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It was about sunset that Susan realised she was in real trouble. It came earlier here than she was expecting . She hadn’t noticed it last night, or the night before, tucked up in the back of the truck cabins on the long road north. She could already feel the temperature, which hadn’t been exactly tropical before, dropping. She was wearing her good jacket and gloves and everything, but it was turning out that ‘good’ for Montana in the fall still wasn’t good for…wherever exactly she was. The last road sign she’d seen had said Hay River, 120km – the other towns had been further away – but that had been a while ago and a kilometer was…half a mile, maybe? For some reason right now she couldn’t remember.
When the last trucker had thrown her out, literally, she’d landed hard in the slush on the side of the road and some of it had soaked through her jeans. The long johns underneath were helping but her thighs already felt frozen. There was an icy wind blowing from the north, heavy with the smell of snow. The pine trees loomed over the side of the road. The part of her that always wanted to write was trying to take notes, and the part of her that talked like Mom was saying ‘What did you think was going to happen, Sue?’
She’d been so sure that Mom would catch up with her before the border, and then definitely somewhere before Edmonton, and then – but how the hell was she going to do it now?
I don’t want her to find me, she thought, a reminder to herself. I just gotta double back and get across the border and –
All of it was too overwhelming to think about right now so she concentrated on what she knew she had going for her. The credit card if she had no other options, the cash she’d managed to put aside, though it was all American and she wasn’t sure if it would be any good up here, Mom’s smallest pistol which didn’t show in the inner pocket of her winter jacket. It wasn’t going to frighten off anybody serious but in a real pinch, there it was. If she really got stuck tonight, she guessed, she could try and use it to get some game; Mom had insisted that no child of hers was going to be helpless in the outdoors.
Which meant that Susan knew enough to know that the cold and the dark were her biggest problems. She hadn’t seen a single vehicle since that last eighteen-wheeler had grumbled off into the distance. She had to assume nobody was going to drive past before morning. Oh, god, nobody was going to drive past until morning, at least.
She’d just about made up her mind to look for somewhere to make shelter off the road when she heard, overwhelmingly loud against the backdrop of the wind and the birds nesting for the night, the noise of a vehicle. She felt panic clawing at her all of a sudden – what if the driver didn’t see her, what if they did, what if they hit her – and froze, which was the worst thing she could have done. Then it didn’t matter, because she heard the vehicle slowing down. As she turned and shielded her eyes against the headlights – the sun was below the horizon now – it rolled to a stop next to her.
The driver pulled over and put their emergency lights on. The vehicle itself was a pickup, an older-style model with a low bonnet and big tray up back. In the dying light it was hard to tell exactly what colour it was, apart from light and not dark, but it was also splattered with mud and snow in the way that said it was a working vehicle.
The driver’s side door opened, and Susan forced herself not to reach for the pistol. Don’t escalate before you need to, Mom’s voice said in her head again. She didn’t want to be in situations where escalation was ever a thing that needed to happen, was what she wanted.
“Hey,” the driver said, coming around the front of the car. “Are you – are you okay there?”
The combination of the dark and the bright headlights made it hard to make out much except that he was a man just on the taller side of average, maybe built wiry under the bulk of his clothing, with a short greying beard. Susan knew she didn’t have the greatest ear for accents – they’d moved around a lot during her childhood but mostly in the Midwest and Plains – but she didn’t think he sounded local. Or maybe he did, and she didn’t know. Canada, she was starting to appreciate, was a really big place.
“Sure I’m okay,” she said reflexively.
The driver looked up and down the deserted road, closed in on each side by the forest, and then back at her with an expression of extreme skepticism. “Right, right. Mind telling me where you’re going?”
“North.” Susan wasn’t sure why she said that so tersely. Her mom would have had the guy charmed by now and offering her a lift. Probably her brother Robbie would have, too.
“North, uh-huh.” He shook his head. “Nothing more specific?”
She took a breath, trying to think of a plausible lie – she’d had hours to think, she was good at stories, why hadn’t she come up with something – and he shook his head again. “Look. Okay. I’m heading to a place called Hay River. There’s – stuff there. Hospital, airport, that kind of thing. You think maybe you might want a ride that far?”
Susan burst into humiliating tears.
*
They were a few miles down the road before she got it under control. She’d let the guy – the driver – usher her into the passenger seat, saying things in a low soothing voice like “It’s going to be okay, you’re alright.” He was very carefully – even when she couldn’t stop crying she’d noticed this – not touching her. He’d handed her a whole handful of tissues and let her cry it out. She wiped her nose one last time, wincing at her red-eyed, snotty-nosed appearance reflected in the truck window. It was full dark now, nothing to see outside except the road and the trees as far as the headlights lit them up.
“So,” the driver said, when she’d been silent a minute or two. “You got a name you want to share with me?”
“Uh. Susan.” She added, spurred by the fact that this guy was a total stranger and that felt somehow freeing, “My mom – my parents call me Sue, but I decided I’d rather be a Susan.”
“Oh, know that feeling,” he said with real warmth. “I’ve gone by my middle name most of my life. Parents don’t always get that one right.”
“Yeah.” She paused. “And, uh, your name is –”
“Ray,” he said. “Stanley if you ask my mom, but Ray.”
“I don’t think you look like a Stanley,” Susan told him, and he gave her a quick sideways grin at that. By the light of the dashboard, and with his hat off, she could see him a bit better; he wasn’t good-looking, aside from being at least as old as her parents, but he had one of those faces that made you think you remembered the person already, an active sort of face. Full of character, was what her mom would say. Sometimes she meant it nicely and sometimes she didn’t.
“Glad to hear it,” he said. “So, Susan. What brings you up to the Northwest Territories?”
