At the Edge of the World Read online

  KARI JONES

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2016 Kari Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Jones, Kari, 1966–, author

  At the edge of the world / Kari Jones.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1062-4 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1063-1 (pdf).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1064-8 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8619.O5328A82 2016 jC813'.6 C2016-900538-0

  C2016-900539-9

  First published in the United States, 2016

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933646

  Summary: In this novel for teen readers, best friends Maddie and Ivan struggle to cope with Ivan’s father’s alcoholism.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design by Rachel Page

  Front cover images by Creative Market and iStock.com

  Back cover images by Creative Market

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  19 18 17 16 • 4 3 2 1

  To the Wildwood Writers, for all the years together.

  Contents

  One Ivan

  Two Maddie

  Three Ivan

  Four Maddie

  Five Ivan

  Six Maddie

  Seven Ivan

  Eight Maddie

  Nine Ivan

  Ten Maddie

  Eleven Ivan

  Twelve Maddie

  Thirteen Ivan

  Fourteen Maddie

  Fifteen Ivan

  Sixteen Maddie

  Seventeen Ivan

  Eighteen Maddie

  Nineteen Ivan

  Twenty Maddie

  Twenty-One Ivan

  Twenty-Two Maddie

  Twenty-Three Ivan

  Twenty-Four Maddie

  Twenty-Five Ivan

  Twenty-Six Maddie

  Twenty-Seven Ivan

  Twenty-Eight Maddie

  Twenty-Nine Ivan

  Thirty Maddie

  Thirty-One Ivan

  Thirty-Two Maddie

  Thirty-Three Ivan

  Thirty-Four Maddie

  Thirty-Five Ivan

  Thirty-Six Maddie

  Thirty-Seven Ivan

  Thirty-Eight Maddie

  Thirty-Nine Ivan

  Forty Maddie

  Afterword Maddie

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  Ivan

  Des is drunk again. It’s not supposed to be this way. It’s meant to be me, the teenage son, who gets drunk and acts stupid, and Des, the father, who takes care of me. But that’s not how it is. I’m the sober one. He’s the one puking into the flower bed.

  We tussle over the van key. “No way,” I say, prying his fingers apart. Across the road in the school parking lot, someone laughs and a car engine starts. More people come out of the auditorium. Still two weeks left of school, but that never stopped anyone in Bear Harbour from calling it end of term and throwing a party.

  “I’m fine,” Des says. Even drunk he’s stronger than I am. He snaps his fingers shut around the key.

  “Get in the van,” he orders. He lunges at me, and I stumble and fall. My feet land under the rear wheel, my head in the flower bed.

  He nudges my side with his boot. “Ivan, get up.”

  I don’t move; my head is throbbing. He stands over me, then lurches to the van door and yanks it open. A few seconds later he revs the engine.

  I leap to my feet as he backs the van out over the spot I was lying in a second ago.

  “Holy shit. You almost ran me over,” I shout at him.

  “But I didn’t.”

  “You could have.”

  “Nah. I knew you’d get out of the way.” He revs the engine again. “Get in,” he says.

  “Fuck you.”

  He turns his bleary eyes to me. “Fine then. You want to drive?”

  I nod and hold my hand out, palm up. He turns off the ignition, pulls out the key and plops it into my hand. I shove the key in my pocket and walk away.

  “Hey,” he shouts.

  I keep walking. The van door opens. There’s silence for a second, then the door closes again. I don’t turn around.

  I stand in the drizzle at the edge of the Legion parking lot, listening to people laughing as they come and go. There’s no movement from the van. A few more minutes and he’ll be snoring. Trees creak around me. Surf booms. There’s the scent of some spring flower.

  When the parking lot is finally empty, I go back and peer in the window of the van. As I expected, he’s snoring away in the driver’s seat. It’s not easy to shove a man his size out of the way, so after a couple of tries I give up and perch on his lap. I can reach the pedals at least, and the roads along our side of the bay are empty anyway. When I rev the engine to get the starter to catch, Des half wakes up and tries to push me off. “You’re sitting on my leg,” he says.

  “Then get in the other seat,” I say as I turn the van around to ease onto the road. Des groans as my leg pushes down on his so I can reach the pedal better, and he shuffles noisily over the gear shift to the passenger side.

  “You sleep.” If he sleeps, he won’t try to take over the wheel or throw up all over me or try to open the door or any of the other stupid drunken things he’s done in the past, so I hum him a lullaby for the few minutes it takes to drive out of town and up the hill to our house.

  “Get up,” I say when I turn the engine off.

  Des grunts, half asleep, but it’s raining hard now, and despite the shelter of the cedar trees overhanging the driveway, rain’s leaking through the roof of the van. A patch of water is already spreading along his thigh.

  “Up,” I say again. I get out and go around the van to open his door. He slides right into me, and I steady him so he doesn’t fall.

  “It’s raining,” he says.

  Genius.

  “Shut the door,” I say, and he shoves it with his shoulder.

