Patrice could tell from her mother’s frown of confusion that she’d slept so heavily she didn’t know where she was. Then Zhaanat’s face sharpened and her lips curved away from her teeth. She pulled the shawl closer.
“Damn if I know how I got here,” she murmured.
“Gerald’s out there.”
“Good. He’ll find her.”
Patrice nodded. Gerald had found people now and then through the years, but sometimes he flew in circles. Sometimes their place was hidden.
That night, he flew for a long time, inhabited by a particular spirit. After a while he did find Vera. She was lying on her back, wearing a greasy dress, a cloth across her throat. She was motionless, but she wasn’t dead. Perhaps she was asleep. Patrice would have thought that her uncle had found an image of her mother from that afternoon, except that Gerald said he had found her in the city, and there was a form beside her. A small form. A child.
The next day, Patrice put aside the troubling, and yet reassuring, information from the jiisikid, and jumped into the backseat of Doris Lauder’s car. It was a rainy fall morning and Patrice was extremely grateful to be picked up and brought to work. She offered, as she had before, to contribute money for gasoline. Doris refused with a vague wave, saying that she’d be driving anyway.
“Maybe next month.” She smiled into the mirror.
“Maybe I’ll be driving next month,” said Valentine. “Daddy is fixing up a car for me.”
“What kind?” asked Doris.
“Probably an all kinds of car,” said Valentine. “You know. A car made of other cars.”
The rain streamed in silvery bolts across the back window. Nobody spoke for a while.
“I hear Betty Pye’s coming back to work today,” said Valentine.
“Oh goodness,” said Doris, with an abrupt laugh.
Betty had taken her year’s week of paid sick leave to get her tonsils removed. At her age! Thirty years. She’d gone to Grand Forks for the operation because it was apparently more serious to have them removed as an adult. But she’d been adamant about doing it. She’d insisted that her neck swelled up every November and stayed thick all through the winter and she was through with that. The doctors had examined her throat and told her that her tonsils were unusually large, “real germ collectors.” Everybody knew the details.
“I can’t wait to hear how it went,” said Patrice.
The two in the front seat laughed, but she hadn’t said it to be mean. Betty would certainly make her operation into a drama. Patrice didn’t know Betty very well, but work went so much faster when she was there. And Betty was, indeed, very much present when the women arrived at the jewel bearing plant. Betty’s round face was a bit ashen, and her voice box hadn’t healed yet. She spoke in a thready croak. But as always she was round and rolling, wearing green checks. A focused worker, she did her job. She had brought a large covered bowl of rice pudding for lunch, and when she swallowed her eyes watered. She was quiet all through work, whispering that it hurt like hell to talk. As they left for the day, Betty slipped a folded piece of paper to Patrice, and walked off. As Doris and Valentine spoke in the front seat, now pitying Betty for the pain she obviously suffered, Patrice took out the paper and read, I heard your looking for your sis. My cousin lives in the Cities. She saw her and wrote to you—with her L hand because she broke her R finger pointing out my faults. That’s Genevieve for you. Watch the mail.
Patrice folded up the paper and smiled. She was drawn to Betty because she was so much like her sister in her ability to make life’s bitterness into comedy. Broke her right finger pointing out my faults. What did that even mean? She tipped her head back, closing her eyes.
On Saturday morning, Patrice put on the swing coat she’d pulled from the piles of mission-store clothing. What a find. It was a lovely shade of blue, lined with flannel wool under top-quality rayon. The coat was tailored, and had a fine shape. She tied on a red and blue plaid scarf, and shoved her hands in the coat pockets. There was a path through the woods that would take her four miles, straight into town and the post office. Or she could walk the road and likely get picked up. Although the sky had cleared, the ground was still wet. She did not have overboots, and didn’t want to soak her shoes. Patrice took the road. It wasn’t long before she was picked up. And by Thomas Wazhashk. He pulled his car over slightly ahead of her and waited. A rope tied down the trunk lid, and she could see the dull galvanized tin of their water cans. One lucky thing about living so far back in the bush, their spring still ran. And it ran clear. Most people closer in, near town, or out in prairie land, had lost their water or cattle had ruined their springs. Even the dug wells were drying out.
Thomas and Zhaanat were cousins—Patrice was unclear on exactly how they were related and “cousins” was considered a general word that covered a host of relationships. Thomas was an uncle to her and so his sons were also cousins. She sped forward and took the front seat when Wade got out and gave her the honor.
“Thank you for stopping, uncle.”
“At least this time you’re hitching on dry land.”
Last summer, she had swum out to his fishing boat, surprised Thomas. She’d hitched a ride out of the lake. It tickled him to talk about it. He didn’t know exactly why she’d been swimming out there so far.
Patrice was one of the only young people who addressed him in Chippewa, or Cree, or in a combination of the two. They didn’t speak exactly alike but understood each other. If Wade was puzzled, let him absorb the language out of curiosity, thought Thomas. They chatted for a while and Thomas learned that Zhaanat had set up the special tent. Gerald had seen that Vera was alive and that she had a child beside her. Patrice got out at the mercantile, which also held the post office. He would return to pick her up. While he and Wade filled the water cans, Thomas thought about how his grandfather had consulted with someone like Gerald, long ago, when they needed to find out about Falon. So it happened they knew Falon had died well before the official message arrived.
On the way back, Patrice decided to read the letter from Betty Pye’s cousin again, out loud, to her uncle.
I saw your sister down in the Cities, and something was wrong with her. Last I knew, she was at Stevens Avenue Apartments, number 206. I know because a number of Indians live there and I was staying on that floor too. Saw her in the hallway with her baby and she wouldn’t talk to me.
Patrice told her uncle she wanted to walk back from his house. She needed to think. The road to her house ran alongside water, and the cool air smelled of rain drying off the yellow leaves. The cattails on the sloughs were soft brown clubs, the reeds still sharp and green. On the lake, wind was ruffling up blue-black waves so lacy that foam rimmed the beach. The sun beamed from between dark scudding clouds. Vera had always wanted to stay where she could see the birches and sloughs. She had worked on an old cabin up the hill from their mother’s house. Vera had camped there, trying to reclaim it. She had cleared away some trees that were trying to grow up through the floor, and she had drawn out her plans to make the cabin into her ideal house. Patrice had helped her work out a large room with a kitchen and a dining table, even two private bedrooms. Every detail of the drawing was labeled. Vera’s penmanship was squared off and even, like on a real blueprint. There was a special close-up of a mullioned window with striped curtains. Patrice still had that picture. Vera, who dressed distinctively and was elegant rather than Pixie-cute, loved home economics class and had copied that window from a book called Ideal Home. She hadn’t wanted to leave, but she’d fallen in love. It was sudden, and Zhaanat hadn’t been in favor. Zhaanat had turned away rather than say goodbye to her daughter when she left for the Cities. Patrice knew this haunted her mother.