So Much Love Read online

  “Do you want me to, like, sext you? Gross.”

  “Nah, I like you fine, even G-rated.”

  Kyla leaned forward and brushed her lips across his before turning back to her book as the librarian stoically approached. She whispered, “I want to be at least PG-13.”

  As Mrs. Rajiv passed, Kyla felt Donny squeeze her hand under the table and she squeezed back.

  —

  The search went on for three freezing hours before they were given one last round of tea and Timbits and told to go home. No one found anything useful, or not that Kyla heard about. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on with everyone spread out in the trees and dark like that.

  In Dermott’s truck on the way home, he hummed a few bars of “Amazing Grace,” but when she didn’t join in, he quit and tapped her knee with his big hand.

  “It’ll be okay, Ky. Our heavenly Father is watching.”

  She pictured God lying on his couch, watching all their suffering on a flat-screen TV, and didn’t understand why that was supposed to make her feel better.

  After the night of the search party, Kyla came home right after school the rest of the week. It didn’t feel safe to be out alone. Everyone was tense, darting eyes and locked car doors all over Iria. Even if she walked to Starbucks at lunch with Britt, they moved quickly, didn’t linger out front with the other kids, and checked over their shoulders.

  So Kyla stayed home, read Ivan Ilych over again, and took notes while Jaycee practised her awful piano downstairs. The picture on the front of the skinny book was of an old man, some artist’s idea of how Ivan looked. Ivan, at the end of his life, seemed sad and exhausted, but that wasn’t the interesting part of the book or the character to Kyla. She thought about poor Ivan as basically a decent person who worked hard but didn’t really know what was important in life or how to find out. The scary part was that he could live his whole life and not even be interested in love or being loved, and die that way.

  On Sunday mornings, Kyla’s family ate Louise’s sausage casserole, then went to what Dermott called “the green church,” which was the woods on the east side of town, by her school. Her parents thought churches were constrictive, created by power-mad humans who obscured God’s creation with their own lesser processes, rules, and stained-glass windows. Louise and Dermott had grown up with that sort of church, learning prayers and Bible passages off by heart so they wouldn’t get hit, but they got hit anyway. Louise talked about having to cover her hair, never getting to play sports. Dermott said he got yelled at when he asked questions, was told to know his place, accept gospel as it was written. They both wanted something else for Kyla and Jaycee.

  They said the best place to worship was among the Lord’s own creation of trees and sky and wind and grass—the green church, the great outdoors. Of course, things were only green in summer, but they always went outside on Sunday mornings, whatever the weather, and hiked until they found a place so beautiful that whoever’s turn it was to pick could “feel God closer.” Dermott always chose the top of hills, Kyla preferred to be by springs or ponds, Louise liked rocks, but that was mainly because she didn’t want to sit on the ground, and it was hard to tell why Jaycee did anything.

  The first Sunday after Donny had disappeared, Kyla’s eyes were burning from insomnia. The family let her pick her church even though it was really Louise’s turn, and so she followed the path back to the area where she had tramped through earlier in the week as part of the line of searchers. Now there was no one but Kyla in her long skirt and tidy bun, Jaycee in her kilt, Louise and Dermott leaning against each other’s shoulders, everyone in the heavy grey parkas from the army surplus and wearing tough, scuffed hiking boots. They held hands by the cracked blue ice of the creek and prayed. Kyla didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to hold Dermott’s work glove or Jaycee’s tiny pink mitt, but when she began to pray, to ask desperately for what she did want, something stopped buzzing in her head that she hadn’t even known was there, and she felt a little whisper of peace. Kyla had grown up praying—at meals, before bed, whenever she was sad or scared—but it had been more than a year since she’d started thinking it was as useful as reading her horoscope in the paper. Now the woods seemed to quiet as she thought the words Dear God.