  It takes me a minute of fumbling with the lock before I can get the door to the house open. Des slumps against the wall, snoring. I have to shove him to get him inside.

  “It’s cold in here,” Des says as he pulls off his jacket and lets it fall to the ground. He shuffles to the living room, and from the hallway I can hear the ring of metal as he bumps into the woodstove, and the tinkle of glass as he pulls a beer bottle from the case.

  My clothes are damp from standing in the drizzle, so I head to the bathroom, where I strip and start a hot shower. The water feels great on my back and shoulders, and I want to stay until the water loses its heat, but I don’t trust what Des is up to out there, so I cut it short.

  “What are you doing?” I ask Des when I come back to the living room. There’s smoke in the air, but it takes me a while to realize it’s not coming from the woodstove—a lit cigarette is dangling from Des’s fingers. He is asleep on the couch. Ash drops from the cigarette to the floor, where it smolders in the carpet. He sighs in his sleep, and the cigarette falls from his hand into the pile of ash. I watch the smoke curl up along Des’s arm until the smell changes from cigarette burning to carpet burning, and then I step f
orward and stomp it out. I also pour half his bottle of beer on it, just to make sure. The packet of cigarettes is on the coffee table, so I grab it and the lighter. Then I check the woodstove but see that he hasn’t lit it. On my way upstairs I lock the front door and turn off all the lights except the one leading up the stairs.

  In my room, I toss the cigarettes into a corner, then climb into bed and lie still, listening to the sound of Des crying in his sleep while I wait for the covers to warm me up.

  * * *

  In the morning, Des is still snoring on the couch when I come downstairs. Shaking his shoulder doesn’t wake him, and neither does shouting in his ear, so I leave him there, gather up the empties around him and pile them into the recycling, which needs to be put out today. There are bottles and cans all over the kitchen and living room, so by the time I’ve gathered them all, the bin is full and looks worth taking to the road.

  There’s just enough milk in the fridge for a bowl of cereal. I should have poured the milk before I took out the recycling. Instead, I put the carton next to the door to remind me we need more.

  I spend the morning sawing wood. Our closest neighbors, Bo and Peter, have ordered some shelves for the front hallway of their house. I’ve been trying to get started on them for a while but have had problems figuring out how to make the shelves go around the corners. I think I’ve finally got a solution, so I put in my earbuds and bliss out to music and the whine of the saw for a while.

  About lunchtime, Des tears out through the door. His eyes are tiny pebbles. His breath is dynamite.

  “You should have woken me,” he says. “I had a shift.”

  “Aw, shit, Des.” The foreman at the mill gave him a final warning last week. One more unexplained absence and that’s the end. He’s only kept Des on for as long as he has for my sake. People feel sorry for me because Des and I have been alone since my mother walked out on us when I was eight. Ten years since she picked her cigarettes up from the table, said, “Excuse me, please,” walked out the door and drove away.

  “Will he pay you? Give you severance?”

  He shakes his head.

  He pulls up one of the metal bar stools we use as lawn chairs and sinks into it. I rev the saw and let it bite into the wood. Cedar chips spray between us, but my hands are shaking and the cut is wrong, so I throw the damaged piece of wood to the ground.

  “Shit, Des,” I say again.

  He rubs his head with his hands and stares at me.

  I work in silence, counting my breaths—one in, one out—to steady myself. I can’t afford to waste any more wood.

  “What are you making?” Des asks.

  “Shelves for Bo and Peter’s front hall.” We’ve talked about it before, so he nods and says, “You figured out how to get them around the corner?”

  “I think so.”

  “These your drawings?” He picks up the notebook lying near the steps to the house and studies my notes. “Yeah, this is good,” he says, “but…” He takes my pencil and draws on the opposite page.

  “Try this,” he says.

  His drawings are perfect. A brilliant answer for a tricky problem. I should have thought of it myself.

  “Thanks,” I say, though my voice is tight. I could have used this answer ages ago. Saved myself hours of figuring it out.

  “No problem,” he says. “What’s a dad for?”

  There is no answer to that question, so I straighten my goggles on my face and bend back to my work. The next time I look up, he’s gone.

  TWO

  Maddie

  “Did you get in?” Ivan asks. To avoid answering, I straighten my board and paddle hard to catch the wave. The green water swells around me, and I curve my board to its contours until it fades below me.

  Somehow, Ivan’s still right next to me. He lies down on his board and stares at me. “Come on, Maddie. Did you get into that university or not?”

  “You’ve got cedar chips in your hair,” I say.

  He shakes his head, the only part of him not covered by his wet suit. “I spent the morning cutting wood,” he says. “Got a good chunk of Bo’s shelves done.”

  Ivan’s made a lot of shelves for my dad Bo, and somehow there’s always a need for more. Bo’s a science writer who works from home, and Peter, my other dad, is a violin maker. He has a studio at the back of the house that he always wants more shelves for. Between them, they buy books like most people buy groceries. It makes for a very full house, but we like it that way.

  “Did your dad help you?” I ask, because Ivan always says no one knows wood like Des does.

