over there.”
“Yeah, but they’re boring trees. They’re not doing anything.”
“Fair point,” Vincent said, and smiled and put the camera away, although it pained her to stop filming at the three-minute-twenty-seven-second mark. She was aware that the necessity of filming in precise five-minute intervals probably constituted an undiagnosed case of OCD, but this had never really struck her as a serious problem.
“How can a road have two dead ends?”
“If it’s accessible only by boat or floatplane. Picture a row of houses on an inlet. Forest all around, water, nothing else.”
“You had a boat?”
“Some people had their own boats. We didn’t. I used to catch the mail boat to get to school in the mornings, then a bus would meet us by the pier on the other side and drive us to the nearest town. There was no television there till I was thirteen.”
“What do you mean, no television?” Mirella was looking at her as if she’d just announced she was from Mars.
“I mean, there was no signal.”
“So if you switched on the TV, what would happen?”
“Well, you’d just get static,” Vincent said.
“On every channel?”
----
—
(A memory: thirteen years old, suspended from school for the graffiti incident, sitting by the kitchen window with a book, then looking up and seeing Dad walking up the hill from the water taxi with an unwieldy box in his arms, grinning. “Look what my mom bought for us,” he said. “I got a call to come pick it up from the electronics store in Port Hardy.” Grandma Caroline had departed that morning to return to her own life for a few days, but it appeared she’d left a parting gift.
A television! A tower had gone up a few months earlier in Grace Harbour, just up the inlet, which meant that for the first time in history there was a signal in Caiette, and Mom would never have allowed this but it wasn’t up to her anymore, because she’d been gone for three weeks. Dad and Vincent flicked through variations of static to find a room, where two women with American accents were talking, one with long brown hair and glasses, the other with a cloud of platinum hair and tighter clothing.
“ WKRP in Cincinnati, ” Dad said. “I used to watch this in the eighties.”
One of the women said something funny, which made Dad laugh for the first time in three weeks. Where was Cincinnati? On television the city had a soft gleam, like the blond actress’s hair. Later, Vincent pulled the atlas down from a high shelf and found it, a point in the middle of the closest country to the south. She looked up the page for southwestern British Columbia, but of course Caiette was too small to appear on the map.)
----
—
Mirella had a story about a duplex in a housing development of identical duplexes, exurban Cleveland, cornfields on one side and an expressway on the other. Her mother worked two jobs and her father was in prison. Mirella and her sister were home alone for hours every day, watching television; they walked home from the school bus stop and locked the door behind them, and then they weren’t allowed to go outside again. They warmed up Hot Pockets for dinner and sometimes did their homework, sometimes didn’t. “It actually wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I got lucky. Nothing terrible happened to me. It was just boring. You grew up with both your parents?”
“My mother drowned when I was thirteen.” Vincent appreciated the way Mirella just nodded at this. Perhaps from now on she would only be friends with people who were missing at least one parent. “My dad was a tree planter, so he’d be up at these remote camps for weeks at a time during the school year, so I went to live with my aunt in Vancouver.”
----
—
The conversation shifted away from points of origin, which was fine with Vincent. Everything about Caiette was either impossible to describe or too difficult to talk about, and everything after Caiette was either boring or embarrassing. Mirella was
“Yeah, but they’re boring trees. They’re not doing anything.”
“Fair point,” Vincent said, and smiled and put the camera away, although it pained her to stop filming at the three-minute-twenty-seven-second mark. She was aware that the necessity of filming in precise five-minute intervals probably constituted an undiagnosed case of OCD, but this had never really struck her as a serious problem.
“How can a road have two dead ends?”
“If it’s accessible only by boat or floatplane. Picture a row of houses on an inlet. Forest all around, water, nothing else.”
“You had a boat?”
“Some people had their own boats. We didn’t. I used to catch the mail boat to get to school in the mornings, then a bus would meet us by the pier on the other side and drive us to the nearest town. There was no television there till I was thirteen.”
“What do you mean, no television?” Mirella was looking at her as if she’d just announced she was from Mars.
“I mean, there was no signal.”
“So if you switched on the TV, what would happen?”
“Well, you’d just get static,” Vincent said.
“On every channel?”
----
—
(A memory: thirteen years old, suspended from school for the graffiti incident, sitting by the kitchen window with a book, then looking up and seeing Dad walking up the hill from the water taxi with an unwieldy box in his arms, grinning. “Look what my mom bought for us,” he said. “I got a call to come pick it up from the electronics store in Port Hardy.” Grandma Caroline had departed that morning to return to her own life for a few days, but it appeared she’d left a parting gift.
A television! A tower had gone up a few months earlier in Grace Harbour, just up the inlet, which meant that for the first time in history there was a signal in Caiette, and Mom would never have allowed this but it wasn’t up to her anymore, because she’d been gone for three weeks. Dad and Vincent flicked through variations of static to find a room, where two women with American accents were talking, one with long brown hair and glasses, the other with a cloud of platinum hair and tighter clothing.
“ WKRP in Cincinnati, ” Dad said. “I used to watch this in the eighties.”
One of the women said something funny, which made Dad laugh for the first time in three weeks. Where was Cincinnati? On television the city had a soft gleam, like the blond actress’s hair. Later, Vincent pulled the atlas down from a high shelf and found it, a point in the middle of the closest country to the south. She looked up the page for southwestern British Columbia, but of course Caiette was too small to appear on the map.)
----
—
Mirella had a story about a duplex in a housing development of identical duplexes, exurban Cleveland, cornfields on one side and an expressway on the other. Her mother worked two jobs and her father was in prison. Mirella and her sister were home alone for hours every day, watching television; they walked home from the school bus stop and locked the door behind them, and then they weren’t allowed to go outside again. They warmed up Hot Pockets for dinner and sometimes did their homework, sometimes didn’t. “It actually wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I got lucky. Nothing terrible happened to me. It was just boring. You grew up with both your parents?”
“My mother drowned when I was thirteen.” Vincent appreciated the way Mirella just nodded at this. Perhaps from now on she would only be friends with people who were missing at least one parent. “My dad was a tree planter, so he’d be up at these remote camps for weeks at a time during the school year, so I went to live with my aunt in Vancouver.”
----
—
The conversation shifted away from points of origin, which was fine with Vincent. Everything about Caiette was either impossible to describe or too difficult to talk about, and everything after Caiette was either boring or embarrassing. Mirella was
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