The Break

The morning after Stella witnesses the assault, she looks to the scene of the crime; she takes note of how the snow has covered the blood and has left “everything clean,” despite the horrors that occurred there hours before. She thinks about her cousins, Lou and Paulina, and fixates on a memory from their childhood. During the summer, Lou and Paulina moved in with Rain and Stella, and they told Stella how they were sexually assaulted by the same man. They attempted to understand why they were harmed, but they could not come up with an answer.

Stella feels guilty for having not seen her family for months due to Jeff’s fear of her traveling to the city on the bus with their son, Adam. She claims that he does not understand “how things really were” because he was “a white boy who grew up in the city” (88). However, she still decides to listen to her husband and does not visit her family anymore. She tries to hold on to a memory of Kookom telling her everything will be okay, but she begins to feel cold. Stella, then, focuses on her house and claims that she never wanted to live by the Break because it is too close to her old neighborhood. Rather, she wanted to buy a house in the “gentrified” neighborhood where they were already living in a rental. However, they could not afford the mortgage. While Jeff sleeps and Stella watches the children, she continues to think about the assault she witnessed and yearns to lie in her grandmother’s arms.

Pete calls Paulina during her shift at the hospital to tell her that Emily has been hurt, and he is rushing to take her to the emergency room. She meets them at the doors of the hospital, and she discovers that Emily has fainted due to losing massive amounts of blood. Pete offers to call Paulina’s mother, Cheryl, as he parks the truck. Paulina thinks about her daughter’s birth and how scared she was to be such a young mother. She feared taking care of a child and being responsible for Emily’s well-being. Then, a doctor comes out of Emily’s hospital room to tell Paulina that they believe someone raped Emily. They found glass within her reproductive system along with a cut on her inner thigh. They also found a cut on her lip and bruises around her body. The hospital calls the police to make a report of the assault.

The hospital staff moves Emily from the emergency room to another wing of the hospital. Once Emily is settled in her new room, Paulina takes her place beside Emily and holds her hand as she waits for her to wake up. Cheryl, Kookom, and Pete come into the room. Paulina wonders just how much she truly knows Pete, but she decides to focus on her daughter rather than fretting about who could have hurt Emily.

Lou wakes up without Gabe, and even though she has a moment of peace, she realizes how lonely she is without him. She thinks about her younger son, Gabe Jr., and makes her way to the living room, where her older son, Jake, and his friend, Sunny, are sleeping. They wake up and go into Jake’s room, as Lou thinks about Rita, Sunny’s mother, and how she gives him a hard time despite being well-behaved.

She gives Gabe Jr. breakfast as she thinks about Jake’s father, James, whom she has not seen in five years. The last time she saw him was during her pregnancy with Gabe Jr.; Jake has never known his biological father. Lou then remembers when Gabe came home from tour and had a hickey on his neck. However, she chose to ignore it. The phone rings, and Lou believes that Gabe is calling. She does not answer, and Jake brings her his cellphone because Kookom called him. She tells Lou to immediately come to the hospital to see Emily.

Cheryl sits in the corner of the hospital room and watches her family as they try to comfort Paulina. On the ride to the hospital, Kookom cried for Emily once she realized what happened, but she struggled to understand at first. As she has gotten older, she has become confused about her surroundings. Cheryl thinks back to her dream before being woken up by Pete’s phone call. She remembers being at the house of the father of her children, Joe, in the bush with Louisa and Rain. She saw a shadow of a stranger, and she ran after it. However, she could not keep up, and the shadow got lost in the trees.

Officer Christie and Scott make their way into Emily’s hospital room, and they ask Paulina about her and Emily’s whereabouts on the night of the attack. Paulina tells them that Emily came home despite having plans to stay with Ziggy, but she got back to their house before Paulina and Pete came home from the bar. The police officers leave to contact Rita and Ziggy while they wait on Emily to wake up. During this time, Cheryl calls Rita to tell her what has happened, but Rita does not answer the phone. After Pete leaves the room, Lou asks Kookom and Cheryl if Pete could have attacked Emily, but Cheryl does not that believe it was him. She tells Lou that she has “to trust someone” and pushes away the allegations (117). Cheryl worries that Lou’s job as a social worker has made her “hard” just as it has Rita due to the horrors that they see in their line of work. Cheryl plans to paint Emily as a gray wolf to symbolize humility and the importance of leaning on their family.

