Read Adam's Peak for Free Online Page A

hair blew wildly in a whistling gale that threatened to drown his voice completely. In her dream, Clare struggled to hear him but caught only meaningless fragments.
    She paused to zip her jacket, and her mother took over the trolley and hurried on, the hemline of her skirt swaying in perfect alignment with that of her black wool coat, her coppery bob dancing over the collar. Clare followed. Shutting out Isobel Fraser’s chit-chat, shutting out Emma, she searched the frigid air for her father. She’d been back home almost an hour; it was about time they spoke.
    It must be a wee bit warmer in Vancouver these days
, he said, predictably.
    His voice was perfectly intact. He’d been gone so long (heart attack in the driveway, on his way to play golf) that many of the particulars of his existence could be difficult to retrieve. But the voice ofAlastair Fraser, no less real than it had been in life, lingered, indefinitely it seemed, in Clare’s head.
    You say that every time I go out there, Dad
. Vancouver’s warm and rainy, just like Scotland. You’d hate it.
    Aye, I suppose I would.
He spoke in the scant, reluctant way he’d always spoken, never uttering more than a sentence or two, a measured observation, a pellet of sensible advice. But only at home.
You’ll be moving out there then, I suppose
, he said next, and Clare clenched her hands in her pockets.
    I don’t know. Maybe.
    She’d been thinking about it. “It’s time, Clare,” the real Emma had insisted, just the night before. “You’re stuck in a rut and it’s not doing you or your mother any good. Listen to me: I’ve known you forever. It’s fine to be close to your family, but there’s a limit. You’re thirty-one, for God’s sake. I’ll help you find work. I’ve got heaps of connections at the college.” It all made sense. And Vancouver was a nice enough place—slower than Montreal, which suited Clare fine. Each time she visited, the idea of moving there gained appeal, until now, she realized, it was pressing inside her with just enough urgency that she could, perhaps, act on it.
    She caught up to her mother at the trunk of the Oldsmobile.
    â€œI think this old thing has had its last winter,” Isobel said. “Time for something new.”
    Clare lifted her suitcase into the trunk. She’d never cared for the Oldsmobile, but as she climbed into the passenger seat, she felt a pang of regret that her father’s sturdy blue car would be replaced.
    Her mother started the engine and pumped the gas pedal. She set the heat on high and the CBC on low. Then she extracted a pack of Virginia Slims and a plastic lighter from her purse, pinched a long cigarette between her copper lips, and closed her eyes as she lit up. Clare frowned and cracked her window.
    â€œWhen did you start smoking again, Ma?”
    Isobel examined the cigarette between her fingers as if baffled by how it had come to be there. “Oh. I hardly ever. I decided to treat myself on my fiftieth, and I guess my body just remembered how much it enjoys them.” She slid open the ashtray and squashed thecigarette into a mess of lipsticked butts, then she wrestled the gearshift into reverse.
    The word
body
, coming from Isobel, sounded foreign and off-key.
    Clare rubbed the car window with her fist, but in the waning afternoon light and the dirty snow of late winter, the world outside was hardly worth looking at. She stared at the dashboard. Inside her pockets, her hands clenched and her thumbs fretted her index fingers. The question, Emma’s question, made her absurdly tense. It was pathetic. Her mother wouldn’t care, and the answer would hardly change anything. There’d be the jolt of having her suspicion confirmed, of looking at a portrait she’d professed to know intimately and discovering in the corner something new and out of place. But aside from those small shocks, there’d