“This is the Northwest Territories?” Another bit of panic; she hadn’t realised the truck had got so far north –
His eyebrows rose. “Yes it is. Alberta border’s an hour south of here.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“We’re about half an hour out from town,” he went on. “For what that’s worth. Okay, so you didn’t mean to come up to the Territories. Where were you going, then?”
“Are you a cop?”
“No,” he said easily and at once, which didn’t mean anything, because cops could lie just as well as anybody. But she couldn’t think of a reason he would lie about it if he was one.
“Are you a, uh,” she tried to remember some stuff she’d heard…god, forever ago now, “a Mountie?”
He laughed at that. “Only by marriage, so also no.”
“So you’re married to a cop, then,” she said. It made her feel maybe a tiny bit better. She had the vague idea that a guy who was married to a female police officer might be…not trustworthy exactly, because look at her dad, even if mom was a bounty hunter and not a cop…but he couldn’t be, like, a total asshole. Probably. Dad was useless at a lot of things, but he wasn’t mean.
“Guilty, yes,” he said. She couldn’t help a quick double-check; yeah, he was wearing a wedding ring, or at least a ring on the right finger. “You don’t want to tell me where you’re going, then. Okay. You running from, or to?”
She didn’t say anything, and he let the silence hang, until she couldn’t take it anymore and said “From.”
“Thought so.” Silence again.
“It’s just,” she said after another five or ten minutes, “It’s really – you’re going to think it’s really stupid.”
“Believe me,” he said, “on the scale of stupid reasons I have heard people tell me they did things for, you would have to work extremely hard to get to ‘really stupid’.”
“No, but it is.”
“You burned down any buildings lately?”
“What? No! I –“
“Stolen anything?”
Susan tried not to think about the candy bars she’d lifted in Calgary and said, “Nothing important.”
“Killed anybody? Hurt ‘em bad?”
“No! Why are you even asking that?”
“You’re gonna be fine. Trust me.”
“Are you sure you’re not a cop?”
He shot her an amused glance. “Alright, alright. I used to be. Different country, different lifetime.”
He probably meant it to sound mysterious, but she just didn’t have it in her to be interested right now.
“It’s just. It’s really,” Susan said, and then found herself telling the whole sorry ridiculous story about how Mom had said yet again that she couldn’t go to college this year, that if Susan wanted to do anything Mom-approved – anything with horses or guns or the outdoors – Mom would support her all the way, but otherwise she needed to bring in money and help with the house, because her brother and her dad weren’t any good at any of that stuff, men were just like that, and Annie was still at school, and school was important of course –
“And she never made him,” Susan said furiously, spurred on by Ray’s nods and encouraging noises. “Ever since I was like ten, it was Sue, you have to watch Robbie, and Sue, you’ve got to help me out here, but Robbie could just do whatever he wanted. And Dad was always – it’s not like a penis stops you cleaning the bathroom.”
“Well, that I know for myself,” Ray said gravely, but kind of like he was laughing at her, so she stopped and eyed him suspiciously. He gestured. “Sorry, go on.”
So she told him the rest, about losing her job at the hardware store when a big box store had opened up two towns over and the owner had decided to retire and close the place, and figuring that if she just left for a bit – took the money she’d managed to save that Mom hadn’t needed for the household – Mom would realise that it would be fine if she went off to college. It was too late now this year, but she’d figured she could get some community college credits in the spring semester and that would put her ahead for the next year. She’d only looked at local colleges anyway, she wasn’t trying to go out of state or anything, she knew they didn’t have much. But she’d fallen asleep in the second truck she’d managed to sneak onto and next thing she’d known, she’d been in Calgary. Which felt way too far away but also way too close, so there’d been another one, only it had been going north and not south like she thought, and then when the driver had found her he’d been furious and thrown her out and so –
“What a fucking asshole,” Ray said. It was the nicest thing he’d said to her so far. “Hey, you didn’t get the numberplate, did you?”
“I – uh, yeah,” Susan said, because she’d memorized it as the truck roared away, figuring she could – Mom always told them to get the plates if they could, that was all. Ray nodded and mmhmm’d and leaned over to rustle around in the glovebox, pulled out a pad of nondescript notepaper from a hotel or something and a pen, asked her to write it down.
“You said you’re not a cop,” Susan said again.
“Told you, I know a couple,” Ray said vaguely. “You know, just in case.”
She wrote it down. “My mom always says you gotta get the plates.”
“Your mom a cop, any chance?”
“Bounty hunter,” Susan said, sighing, because people always thought it sounded so exotic and exciting and it was just crappy motels and sleeping in the truck and Mom saying over and over that she was doing it for them, which Susan had stopped believing way before Dad had run away to Chicago.
“Oh, fuck me,” Ray said in a weird, resigned-sounding voice. “Bounty hunter, Montana – your mom’s name Janet Morse, by any chance?”
Susan went cold all over. People who knew her mom’s name did not necessarily know it in a friendly way. “What makes you think –”
“We’ve met,” he said, drumming his fingers on the wheel. “Chicago, nineteen ninety-seven. Your brother handcuffed me to a pipe. Ringing any bells?”
“Oh my god,” she said. “You were. Uh. Detective Vecchio?” She’d always had a good memory for names; maybe also because Mom made them practice.
“Yes, but also no.” The corner of his mouth moved up. “For reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, it’s Kowalski, and also no longer detective, as we’ve discussed.”
“You get fired or something?”
“Had a mid-life crisis, took early retirement, moved to Canada.” He shook his head. “God, okay, this is all falling into place. You’re Janet Morse’s oldest kid. She and your dad still married?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah,” Susan said, totally at sea. How was she in Canada and getting a lift in the middle of nowhere from a cop she’d met in Chicago when she was ten? “Yeah, they keep – Mom says it’s important for us. I mean, my brother and sister and me. That they’re both there.” When they were both there, that was.
