He coughed into his fist as his helper bobbed his head self-consciously, took a drink of his beer, and licked his lopsided mustache.
“It was a dangerous thing to do,” my father said, a hint of anger coming into his voice, his gaze unfocused as if he were alone—“but I didn’t regret it. I hated that camp. The men there just talked about women and what they’d do when they got out. It was no different than prison.”
Though his telling was gripping—the rising river, the shaking bridge, his bold dash across its planks—it wasn’t this that haunted me. It was the way he’d spoken about the camp. I reran that line over and over in my head, how he said it with intensity and anger: “It was no different than prison.”
✴
BEYOND MY WINDOW, a pale splotch in the low clouds showed where the moon hid.
Shouting had woken me.
“You can’t go! I won’t let you!”
“You can’t stop me!” she shouted. Her footsteps crossed the living room.
“You’re fucking crazy!” He slammed a door, making the house shake.
I stared at the ceiling, willing my brain to do more than listen to the battering of my heart. There was a secret at the center of our lives. It was like something from a dream, a shape that I glimpsed but couldn’t remember and then saw again another night; I woke knowing I’d seen it, but not what it was.
I might have slept, drifting in and out, sensing a subtle change like a snowfall in the night, the gradual silencing of the outside, though now the season’s shift was within our walls.
In the morning, I went down the stairs, more tired than ever. My mother was packing, hurrying about. My father’s truck was gone.
“I don’t have time for questions,” she said. She told us only that we were moving across the Fraser River to a town called Mount Lehman.
My brother sidled close. The strangeness of his gaze shone in a way that made me want to run to the mirror. He said he had something to ask, and I saw from his expression that he’d readied one of the trick questions he used to torment other kids. They often involved World War III, and his favorite was, “If America dumped boxed cereal on the USSR, why would it be chemical warfare?” He then had to explain in minute detail our mother’s lessons about chemical foods.
Now he said, “If a nuclear bomb strikes a mile away, do you run toward it or away?”
I let myself see this. A wall of blinding light approached, melting cars and incinerating Christmas trees and cooking human flesh from the bone. Though I knew he’d fool me, I blurted, “Away! I’d run away!”
“Wrong,” he said, loudly but without inflection.
I went to the kitchen door and outside, over the wet grass, past the apple tree to the waterlogged fields. I stood in the windy silence of the valley.
✴
THE PACKING REVEALED how little we owned—blankets and clothes, worn-out books, and some binders of school papers. My mother loaded the spinning wheel she’d bought in hopes of making everything from scratch. Then she filled several jugs with water. We asked why and she said that the water in the valley was from a spring and we would miss it.
We pulled out of the driveway, each of us holding a shimmering jug in our lap. My sister had her hair pinned back, her forehead high and pale, her chin lowered to her collar. My brother stared straight ahead.
We passed Ten Speed where she’d stopped on the roadside, one foot on the ground as she watched, her eyes full of fear for us, wide and flashing with refracted light as our van drove by.
I made myself stop thinking, just seeing, for later, for the rest of my life. I knew this with an unmoving wisdom that made me feel I would indeed become someone else.
And then I was no longer in my seat, in the van, but on the mountain where my father had once taken me. I could see the entire valley, its fields and streams, the road at its center whose presence alone, each day after school, gave me a sense of certainty. It descended past wet rocks and old, gaunt trees, and then leveled and turned onto the straightaway. Past a few farms and the fields of Christmas trees or sod, it rose back along the mountains and returned to where it entered, beyond rock faces lit with quick, brittle streams.
Just outside was a service station where carpooling parents waited. If we turned right, we headed to my school in Abbotsford or to Vancouver. Left led toward Nicomen Island, that piece of muddy earth where my father got his mail and I was born.
Mountains stood against the distance, larger and whiter than those of the valley, the flat, humid, windy ranges washed down from them over millennia and called prairies by those who’d chosen to stay. This was the shape of the world. As a child, I could have drawn it with a crayon: that damp sheet of alluvial land hemmed in by the horizon.
And now we were gone.
PRAYERS, MANTRAS, AND HOW TO SWEAR
On the paper there was a tree, the trunk split in two, and each of those branches split in two, and so on. At the top were the words Arbre Genéalogique, and on the trunk and each fork stood empty boxes. I’d been trying to act normal, but I couldn’t stop yawning, and now there was this. Other kids were filling in the boxes. I couldn’t concentrate. It had taken me a while even to write my own name on the trunk. In the two boxes on the branches above, I printed Bonnie and André. But the highest boxes were the problem. Mrs. Hand told me to write the names of my grandparents—“your father’s father and mother.” When I said, “Je ne les connais pas,” she just said, “Ta grand-maman et ton grand-papa?” But