  After that, Kyla was surprised at how strong the impulse to pray became, how genuinely she felt herself speaking to God. And how quickly she fell back into the habit. They prayed again at home over dinner, and then at bedtime—each time, Kyla’s prayers were mainly Donny’s name. She wasn’t sure it was possible to hand God her problems, her fears, her hopes—or that God was even there to receive them—but it was the only thing that calmed her. It helped so much that she went back to her childhood habit of praying at random. She found herself wandering around in the blowing snow after school, avoiding her friends and forgetting to pick up the milk so she could pray. As she walked, her brain chanted in circles: Just let him be okay. Even if he can’t be my boyfriend anymore, just bring him back and that will be my sacrifice. I won’t see him, I’ll make myself forget if I have to. Just let him be okay. Just let him be okay.

  Ivan died at the beginning of the book, then the story flashed back and went through his whole life: lots of quick general descriptions when he was young, getting into day-to-day details only when he got older, and then sick. By the end, the pace was almost minute by minute.

  Kyla tried to avoid imagining where Donny might be, but rereading the section with poor old Ivan lying on his couch, his tongue coated with a gross flavour and pain radiating from his side, conjured what she was most afraid of. She sat facing forward on her own couch, her legs sprawled on the coffee table, just to feel less like him. A lot of kids were saying that maybe Donny had somehow wandered off in the parking lot and frozen to death. Kyla couldn’t imagine how that would have happened. But still, that’s one way to die. It had been really cold out, even for February—cold enough to kill someone.

  “…all the while here is death! Can it really be death?” Again terror seized him and he gasped for breath. Kyla shut the book and pulled her mom’s laptop over to start typing—she didn’t have any ideas for her paper, but she couldn’t read anymore. Kyla was scaring herself with the way she’d started thinking of Donny in the past tense, as if she was getting close to accepting that he wasn’t coming back. Something terrible had to have happened, even if he wasn’t dead. She was always praying that he wasn’t, but he had left with no car or money or anything, so where could he go?

  Dermott came wandering into the living room then, trying to seem casual, before pulling a book out from behind his back and thrusting it at Kyla. Jaycee glanced up long enough to realize it wasn’t for her, then went back to playing pickup sticks by herself.

  “Tolstoy’s Shorter Works? Great,” muttered Kyla.

  “I couldn’t find the same edition of Ivan Ilych as you have, but it’s in here too.”

  “I finished reading it. I’m already working on the paper. It’s really short.”

  “I did too, so we can talk about it at pizza dinner.”

  From the floor Jaycee said, “Oh, no! I hate pizza.”

  “You don’t have to do that. I’m doing fine with the essay.” Kyla shifted her legs on the coffee table and glared at her sister. “No, you don’t.”

  “Don’t devalue your sister’s feelings, Ky. And I think the book could be interesting to all of us.”

  “Yeah, I know what Louise thinks, but I think he wrote it after he lost his faith.”

  Dermott stared at the cover. “I didn’t get that from reading it.”

  “Well, it seemed pretty hopeless at the end. Ivan actually thinks to himself—” she reached for her sticky-noted paperback and flicked to find the page but couldn’t. “Well, he thought everything was worse after he saw the priest. He thought it helped, but then he felt worse.”

  “What about the light, Ky? The light he sees at the bottom of the dark hole?”

  Jaycee looked up and cocked her head to the
side. “I maybe don’t hate pizza anymore.”

  Kyla could not ignore the fact that the worst thing that ever happened to her was what made her the daughter her parents had always wanted. She was home right after school, with no Donny to hang out with at Starbucks, wasting her babysitting money. She was home every night, doing homework, praying with her family, watching the news. And somewhere along the line, she had lost interest in arguing, in telling Louise to read the newspaper and Dermott that she could join the hockey league if she wanted to. And what did she know anyway? The world was turning out to be so much worse than she’d ever imagined.