  “Yeah,” he says, though the way he turns his head from me makes me think there’s more to that statement than he’s letting on.

  “Yeah, but…?” I ask.

  He shrugs. His typical answer to a question he doesn’t want to answer. Well, that’s both of us not answering questions then.

  “Let’s catch this one,” I say to cover the silence, and we both straighten our boards. When we ride, it’s like we become only bodies. White water bursts around my head; smooth green water slips under the board. The roar blots out all other sounds. Salt stings my eyes and lands in my mouth, but I rise on the board, and I’m flying, so it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing but motion for a few seconds.

  The wave dies down, and I can see Ivan close by, on another wave now. He bends and flows with the water. Ivan’s clumsy sometimes, bangs himself up and is always covered in cuts and bruises, but he’s been surfing since we were in kindergarten, maybe even before, and on water he’s a seal. There’s nothing I like more than playing at being a seal with Ivan, though today I try to keep a wave or two between us so I don’t have to get into a discussion about going to Emily Carr University. I’ll get enough of that on Monday at school. Everyone’s making their plans for next year. Tension is high. Questions abound.

  I shouldn’t have applied, but it was part of a deal I made with Peter. He said I could live in the house for free for the summer as long as I applied to at least one major art school. But getting accepted doesn’t mean I’m going.

  We surf for an hour or so, until the tide’s too low, and then we both ride a small wave to shore. We lounge in the shallows, neither of us willing to leave the waves quite yet, but the water’s still really cold in these last days of May even with a wet suit, so soon I pull up my board and walk to the high-tide line, where I’ve left my towel and water bottle. Ivan follows.

  “Unzip me?” I ask. My hands are too cold to do it myself. Ivan lays his board against a log and takes off his gloves. He pulls at his sleeves to drain them, then tugs at the zipper at the neck of my wet suit. It doesn’t move.

  “You got in, didn’t you?” he asks again.

  There’s no point avoiding this conversation anymore. It’s inevitable. “Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Yeah, I got in.”

  “Peter’ll be happy.” Ivan tries the zipper again. It often sticks when it’s full of salty water.

  “Yeah.”

  “You should go. You know that, right?”

  “Seriously, why is everyone in such a rush to get rid of me?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Maddie. You know that’s not what it is.”

  “Bo and Peter—especially Peter—think I have to go to university to blossom as an artist and become famous or something. Peter always tells me about how his life would have been easier if he’d had a chance to get a degree, how he wouldn’t have had to spend all those years starving, and Bo goes on about how university was the best time of his life. Then they get into arguments about what I should study—straight-up painting or art history or whatever. It gets so tedious. They don’t even listen to me. Honestly, Ivan, sometimes I envy you. Des doesn’t care what you do. Must be nice.”

  I can hear Ivan’s intake of breath at the back of my neck. He yanks hard, and the zipper finally comes loose.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Whatever.”

  “No, seriously, I’m sorry.”

  “
It’s fine, Maddie. Now do me.”

  Ivan’s wet suit is older than mine, and the zipper is even stickier. It’s so crusted with salt, I have to pour some fresh water from my bottle over it to get it going.

  I find a log to hide behind and struggle out of my wet suit and bathing suit and into dry clothes. Neither of us says anything. I shouldn’t have said that about Des not caring. Des can be tough going sometimes. He drinks way too much, and there have been times when I wonder if Ivan ends up being the parent in the relationship. Plus, I don’t like it when Ivan’s upset with me. It unbalances my world.

  Ivan reaches past me to drink from my water bottle before we head up the beach. “I’m starving,” he says.

  “I’ll make you some lunch,” I say, because I want him to feel better and because I suspect no one in his house ever goes grocery shopping. Two guys living alone—honestly, they live up to every stereotype.

  “Thanks,” he says with a huge smile.

  We gather our boards and walk along the beach to my house. There’s smoke coming out of the chimney.

  As we walk, I tell Ivan about the series of paintings I’m working on. They’re acrylic on easel-sized pieces of particle board left over from when we renovated the bathroom a couple of years ago. The series is about ravens, how smart they are, how they have a culture and a language. I’m trying to show in paint what I see every day outside my bedroom window.

  As Ivan listens, he smiles and nods. I take his silence to mean he’s in a better mood.

  At the house we brush the sand off our bare feet and stack the surfboards in the rack. We take turns rinsing our wet suits under the outside tap, then hang them on pegs next to the surfboards. The perfect setup for a house on the beach.

  “Remember when Des made these?” I ask Ivan, pointing at the rack and pegs.

  “Sure, I helped him.”

  I’d forgotten that. He was a skinny kid, and he’d followed Des everywhere. He runs his hand over the wood. “Needs a touch-up.”

  I leave him examining the rack and go into the house to make lunch. I’m glad Ivan’s here. I haven’t told Peter yet that I got into Emily Carr, but I know he’s going to ask at lunch. He asks every day. Maybe with Ivan here, he won’t explode when I tell him I’m not going.