Page 31

2021

From the top of a large oak tree, a raven looked down at the two sisters; all three stood silent with their own thoughts as they looked up and down a sunbaked dirt road. The overcast sky suggested rain, but a warm August breeze offered comfort.

The oldest sister wore long sun-bleached hair in a loose ponytail and cutoff shorts. She’d just turned eighteen and was seeing the world through new eyes as she prepared for her first year of university. The younger sister had short dirty-brown hair and a determined look in her eyes as she stared down the beginnings of adolescence. She emulated her older sister’s movements, like a spunky shadow.

The eldest turned her gaze to the trees. As if in greeting, a puff of wind shook the branches, shuddering the leaves. The raven cawed out before taking to the sky and leaving the two girls with their goodbyes.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Bella said.

“Yup, it’s exactly where Dad said he left it. And Officer Boychuk gave me the exact coordinates from the police records,” Grace said.

“Doesn’t look like much.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to.”

The sisters had left Ottawa that morning, taking the two-hour drive leisurely, chatting about clothes and boys and unknown futures. Each felt a somberness in the occasion, but neither could dampen their excitement at being with each other.

They’d missed the old logging road on their first pass and stopped for ice cream in Patricia Bay before doubling back. Bella still had a little crust of white in the corner of her mouth and the taste of vanilla on her tongue.

“There. That must be it,” Grace said, pointing to the side of the road where a small indent pushed into the surrounding undergrowth. “It’s overgrown, but there’s still a half moon of gravel under the grass.”

The letter to Grace had arrived, like a ghost, a month after they’d received word about Matthew’s death. It happened sometimes on the island. Mail was slow at the best of times, but sometimes a piece would fall behind. There was no digital sorting machine on the part of the island where Grace lived, only the old hands of the postmaster who did the best he could. But sometimes things, like people, got temporarily lost.

Matthew had written a couple of weeks before the camping trip on Nagadon Lake with Sarah and the kids. He felt he owed it to Grace, he wrote, to explain why he’d left her and Faith and why he was a different man now. There wasn’t anything in there that they’d not learned through the police investigation, except for the car.

Matthew had traveled away from his first home, his first family, in a beat-up secondhand Honda Civic. Once he arrived in Ontario, he abandoned it on an old logging road in a little patch of paradise . It was a safeguard at first, he’d written, a way to escape again if he ever needed it. But I don’t need it anymore. I’m not escaping ever again. You don’t deserve the father I was, but I hope to become the father you do.

Grace had shared the letter with the police. It had removed the thorn of the little red Honda from the story but hadn’t offered a clue to how Matthew died; it only explained where he’d been. They had thanked her and placed a copy in Matthew’s file. The original was tucked into a keepsake box that lived in Grace’s desk drawer along with an eagle feather, her medal for finishing the Westcoast Sook 10K race, and her grandmother’s wedding ring.

Not long after Boychuk discovered Matthew’s resting place, Sarah reached out to Faith and Grace. The kids, Bella and Charlie, wanted to meet their sister, she’d said. Grace was reluctant at first, but after a short visit to Ottawa to meet them, she fell hopelessly in love with her siblings. And vice versa. Call it kismet or DNA—it didn’t matter. She was linked to them, and they to her, by blood, by love, and yes, even by trauma.

She’d finally told Bella, all of thirteen years old, about the car a couple of weeks ago, and together, the sisters decided to visit the spot, even though they knew the Honda had long been towed away. It was the place where Matthew Anderson and Jonathan Evans existed simultaneously; where Bella and Grace could both lay claim to the man who was their father.

The road cut through a thick forest of oaks, maples, and aspens, all reaching for the closest point to the sun. Beneath, in the shady undergrowth, pale-green ferns filled the empty spaces between the trees.

“What do we do now?” Bella said.

“I don’t think we need to do anything.”

They took a final look around and walked back to the car.

“It is kinda pretty, though, isn’t it,” Bella said as she opened the car door.

“Ya, it is.”

Far overhead, as if touching the clouds, the raven circled.