The Broken Places Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE BROKEN PLACES

  “In her debut novel, Frances Peck masterfully brings together a cast of complex characters, each broken in their own way, and weaves a compelling story set against the backdrop of a catastrophic earthquake. It beautifully reminded me that none of us are ever on solid ground, especially when it comes to our human, and fragmented, hearts.”

  —BRIAN FRANCIS, author of Fruit and Missed Connections

  “With masterful use of craft, Peck takes readers on a journey into how devastation draws us together while pulling us apart. With moving imagery and haunting insight into response to trauma, The Broken Places highlights the flawed nature of humanity and our ability to move forward and find community after complicated, tragic loss. Above all, Peck gives nuanced, stunning characters who show readers what it means to give ourselves up to our flaws and find love and beauty in the process.”

  —KELLY S. THOMPSON, national bestselling author of Girls Need Not Apply: Field Notes from the Forces

  “Frances Peck’s wonderfully sophisticated and razor-sharp novel takes dead aim at Vancouver’s tenuous decadent dreams against an ensemble of mesmerizing characters. The Broken Places casts an unwavering eye on a city of glass and its inhabitants who must respond to a savagely cruel event that shatters some families while bringing others closer together. It’s Balzacian in its ambition and wit, raising ineluctable questions about family and wealth, love and lust, resignation and resilience, and offers hard-earned truths about the death of dreams and how we’ll fight fiercely to keep them intact regardless of the cost. A well-crafted, affecting debut.”

  —JOHN VIGNA, author of No Man’s Land

  “Frances Peck reveals herself a writer with seismic impact as she examines the before, during, and after of crumbling worlds and relationships. The Broken Places will scare the living daylights out of you while it yields harsh truths, heartbreak, and hope about the human condition.”

  —GLEN HUSER, author of Burning the Night

  “The Broken Places is a propulsive, terrifying novel about the sudden catastrophic upending of day-to-day life. Hillsides slump, bridges give way, apartment buildings tilt and crumble — while love, desire, greed and devotion are tested, heightened or lost forever. Frances Peck’s characters are those we instinctively understand. Beautifully layered and compelling, this novel explores the intricacies of human behaviour — what it is that makes us, and what it is we cherish most.”

  —LIBBY CREELMAN, author of Split

  “The Broken Places is a rare treat that combines high-tension narrative with true literary craft, delivering characters that readers will love to love, hate, pity, and grieve. Set against the backdrop of a devastating earthquake, the story of how a diverse group of people react to their new reality is beautifully delivered, offering many moments of masterful writing and rich, sensory engagement. Layer by layer, Peck reveals the motivations, fears and desires of her characters, doling out clues that culminate in an explosive and heartbreaking climax. Yet the novel ends with hope. Not a sweet-sugary treat, but a hope grounded firmly in believable characters and situations that resonate.”

  —RUTH E. WALKER, author of Living Underground

  “Frances Peck’s dazzling debut novel snatches a cast of vividly realized, multi-faceted characters out of their daily lives in Vancouver and gathers them closer and closer as the book builds toward a dramatic, disturbing macroseismic cataclysm. Peck slides effortlessly in and out of the intimate thoughts and turbulent flux of emotion that individuals experience as they connect, as their destinies interlace, as their lives are irrevocably altered. People disappear; people are transformed. Peck’s prose is piercing with precision — here are broken people, and here is what might heal them.”

  —CLAIRE WILKSHIRE, author of The Love Olympics and Maxine

  The

  Broken

  Places

  * * *

  THE

  BROKEN

  PLACES

  A NOVEL

  FRANCES

  PECK

  NEWEST PRESS

  Copyright © Frances Peck 2022

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication — reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise), or stored in a retrieval system — without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Madeleine Thien’s essay “Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh” appears in Finding the Words: Writers on Inspiration, Desire, War, Celebrity, Exile, and Breaking the Rules, edited by Jared Bland. The quotation attributed to a geologist on page 279 is from Andrew Alden, “What Is Geological Strain?,” ThoughtCo.com.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The broken places : a novel / Frances Peck.

  Names: Peck, Frances, author.

  Series: Nunatak first fiction series ; no. 57.

  Description: Series statement: Nunatak first fiction series ; no. 57

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210212632 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210212640 | ISBN 9781774390450 (softcover) | ISBN 9781774390467 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS8631.E355 B76 2022 | DDC C813/.6—DC23

  NeWest Press wishes to acknowledge that the land on which we operate is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux.

  Editor for the Press: Leslie Vermeer

  Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen

  Cover image © Kirill Bordon photography / Stocksy.com

  Author photo: Rebecca Blissett

  NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

   #201, 8540-109 Street

  Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  Printed and bound in Canada 22 23 24 25 5 4 3 2 1

  for Marjorie Watt Peck

  The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  A Farewell to Arms

  * * *

  They create art not for art’s sake, but from necessity, to hold together what is beautiful and what was broken . . .