"Ohhhhhhh, boy,” muttered Ray Kowalski. “You know, I don’t have kids, but take it from me as an extremely divorced guy, sometimes it really is the best life choice you can make.”
“I thought you said you were married to a cop! Or a Mountie. Whatever.”
“The triumph of hope over experience.”
“Samuel Johnson,” Susan said, with some satisfaction.
“Uh, that’s the name of the guy that said that? Huh.” He shrugged. “It’s the thing they say about second marriages, anyway. But I had a first one, and after it went…after it was over, we were both much happier after we got divorced. Well, about five years after we got divorced, it was kinda – never mind. How come you know about this Samuel Johnson guy?”
“I want to do English Lit,” she said. “At college. Mom – if I told her I wanted to be a nurse or an accountant or something I think I might have got around her, but she says I spent too much time reading as a kid and I need to spend time in the real world.” The reading had been the only way she’d had sometimes to get through the long car rides and the crappy motels. Mom had always said it was distracting her from doing what she was supposed to be doing.
“My dad wanted me to go to college,” said Ray. “Real bad. To have more choices than he did. And I did, for a bit, but then I ended up a cop instead.”
“Did he…was he okay with that?”
“Eventually.” Ray said that in a way that made Susan pretty sure it meant a lot longer than like, a week. “Then I upset the apple cart again when I – also never mind. Listen, we’re almost there, so…” he looked over at her. “I want to take you to the detachment. I think…I think that might be the best idea. That okay with you?”
“What’s a detachment?”
“Like a police station,” he said, very carefully. “The Mounties.”
She thought about the pistol, and being so far north she wasn’t even in Alberta anymore, and then – “That time I met you. In Chicago. There was a Mountie there. Two Mounties.”
“Three, actually,” said Ray. “Inspector Thatcher wasn’t in uniform, I guess, you wouldn’t have known.”
“That Mountie. He was – he helped Mom,” Susan said cautiously. They were driving past buildings, now. It was a small town, but a town. “I mean, mostly because she was doing her thing, but he helped her.”
“Her thing?” Ray asked, sounding weirdly curious.
“Mom – she –” Susan didn’t want to talk badly about her mom to someone who’d actually met her. That seemed…it didn’t seem fair. “You know, for her job, she’s really good at getting people to feel sorry for her, help her out. Uh, mostly guys. But I don’t mean, she’s not – it’s just her job – she and Dad, she never –”
“Uh-huh,” Ray said with some deep current of satisfaction that Susan didn’t understand at all. Maybe Mom had done her thing on him, too. He hadn’t really acted like it, that Susan remembered, but who knew. “Aw, never mind, Susan, it’s not important. Yeah, he helped your mom because she needed help, and – I gotta level with you, Fraser was, is, he’s not a normal Mountie.”
“Oh,” Susan said. “Are they more like – what was his name – the really tall one –”
Ray snorted. “No, Turnbull is his own thing entirely, trust me. But the rest of them, they’re more like, you know, regular cops. Maybe slightly nicer than American cops. Still cops, though.” He turned down a side street. “But I think they can help you figure out how to get home.”
“I don’t see why they’d care.”
“I am going to ask them very nicely.”
“You keep telling me you’re not a cop –”
“I’m an aircraft mechanic these days, actually,” Ray said, “but I am married to their boss so they’re all used to my personal brand of bullshit. Plus unless something’s caught on fire this afternoon, I happen to know they’re having a quiet week.” He turned into a parking lot. “Or I drop you at a motel, and you figure out what you’re doing from there. You got some cash for a motel?”
Susan bit her lip. “Yeah. I don’t…I don’t think I know how to get home.”
The truck came to a stop. “Yeah, I figured.” Ray turned to her. “Decision time, Susan. Where are you going?”
She thought about cops, and Mom, and the pistol, and waking up and realizing she was in Calgary, and it was all just too much. “I want to go to a motel, thanks.”
Ray didn’t move. “Sure?”
She sat up straight, channeled Mom as much as she knew how. “I want to go to a motel, now. Thank you.”
He stared at her a few seconds, too many seconds, long enough for her to start moving her hand cautiously – very cautiously – towards the inner pocket where she had the pistol. She saw him see her, and then –
He started the truck again. “Okay. Motel it is.”
*
She threw caution to the wind and used the credit card to get a room at the motel. They didn’t look at her too weird for only having a backpack. She startled when she thought she saw Ray Kowalski in the back room past reception, but when the woman behind the counter took her to her room the truck was gone, so she must have got that wrong. The room wasn’t worse than some of the ones she’d stayed in with Mom, and it included some breakfast, so that was one less thing to worry about. She was so tired that once she’d locked the door and moved the dresser in front of it and checked the windows – Mom’s habits, Mom’s precautions, but she didn’t feel right going to sleep without going through them – she sacked out right on top of the made-up bed. She woke up cold sometime after midnight and had to dig her way under the tightly-made blankets.
When she woke up again in the morning she had no idea where she was for a few desperate seconds before memory kicked in: getting thrown out of the truck, the terrifying cold walk along the side of the highway – in a warm room, she could admit to herself she’d been terrified – getting picked up by Detective Vecchio from Chicago, or Ray Kowalski, or whoever he really was. She thought about whether he’d been telling the truth and decided that he had to have been, because who else would even know about the thing with the handcuffs? And he’d said the names of the Mounties, Fraser and Turnbull, she’d never said them herself. Her mom’s name, too.