  Someone else disappeared, a girl from the university. A woman, in her late twenties—someone with a husband, a house, which seemed odd for a university student. Kyla hoped she would be much further along in her own life by that age, although she didn’t know what exactly she wanted to do yet. The woman’s husband was on Live at Five, along with Donny’s parents. This guy had lost his beloved, same as Kyla, but he was a grown-up. Did that help him? she wondered. Was it better to lose someone after you had lived with them, had sex, held each other all night? Or was it worse—was there just more to lose? Did this man, with the funny name Grey Reindeer, wake up dizzy, convinced everything was somehow all his fault, fumbling in his bed for something from a dream, an answer that he could never remember? Did he lie there, trying to breathe evenly before anyone else was awake, wondering how it felt to be missing, if the missing one was scared or in pain, and how would he ever know? This man on the news was the only person in town who could possibly feel what Kyla felt. She would have loved to talk to him. He looked like a nice guy. Louise started adding Catherine and Grey Reindeer into their evening prayers, and though Kyla felt she had nothing more to give, she reluctantly did too.

  Everyone in Iria was scurrying to their cars, hurrying home, locking their doors. A few times a cop even came to talk to some random person who walked by the school one too many times. Britt and Siobhan didn’t want to hang out downtown or go to the mall anymore. Which was fine. Kyla didn’t want to go out either. Easier to stay at home and wash the dishes. Have dolly tea parties with her baby sister, pray herself to sleep. When the weather got nicer, she did her homework in the fenced-in yard, watching Jaycee run in circles and jump off the swings. She could almost accept that this was her life now—no boyfriend, no social life, just homework and prayers and family. But then the pre-grad events started at school: the grad breakfast, grad skip day, all the things Donny should have been doing, that she should have been hearing about all lunch hour, every night when he texted her. There was a black-and-white page in the yearbook with a scattering of shots of him on the basketball court with his teammates, a poem some grade ten he didn’t know had written, lots of pen-and-ink drawings of flowers. Kyla went back to crying herself to sleep and was so glad when it was summer.

  By the time the cool sunny fall rolled around, she was calm again and finding it easier to keep it together at school, even if people did want to talk about Donny. She’d spent too many nights staring at her dark and silent phone, watched too many news reports that were only about forest fires and the price of gas. She was giving up, or she thought she was.

  Then in November the university girl was found staggering by the side of a country road. There she was, but where was Donny? Kyla and her parents sat in front of the ten o’clock news after Jaycee went to bed, and after that, Kyla stayed up and Louise kept clicking refresh on the news websites. Surely this Catherine girl knew where Donny was, could help the police find him, Kyla was certain, but the square-jawed guy behind the anchor desk said nothing, moving on to a story about a jack-knifed tractor-trailer on the 414 as if there were no other people missing in the city, in the world.

  Life started back up again, but this time Kyla couldn’t face it. She kept staring at every door she saw, feeling almost certain that Donny would be coming through it, or maybe flying through a window, maybe a ghost. Everyone was sure some clue would be forthcoming, some hint of Donny’s fate, but she didn’t know if the news would be good. After nine months of prayers, going back to being terrified was like falling into ice water—she had grown comfortable in her silent misery. All the evenings she spent pouring out her heart to God, or quite possibly just her bedroom ceiling, she had never gotten a response. Sometimes she felt better and thought that feeling might be Jesus’ hand in hers, but sometimes she didn’t, and what then?

  Kyla just drifted as the days and weeks went on—family dinners, the green church, handing in her Obasan paper. She read all the time now, was finally starting to get why Donny loved English class—all these other worlds to slip into, other people’s problems to swim in, then climb out of.

  There was a hard calc test. Louise made a meatloaf. Christmas was coming but of course they didn’t buy a tree. Then one night the first story on the news was a cop at a press conference saying they had found Donny’s body buried in a backyard in Turgrove, the yard of a house where the owner had recently been found dead as well, and where Catherine Reindeer was believed to have been held. There was some boring video of a small brick house with a big lawn and people milling around the side of it, none of it giving any hint of the violence that had occurred inside, followed by a short interview with the police chief, who was jowly and grave. Then a note that funeral arrangements had not yet been announced, and the Zimmerman family had requested privacy at this time.

  Kyla sat very still. Donny was dead. She could still feel how his fingers felt grasped in hers. The tiny bit of bristle above his mouth when he kissed her. He couldn’t be dead because it wasn’t possible in this beige living room, with the sports and weather coming right after this commercial break, with her mother’s crisp skirt spread out on the couch beside her and Dermott’s glass of apple juice leaving a wet mark on the particleboard end table.

