Free The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger Page A

and waited for the wind to die down, as the man at the ferry terminal said it would.
    It was just after 3 p.m. when he stood on the wet ferry deck, the flat-nosed boat plowing through the chop of the Georgia Strait. The clouds were low and heavy and scraped across the rocky hills of Aguanish. All the letter had said was that Elka had been found dead in Alberta. It wasn’t news that he was surprised to get, but listening to Bobbie tell it was going to be hard, like lifting a bandage to see a wound.
      
    From Owl Bay, Tom caught a ride to Bobbie’s place with an elf-like woman in a yellow van. A trinket of beads swung from the rearview mirror as she turned south onto the main island road.
    “You visiting someone?” she asked.
    “My mother-in-law.”
    The road moved gently through dense Douglas fir flossed with hairy grandfather’s-beard and mist. Something heavy rolled in the back of the van. Up ahead, two men in raincoats walked by the side of the road, and when she was level with them she slowed the van and leaned out the window. She asked if they needed a lift. Smiling, they waved her off, and she told them she’d see them later.
    Elka had asked him once or twice if he would consider moving there. Some aspects of the place would have suited him—subsistence farming, producing his own energy, and wasting nothing. But what he couldn’t fathom was the familiarity. All the people on the island knew each other. And the basket weaving, the spirituality, the self-centeredness. So much of Elka’s upbringing had been about seeking some kind of inner peace, and he sometimes thought that maybe after looking so hard at herself, she’d bored a hole right through her middle.
    “So who’s your mother-in-law, then?”
    “Roberta Sirota.”
    “Bobbie?” She looked at him, her eyes wide. “No kidding.” She cupped the wheel loosely with the fingertips of her right hand and draped her left arm out the window. She cocked her head to the side. “You staying long?”
    “Just down for the day.”
    “You know, a bunch of us built her a cob hut last year, a place to make her brews and creams and stuff.”
    He nodded. She turned onto a smaller, dirt road that cut into a seam of island bedrock. Patches of gray sea could be seen through the trees, and soon the road swung to the left and followed a cliff. There were glimpses of the coastline dipping in and out of rocky coves before the road turned in again. Tough pines and junipers accustomed to strong wind and saltwater spray. This was Bobbie’s island.
    The woman stopped the van in front of a familiar wall of blackberry. She leaned over to turn off the ignition, and the edge of her ear poked through the straight fall of her hair, like a kitten’s tongue. “Tell Bobbie to come over and see me sometime,” she said.
      
    It had been nine years since he’d been to Bobbie’s place, and nothing much had changed. There was the poorly built driftwood gate that needed to be coaxed open with a knee, which led to a path through salal and blackberry into the yard. The brick cottage, surrounded by fruit trees and overgrowth, hunched stubbornly at the top of a slope. Where the ground leveled out along the side of the house there was the pond, half hidden by the skirt of a large willow. This, Elka once told him, was where she used to hunt tadpoles. And beyond that, the vegetable garden.
    Dirty smoke curled from the chimney into the overcast sky, and from somewhere behind the house came the rumble and chuck of a generator in need of a new exhaust. He looked up at the front of the house, preparing to go in.
    Bobbie must have been watching for him from the window, because she opened the door before he made it to the porch steps. She stood in the doorway, as if she were unsure whether or not to let him past. Her hair was now more white than gray, and she wore it in a long, thick braid thrown over her shoulder. Her eyes, dark and heavy-lidded, had sunk a little farther into her face, the