Read Online A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun - Free Book Online

was a line they all knew was far too easy to cross on Jackie’s bad days. And then there was his father, who had let him down in more ways than he could count. Just last week, for instance, that letter had come about the house.
You and your sister are guests in
my
house,
his stranger of a father had written. My
house,
remember that
. Bryan wondered if the letter had been dictated; it read so cold.
    Bryan’s father, Trevor Nowicki, had grown up on a farm up north. He’d spent his youth working on the sour gas wells, but on a hunting trip down here, Trevor met Bryan’s mother, Junie, and though they’d tried to make a home together up north, people didn’t make it easy for a white man with a Kitselas wife, a “squaw”—not Trevor’s family or his old buddies or the people in the town. Junie never spoke about it, but the truth was, she couldn’t even get a cup of coffee up there. If Trevor and Junie went out, the waitress would only bring the one cup and, if challenged, spit right back at Trevor: “You should know better than to bring
her
in here.” He had gone back to working on the sour gas wells, and more than a few times those wells had flared close to the farmhouse they were renting, sickening their goat and cow and making them all dizzy and nauseous. By then, Junie had lost one baby and the headaches had begun to get really bad right about the time they learned about the second pregnancy, and while Trevor refused to connect the dots publicly—God knows, you don’t bite the hand that’s feeding your community—he himself kept having nosebleeds that privately terrified him, so he caved in and moved back here, where my dad, his good friend, had arrived and met my own mum, who never pretended she would go anywhere else with him, where Bryan, then Ursie, were born intact and healthy, and Junie’s sisters spooling around to help and cheer until one by one, they began to slide—and Junie with them, but for different reasons. In those last days, Trevor was still down at the mill yard, and Bryan, who was fourteen and without a license, would drive Junie home from the clinic to find one of her sisters picking through Junie’s clothes.
    â€œWhoa,” the sister might say, “you look
bad
! Don’t they have a medicine for that?”
    Junie would barely manage a weak smile as Bryan eased her back into bed. And when her sister would lurch close to Junie to “smooch” her cheek, Bryan would flinch and bite his tongue, noticing how Junie held her wriggling sister tight and whispered,
You be good
, before the sister pulled free and, giggling, left in Junie’s last best blouse.
    They tried to swarm after Junie died, but Trevor held them off. All three of them—Trevor, Bryan, and Ursie—would come to the door as the sisters began to rattle the knob and thrash their way back into Junie’s house. All three wearing the same fierce expression with which Trevor’s implacable Polish father had faced every homesteading challenge. Even Ursie, Junie’s spitting image, summoned up her father’s kin so that her soft brow grew stern and her usual easy laugh could not be enticed by her once-giggling aunts, begging on the threshold to visit and hold them tight, to be to Bryan and Ursie what Junie had been to them. Trevor chased them off, but it was the kids standing beside him without an ounce of their mother’s grace showing that made them stay away. Junie’s sisters came to believe the Polack, as they called Trevor, had kidnapped first their sister’s treasured soul and now those of their sister’s children. Only Madeline, the youngest, dared eventually to come back, sneaking through an open bedroom window one afternoon to pilfer Junie’s old red high heels and a bottle of cologne Trevor had bought his wife while she was in the hospital that last time. She tried again after Trevor left, but Bryan set her