The Break

The powerful tale of love, loss and violence, endorsed by Margaret Atwood

Katherena Vermette

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781786493910
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786493903
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2018
Crime Book of the Month, Sunday Times, February 2018 'A tough, close-up look at a side of female life that's often hard to acknowledge: the violence girls and women sometimes display towards other girls and women... An accomplished writer who will go far.' - Margaret Atwood Stella, a young Métis mother, lives with her family by the Break, an isolated strip of land on the edge of their small Canadian town. Glancing out of her window one winter's evening Stella spots someone in trouble; horrified, she calls the police. But when they arrive, no one is there, scuff marks in the compacted snow the only sign anything may have happened. What follows is a heartbreaking and powerful tale of a community in crisis as the people connected to the victim, a young girl on the edge of a precipice, begin to lay bare their stories leading up to that fateful night. From Lou, a social worker grappling with the end of a relationship, to Cheryl, an artist mourning the premature death of her sister. And from Phoenix, a homeless teenager released from a youth detention centre with no one to turn to, to Officer Scott, a Métis policeman caught between two worlds. Through the prism of one extended, intergenerational family, Vermette's urgent story shines a light on the power, violence and love shared between women of all cultures, creeds and ages.

PART ONE
• • •

The Break is a piece of land just west of McPhillips Street. A narrow field about four lots wide that interrupts all the closely knit houses on either side and cuts through every avenue from Selkirk to Leila, that whole edge of the North End. Some people call it nothing and likely don’t think about it at all. I never called it anything, just knew it was there. But when she moved next door, my Stella, she named it the Break, if only in her head. No one had ever told her any other name, and for whatever reason, she thought she should call it something.

It’s Hydro land, was likely set aside in the days before anything was out there. When all that low land on the west side of the Red River was only tall grasses and rabbits, some bush in clusters, all the way to the lake in the north. The neighbourhood rose up around it. Houses built first for Eastern European immigrants who were pushed to that wrong side of the railway tracks, and kept away from the affluent city south. Someone once told me that North End houses were all made cheap and big, but the lots were narrow and short. That was when you had to own a certain amount of land to vote, and all those lots were made just inches smaller.

The tall, metal Hydro towers would have been built after that. Huge and grey, they stand on either side of the small piece of land, holding up two smooth silver cords high above the tallest house. The towers repeat, every two blocks, over and over, going far into the north. They might even go as far as the lake. My Stella’s little girl, Mattie, named them robots when the family first moved in beside them. Robots is a good name for them. They each have a square-like head and go out a bit at the bottom like someone standing at attention, and there’s the two arms overhead that hold the cords up into the sky. They are a frozen army standing guard, seeing everything. Houses built up and broken down around them, people flooding in and out.

In the sixties, Indians started moving in, once Status Indians could leave reserves and many moved to the city. That was when the Europeans slowly started creeping out of the neighbourhood like a man sneaking away from a sleeping woman in the dark. Now there are so many Indians here, big families, good people, but also gangs, hookers, drug houses, and all these big, beautiful houses somehow sagging and tired like the old people who still live in them.

The area around the Break is slightly less poor than the rest, more working class, just enough to make the hard-working people who live there think that they are out of the core and free of that drama. There are more cars in driveways than on the other side of McPhillips. It’s a good neighbourhood but you can still see it, if you know what to look for. If you can see the houses with neveropened bed sheet covered windows. If you can see the cars that come late at night, park right in the middle of the Break, far away from any house, and stay only ten minutes or so before driving away again. My Stella can see it. I taught her how to look and be aware all the time. I don’t know if that was right or wrong, but she’s still alive so there has to be some good in it.

I’ve always loved the place my girl calls the Break. I used to walk through it in the summer. There is a path you can go along all the way to the edge of the city, and if you just look down at the grass, you might think you were in the country the whole way. Old people plant gardens there, big ones with tidy rows of corn and tomatoes, all nice and clean. You can’t walk through it in the winter though. No one clears a way. In the winter, the Break is just a lake of wind and white, a field of cold and biting snow that blows up with the slightest gust. And when snow touches those raw Hydro wires they make this intrusive buzzing sound. It’s constant and just quiet enough that you can ignore it, like a whisper you know is a voice but you can’t hear the words. And even though they are more than three storeys high, when it snows those wires feel close, low, and buzz a sound that is almost like music, just not as smooth. You can ignore it. It’s just white noise, and some people can ignore things like that. Some people hear it but just get used to it.

