After James (38 page)

“Lord. Where we find ourselves.”

She saw Hattie look in the rearview and away. There'd been something about horses.

“Will the horses be okay?”

“This kind of thing is local. I'm still twenty miles from here. Not that there's ever been this kind of thing.”

“And we're still alive.”

“Well, I'm taking a clue from Corban. He looks alive and, see, he turns his head when I say his name so that's a good sign for me, and I'm talking to you. The sky gives you a beating like that, makes you feel twice as alive.” She
turned to Celia and smiled. There were grains of ice in her hair. “Feel it?”

When they reached the ranch Celia opened her door and Corban scrambled over her and fell out onto his chest and ran up to the house. It was three storeys, wood and stone, dormered, with trees shading a porch. She got out and stood beside the truck. At the screen door a tall black teenage girl appeared and came out onto the porch and smiled as Corban wagged madly at her feet. Hattie asked her about the storm and the girl said they'd seen it in the distance was all.

“Jana, this is Celia. She'll need dinner and a bed.”

Jana led her to a second-floor room with a view of a little river and handed her a towel, as if she'd been expected. She showered and cleaned the red stars on her hands and knees and a round-faced white girl came to the bathroom door with a green cotton dress and took Celia's clothes for washing. She said to call her May but it wasn't her real name because she was in hiding. No one knew where she was, except her older brother knew she was somewhere. She asked Celia who had sponsored her and she said no one, she was just a guest for the night, and May said that Hattie had told them it might be longer. Celia asked about a phone but May said the line had been dead for hours. There was no internet in the house, Hattie wouldn't have it, and no TV. The radio said the storms were still out there.

She found herself in the kitchen helping Hattie prepare a green chili. The two girls she'd met joined them and asked her
questions about where she was from and what state Canada was in and what the hailstorm had been like and after a few minutes Celia couldn't talk anymore, felt weak, and had to go outside and sit on the porch. At some point a woman around her age came out and asked if she was all right. The woman sat on the porch steps, leaning back with her limbs slightly splayed, and stayed with her, saying nothing. May brought Celia and the woman bowls of chili and they ate watching a skinny blond girl lead a grey horse up from the river, both of them covered in mud, and stand across the yard brushing it and then lead it under an arch made of punctured garden hose so that a rain fell on them and then she led the horse into the barn and the woman with Celia said, “Those two are in love.” May collected their bowls and returned a few minutes later with three schoolbooks and sat on the steps and began to read and murmur to herself. The books had cracked, worn spines, barely legible titles.
Introducing Biology. A World of Literature. History Now.
Then the skinny girl went into the house and came out with her dinner and sat with May and they read side by side. The skinny one had washed her hands but mud was caked along her bare slight arms.

Celia went up to her room and lay down and listened to the sounds in the house. She woke after midnight with a fist in her head and lay there eyes open in pain. Past the mounds formed by her feet under the sheets she watched the ruled score cast on the wall by the moon as a breeze moved the latched shutters and the slat lines shifted and fixed, shifted and fixed. In the furrowed light dimly hesitant on the wall were parade grounds, canalscapes, microchips, fork tines and
barrel staves, ribs breaching a cave floor. The images fired briefly and died. A pattern held in the sequence of things never fully read or proved before the pattern changed. Some mechanism of perception could make forgetting and knowing the same. The thought made no sense, there was something to it. At least the headache located her. When had she last felt fully and surely composed? In time the pain eased and she sat up, stood. She put on the cotton dress.

In the dim glow of a horseshoe night-light plugged into a hallway outlet she found outside her door the plastic superhero that wasn't hers, her suitcase, computer bag, and smashed cellphone. She took the phone and made her way in the semidark along the silent hall. The doors she passed stood open and the rooms were dark and empty. Moonlight through the windows guided her down the stairs and into the main room. She took a chair near an open screened window and a cold woodstove with a yard light fixed in the door glass. She felt like the issue of a stranger's dream. The house seemed empty, as if no one had lived there for years, but down the hallway the nails of the dog clicked along the pine floor. She had never before so needed just to sit still.

