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  “Not hungry,” Hutch said. “Thanks.” He hadn’t even noticed the food being brought and there was that little plastic thing the pills came in so the nurse had been round too. “When’ll Dr. MacPherson be back?” It was an hour or so before the resident came.

  “If I don’t have the amputation, what would you have to do to turn that—” he jabbed his chin towards the splint, “into a leg?”

  The doc stood looking down at Hutch, said he needed pictures to explain. He came back later with this big book that looked like a school atlas—Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy. He leaned it on the table, tilting it so Hutch could see.“This is what the lower leg looks like inside, the layers. See these bones, joints, these muscles…”

  “So that’s like a lever,” said Hutch, after a bit.

  The doc nodded.“Exactly.”

  “And the fulcrum should be down there but on my leg it’s gone.” He waited for the nod.“And you’d need to glue all those bits together before it could work again?” Yes. “And it wouldn’t work anyway because the wiring’s gone?” More nods. Hutch stared at the diagrams, flicked a page. “You do plumbing too?”

  Dr. MacPherson smiled a little slow smile.Waited.

  Hutch’s throat closed up and his mouth felt like wrinkled cardboard. He’d have to change stuff kayaking. It meant letting go of hockey and hiking, even chasing a ball around the schoolyard. He’d walk like an old man. And girls. God, don’t think about girls. Jenny. He could hear his mom. Nice girls won’t care. Yes. But. He tried to speak but had to clear his throat and start again. He took a tight breath and forced the words out so they came out in a bellow, like when his voice was breaking.

  “Better take it off then.”

  Mom and Dad were smiling when they came back, hugged him, said they were proud of him. He’d just needed time to think it through.

  “So now you can stop whispering to all the nurses.” Hutch’s grin felt a bit stiff.

  And they both stood there like lumps and that scary look was back in their eyes.

  “What?” He looked from one to the other.“What?” Nobody spoke. “Tell me.”

  “Eugene and Jenny,” Mom said. Stopped. “The back of the bus.” She was whispering.“It went through the ice into a pond.”

  Dad put his arm round her.“They were killed, Hutch.They’re gone.”

  Hutch lay there. The facts seeped into the edges of him but his insides had frozen solid. Eugene and Jenny? Couldn’t be. He just lay there. Now and then something tiny would float up: Jenny splashing him with her paddle, Eugene’s big front teeth. After a while he turned his head away, pulled the sheet up over his face.

  Like Jewels

  Jamie Fitzpatrick

  I WAITED TILL a couple of weeks after the funeral. After they cleared away the wreck and it wasn’t in the papers anymore.That’s when I went out to the highway with my flashlight and tape measure.

  Mother had given up going to bed altogether. She’d be on the couch every night with the TV up on bust. Never watched anything. Just clickclick-click all night long. Come around eleven o’clock one night I sat on the basement stairs and waited. When the channels stopped changing and I could hear it was just the one show with the ads and all, that’s when I knew she was out. The glasses all twisted on her face and the clicker gone down in the cushions.

  Out the back door then. Kicked a plank out of Foley’s fence—it only took one good boot—squeezed through there and I was down the street in no time. Took the shortcut behind Comfort Inn and started up the highway. Sweating through my shirt. Another hot night with no wind at all and the nippers were at me. Flies were bad that year.

  There were two skid marks. Just past the Esso station, where the road turns for the bridge. They started in the right lane and went across to the other shoulder. One was thick and curved like a big eyebrow. The other was thin and you could read the tread pattern in it, the way it pulled sideways. There was no keeping that car on the road. I’d say he hardly got his foot on the brake, it happened that quick. I bent down and dug my nails into the thick one. It was cool and wet from the midnight dew. My nails came out all black. There was the smell of rubber from the sun baking it every day.

