Adam's Peak by Heather Burt Page B

geometry of the street.
    Rudy looks back at his father’s sagging lights, the exception on the block. Complementing the red shutters and door, the bulbs are green and red, but the wires hang in loose arcs along the eaves and under the windows. “Like the lights at the Kandy Perahera,” Adam apparently said when he put them up. Dad said they looked sloppy and apologized for them when Rudy and the others came home. “Kandy Perahera!” he huffed, shaking his head. “The boy has never even seen a perahera. The neighbours must think we’re completely ignorant.”
    Rudy turns back to the street. “You should have been born in the old country, machan,” he muses to his absent brother.
    Rudy himself is tired of being Sri Lankan. Or, rather, of being
only
Sri Lankan—especially to women. His relationships follow a pattern as regular as the lines and angles of Morgan Hill Road. Currently it’s Renée, who took the initiative and asked him out. At first, she found him exotic (that word he has grown to despise) and therefore incapable of being boring. And he, in the interest of boosting his desirability, became in her presence someone not quite himself, peppering hisdescriptions of “home” with tropical flavours and smells, using Sinhala words whose meanings had escaped him, admiring the contrast in their skin tones when they made love. It worked, for a while. Then Renée asked about his name, and on discovering he was neither Sinhalese nor Tamil, but a hybrid with European ancestors, began to find entirely ordinary faults in him. Soon, he’s sure, they’ll break up, and once again he’ll vow not to take part in this embarrassing routine.
    As if to assert his Canadianness, he crouches and scoops up some snow with his bare hands. It doesn’t pack very well, but he manages to form a lumpy little ball, which he fires across the street at the Frasers’ Oldsmobile. He crouches to scoop up more snow, but as he does so the Frasers’ front door opens and Mrs. Fraser and her daughter come out. For an instant, Rudy worries they’re going to bawl him out for hucking snowballs at their car, the way Mr. Fraser once did. But Mrs. Fraser and her daughter seem oblivious to his presence. Mr. Fraser himself—odd, sullen guy—is no longer around to care. Apparently his heart gave out on him in the summer.
    Rudy straightens up slowly and leans back into the juniper, grateful that his jacket isn’t far off the green of the bush. To step out into the street would probably call for a greeting—something he’d rather not bother with—so he stays where he is, waiting for the two women to get into the car and drive off. Curiously, though, they stay where they are, hovering by the front door, as if trying to decide where to go or what to do. Mrs. Fraser, in a fur-trimmed coat, is cradling something in one arm, gesturing toward the middle of the lawn with the other. Her daughter, Clare, looks frozen in a turtleneck and jeans. Her arms are folded across her middle and her head is bowed, long hair hiding her face.
    Rudy hasn’t seen Clare Fraser in years. In his time away from Morgan Hill Road, he’s forgotten her, and only now, watching her like this, does he recall with an unexpected wave of nostalgia that she used to be a fixture in his life. He never spoke to her; they weren’t friends. But she was regularly
there
, the girl across the street, about his age, a presence he could count on.
    His mind begins to drift, until Clare and her mother walk out to the driveway. Rudy presses his body farther into the juniper. TheChristmassy smell fills his nostrils. “Come on, you two,” he mutters. “I feel like an idiot here. Get in the car.” Cupping his hands around his mouth and nose, he prepares to slip around the bush and back to the house. But then the scene across the street changes.
    The two women march through the fresh snow to