Tommy believes that Emily’s attack is connected to the assault witnessed by Stella. Christie explains to Tommy to never ask questions in front of the entire family because he believes that the family will lie for each other; he does not think that Emily’s attack and the one on the Break are connected. As they wait to question Emily, Tommy thinks about how little sleep he has had and how Hannah got up earlier than expected, despite having gone out drinking the night before with her friends. Once Emily wakes up, Christie warns Tommy to “keep the questions to the facts” and reminds him that he needs to practice his questioning skills (122). As Tommy thinks about what to ask, watching the nurses reminds him of when he first met Hannah, who used to want to be a nurse. However, she decided that nursing school was too hard, and she chose to go to secretary school. She tells her friends that Tommy will be able to support them both, so it does not matter if she does not make a lot of money.

He notices Cheryl sitting in the corner, and Tommy recognizes how intimidating she is, despite how much she reminds him of the women in his family. He looks at Paulina and thinks of his mother. He starts to ask Emily about the assault, and she tells him about sneaking to the party. Christie recommends that Emily has an opportunity to speak to them without the presence of her family, but Lou tells him that this would be illegal. Pete leaves the room, but the rest of the women stay. Emily claims to not know who attacked her, and Paulina asks if they can take a break. Before they leave, Emily tells the officers that her attackers were wearing black clothes and one of her attackers had a braid in their hair. As they start to leave the hospital, Christie gets a call that another teenage girl has been attacked, and they must question her before they can leave. Tommy feels agony for hearing the words “another victim.”

Ziggy wakes up in her bed with her face covered by her blanket. She feels hot and uncomfortable, but she refuses to get out of her bed. Rita came home drunk the night before, and she went to check on Ziggy and Emily before going to bed. Ziggy waits for her mom to wake up, and she thinks back to living with her grandfather, Moshoom, and yearns to be back with him. After falling back to sleep, Rita wakes up Ziggy in a panic because Ziggy has bruises all over her face. Ziggy continues to think about her grandfather and wishes that they were chopping wood together. Rita calls her son, Sunny, and yells at him to come home immediately. Rita gets Ziggy out of bed to get her dressed before Sunny takes them to the hospital. Ziggy continues to think about her life back in the bush, and she misses being at her home.

Ziggy does not fully wake up until she is at the hospital and being checked out by a doctor, who claims that her cheekbone is not broken. Ziggy tells Rita about going to the party with Emily and how they were chased by girls for hanging out with Clayton, despite not knowing that he had a girlfriend. She asks where Emily is because she could not tell where she went during the attack, and Rita tells her that Emily was raped. Ziggy starts to remember the attack more clearly, and she sees Roberta, Phoenix’s friend, standing over her and punching her. Roberta and another girl ran away, and Ziggy laid on the ground for a while before she was able to stand up. She kept yelling for Emily on her walk home, but she was too tired and cold to keep looking for her.

Phoenix smokes a cigarette while thinking about the party. She thinks about all the makeup that she is wearing and how uncomfortable she feels despite Roberta and Dez giving her a makeover. Phoenix feels insecure about her appearance, but she does not want anyone to know about this. She pretends to be confident. The morning sky fills the kitchen, and Phoenix looks out to the hydro towers. She claims that “that’s where it all went down” (143), and she replays the night before in her head. Phoenix remembers how Alex and Clayton looked at her, and she tries to forget about it all. She fights the urge to check her phone to see if Clayton has texted her, despite knowing that he will probably never talk to her again.

Phoenix misses her sisters, specifically one of her younger sisters, Cedar-Sage, and she wishes to be with her. Alex comes into the room and asks Phoenix for a cigarette before telling her that the party got out of hand. He yells at her that someone needs to clean up his house, and Phoenix tasks this to her friend, Cheyenne. Alex tells her that she must fix what happened because no one can find out what they did. Phoenix reassures Alex that even if “that chick” tells someone about the attack, she will not be able to pin it on them. She claims to know that Clayton does not love her, but she also does not care. Back in the living room, Mitchell speaks to Clayton on the phone. Once he hangs up, Phoenix steals his phone to call Clayton back. She threatens Clayton to not come back to Alex’s house, and he tries to hurriedly get off the phone after telling her that he will stay away.