to say. Despite her father's reassurance and everything she had read about her brother's illness, she still felt Bran was no longer with them, that someone,
something
had taken his place. She looked down to avoid Alex's gaze, to the shoreline at her feet. There in the mud were the directionless tracks of dogs, so easy to differentiate from the footprints of the coyotes, which didn't meander but ran with purpose. Amid the coyote tracks, she spotted one set of bare human footprints that she had managed to miss on her earlier search. As she stared, another set of footprints appeared in the mud as if someone had just stepped down in front of her. She looked up but there was no one close.

“What is it?” Alex asked.

“I'm not sure.” Another set of footprints appeared, then another and another, heading upriver. “Don't you see that?” she asked, pointing.

“What?”

She followed the prints and they led her to the band's recreation site near the bush. As Alex caught up with her, she turned to him. Behind her the footprints were gone; only Alex's and her own wet boot prints remained.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“I think someone is trying to tell me something,” she said. She searched the trees ahead of her and there was Brandon, running through bush. “He's there!” she cried.

“Where?”

Hannah sprinted after her brother. “Bran, wait. Stop!” The blur of bare skin through bush. “Bran, wait!” Her brother didn't slow or turn and his dark figure receded into the bush, following the path up Little Mountain.

Alex overtook Hannah and she followed him up the path until it opened onto a logging road on crown land. Alex stopped and looked both ways. Hannah caught up to him, out of breath. “Which way?” she said.

“I don't know. Are you sure you saw him?”

She stood there, baffled, searching. Then she saw her brother again, far up the road that wound around Little Mountain. “There.” She sped ahead but lost him, and began to doubt what she had seen until she once again spotted him up ahead, at the lookout near cliff's edge. “Brandon!” she called, but as she reached the turnaround, her brother wasn't there.

Hannah wiped the sweat from her face with the edge of her T-shirt. Her legs felt weak, not in her control. They vibrated from exhaustion, beat with the blood pumping through her. But there was something more, a buzz from the fireweed brushing against her leg. Hannah reached down and pressed the stalk between her fingers and felt the vibration between her hands, like the electrical hum she experienced when she ran her hand over the back of her laptop as she closed it.

Alex reached her and bent over with both hands on his knees to catch his breath. “You see him?”

“He
was
here. He just disappeared.”

“We can't stay up here to look for him. We've got to leave.”

“Why?”

Alex glanced at the clouds swirling immediately overhead. They rumbled as lightning flashed across the sky. “You feel that electrical hum around us?”

“I felt the buzz running through the fireweed.”

Alex pointed up, at the hydro towers that loomed high above her and receded one after the other back through the cut block down the next slope. The lines hung low over their heads. “The electricity is bleeding from the lines to us on the ground. Standing out here, we're just asking that lightning to hit us.”

He held out his hand and Hannah touched it tentatively, with just the pads of her fingers. She startled as a jolt of electricity zapped between them. She tried again, taking his hand, and felt a tingling that electrified every nerve.

Hannah glanced up at Alex in wonder. He grinned at her. “This isn't the first time I've felt that with you,” he said.

Hannah released his hand, uncertain how to respond. “We can't leave Bran up here,” she said.

“You sure he went this way? I didn't see him, not even once.”

“How could you miss him? He was naked.”

Alex shrugged.

Hannah put her hands to her face and turned circles as she called her brother. “Bran! Brandon!” Lightning arched to the left and then to the right of Little Mountain and thunder immediately boomed.

Alex said, “He could have taken another path down. We should head back to the river. Watch for him there.”

Hannah stepped forward, to cliff's edge, to look out over the valley, hoping to see her brother on the trails below. An eagle, perched on a pine that clutched the cliff face, took flight, circling over the benchland, and Hannah did see Brandon there, standing on the cliff side of Samuel's grave. The tent hid him from anyone standing on the opposite shore. “Look!” she cried. “There's Bran!”

“If he was up here, how did he get down there so fast?”

“I don't know.” Hannah grabbed her phone and pressed ‘Jesse' on her contact list. “But I saw him.” She waited for her father to pick up.

“Then his soul is still here.” Alex paused. “Or has returned.”

Hannah shook her head, bewildered. The Brandon she saw by the tent below was only dressed in underwear and a T-shirt, but at least he wasn't naked.

Jesse picked up. “Dad, Bran's at the grave.”

“Oh, thank god. We're at the turnoff to the highway. I can be back in twenty minutes.”

“Hurry.”

Hannah hung up and pocketed her phone.

“I was right,” said Alex. “He
is
calling down the storm. Look.”

Below, Bran faced the cliff on which they stood, staring up at the pictograph, his arms outstretched. Then he roared, his voice ringing against the rock face, and the clouds burst. Rain at first sprinkled them, then poured down. Lightning
flashed and flashed again, followed immediately by booms that shook the ground beneath their feet. All at once, Hannah saw Brandon standing at cliff's edge right in front of her, even as she also saw him below, at Samuel's grave.

“What the fuck?” she said.

“What?” asked Alex.

“Don't you see him?”
This
Brandon was naked. He opened his arms and fell backwards off the cliff edge and into the thunderous rain as if into river water. Instinctively, Hannah reached out, crying, “No!” But her brother didn't fall to the benchland below. He simply disappeared. Hannah understood. She
knew
with that same powerful certainty she had experienced when her mother had died, the knowing of schizophrenics and mystics. Brandon had just asked her to do the necessary thing, to submerge herself with him in these dark waters, to dive into his madness, to save him.