So now all she had to do was decide how the hell she was going to get back to Montana. That was still too big and depressing to think about, so she had a shower and moved the dresser away and went and got breakfast, which was just coffee and cereal and toast but at least it was breakfast and she hadn’t ended up trying to catch a rabbit or something last night. Mom would have been so proud of her if she’d done that, she thought moodily. If she – if she went back home Mom would probably tell her off about the motel, as well as everything else.
Checkout time was ten am, still an hour or so away. She’d been so tired she’d woken up with the sun, and that was a full hour later here than it was back home right now. She was going to have to decide what to do before then. Ray had mentioned an airport, hadn’t he? But she didn’t think she could afford whatever it would cost for a ticket, and she didn’t have a passport. Try and hitchhike back south? She was still going to have to get across the border.
She chewed on her lip. Maybe she should have gone to the – what was it called, the detachment –
There was a sharp knock on the motel door. She jumped.
“I thought checkout was ten!” she called, stuffing her things into the backpack. It was a pretty meagre collection; she’d only meant to be gone a couple of nights. “I’m not ready –”
“This is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, ma’am,” said a man in a voice that almost sounded familiar. Ray would have said if one of the Mounties they’d met was here, wouldn’t he?
“One minute!”
She shrugged on her coat and checked the pistol in her pocket, then opened the door. There were two cops standing there, blue uniforms and sidearms and everything.
“I thought you said Mounties,” she blurted.
“Yes?” said one of them, sounding confused. She was not too much older than Susan and looked like she might be Indian or something – Indian from Asia.
The other one was a lot taller than her, and older, a dark-haired man with visible grey at his temples under his cap. He smiled encouragingly. “You may be thinking of the ceremonial uniform, colloquially known as the ‘Red Serge’. This is what we wear on a more day-to-day basis.”
He did sound familiar. “Are you…”
“Sergeant Benton Fraser,” he said, holding out his hand, “And this is Constable Manpreet Kaur. Susan Morse, I presume?”
“Susan Torrance,” she corrected him.
“Ah, right you are,” he said. “Ms. Torrance. We’ve been told that you’ve found yourself in a situation you didn’t intend. We’re here to see if we can help.”
“Oh, that’s –” Well, fuck Ray Kowalski and pretending to offer her a choice, just – fuck him. “That’s, that sounds really great actually, but like I just said I’m not – checkout is at ten – can you just give me a minute to finish getting ready?” She made eye contact with Constable Kaur. “It’s, um, you know, girl stuff.” She thought very hard about tampons and managed to make herself blush.
“Ohhhh, yes, I see,” said Constable Kaur, and “Well of course, we’ll be right here,” said Sergeant Fraser politely, and Susan smiled and said thank you and shut the door and grabbed her backpack and was out the bathroom window, which had a broken catch that let it open all the way, thirty seconds later. On the way she turned the bathroom fan on and flushed the toilet, just for some verisimilitude.
The motel lady had given her a little map of the town the night before, so she knew where the airport was – the motel was pretty close by, only a mile or so. It was cold but the sun was up and the wind was down, so moving kept her warm. She sprinted the first couple of hundred metres and then slowed to a brisk walk, once she was sure she was out of sight of the motel. Way less suspicious. In the end it turned out not to matter. Nobody was following her, and nobody stopped to ask where she was going.
That made her feel just as paranoid as if they had. It had been way too easy. Unless Canadian cops were really just nicer than American ones and they had just been checking in, wanting to help her, in which case she was going to feel pretty stupid later, or even right now. But it didn’t matter, did it? She was going to be out of this town as soon as she could and she’d never be back. Doesn’t matter if you’re not staying, her mom said in her head.
By the time she got to the airport she’d talked herself back into feeling like she was on top of things, finally. She was going to go home and if she had to save another semester because of it that was fine. She was going to go home and tell Mom how she’d been all the way to the Northwest Territories and back and then Mom would have to admit that if she could do that she could go to college. The thought buoyed her right up until she walked up to the door of the terminal, which was tiny, not even that much bigger than a big house, and saw Ray Kowalski standing there. He was wearing glasses today, with heavy black rims, that she would have called nerdy except that he was also in grease-stained overalls and heavy boots.
“Oh, hi,” he said, putting a mobile phone back in his pocket. “Fancy seeing you here. Decided to fly home?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. She tried to step around him to go in, and he stepped with her, a few feet apart.
“Thing is, Susan,” he said very gently, “you can’t get a ticket all the way back to the US without a passport, and you definitely aren’t going to be able to get that gun you don’t have on a plane that’ll take you across the border. You ever, uh, you ever left the country before? America, that is, not Canada.”
“I just need to go home,” Susan said, hearing herself on the edge of tears and hating it, and somehow without even thinking about it much she had the pistol in her hands and she was holding it exactly the way Mom taught her, head up, arms steady.
Kowalski just looked at her like – actually, exactly the same way her mom looked at her when she got home and dinner hadn’t been cooked and Annie was watching TV she wasn’t supposed to watch and Robbie was off who knew where and Dad was being useless, again, and all of that was Susan’s fault, somehow.
“I just want to go home,” she said again, because he wasn’t moving, hadn’t even raised his hands.
He put them up then, but it felt condescending, and Susan resented it just as much as she’d resented him not doing it.
“Put the gun away and you can go in there,” he said, “but I can’t let you go in there with it. Understand? You don’t need to do it this way, Susan.”
He took a step towards her, and she said “I – I’ll – stay there!”
“I don’t think you don’t wanna do this,” he said, face alive with tension, voice very clear, “but if you do, not much I can do about it.”
She heard running footsteps behind her and knew that she was out of time and tried to remember exactly how she’d got here, the Arctic breeze picking up now, making the gun feel like ice, and she couldn’t. She couldn’t think.