  Nobody could tell Margaret what to do. She wouldn’t do the decent thing and sneak away with Nate Cumby. Had to make a show of herself, out driving around with him. Everyone knew Nate and his blue Camaro with the Canadian Club stickers up the side of the windshield. Everyone saw Margaret next to him. They knew her husband was left home with baby Jeremy. Margaret should have been home and they should have been a family. What kind of girl doesn’t want her baby? There was nothing but shame in it. I tried not to take much notice. I was seventeen years old and nothing my big sister did ever made sense to me. So what odds. But it must have been bad for mother.

  The bartender at the Airport Club said they were there most of the afternoon, playing pool. Bold as brass. Nate Cumby must have been pleased with himself, out shooting pool with another man’s wife. Not even trying to hide it. Buddy who worked at the Esso station said he was pumping gas when the Camaro flew by. Doing a hell of a clip, he said. Suppertime on a Tuesday, and summer nearly over. Hardly another car on the road.

  It was the baby drove Margaret to it. She wasn’t ready for a baby, especially a baby that was sick right from the start. At first they thought Jeremy wouldn’t live more than a few days. Maybe it would have been better for everyone if he didn’t, with all the trouble after. When he was born they had to keep track of every breath, every heartbeat. Margaret and her husband wrote it all down in a book, and some days she would leave the hospital and bring the book over to show mother. There were days when it seemed like he was stronger, and days when it seemed like he might not hang on at all. But by Christmas they were able to take him home. So everything should have been better after that. But Margaret couldn’t take it. It was like the baby made her sick too, and he could manage with it but she couldn’t.

  It was bad. Closed casket. People came to the house with cakes and pea soup and Mass cards. I remember a big casserole, must have had three or four pounds of hamburger in it. They all came to the funeral and the next day they went back to their lives like it was nothing to them. They buried Nate somewhere else. He was from Plate Cove, I believe.

  That was my first summer working construction. Pellerin was a real bastard, had me on the run every day. But I was proud of that job. Never left the house without my tape measure. So when I was out there on the highway I felt for it on my belt and got down on my knees. There was no moon, but the big sign was lit up over the Esso station. I got the tape out and took the measure of the skid marks. The big one was nearly three times as wide, and had the steeper curve. The thin one had little gaps in it. Each gap bigger than the last by an eighth or quarter inch, and then half an inch, and then the better part of three inches. The car trying to get airborne, right before she flipped. Nate with a big grin on his face and a hairy elbow hanging out the window. Margaret with the bottle between her legs. I turned my flashlight to the gully, where the grass was all flat and dead, with bits of the windshield sparkling in it, like jewels.

  Jeremy never had much to do with us after that. They brought him around a couple of times when he was a baby. Then they stopped coming, and mother just let it be. She hardly left the house anymore. Still on the couch every night with the TV.

  It might have been different if Jeremy was a regular boy. But he was never well, and they used to take him away to the doctors on the mainland. In the summers he’d be home. One year, he must have been seven or eight years old, and I’d see him and his father every day out on Bennett Drive. Pellerin had us down there doing the new bungalows and split-levels. It was shoddy work too, the way he was rushing us along. And they’d be coming down the sidewalk. Jeremy putting one foot in front of the other. Fighting it, because the feet didn’t want to go and he had to force them. His father holding his arm and nudging him along.

  After that they sent him to a special school somewhere, and
you would always see his picture in the paper, winning a prize for math or science or something. His body was still all wrong. You could see it in the pictures, the way his shoulder lifted up to one of his ears. But you could see Margaret in him, too. Even when he smiled he had a hard face on him, like you just said something. Like he was ready to fight. It was Margaret’s look.

  I couldn’t take living with mother anymore, so I went to Toronto. I think she wanted the house to herself anyway. Said she’d pay my board until I got a job up there. I was over thirty years old by then. But it wasn’t easy, I tell you. Picked up a few cash jobs doing carpentry, tried to get on with the recycling depot. Then mother stopped paying the board and when I called her up she said, “You always wanted to be special and you were never anything special, believe me.” So that was it. Out on the street. It was bad for a while, until I got on with the road crew, painting lines every summer. Finally got myself straightened out.

