Introduction

2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Winner Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Finalist

A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years

"A stunning debut about love, race, brutality, and the balm of forgiveness." —People, A Best New Book

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.

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Excerpt

The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry. The white folks at the store where we got our supplies said that Indians made such good berry pickers because something sour in our blood kept the blackflies away. But even then, as a boy of six, I knew that wasn’t true. Blackflies don’t discriminate. But now, lying here almost fifty years to the day and getting eaten from the inside out by a disease I can’t even see, I’m not sure what’s true and what’s not anymore. Maybe we are sour.

Regardless of the taste of our blood, we still got bit. But Mom knew how to make the itching stop at night, so we could get some sleep. She peeled the bark of an alder branch and chewed it to a pulp before putting it on the bites.

“Hold still, Joe. Stop squirming,” Mom said as she applied the thick paste. The alders grew all along the thin line of trees that bordered the back of the fields. Those fields stretched on forever, or so it seemed then. Mr. Ellis, the landowner, had sectioned the land with big rocks, making it easier to keep track of where we’d been and where we needed to go. But eventually, and always, you’d reach the trees again. Either the trees or Route 9, a crumbling road littered with holes the size of watermelons and as deep as the lake, a dark line of asphalt slithering its way through the fields that brought us there year after year.

Even then, in 1962, there weren’t many houses along Route 9, and those that were there were already old, the grey and white paint peeling away, the porches tilted and rotting, the tall grass growing green and yellow between abandoned cars and refrigerators, their rust flaking off and flying away with a strong wind. When we arrived from Nova Scotia, midsummer, a caravan of dark-skinned workers, laughing and singing, travelling through their overgrown and rusting world, the local folks turned their backs, our presence a testament to their failure to prosper. The only time that place showed any joy at all was in the fall when the setting sun shone gold and the fields glowed under a glorious September sky.

Among all that rust and decay stood Mr. Ellis’s house. It was on the corner where Route 9 met the dirt road that led to the other side of the lake, the side without Indians, where the white people swam and picnicked on Sundays, their skin blistering under the weak Maine sun. At home, years later and before I left again, I remembered that house like it was a picture from a book or a magazine that you looked at when waiting at the bus station or the doctor’s office. The tall maples hung over the driveway, and someone had planted a long, straight line of pine trees between the house and the dirt road that led to the camps, so we couldn’t peek at it, not that we didn’t try.

“Ben, why do they bother having a house at all if it’s just gonna be all windows?” I asked my brother.

“People need a roof over their heads. It gets cold here just like home.”

“But all those windows.” I gaped.

“Windows are expensive. That’s how they show the world they’re rich.”

I nodded in agreement, even if I didn’t understand exactly.

The whiteness of that house, painted every second summer, with the red trim and two columns framing the front door, was enough for me, who lived in a tiny three-bedroom with a leaky roof, to declare it “the mansion.” Years later, when I returned, Mr. Ellis long dead of a heart attack, I had fresh eyes and realized it was nothing more than a two-storey with a bay window.

When we arrived in mid-July, that summer we lost Ruthie, the fields were thick with green leaves and tiny wild berries. We were still full of excitement, the memories of hard work and long days from years past all but forgotten. My father dropped us off with the supplies we needed for the next eight to twelve weeks, and then left again the same day. The dust followed him as he headed back to the border. He went to New Brunswick to grab the same pickers who always came. The ones he could trust. Old Gerald and his wife, Julia, Hank and Bernard, twins who worked hard and stayed to themselves, Widow Agnus and her six children, all of them big and strong, and Frankie, the drunk. A funny man, scared of bears and the dark and not much of a worker.

Dad always said, “Your mother says that even people like Frankie need money and a purpose in life, even if only for eight weeks.”

“I pick more than him, Dad,” I said, nodding my head at Frankie as he absent-mindedly plopped a berry into his mouth, “and he eats just as much as he picks.”

“There are some people, Joe, that we make allowances for. You know he nearly drowned as a baby and didn’t quite grow up right after that. Nothing wrong with Frankie. God must have had a plan for him, so we take him just the way he is. He needs this each summer just like we do. He likes to come and sit ’round the fire and earn a bit of pocket change. Gives him something to look forward to.”

“Yeah, but Dad—” I started to say, annoyed that Frankie got paid in money and I picked more and all I got were new school clothes in September.

“No but. Just get back to work and be kind to Frankie. You never know when you might need kindness from people.”

While Dad was away, loading the additional pickers onto the back of the truck, we cleaned out the cabin and set up the camp under the watchful and exacting eye of our mother. “You boys pull out the grass growing through the porch floor. Tidy this place up a bit.” We cut our hands pulling that grass that dared to grow in our absence. Then, we collected dry wood for the fires, one for cooking, which was lit almost all the time, and one for cleaning dishes and, on weekends, our clothes. My sister Mae and some of the other girls helped clean the cabin, and a few went to the landlord’s house like they did every summer to help his wife clean the house from top to bottom. They got a small amount of money for it, money they spent at the county fair on bobby pins, bootleg whiskey and popcorn.

We couldn’t see the lake from our cabin, but we could from the outskirts of the camp, down where Old Gerald and Julia had their tent. We were lucky to have a cabin with a roof, a door, and a few old mattresses to sleep on. Only a handful of us got to stay in a cabin. The others, including my two older brothers, Ben and Charlie, slept in a tent, their backs to the hard ground, their jackets used as pillows.