“Okay,” Ray said, “okay, okay, okay,” every okay a step forward, and she found he was taking the gun from her shaking hands. He had the safety on and the mag ejected and was holding it up, mag in one hand, gun in the other, hands to the sky and gun pointed down at the ground, almost before she could blink. He was looking over her shoulder at someone and he nodded, once, then knelt and put them on the ground, keeping his hands apart as he rose.
Susan started to turn but someone – Sergeant Fraser – barked “Stay where you are!” and someone else was grabbing at her arms and she started to twist away, but then Sergeant Fraser stepped into her eyeline and he had his gun trained on her and a sort of cold fury on his face that froze her in place as Constable Kaur put the handcuffs on her and oh, shit, Mom was going to kill her, like the way she kept half-joking threatening to do to Dad, actually for real kill her.
Once Sergeant Fraser saw she was handcuffed he holstered his weapon and bent to pick hers up off the ground. Ray Kowalski let out a long, long breath. “Whew. Okay.”
“What the hell, Ray,” snapped Sergeant Fraser, and Susan had vague memories of a tall, good-looking man in red who smiled politely all the time, and smiled at her mom a lot more. This guy, armed and clearly pissed off, bore almost no relation to the one in her memory. Maybe he didn’t like being back in Canada very much, she thought.
Constable Kaur was saying something which had to be her Miranda rights – whatever the Canadian version of that was – but she’d missed about half of it.
“Do you understand?” she was saying. “Would you like to speak to a lawyer?”
“Uh – I – I don’t know,” she said, which was extremely stupid but also her brain was blanking on – everything.
“Oh, was that upsetting?” Ray Kowalski was saying to Sergeant Fraser in tones of extreme sarcasm. “Is it upsetting when your unarmed partner walks up to someone holding a gun on them? Is that something that you don’t wanna watch? Funny, that.”
Sergeant Fraser rubbed his eyebrow and visibly swallowed back what Susan was pretty sure were several swear words. “We can talk about this later.”
“Great, because like you, I am in fact at work –” Ray jerked a thumb at a hangar off to the side of the terminal, “– and I need to get back to it.”
“You need to come to the detachment and give a statement.” Fraser seemed to have cooled off, but he was still firm.
Ray scratched his nose, leaving a grease mark; Susan hadn’t even noticed his hands were dirty. “Lunchtime.”
“Thirty minutes.”
“I actually can’t, you enjoy having planes that fly in and out of here, right – an hour.”
“Fine,” Fraser sighed, and turned his attention to Kaur and Susan. “Ms. Torrance. I’m afraid you’re going to have to accompany us to the detachment after all.”
Susan just nodded. The handcuffs were very cold on her wrists.
*
She’d never been arrested before but she knew what happened after arrests, had accompanied her mom to police stations when her mom brought someone in, so she wasn’t surprised by how long everything took. Canada had paperwork too, seemed like. She started crying in the car, not sobbing like yesterday, just little slippery tears in ones and twos that she couldn’t hold back. Constable Kaur, who was sitting in the back with her, said “Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’m sure this will all get sorted out.” But it wasn’t like she took the handcuffs off. Then she had to walk into the precinct – the detachment – red-eyed and in handcuffs and Mom was seriously going to kill her when she got home, if they let her go home.
They finally took the handcuffs off once they got there and put her in a room, offered her a glass of water and a granola bar. She knew she should eat it, but she ended up just tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces, waiting for them to get to the size where she felt like she could put one in her mouth.
The room they put her in wasn’t soundproof or anything – she could hear a bit of what was happening outside. There was no clock in the room, so she didn’t know what time it was, but at some point when the granola bar was less bar and more granola, she heard Ray Kowalski’s distinctively nasal voice saying something muffled that she only caught snatches of. “Hey Mike, hey Angela…statement…yeah, no…she wasn’t gonna…he what?”
They hadn’t exactly introduced her to the other cops, the other Mounties, but she’d seen at least two of them out there. He sounded like he knew them. She remembered him saying yesterday I am going to ask them very nicely and wished, with a sick feeling, that she’d said yes when he’d asked her to come here last night. She’d just wanted – she wanted to make her own choices. Maybe Mom was right and she didn’t know how to make any good ones yet. But if she didn’t start making some on her own, then when was she going to?
Then there was the sound of the front door opening, and a woman’s voice talking. Susan couldn’t make out the words at all but it sounded almost exactly like Mom, probably because she was thinking about her. She remembered Mom saying once, when you’re looking for someone, when you’ve been looking a while, they all start to look like the guy you’re after. Something like that.
Then she heard her mom’s voice saying, clear as day, “You’ve got her under arrest?” and oh shit oh no it was Mom, it was her worst nightmare, this was the worst day of her entire life. She contemplated whether it was possible to hide under the table.
There were a lot of raised voices and then Constable Kaur opened the door.
“Susan,” she said, “your mother is here. Would you like to speak to her?”
“I will speak to my own damn daughter,” Mom said, right behind her, and Constable Kaur said, with surprising firmness – she was a lot smaller than Mom – “I will let you know if she wants to speak to you, Ms. Morse.”
“Sue!” Mom said, over Constable Kaur’s shoulder. “Sue, honey, are you alright? Are you hurt?”
She sounded pretty well pissed off but she sounded scared, too, in a way Susan didn’t think she’d ever really heard her mom get scared, and abruptly the only thing she wanted was her mom to come in the room. So she said “Yeah, Mom, I’m okay, I’m okay, can she come in? Can you let her in?” and Constable Kaur looked at her, not unkindly, and stepped aside.
Mom gave her a big, all-encompassing hug, pressing her face against Mom’s shoulder with her hand, and said “I am going to scare the living daylights out of you later for this but thank God you’re alright. Sue, what the hell were you thinking?”