  Never talked to mother for years, five or six years at least. She found me, I don’t know how. Called a few times. But I never called back. Not until the day I was on a job site and went into the porta-potty and tried to pee. Blood came out. Nearly black, it was that dark coming out of me. I started sweating and shaking. One of the boys dropped me at the hospital and they put me in ICU. First they put a catheter in right down below, and then I had the IV. They stuck so many tubes in me I thought I’d never come out of it.

  At the end of the week they said I could go. I called mother and said I’m coming home out of it. Mother bought the plane ticket because I couldn’t ride the bus, the state I was in. She had to go off her medication to pay for it. She keeps a diary of her medication, and she showed it to me. Nine weeks she couldn’t afford it because she paid for my ticket. Says she’s never been the same since, after the nine weeks and everything else I put her through, and Dr. Snow says she’ll never be the same again.

  She says it nearly killed her when I left and it’ll kill her for sure now I’m back. So I says, make up your mind.

  She still looks like she did after the funeral. Walks around all day with her mouth half open, like she’s thirsty. Like an alcoholic looking for her drink. Still at the TV all night.

  I must have been back about a week, down to Sobeys in the new mall, and who do I see but Jeremy.Wearing the green apron and stacking the fruits and vegetables. Mother never goes to Sobeys. She’s at the Co-op every Tuesday, rain or shine. Same as always. I came home and said he’s up there working, and she nodded. I said it was the baby that killed Margaret, drove her to it all those years ago. Mother shook her head with a queer look, and turned away. I was supposed to leave her alone then. But I didn’t, and finally she said yes, it was the baby.

  Jeremy’s there every day, always on the move and ordering the rest of them around. If you ask him, he’ll still price your fruits and vegetables the old-fashioned way. Put them on the scale, and watch the scale with one eye closed. Do the math in his head and write the price in a big black marker. You can add one more banana or take away a carrot and he’ll do it again. Give you the new price in a flash. Do it in his head. He still lives with his grandparents and walks home at the end of the day, up behind the mall. But he doesn’t walk. He runs. Every day he’s out the door and off like a shot. The other night I was out on Bennett Drive, and he flew right by me with a big grin on his face and the yellow hair bouncing in his eyes. Not much weight on him, and the one foot still turned nearly sideways. But he can motor.

  The highway’s long since paved over. You’d never know anything happened. People are always getting killed and they just clean it up and carry on. There was a feller killed the other day out around Springdale. It was on the news. They showed the wreck. Big old F-150. Someone was on crying and saying what a fine young man he was. Makes you wonder what kind of mess he got himself into before the accident. He’s probably better off. They’re all better off.

  I went in for a check-up last week. They made me stay all day and shot the enema into me and did the x-ray. At the end of it they said I got a black spot right down below. I said how big is it, and the doctor said it’s small. As big as a dime? No, he said, not even that. I’m going back on Monday and they’ll know what it is.

  Jeremy will be twenty-two in the fall. Older than Margaret. She was a couple of weeks short of twenty-two when Nate Cumby’s Camaro went off the highway. That’s a long life for someone in his condition. The doctor said so when he was born, that the best they could expect was a few years. He’s well past that now. He’ll slow down, and then his body will go just like that. It’ll take him in a hurry. I should go down to Sobeys and tell him. We’re in the same boat now. Me and you, Jeremy. It’s coming for you in a hurry, and I got the black spot and we’ll see what they say on Monday. So it might be coming for me as well. Everyone got to pay for their sins.

  Rescue

  Carrie Ivardi

  LAYLA IS CROUCHED beneath the sharp jut of rock that angles toward the sky. Adam can make her out, just barely, in the lulls when the snow settles. He’s strapping the injured snowboarder to the toboggan but turns his head to look up the hill. Gusts of wind blow across the flat top of the mountain, pouring snow down over Layla’s head.

  Layla stands. Arms out in a surfer’s pose, rocking a little to ease her snowboard forward. Adam suspects she’s making a move to position herself below the toboggan to help stabilize it, but he’s already maneuvering into a snow plough and is starting to make his way down.

