Adam's Peak by Heather Burt

unpack,” she said.
    In the bedroom she unzipped her suitcase and tossed clothes into the laundry hamper until her mother’s footsteps sounded on the creaky stairs. Then she went to the window and stared at the dark boughs of her father’s favourite tree—the pine he’d brought with him from Scotland. His final resting place.
    It was good we did it on Christmas. You always loved Christmas, didn’t you ... the rituals anyway.
    Oh, aye.
    It’s been six years already?
    So it has.
    What have I been doing?
    Och. Carrying on.
    Not even. I feel like I’m still standing out there in the snow with your ashes.

DECEMBER 1990

    I t’s winter again. Christmas Day. Rudy has driven out from Toronto along with Susie and her family. Adam still lives at home. All in all, it’s an ordinary Christmas—messier now that Sue and Mark have baby Zoë. Mum’s absence no longer oppresses, as it did for so many years, though Dad still drinks too much arrack.
    Rudy is at the kitchen table with the rest of the “children,” browsing an old issue of the
Gazette
while his aunt makes Christmas lunch and his father listens to the Jim Reeves Christmas album in the living room—right hand anchored to his drink, left hand lazily tapping the arm-rest of his chair, more in time with his own thoughts, it seems, than with the music. Bundled up in her multiple cardigans, chopping away, Aunty tells stories of the old days on the tea estate. Adam’s the only one paying any attention. He listens as a curious outsider would, tilting his head and widening his eyes, as if it were all fabulously exotic—as if peraheras and kavichchis and Peria Dorays were from a different planet. It’s vaguely embarrassing, Rudy thinks, the way his brotherfawns over things that should be ordinary to him. But then Adam has never been home; he’s different from the rest of them.
    â€œSo, Aunty,” he says, rocking back on two legs of his chair, hands clasped behind his head, “were there any problems between the Tamils and the Sinhalese back in those days?”
    In the living room Dad coughs. Aunty keeps on chopping.
    â€œAh, not like they have now,” she says. “Things were more peaceful then.” She brushes loose strands of hair away from her face with the wrist of her chopping hand. “People got along better, isn’t it.”
    Adam frowns. “Well, they made it
look
like they did. But I can totally understand why they got fed up—the Sinhalese
and
the Tamils. I mean, I’d wanna start fighting too if I had second-rate status in my own country. Wouldn’t you?”
    â€œAh, maybe,” Aunty says, without conviction.
    Dad coughs again. Rudy and Susie exchange a glance, then Susie retreats to the heavy manual she has brought with her from Toronto:
An Introduction to American Sign Language
. As far as Rudy is concerned, Sri Lanka’s problems aren’t
real
. Real is another frozen Christmas with crappy gifts and too much food. It’s Adam’s larger-than-life presence. It’s Susie and her husband finding out their tiny blue-eyed, black-haired kid is severely hearing impaired.
    Watching his sister move her hands like pieces of newly acquired anatomy, Rudy senses a familiar impotence—a powerful but hopeless desire to be helpful, to be significant in some way. He remembers an afternoon, ages ago, in Aunty Mary’s garden, when Susie leaned too far over the edge of the well and got stuck. For several long seconds, she teetered perilously atop the narrow stone wall, screaming, feet kicking in the air, before Rudy got to her and yanked her back down by the hem of her skirt. In his mind, he’d saved his sister’s life, and for a brief, triumphant time he was her hero and protector. But he doubts Susie even remembers the incident. And in any case, it’s no longer Rudy she calls for in her moments of crisis, but Adam.
    Adam’s interest in