“It’s Susan,” Susan said, not knowing where she found her voice, “and I’m going to college next year, Mom, you can’t keep saying no.”
“What in God’s name does you haring off to Canada and getting arrested have to do with going to college? See if I let you leave the house for the next decade after this –”
Someone coughed, in the doorway, and Susan and Mom stepped apart; it was Sergeant Fraser.
“Janet,” he said. “I’m sorry about the occasion, but how nice to see you again,” and Mom’s jaw dropped and she said “Ben Fraser? Of all the Mounties in all the world! It’s been – my God, it’s been ten years, hasn’t it?” She smiled, and it was one of her you-want-to-do-me-a-favour smiles, but it was real too. “You never made it to Montana, huh.”
“Never quite the right time,” said Sergeant Fraser, and he was smiling too, the same way Susan remembered him smiling in Chicago. But he was in the cop uniform, and he was still carrying. It just came across – different. “I’m afraid Susan has – I suspect quite by accident – got herself into some trouble. We’ve still got to take a statement.”
“Let us talk first,” Mom said. “Just for five minutes.”
Sergeant Fraser rubbed his eyebrow, then said “Well, alright,” and stepped out, shutting the door behind him.
“I’ll be damned,” Mom said. She smiled fondly. Then her face went hard. Mom time over, bounty hunter time starting. “We’ve got five minutes, Susan. Tell me how you got here.”
They’d practiced this over the years, Susan reporting back, so she knew how to do it quickly. She didn’t bother with the whys. Mom was never much interested in the whys. She just told her about stowing away, and realizing she’d crossed the border, and trying to go south but ending up further north instead, and getting picked up by Ray Kowalski who had been Detective Vecchio in Chicago –
“What’s he doing here?” Mom asked.
“He said he was married to the captain, or – I don’t know what they call it. Whoever’s in charge of the, uh, the detachment.”
“Guess Ben must have introduced him to his good-looking Mountie sister or something. Anyway, go on.”
So Susan told her the rest, including the bit at the airport because this was the kind of trouble Mom would know how to get her out of, if anybody did or could. Mom sighed, and put her face in her hands. “Oh, kiddo.”
That was worse, in some ways, than yelling. It made Susan feel like she was ten again.
“I was just trying to get home,” she said in a very small voice.
Mom picked her head up, and patted Susan’s hand. “I know.”
“How did you find me?” she had to ask.
Mom shrugged. “Found someone saw you getting on the truck, got the company to tell me where it was headed, crossed the border yesterday, then you used the card for the motel last night which is attached to my account so the bank called me. Been a hell of a long drive, Sue.”
The door opened; time up. It was Sergeant Fraser again. “We need to take that statement now.”
“I want –” Susan started, but Mom pursed her lips and shook her head and she stopped, confused, and then Mom and Sergeant Fraser were out the door and Constable Kaur was coming in. Susan figured if Mom wanted her to finish asking for a lawyer she would have let her. Constable Kaur was pretty when she wasn’t handcuffing Susan and reading her rights to her, smiling warmly at her and making sympathetic noises, except Susan also remembered very clearly the force she’d used to pin Susan’s hands behind her back, so she didn’t let any of the rest of it stop her being very careful about what she said.
"And where did the gun come from?” Constable Kaur asked. The notepad in front of her was on its third or fourth page. Susan wasn’t sure how there was so much to write down.
“I’m licensed,” she said quickly, because it was true. “Mom’s been taking me to the range since I was twelve.”
“And it was your weapon?”
“Yes,” Susan said, which was the first outright lie she’d told, because it was Mom’s, but it wasn’t like they’d have any way of knowing that and Mom wouldn’t say anything.
“You understand,” Constable Kaur said, “The gun laws are different here. We won’t be able to return your weapon under any circumstances.”
“But I didn’t mean to –”
“Nobody ever does,” said Constable Kaur very dryly, which was the first sort of mean thing Susan had heard her say and made her feel a lot more like a real person and not someone being the Good Cop. “Alright, thank you very much, Susan.” She closed the notebook.
“What, uh,” Susan said, “what are you going to charge me with?”
“You were arrested for breach of the peace,” Constable Kaur repeated, as she’d said that right at the start, “but other potential charges include –” She read off what was quite a long list. Susan felt a bit sick at the end of it.
“Nothing’s been decided,” she said at the end, and stood and left, and didn’t say when she – or anybody – would be back.
As the door opened, the muffled noises of what sounded like Mom arguing with someone sprang into clear life. “Nobody’s got hurt, can’t you just –”
The door closed again, but maybe five minutes later it opened, and it was Sergeant Fraser again. “You can come out, Susan.”
She left the shredded remnants of the granola bar and followed him out. Mom was standing out there, arms folded, looking unhappy, facing Sergeant Fraser. Ray Kowalski was coming back into the main room, holding a coffee, his other hand gesturing animatedly as he talked to one of the Mounties, presumably the one he’d called Mike, since it was a guy. He’d taken his overalls off, and the glasses were tucked into his shirt pocket, but he still had the smear of grease beside his nose.
“What are you doing here?” Mom said to him. She didn’t seem too pleased to see him.
“Giving evidence,” Ray said, with a polite smile that was eerily too much like the way Sergeant Fraser smiled, except then it widened to show about three too many teeth. “On account of how your daughter pointed a gun at me.”
“Under the circumstances,” Sergeant Fraser said, very firmly, “and given that the weapon has been confiscated – we will provide a receipt – I am prepared to let you drive Susan to the border. We’ll call ahead and let them know. If you attempt to cross anywhere other than the specific crossing we agree on, or by a time we agree, then we will have a very different problem.”