When all the other families arrived, families from all over Nova Scotia and a few from New Brunswick, the boys would get loud and boisterous. They hadn’t seen each other since last year’s berry season and had a lot of loud catching up to do. That summer, I wasn’t old enough to hang out with the boys, so I spent my time with Ruthie, who got nervous around those older boys. During the day when they were serious and working, she remembered them and loved them the same as the rest of us. But at night, when they were singing around the fire, flirting with the girls and play fighting with each other, she retreated to the cabin and slept with her back against the far wall, her doll made out of old socks settled under her arm. Mom lay on the other side of her, a barrier to protect her from the loud boys she had forgotten.

When we’d left home that summer and headed south, seven of us had piled on that old truck. Mom, Dad, Ben, Mae, Charlie, Ruthie and me. Ben and Mae used to live at the Indian school, and every summer before that one, Mom would wait for them to come home, pretending she wasn’t. And when they did, they’d hardly have a chance to get out of that car before Mom would be on them, grabbing one and then the other, taking their faces in her hands and just standing there looking at them, like they were made of gold or something. She’d kiss them on their foreheads, repeating their names over and over again like the Hail Mary. Dad would pat Ben on the back and hug Mae before he loaded us onto the truck and headed to the border. The Indian agent would only let us see them twice a year, at Christmas and berry-picking time. “Hard work will build their character, help them to become proper contributing citizens,” Ben read from a letter once, pieced back together after Dad had ripped it up. Dad didn’t like Mr. Hughes, the fat Indian agent with little purple holes on his nose, and after Dad read that letter, Ben and Mae didn’t have to go back. They got to stay home with us and go to the same school as Charlie and me.

Now, Ben sleeps in a single bed across from me. He’s awake most nights, scared I’ll take my last breath on his shift. When he’s not in the bed, Mae is there, grumbling and snoring. It’s just us now, Mom, Mae, Ben and me. If the spirit world does exist, it’ll be good to see those people I’ve lost. Be good to give them a hug and tell them I love them, tell them I’m sorry. I have apologies to say on both sides of the great divide. If heaven doesn’t exist, I guess I’ll never know, so I’m not going to let it bother me. I’d tell Mom that I doubt heaven, but she believes that all the people she loves, who’ve passed on, are sitting at the right hand of the Lord.

On a clear night in mid-August that same summer, we all sat around the campfire. Dad had just put away his fiddle, and we were tired from dancing and singing along. Ruthie and I spread out a blanket and lay down. Our hands cradled our heads as we watched the fireflies fight the stars for attention. Those who were lucky, and old enough, headed down to Allen’s Mountain for their own fire. Mae told us tall tales about boys and girls dancing and kissing, trying to convince us that she was always on her best behaviour and never did any of those sorts of things. Neither me nor Ruthie believed her. Mae never found a party she didn’t like, where she couldn’t cause some sort of trouble. But back at our fire, talk turned to other things.

“They say it’s good, help the kids fit in, get jobs.” The old woman had hands like thick knots, but she weaved the long strips of ash into the shape of a basket without even looking down to see what she was doing.

“I say it’s horseshit. No one’s got the right to snatch our kids like that, ’specially white folk. You see how they raise ’em, all snivelling and blatting all the time. They got no joy, and now they’re tryin’ to take ours.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I love having Ben and Mae back home, but there must be something said about how they give them the teachings from the Bible,” my mother said, leaning toward the fire to see as she cast on stitches for another pair of socks. “I’m never sure if taking Ben and Mae out was the right thing, but Lewis is, as sure as the sunrise.” My mother, through no fault of her own, had come to love the church, the elaborate ceremonies replacing the ones torn from her heart during a childhood she rarely mentioned. Ruthie got up and whispered in my ear that she had to go to the bathroom, leaving a warm indent in the blanket we were sharing. She never came back to the blanket. Mom went looking for her after a bit and found her curled up, asleep in the cabin.

The very next day, Ruthie went missing. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Questions from the publisher - added by Pauline:

1) Amanda Peters has said that the opening line “The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry” came to her, and the rest of the book followed. How did this line set the scene? What expectations did it give you for the story, and were those fulfilled?

2) When did you figure out the relationship between the two storylines, and how did it make you feel?

3) Have you ever discovered a family secret? How did it change your relationship with the people around you?

4) Did you prefer Joe’s voice, Norma’s, or the combination? Were there other characters you wished could give their point of view?

5) After Ruthie goes missing, what do you think keeps the remaining family members bound together? What do you think pulls them apart?

6) How does Ruthie’s disappearance echo tragedies and atrocities in the broader history of Indigenous peoples? Have you learned more since reading the book?

7) How does Norma’s feeling of being stuck between worlds come out in the story? In what ways might other characters feel a sense of duality or out of placeness?

8) Why do you think art-making becomes so important in the story? Are there other themes that jump out at you about making a meaningful life after loss?

9) In the end, why do you think Norma’s mother did the very drastic thing she did?

10) You might say this story is ultimately about forgiveness. Are you able to find all the major characters redeemable in some way, or are there any you cannot forgive?

11) If you were going to write a novel based on stories of family history your parents told you, as Amanda Peters has here, where would it be set and what might it be about?

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