She pressed a button and examined the display on her phone. She'd received a text from her father or Indrani that must have arrived on the road somewhere, what seemed a single, broken word caught in the phone's spidering glass, the crystal letters fragmented, busted back to cuneiform, refracted out of sense. There was no signal. She stared at the shattered characters, trying to believe they read “safe” or “found” and continued to stare until they weren't characters at all but little
shards of need caught in a webbing, the need to say, to be said to, and she supposed she was the webbing, still in shock, and she allowed herself to believe that what could be known was formed by what could not be, that at times the otherworldly came hammering down as if to reshape the tired realities, exhausted of force. And she was the webbing that radiated like light shined on a cave wall, like glass in broken memory theatres, in burst ice, shattered windshield and headlights. She was the webbing was river mud caked on the arm of a girl trying to memorize kingdom phylum class and sonnets, the dates of imperial centuries, the definitions and numbers not taking, thinking instead of her new friend May who was thinking of her older brother watching the news, some foreign streets on fire and where was she, his sister hiding somewhere, closing the old schoolbooks and thinking of her friend who learned today only how a certain grey horse liked a certain firm brushstroke and stood foursquare thinking blood bone I am thinking back into the girl into Celia thinking once you break it all up, the old ways of seeing and saying, you can know anyone, be right inside it, the thing itself.

The nails clicked on but Corban didn't appear. She shut her eyes and the sound stopped. When she opened them someone sat across from her in the dark.

“You were dreaming.”

At first she thought it was the woman who'd been with her on the porch, but then it wasn't.

“I don't remember.”

“You were talking. Not in words.”

So she talked in her sleep.

“What's that sound?” asked Celia.

“Generator. The power's gone. I woke and here you are.”

“Where? Another place I'm not from.”

“None of us is from here. Not a soul.”

A breeze moved through the window. Outside the vapour lamp spun insects in a multiple helix, pressed a thin silver dust onto the yard. She used to know the word for the force that drew them to the light.

The woman said, “Phototaxis.” Almost a whisper.

Celia turned back. The woman's eyes weren't visible but she was facing Celia and the window. There was nothing to see out there but the light.

“Yes. Phototaxis.” Celia nodded. “I don't know your name.” Now the woman nodded. “I'm Celia.”

“I know.”

The woman's motions were the same as her own. Even her posture, sitting back, one foot rafted slightly forward, a reflection.

“One of those hailstones hit my head. I should try to keep awake.”

“I'll stay with you.”

The woman told a story about the house and the area and a neighbour who lived alone, and Celia tried but could follow only the voice, not the story, which passed by in images. A great fire, a man near the edge of the river and walking at night in the fields under the stars. The story then broke open and covered crowds and cities, planes and handwritten pages and sisters, and in the woman's voice the only question wasn't whether the stories were half-true or dead
true but whether they were truthfully told, and though Celia was aware she was dreaming again the things the woman spoke of carried a desperate loneliness that felt the more real when other notes emerged or a chord of them she hadn't heard before.

The next time she opened her eyes the woman was gone. There was no generator. The yard light was there with the moon. Through the window she heard a sound like a great branch snapping far away. She couldn't see into the days ahead. Her eyes closed and when she opened them she had only her name and a shifting on the wall and something moving in the yard that set off the horses and then it passed and all was quiet again.

All gratitude to dear friends Hendrik and Debi Poinar, who find sequences and the stories in them. Here's to their codes and expressions, and their guiding the way to remote caves and the mouths of worlds long past and to come.

For their readings I'm indebted to Gil Adamson, Richard Helm, Ben Lerner, Michael Redhill, and Karen Solie. For great catches, Anne Horowitz, Heather Sangster, and Müge Turan. Thank you Susan, Rob, John, Sandra, Glenna. Thanks to my agent, Ellen Levine, for her wisdom and support.

Thank you, Don.

Thank you to my wonderful U.S. editor, Meg Storey, the All Seer, and to Nanci McCloskey, Cheston Knapp, and the staff at Tin House, people of surpassing imagination. Thanks to Lynn Henry, Anita Chong, Ashley Dunn, and everyone at McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada Limited, who saw the novel home in hard weather.

There is no deeper or more exacting a reader than Alexandra Rockingham. She was with me city to city, border to border, and made everything itself by making it better.

With great courage, Ellen Seligman edited this novel. There's no end to what needs saying, no way to begin saying it. She was a friend and I miss her