  Kyla muttered Fuck right there in the family room—no matter how often she heard kids from school say it, that word still sounded like the worst thing. She started sobbing and it was as if she’d broken the spell because both Louise and Dermott began to weep too. They leaned over to hug her, but Kyla shook their hands off because fuck that shit. They thought there was light at the bottom of a hole when there was nothing, just Donny’s beautiful hazel eyes and pointed chin buried in dirt. Either God was cruel or God allowed cruelty or God didn’t exist, Kyla didn’t know which. But she didn’t care either.

  Louise snuffled into her wrist and put her hand on Kyla’s shoulder again. “Oh, my darling, you feel so much for these people. I know it is tragic, but try to be strong. We have to pray for the family, for the people who were closest to him.”

  “I was closest to Donny,” shouted Kyla, standing up from the couch. “I knew him better than anyone. He loved me, and I loved him. Love him. Who is going to be strong for me?”

  Her parents were gaping at her, Louise reaching out from the couch, her mouth open in a question that was just taking shape.

  The rage carried Kyla up the stairs to her room, the stupid hypocrisy of how hard they had all prayed for Donny, how desperately they had wanted him to be safe, and then her parents wanted to turn around and say it was all God’s will that he was dead. Dead and buried under scraggly sumac that were really just sticks because it was December and everything was dying.

  Kyla wanted to lie flat on her bed and sob, but her tears were gone. She’d used them all up. She rolled over, catching her arm on the bedside lamp, letting it crash to the floor though she could have probably caught it. Her phone tumbled too, but she snatched it up, though she never wanted to speak to anyone again. No one but Donny.

  Somehow she fell asleep, fetal, clutching her phone to her sternum. In the morning, she lay on her stomach, her head aching and her eyes sticky, and peered down into the gap between her bed and the nightstand. There were shards of the lamp base down there and somehow also her copy of Ivan Ilych. Her teacher had made her pay $15 when she lost her school copy last winter. And there he was—Ivan, bland and unhappy on the front
of her floppy little book full of typos. She got a B on the paper; the red writing in the margin said it was well-written but she needed a few more supporting points for her argument. She’d been doing better in English ever since then—mainly As lately. She almost wished she could go back and write a better paper on Ivan, something about the way he mourned for his life while he was still alive. Like everybody does. And then the memory of last night’s news slammed into her, along with a new wave of grief.

  —

  Screen time was tightly policed at home, but at school Britt handed Kyla her iPad without hesitating. Most people at school would have given Kyla anything at that point so they didn’t have to look at her red, swollen eyes and matted hair. She was like a pathetic celebrity. Kyla couldn’t find a current picture of Catherine Reindeer—she hadn’t been out in public much, or no one was taking photos of her, or both. But in the older photos, stuff from her Facebook account that the news used, she was laughing and picking apples, petting a cat, hugging a man that Kyla knew from TV was her husband. She looked average—not especially blessed or lucky. Ponytail, cutoff shorts, big stupid smile. Donny was more handsome, and he did volunteer work at the seniors’ home. Why did this girl live and Donny die?

  At home that evening, Louise and Dermott were for once staying clear of Kyla, too baffled to argue or reproach. The night before, they had extracted from her that Donny was her boyfriend and that she had lied and hidden things from them. She didn’t apologize, and they quickly stopped asking her any more questions. So when she paused in the front hall with her boots on, her parents agreed that Kyla could go to the candlelight vigil. What she didn’t expect was for them to get up, summon Jaycee, and put their boots and coats on too. At the vigil, they all stood in the mushy wet leaves at the edge of the school parking lot, cupping their candles in their palms. It was only a few weeks until Christmas, and all those hundreds of people around the football field with their little yellow flames in their hands looked festive, or something like it. Kyla was cold, and her tears kept freezing to her cheeks until her mother gave her a wadded-up tissue from her purse. Kyla managed to say thank you but didn’t look up. Jaycee kept singing Christmas carols under her breath, and when kids from school came up and hugged Kyla, she sang louder, as if she were trying to block them out.