“The weapon has been confiscated?” Mom said sharply. “That’s my property –”
Constable Kaur, who was still there as well, shot Susan a very sharp look at that and Susan felt herself going red.
“If you or Susan have sought and been granted permission to carry a handgun in Canada, we will of course be happy to return it,” said Sergeant Fraser. Mom glared at him. “Otherwise, the law is very clear on this point.”
“You were a lot nicer in Chicago,” Mom snapped. “Just give us the damn gun back and we’ll go.”
“As I believe I remember telling you, I was not a licensed peace officer in Chicago. In addition –”
“I just want to take my gun and my daughter and go home, Ben.” She gave him a pleading look. “I thought I could trust you?”
“In addition,” Sergeant Fraser went on, his eyes narrowing, “at this point I am going to ask you to hand over any other unauthorized weapons you may be in possession of.”
Mom was speechless with outrage, and Susan winced, because Mom was so particular about being properly licensed and doing everything right, and it was Susan’s fault she’d hared up to Canada after Susan without stopping. She didn’t bother wondering if Mom was carrying, because she always would be, when she was looking for someone. She said it was always better to carry and not need your weapon than not carry and need it.
“I want to speak to whoever’s in charge around here,” Mom said, switching tactics flawlessly.
Everybody in the room – Maybe Mike and Constable Kaur and Sergeant Fraser and Ray Kowalski – did a double-take.
“I’m the officer in charge at this detachment, Ms. Morse,” Sergeant Fraser said. “Unless you’re asking to contact regional headquarters, who I assure you –”
“No, I mean –” Mom frowned at Susan, and pointed at Ray Kowalski. “You said he was married to whoever was in charge here. So where is she?” Susan could follow what Mom was thinking; maybe another woman might go easier, might understand Mom’s need to protect herself.
“Well – he said that, yeah,” Susan said, not sure what had happened, and Ray Kowalski put down his cup of coffee on someone’s desk and ducked his head like he was trying not to laugh, and Sergeant Fraser said “Oh. Oh, dear.”
“And what does that mean?” Mom said, turning back to him.
He coughed. “Well, I realise now you may be unaware that in two thousand and five Canada chose at the federal level – although of course a number of provinces had already passed legislation, beginning with British Columbia in two thousand and three, though sadly the Northwest Territories were not among them. And of course, I would be remiss in failing to note that the Netherlands was in fact the first nation to achieve marriage equality, not discounting the fact that it was in fact two men in Minnesota who were the first –”
“What are you talking about,” Mom said.
“He is trying,” said Ray Kowalski, “to tell you that I told your daughter yesterday I was married to the officer in charge here, which means I’m married to him, because the great nation of Canada decided two years ago that queers get rights now. God save the Queen, or whatever.”
“Now you think we’re a great nation?” said Maybe Mike, which sounded like an ongoing argument.
“Gay rights yes, baseball no,” Ray Kowalski said placidly, and picked up his coffee again and took a sip.
Mom just kind of stared at him, like she couldn’t process the words. Susan realized she had heard that about Canada a couple of years ago, and Massachusetts too she was pretty sure, because it just seemed – it seemed nice, that was all.
“So anyway,” Ray Kowalski went on, “you can keep on wasting your time flirting with my husband to try and keep your guns, although I gotta say I think it’s making some people a bit uncomfortable.”
This was directed at Constable Kaur, who was shuffling her feet and looked like she really did not want to know anything about whatever Sergeant Fraser and Mom had going on, or didn’t have, or had maybe once had. Ray looked at her too and Susan realized she was blushing as well, which was dumb, because she wasn’t even doing anything wrong, and neither was Mom really.
“And not you?” Mom said to him.
He gave her a sharp grin. “I, personally, think it’s hilarious.”
Mom looked back at Sergeant Fraser, who had gone a little red around the ears and said very fast, “Right you are, that is, now we’ve cleared that up, illegal weaponry is a matter we take very seriously, so I am going to have to ask you again –”
“You were a lot nicer in Chicago,” Mom said bitterly, but she didn’t say anything meaner so Susan personally thought Sergeant Fraser should count that as a win. She gave up the guns with silent fury. Then there was some more paperwork and suddenly, somehow, Susan was free to go.
“Hey, hey,” said Ray Kowalski, pulling her aside as Mom was signing something about the guns. “Look, I actually really do have to get back to work, but I just wanted to check – are you okay going home with your mom?”
“Yeah,” Susan sighed. “I don’t – she looks after us, you know. She always has.”
“Because, uh, the thing is,” he was shifting restlessly from leg to leg. “You told me yesterday you wanted to go study English Lit, right? And I was wondering, why that?”
“Does it matter?”
“Just asking.”
“I want to know how writers – how they make words take you away from where you are. You know, in your head, instead of running away. I figure if I can understand that I can go wherever I want, even if I have to – I don’t want to leave Mom on her own really, I know she needs the help.” She snapped her mouth shut, feeling like she’d said way too much and who was this guy, really, anyway? A queer ex-cop who’d had a mid-life crisis and moved to Canada.
“Huh,” he said. “Huh, no, I get that. What I was going to say is – uh, you’re twenty, twenty-one, right? So when I was your age – that’s the age you’re supposed to be trying things, figuring out who you’re gonna be. And, take it from someone who has a long and storied history of fucking up while I figured out who I was going to be, way past your age, you can’t…you should make it work, you know. Going to college. Sounded like you’d thought about it a lot. And yeah, maybe your mom is never gonna get behind that a hundred percent, and maybe that’s okay, because I think you’re right, I think she loves you and she wants you to be okay. But that doesn’t mean you have to be exactly the person she wants you to be for the rest of your life. Being a legal adult means you get to make that call.”