It was snowing when it happened. The sky was pink and swollen and the snow had finally started to fall. Even from inside her house, my Stella heard the buzzing, as sure as her own breath. She knows to expect it when the sky fills with clouds, but like everything she’s been through, she has just learned to live with it.

( 1 )

STELLA

STELLA SITS AT her kitchen table with two police officers, and for one long moment, no one says a thing. They just sit, all looking down or away, for a long pause. The older officer clears his throat. He smells like old coffee and snow, and looks around Stella’s home, her clean kitchen and out into her dark living room, like he’s trying to find evidence of something. The younger one goes over his scribbled notes, the paper of his little coiled book flips and crumples.

Blanket over her shoulders, Stella wraps one hand around a hot mug of coffee, hoarding the warmth but still shaking. In her other hand, she balls a damp Kleenex. She stares down. Her hands look like her mom’s did, older-looking hands for a young woman. Old-lady hands. Her Kookom had hands like this too, and now that she’s an old lady all over, her hands are practically transparent, the skin there worn thin. Stella’s aren’t that bad yet, but they look too wrinkled, too old for her body, like they have aged ahead of her.

The officer breathes heavily. Stella finally looks up and braces herself to start explaining, again. The officers both sit with shoulders up, and neither touches the steaming mugs of coffee she has poured and placed in front of them. Their uniformed jackets are still on. The radios at their shoulders spit static and muffled voices, numbers, and alerts.

She has given up trying not to cry in front of these strangers.

Officer Scott, the young one, finally breaks the silence.

“Well, we know something significant definitely happened out there.” He looks at her side-eyed. His voice matter of fact, slow and hinging on the words happened and out there. His mouth frowns in a practiced sympathy that Stella knows is fake but takes anyway. The older one, Officer Christie, doesn’t look at her, only agrees with a quick nod of his bearded head and another throat-clearing noise. Stella thinks he’s bored, and the young one, he’s so young, is eager, maybe even excited.

Officer Scott tries to look nice, again, and asks her, again, “Can you think of anything else? Anything at all?”

Stella blinks a tear and shakes her head. She looks out the window at the Break, that empty expanse of land next to her house. She doesn’t have to look to know it’s snowing lightly. She can hear the faint buzzing, the low drone of the Hydro towers just out of view. The sky is still bright pink in the night, swollen with more snow to come. The Break is mostly a blank slate of white stretched out to house beyond. The house’s siding and the snow reflect the streetlights and the moon, but the windows are dark, of course. Everyone’s windows are dark except Stella’s.

The two officers had gone out there, stomped around, and made a circle around the blood, the puddle that melted the snow. Stella can just make it out from the window, a corner of it. It lies across the white ground like a dark shadow, probably frozen now. Flakes fall on top of it, wanting to cover it up. It doesn’t look sinister. It doesn’t look like what it really is.

Stella goes over each detail in her head, remembering everything, wanting to forget. It is probably 4 a.m. now, and Jeff will be home soon. She wants Jeff to be home more than anything. She listens for her children, ready if they wake, surprised they haven’t from the all the foot stomping the officers made when they came in, but everything is quiet upstairs. The baby’s been asleep since Stella finally got her kids to bed about four hours ago when she got off the phone with 911. They slept but she couldn’t. She waited and stared out the window with nothing to pass the time but her anxious thoughts. So she got up and started cleaning. Everything was spotless by the time the officers finally arrived.

Her mind scatters, but she remembers everything, over and over.

“She was small, so small.” Stella’s shoulders shake as she finds her words again. “Like a really tiny woman, maybe five feet, not much more than that.” She clings to the blanket around her. “Long straight black hair. I couldn’t see her face. So small and skinny.” Stella reaches for her own long black hair and remembers something else. Her voice chokes out for a minute. She knows she’s repeating herself.

“Now, you only saw her through your door, right?” Scott has stopped taking notes. His pen rests on the paper pad, over his few blue scrawls. Christie finally takes a sip of coffee.

“Yes, through the screen door. The glass.” Stella motions at the air. She can still see the small woman through the foggy glass, slowly moving away, finally moving down the back lane.

“That’s a pretty long way away, Mrs. McGregor. Are you sure it couldn’t have been a young man? You know a lot of these native boys wear their hair long.”

Stella just looks at him. His too-young face still a mask of a smile, stuck there. Naïve. She thinks of the word and rolls it around in her head. Naïve.

“No, it was a girl. A woman.” She looks down again, wraps her hands in the blanket but still shakes.

“Okay, okay, tell us again,” Scott tries gently. “From the beginning, please. You heard noises outside . . .”

Ste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Family Tree
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Acknowledgements