Sometimes my father left me alone to wait for the bus. I was terrified to wait there. Across the road was a thick forest and I was sure I heard unearthly things in the trees. The woods on our property were familiar, I told myself. They were safe and rang with birdsong. But I didn’t know what lurked across the road. I never told my father. I didn’t want him to think I was afraid.

One morning my mother came home sick from an early shift. She’d turned around at the hospital and driven right back. I was waiting alone for the bus. The coyotes next door had killed the neighbours’ sheep. Now they had two Great Pyrenees dogs on the property to guard the new flock. My mother was terrified of the enormous white dogs. I wondered if this was what lurked in the forest across the road but I still didn’t say a word to my father. I remember how Ocean had started yelling at my mother around then, about how she had to get in touch with her heritage.

She had black hair, like Morgaine. My father said it was their Indian blood, that the Native peoples out there on the Pacific were holy and she should tap into the power — it was nothing to be embarrassed about.

She rolled her eyes. It was just an old family story he wanted to believe.

He would pick Morgaine up and call her his Indian princess. I had blue eyes like him.

My mother started getting a ride to the Valley with a neighbour so my father could have the car at home. This way he would have no reason to make us walk so far to catch the bus in nasty weather. When the weather was bad, she started staying down in the Valley, in town at a friend’s house, a friend she worked with.

It wasn’t long after that she told Ocean she was going on a maternity leave. It was early spring. She said she’d be staying down in the Valley permanently. Ocean was convinced she’d been contaminated by self-indulgence. But then my mother told him about what he called the “sacred breech” — the baby belonged to the friend she was spending the nights with, a man who worked at the hospital with her, a doctor. He didn’t live on a reserve, but he was Indigenous. That he lived in town seemed to bother my father the most.

“That’s how it is, George,” my mother said, using our father’s real name like a swear word.

We could hear him crying up on the top floor of the tree house. We could even hear him crying all the way through the woods on the meditation bench perched by the dangerous cliff, howling into the wind and salty spray, wailing down toward the jagged rocks where the ocean smashed against the cliffside far below, the mists blowing in through the trees and carrying his weeping to us.