Most of what Susan got out of that was that he thought she should still try and go to college, which made him the first person in her life who wasn’t her high school English teacher who thought that and had told her so – Dad always just said she needed to help Mom, like he knew anything about that. So that felt…pretty good, actually.
“So,” she said, to make sure they weren’t talking about her and her fuck-ups any more, “were you – when we were in Chicago – were you mad at Mom because you and Sergeant Fraser, uh, you…”
He scratched his chin. “Susan, I was an angry closeted mess ten years ago, but that particular week I had a lot of things on my plate that were nothing to do with your mom and Sergeant Fraser. The strike – uh, legally speaking not a strike – just, other things. You know? Work things.”
“Oh, okay.” She decided to be brave. “I think it’s nice. That you got married.” She remembered what she’d thought about a guy who was married to a female cop and what that meant. Showed what she knew.
“Funny, I think so too,” said Ray Kowalski, and clapped her on the shoulder and left.
“Drive safely now,” said Sergeant Fraser as he showed them out. Constable Kaur had given Susan her backpack with a smile and then gone off to do other cop stuff, presumably. “After guns, road fatalities are –”
“With all due respect, Sergeant, I don’t want to hear your road death statistics,” Mom said. “I’ve been driving nearly as long as I’ve been shooting.”
“Understood,” Sergeant Fraser said, and he smiled at her a little bit sadly but mostly polite. “Still. Safe travels.” He turned to Susan. “And I want you to know – I’ll be having a talk to that truck driver.”
“Wait, what?” She blinked. “The one who threw me out?”
He nodded. “I don’t think you realise – that was an extremely dangerous situation to be in, even at this time of year.”
Susan remembered how fast it had got cold, really cold. “I…yeah. I know.”
He nodded again. “So. We’ll be having a chat.”
Mom sighed. “Thank you, Ben, I guess.”
Susan thought about the cold, and the list Constable Kaur had read to her, and said “Thank you, really,” and Sergeant Fraser gave her a warm smile and a nod, and then they were getting in Mom’s truck, and turning out of the parking lot, and she was going back home.
*
Mom made her do most of the driving that day. She was totally wiped from getting up here, she said.
“Did you have a decent night’s sleep?” she wanted to know.
“Yeah, at the motel,” Susan told her. “It’s okay, Mom. I’ve got this.”
The road was pretty clear, so Susan put on a CD – there was no reception – and Mom slept. She said she wanted to make it as much of the way to Edmonton as they could in the rest of the day.
“He told the border folks midday, day after tomorrow,” she said, sometime in the early evening. “So let’s make good time, give ourselves some leeway. God, I can’t believe they took my guns.”
Susan knew she was supposed to say sorry for that but now she was in the pickup with Mom and headed back she found she was starting to feel angry all over again, and a bit hopeless, like she’d come all this way and still the only thing to do was turn around and go home, even though up until now that was what she’d wanted. “Well, Constable Kaur said that’s the law here, Mom. You always want us to follow the law.”
“Hmph,” said Mom. “Sue, do you see now why I think –”
“No, Mom, I don’t,” Susan said hotly. “I do not see why you think I have to do exactly what you want. I think if I wanted to go and – join a rodeo, or go bounty hunting with you –”
“Well, I have to say,” Mom allowed, “sounds like you did okay the last couple of days. You shouldn’t have pulled the gun on Vecchio, though. Or – what did you say his real name was again – ah, doesn’t matter.”
“I know,” Susan said. “Mom, the point is, you always tell us about how your mom and dad weren’t going to let you leave the house ‘till you married, so you lit out and got that job riding –”
“Yes I did, and do not tell me that I have ever told you that you have to get married to leave my house, young lady, because you know I would never stand for that sort of thing for you and Annie –”
“Well I don’t want to get married,” Susan said, not thinking in any way about Canada, or Massachusetts, “but I want to go to college and I’ve worked it all out, how I can do it and I know you say debts always lead to trouble but there’s programs, if you’ll sign the forms, I can make it work. I am going to make it work.” She took a deep breath. “What are you going to do – point a gun at my head and stop me?”
“Sue!”
She looked over and Mom looked horrified, really truly upset. “Is that what you think of me?”
“Dad ran away and you took the bounty.”
“Jesus,” Mom muttered, and for her that was a real swear word. “Sue, honey. I’m sorry if – I’m sorry if that’s – I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry, Mom. Just do the financial aid forms with me. And I promise if – I can do some credits at community college next semester, that’ll get me through faster, if they still – if I still get accepted, of course.” She’d got the acceptances, two years ago, but never been able to reply to any of them. “If it doesn’t work, if I’m just no good at it, then fine. But I have to try.”
Mom was silent for a long time as the sky turned dark. This time yesterday Susan hadn’t even seen Ray Kowalski’s pickup yet. It felt like a million years ago.
“Alright,” Mom said, eventually, and Susan was so surprised she nearly swerved off the road.
“Alright?!”
“Yeah, okay. Seems like you’ve learned a lot of things from me – and your dad,” her voice went dry, “about fighting and running, but maybe…maybe you could stand to learn some things from someone else.”
“Well. Yeah. I think so.” Susan felt a rush of guilt. “But not because – I don’t appreciate all the stuff you taught us, Mom –”
“I know, honey.”
“Also,” Susan said, “I think Robbie needs to learn how to clean the bathroom.”
Her Mom looked at her like she was from outer space. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“If I end up having to move out for college, you know. Someone else is going to need to. And you keep saying Annie has to concentrate on school.”
“Huh,” her Mom said, kinda thoughtful, and that was enough for now. “Listen, I reckon if we go another two hours we can stop for the night, and then if we get an early start –”
Susan drove on into the dark, on the long road going home, smiling.