Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien

the air in and out, a lone swimmer.
    On the fourth day, they called their father. Long distance, the telephone lines snaking across the water and up into the Island’s
     northern tip. Lorraine tried to calm herself by picturing him, phone cradled against his shoulder, mountains and forest in
     the background. He asked them over and over, “But when did you last see her?”
    “Days ago, days ago, days ago.”
    “What did she say?”
    “She didn’t say anything.”
    “I promise you,” he told them. “She’ll be back before I make it home.”
    They wandered around the empty house eating peanut-butter sandwiches. Kathleen stared out the front window. “Mom’s coming
     back today,” she said. “She doesn’t know what to do without me.” Lorraine’s head hurt. She went and stood inside her mother’s
     closet, wondering if they would be able to take it with them when they left the house.
    The next day, when her father walked in the door, Lorraine was lying on the carpet, her hand pressed to the cave of her stomach.
     Kathleen came out of the bedroom hysterical. She was screaming and it was so out of character that Lorraine sat up, her brain
     muddy. It looked like Kathleen and her father were dancing, the way his hands clamored around her shoulders, then her head.
     If only it were quieter. She lay still thinking that if everyone would leave her alone, she might be able to get up off the
     floor and find her way into bed. Then she became afraid that she was not real at all. In this room was Kathleen, unable to
     breathe, sobbing. Her father, calming her with his sad voice. And then the nothing of herself like a crumb in the carpet,
     gradually becoming nothing at all.
    Lorraine remembers that after their mother left, they went up to the logging camps with their father. They drove for hours
     along gravel roads. In the geographical center of the Island, the trees opened up into a little town. The air was so clean
     it hurt Lorraine’s throat. She tilted her head to the sky and the trees pointed up forever. Their father took them up to the
     side of a mountain where boys as young as twenty were taking the trees down one by one.
    “You see,” her dad said, as they drove along the logging roads, “I never could have brought you here.” He was wearing a white
     T-shirt, suspenders, and jeans. His skin was dark and shining from the sun. “This isn’t any place for a family. No shopping
     malls, no movies, nothing to do.”
    Lorraine didn’t bother to argue. They watched from the car while sunset turned the sky a blistering orange.
    There was a general store in the camp, the kind that sold milk and cheese among the diapers and saws. Her father towered over
     the shelves, his big hands scooping up Popsicles from the freezer and packages of marshmallows. Outside the tent, when the
     night was pitch black but the air was still warm, they sang songs around the campfire. Kathleen had a voice like an angel,
     thick and rolling like their mother’s. “Boy,” Dad said, his voice scratchy, “you sure know how to raise the dead, don’t you?”
    When he lay back in the dirt and his face disappeared in the darkness, he told them how excited their mother had been when
     she first found out she was pregnant. She thought it would turn her life around. Their father shrugged his shoulders. “She
     thought I might give up this kind of life. Move back to the city. Don’t ever think it’s your fault, because the one to blame
     is sitting right here. I was no help to her. I kepttelling her I had my work. I had all this work to do.” His voice was dry as sand.
    When they got back to the city, their father arranged everything. He took them to meet their social worker. He explained that
     he wasn’t up to raising a family, that he’d had his chance and lost it. Kathleen, distant and aloof, told him, “We’ll be fine.
     Don’t change your plans on our account.” Lorraine said nothing. She couldn’t bring herself to look at