  “Adam!” Her voice is a snow gun going off in his head. He looks around and sees the slab of compressed ice and snow break off beneath her snowboard. It’s gliding ahead of her over the powdery layer, a car with no brakes, heading straight for Adam and the injured rider on the toboggan.

  Earlier, Adam had seen Layla at the bottom of the hill between the ticket booths and ski lifts when Kyle cut him off. Hip cocked, one arm hugging her board, her other hand massaging her cheek with a guitar pick.

  Kyle was having a hard time between gasps and nose wiping to explain what the matter was. Layla’s hand pressed the pick into the flesh below her cheekbone and Kyle got his point across: his brother was stranded somewhere up in Harmony Bowl. Adam led Kyle to the front of the gondola line and Layla was there, in a waft of pomegranate lotion and beeswax lip balm. She shook off both mittens, unzipped her pocket to put the pick away.

  Adam didn’t want to look at her. Kyle had said his brother told him he was fine. Adam had an obligation to see for himself. He stared through the scratched Plexiglas window at the view, layers of mountain peaks and winding valleys doused in white and green, revealing itself above the stubborn layer of fog still clinging to the valley. Adam spoke without looking at Layla.

  “It’s not going to make any difference.”

  “But you knew I’d be here.”

  Kyle had stopped sniffing and started slapping his hand against his thigh. Probably anxious about the half-hour gondola ride. Kyle eyed the symbolic cross on Adam’s patroller jacket before lighting a joint. His shoulders were hunched, and his dark hair frothed out from under his helmet. “My mom’s gonna kill me. Fuck.”

  Layla turned her back on Adam when Kyle offered her the joint. The spliff hissed and glowed, hissed and glowed, and Kyle’s hand shook during the pass.

  “Where’d I know you from again?” Layla asked Kyle.

  “We met at Tommy Africa’s, remember?”

  Adam remembered. He chuckled to himself, smugly, because Layla’d had to ask Kyle his name before. She’d told Adam months ago she was done with stoner snowboarder types.

  “So who’s hurt?”

  Kyle took the last drag, licked his fingers and pinched the end, then stuffed the roach into his empty smoke pack.

  “My brother. Shit, Mom’ll kill me, anything happens to him.”

  “I think it already did, bro,” said Adam.

  Kyle groaned like a child with a tummy ache and rubbed a hand up and down one side of his face.

  Adam focused on the razor-sharp pe
aks Layla had once compared to actors appearing and reappearing from behind a curtain of weather. She moved closer to him and opened her mouth, that silent gasp of awe he knew she reserved for the view. He expected her to break out in that honky-tonk version of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill,” the way she did when he met her. It was a First-Aid course he was teaching. She showed up ten minutes late, her guitar case clenched under her arm the way some people carry a briefcase. She croaked a verse of the song out during the unit on how to tie a sling, and then broke into a snorting laugh. Adam chose her as his casualty to demonstrate First Aid for choking, the insides of his arms snug against her abdomen.

  The gondola swayed and Layla stepped closer to him, close enough that he imagined her heat, that constant vibration she emitted, bouncing like sound waves off his sleeve. He concentrated on the flotilla of mountains unfolding as they climbed higher on the cables.

  “The topography of climate, eh?” she said.

  Adam pulled his arm across his chest. He touched his mouth with one finger, assumed the stance of the First-Aid instructor three years her senior. Kyle was busy babbling a soundtrack of curse prayers to his mother, and Adam didn’t want to have this conversation in front of him.

  Her voice was soft, and he thought, maybe she’s acting out this calmness, which he found more alarming than the raw, pleading way she’d attacked him the night before, saying, “Fuck it. Love is like a job. It’s easier to find another when you already have one.” But he didn’t recall either of them, throughout this whole season of tangling themselves in each other’s limbs, ever mentioning anything about love.

  Maybe she believed he’d change his mind. He had a selfish desire for her to pine for him, look out to the horizon of his departure and wait for him to come back over the mountains.

  “At least look at me.”