  MADELEINE THIEN

  “Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh”

  PART

  ONE

  Strain

  ONE MINUTE you’re at your spot in the enormous kitchen, a chrome-and-leather stool at one end of the gleaming granite island. The desert island, you privately call it. You’re alone there so often you may as well be marooned.

  Down-island: a clamshell. Actually a laptop, slim, silver, screen gone black, the only sign that another human has crossed this strip of land. The human: your mother, who abhors crumbs and unrinsed coffee cups, drips and stains, crusts of toast — all the messes of human life. Your mother, who moves through each day leaving no trace other than some random electronic device. Hurricane Charlotte, Dad calls her, a strange name for someone who glides cold and robot-like through life. Your mother, who never listens, who doesn’t understand the first thing about you, who is too oblivious to even know that she doesn’t know.

  One minute you’re sitting there, empty Mountain Dew can at your elbow, the drink having edged you into another reluctant day, along with the fatty-sweet bitsu-bitsu May made fresh this morning. Breakfast of champions, Dad said when he strolled in. He swiped a couple of the chewy doughnuts himself, trailed sugar like white sand all the way to the kitchen island. Your mother glared.

  One minute you’re on your stool. On your phone, scanning Instagram posts from Rebecca Lee, who used to hang out with you. You’d go to the mall, split a frozen yogurt, one topping your choice, one hers, get high, steal nail polish, steal, once, a pair of jeans you shoved under your jacket when Rebecca said no way, you never would. Rebecca, now a stuck-up slut who has quit talking to you.

  It’s not like she’s the only one. Lots of people won’t acknowledge you now. You creep along the hallway outside chem lab — which used to be your spot between classes, you owned that spot — and your so-called friends fold into a tight whispering knot, no words for you. You angle toward your place in the cafeteria, the table where you’ve sat for the past two and a half years, and find every chair occupied. In class, it doesn’t matter which one, the person in front of you hands papers back without turning all the way. When you enter the washroom you clear the place out.

  It’s fine. They talked about this in group. Reintegration, they called it; also redrawing. It’s hard for the people in your life to redraw you. They want to see the same you they’ve always seen. The group counsellor, Drayton, too earnest and granola for your liking though he always gave you respect, would trace a rectangle in the air with his forefinger. For most people, he said, the world is a tidy box. Step outside the box, disturb their sense of order, and they feel profoundly uncomfortable. When that happens, you’ve got to remember the discomfort is their problem, not yours.

  Redrawing. You like that idea.

  One minute your earbuds are pulsin
g Taylor Swift, a not-bad song years ago when it came out, the video with all the ballet dancers, now just lame, an embarrassing scrap of childhood. Like the frilly canopy bed you hung on to until you were fifteen and woke up one day to realize you were no one’s princess. Time to make a new playlist. Taylor Swift is so . . . yesterday.

  One minute you’re on your desert island, scrolling, scrolling, looking for a better, more meaningful song, a more mature song, one that suits your mood this boring Tuesday morning, wondering if you should post something about that skanky Rebecca Lee, because you know stuff about her no one else knows, or if you should just let it go, the way you’re learning to let things go.

  The next minute — how? —

  You’re on your ass, the heavy stool you were sitting on tipped over beside you.

  What —?

  Pots and pans sail off copper hooks. Crash all around you. Bounce.

  Holy shit! Dad?

  Instinct kicks in. Make yourself small. You curl up like a snail, hold your bandaged hand close to your belly. Be a snail. Be a snail. Only you’ve never had a shell.

  The blender flies off the granite island, smashes onto the terracotta floor. Glass sprays. Another barstool falls.

  Dad!

  You wait. Wire-taut, every nerve screaming run. But you don’t.

  It’s the one thing you’re not supposed to do.

  Below the treble of smashing glass and clanging metal, a bass line builds, like no sound you’ve ever heard before. Deep rolling thunder, but louder. Close. A jumbo jet landing on the roof.

  You wait. Terrified.

  You wait, like you’ve waited for so much in life. To be understood. To matter.

  You wait. For everything to end. For something else to begin.

  ONE

  * * *

  Morning dawned soft grey and still, mother-of-pearl streaking a sky that domed the harbour and embraced the snow-frosted mountains. High overcast, said the forecasters, with sunny breaks. No wind. Warmer than average.

  A mid-May day on the laid-back west coast. A day for lingering over morning coffee or chai latte or herbal tea, for beachcombing and dreaming, for tending to tasks and children, to aging parents and spring gardens. A Tuesday. A day for working, but maybe, in deference to the milky mild air, not too hard.

  A day like any other. Even better than some. Until it wasn’t.

  * * *

  SIX A.M. A little brighter than yesterday, morning light elbowing its way through the gaps in the bedroom blinds, but basically six o’clock today is a lot like six o’clock yesterday. Not too early, not too late. Time to get at it.

  Six o’clock has been Joe’s time for so long now that he hardly needs to set the alarm. It’s not like the old days, when he was fresh off the boat, so to speak, a wide-eyed Newfoundlander in Toronto, with odd jobs and no fixed address, moving from couch to futon, bunking with any co-worker or friend or nighttime acquaintance who’d let him stay in exchange for his handiness around the place, his reliability, his rock-solid good cheer. In those days he might wake at any time, ten in the morning or two in the afternoon, and whenever his eyes cracked open, the day and the city spread before him like a market of unsampled delights.

  Here on the west coast, where he’s older and settled, a self-employed landscaper in a city of year-round gardening, he follows a stricter rhythm. On any given day, sometime between five fifty and six, he switches from deeply asleep to ready to go. His mind sharpens, as much as it ever does, and his body knows: time to get going.

  He is sleepier than usual this morning, but other than that there’s nothing different about six o’clock today. Later he will wonder about this. He’ll rack his memory looking for the sign he missed in his pre-coffee haze, because there must have been one. Was it in the light or the sky? Carried by the breeze? There must have been something. Some smell or shimmer, a shift so faint as to escape his notice then, but that he could summon up later if he tried hard enough.

  Later, when the city has fallen and he has time on his hands, he will think on it. But he will come up empty. There is nothing to account for the great change to come. It’s just another morning, quiet, dim, routine. The sheets, which Joe changed yesterday after work, are well known to him. Five hundred thread count, sateen. Pewter, a shade Kiki hunted down obsessively online. The post-sleep smell that hangs in the air is deeply familiar, a mixture of Zest soap from their evening showers and the cleaning lady’s orange furniture polish. The bed feels the same, the king-sized Tempur-Pedic boxed into the Shaker-style dark-oak frame, supportive the way only a four-thousand-dollar mattress can be. Joe’s cheeks still redden, two years after they put it on their Visa, at the mattress’s price tag. Four thousand bucks! That’s a lot of landscaping. But Kiki needs the best sleep money can buy, and since Kiki did all the research and is the main breadwinner of the household, Joe shook his head and went along. What would Ma make of such a bed, Ma who slept on the same iron cot, topped with a stained, lumpy grey-ticked pad, her whole adult life? Some mornings Joe wonders, gazing longingly across the vast expanse of sheet, whether it was a good decision. Joe is a compact man. Kiki is also small. The bed is very large, the space between them wide.

  Joe lingers a minute, stretches mightily, feels the keg of his chest expand. Tests his knees. A little creaky, but not bad. He’s got a long day ahead, a new West Van client with a waterfront property that’s gotten out of hand, then another regular, also in West Vancouver, plus a drive out to the nursery if he can fit it in, and already he’s flagging. What was he thinking, staying up past midnight to watch that foolish comedy on Netflix? It could’ve waited. True, he is duty-bound to see every movie that features Melissa McCarthy, because she is fat and has to work harder to be a star. She needs her fans. If you’re going to support the underdog, you can’t hold back. Joe has seen the entire filmography of the small actor Peter Dinklage, has read all he can get his hands on about the unlikely racehorse Seabiscuit, came to idolize that homely Scottish singer — or was she Welsh? — before she hit it big in North America. Still, it’s not like they’d whisk the Melissa McCarthy show off of Netflix overnight. He didn’t have to stay up so late.

  He hazards a glance across the bed, where Kiki is snoring softly, mouth agape, flecked with — spit? toothpaste? Joe can’t tell without his fancy new progressives. For Pete’s sake! Can’t even see to the other side of your own bed. Gettin old, b’y, he tells himself. One of the countless humiliations ahead. Whatever time Kiki got in, it was long after the credits had rolled and Joe had rinsed the popcorn bowl and stowed it in the dishwasher so the counters would be clear. Long after he’d flipped open his phone again to make sure the ringer was on, after he’d brushed his teeth, pulled out fresh jeans and a tee-shirt for the morning, and crept inside the cool pewter. He vaguely remembers the pipes rumbling in the middle of the night, signalling that the shower was on, but nothing after that. He can’t feel it when Kiki climbs into bed, the mattress is that good, designed to hold them together while shielding each from the other’s movements. It’s a solid, wide bed. Like a tennis court, Joe thinks, still straining to see his lover on the opposite side. Kiki’s light snores drone on. No hope of a cuddle.

  Joe swings his legs out into the morning air and takes a minute to straighten up. Knees hurt like a bugger when he settles his weight on them, but it’ll pass. He just needs to walk around awhile, needs to putter, as Ma used to say. By the time he fires up the truck he’ll be fine.

  He’s leaning against the kitchen counter, on his second mug of milky tea, half-listening to the deejays joshing on the soft-rock station, knees nearly normal, when an elephant-like yawn comes from down the hall. In stumbles Kiki, eyes heavy-lidded, in the earliest stages of awake. Like that, the morning glows and Joe’s tea sweetens.

  “Would you look at that.” He grins. “The miracle of resurrection, in our very own kitchen. On the third day he rose again.” Funny how the Catholic liturgy is always there, twisted into the strands of your DNA.