Blink & Caution (17 page)

She is almost dizzy with sleep. But she can’t afford it, so she drags herself to her feet, teetering like a drunk, and makes her way to the stall’s self-contained sink. She turns on the water and douses her face. She grabs at her hairpins: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven — pulls them all out and throws them in the overflowing garbage bin. Then she puts her whole head in the sink and soaks her weary skull.

She looks up at the mirror, dripping wet, her eyes blinking like that unfortunate boy. The mirror is tilted forward for someone in a wheelchair. She wishes she were in a wheelchair. She doesn’t want to stand up anymore. She doesn’t want to be on the run. She is beaten. So why doesn’t she simply walk out there and give herself up?

She leans on the sink, staring at herself in incomprehension. This has to stop, she thinks. Then she says it out loud. “This has to stop.”

From the restroom doorway, she can see the lines snaking toward the gateways to westbound and eastbound trains. She has formulated a plan. The end of the line for the Montreal train with service to Kingston winds its way through gate 12. The man at the gate seems only to be checking tickets, not collecting them. Nodding, pointing. A woman with a baby in a stroller is his last customer. The baby is lifted up, and the gate man helps the mother fold up the stroller.

Now.

Caution takes off across the station, running as fast as she can, running on empty, running for her life. If Merlin is here somewhere, then he will see nothing but a blue flash, a blur. There is nothing left of her but this movement toward gate 12. He will need real magic to stop her, and she no longer believes he has any. Just an electronic toy she has already dealt with.

The gate is closed when she reaches it. She rattles it like a prisoner and the conductor turns around.

“Kingston?” she says, breathing hard.

He pulls keys from his pocket as he returns to let her through.

“Thanks,” she shouts, dashing past him to the steep escalator up to the platform.

“Miss!” he calls after her. But she can’t stop now. She takes the escalator steps two at a time, until she is brought up short behind the woman and child. It’s a narrow escalator, with no room for her to pass, but when she stares back down, the gate man has abandoned his post. The child above Caution stares down over its mother’s shoulder at her, reaches out a tiny hand, says some baby word. The mother turns and smiles. “Just made it,” she says.

At the top of the escalator, Caution ducks past the woman and runs to the first coach.

“Ticket,” says the man at the bottom of the steps.

“I didn’t have time,” she says. “Can I pay cash?”

He makes a sour face but herds her onto the train, where she finds the first available seat and falls into it. By the time the train starts moving, she is almost asleep. A hand on her shoulder shakes her gently.

“Ticket?” says the conductor.

She wipes her eyes and reaches into her pocket for the roll of money. “I was late,” she says. “Sorry. How much do I owe you?”

His face is stern, and she fears some kind of reprimand. She wonders if she has the energy to listen to a lecture about rules. His face is jowly and gray, but his eyes are a penetrating green. “Where to?” he asks.

“Kingston,” she says.

“Student?”

She nods.

“Could I see some ID?”

She has her driver’s license, but there is no way she’s showing him that. She glances down at the floor, trying to dredge up some kind of ploy or scheme, but her mind is a blank. She looks up, pushes back the wet tangle of hair from her forehead.

“I don’t have any ID with me,” she says. “I’ll be seventeen on November thirtieth. But if you want to charge me adult fare, that’s okay. I understand.”

She’s not sure why, but his expression suddenly softens. “Fifty-nine eighty-five,” he says. “Student fare, one-way.”

She hands him three twenties. He says he’ll be back with the change and a ticket. “The Kingston car is two up,” he says. Then he places a finger on her shoulder. “But why don’t you just rest up a bit, dear? No hurry.”

Her eyes won’t stay open another moment. It is as if she were just waiting for permission to close them. There is a fluttering shape in her mind’s eye, something primary, bright and swirling and smudged.

She marches up the hill behind the house, through the meadow to the shooting range. Her rifle bounces on her shoulder. It hurts, but she doesn’t care. She’s angry. Angry at Spence. First he doesn’t come home from Toronto at the end of the term because he’s got some kind of a job. Then they can’t even go for his graduation because Mom got the flu. Finally, when he gets home, he’s impossible to talk to.

“Fine,” she says. “Be that way.”

She is going to do some target practice. Spence helped her set up a target. He brought up some hay bales in the tractor, found a messed-up scrap of plywood out behind Dad’s workshop. It’s about four feet by eight feet; the bales rise above it and out about two feet to either side. They had measured out markers in the meadow to indicate
50, 100, 150, and 200 meters. They used to have shooting competitions; she even won sometimes. But that was last summer, when Spence was Spence, instead of this alien
!

She pins a fresh new red-and-white paper target square in the middle of the plywood, then trudges out to the 50-meter marker. Beyond the target is bush, thick and overgrown. She can’t see the house from here, only glimpses of the lake. The wind is behind her, strong. She swears and, with her rifle between her knees, ropes in her long black hair and shoves it down the back of her sweater.

She loads up the Remington. He gave it to her for her fourteenth birthday. It had been his, but he didn’t buy a new rifle, which is what she expected he was going to do. Another thing that was different about him. It was as if he were leaving her, leaving her behind. When they went hunting or target shooting anymore, he borrowed one of Dad’s old rifles.

She opens up a new box of CCI Mini-Mag cartridges. Forty-grain solids, gilded lead round noses. Solid tip, less drag than hollow point.

She raises the rifle to her shoulder. In, out, in, hold.

Bang!

She squints; it looks like a bull’s-eye. She’ll shoot twenty bull’s-eyes and take down the tattered target to show him. If she knows Spence, he’ll challenge her to a competition right then and there. Except she doesn’t feel like she knows him anymore.

Bang!

Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees a car winding its way up Lake Road, away from their place. It’s Melody in her father’s truck. There’s a trail of dust behind her. She’s driving fast. What now? Kitty wonders.
Did Spence tell her he’s heading back to Toronto on Monday? That’s what Kitty overheard him saying to Dad.

Bang!

Well, good riddance! she thinks.

Bang!

“I don’t mean that, God,” she shouts into the wind. She doesn’t expect that God is listening. And, anyway, God probably knows. All she wants is her brother back.

Bang!

Her hair has escaped from her jacket and whirls around her face. She pushes it aside and squints again at the target. She goes to look. There’s her first shot, pretty well dead center. Then there are three bullet holes fanning out across the target, as if her aim got worse with every shot. She had fired five times. There is no sign of a fifth bullet hole.

Y
ou settle back in your chair by the window on the land side and watch Toronto slip away. You clickity-clack past where you slept last night on a construction site rolled in a painter’s drop cloth. The train picks up and speeds past the abandoned building where you’ve been sleeping for the last few weeks, faster and faster, until you pass by where you were born and where you lived until May, and then the Beaches, where Nanny Dee and Granda Trick lived. Live. Lived. Your whole young life is mapped out along the edge of the lake. You are traveling backward in time. You are slipping right out of life as you know it, Blink.

Pretty soon you’re speeding along the shore of Lake Ontario, and since there aren’t too many people on this early morning train, you move to the lake side of the car and stare, tired-eyed, out at the endlessness of water, so wide it seems there is no other shore to it. You ride along the crest of a cliff that tumbles down into the sun-speckled water. The Scarborough Bluffs. You’ve heard of the bluffs, but they might as well have been the pyramids of Egypt, for all you knew.

And the lake . . . God, from up here it stretches to forever. Is this the water in the picture of Alyson? Does she live beside the same lake? You dig the picture out and hold it up to the window with the lake behind it. Could be.

You settle back in your seat. But you can’t settle. The excitement of your escape and the anticipation of what lies ahead suddenly give way to the little earthquake that happened back at the train station. More like a blue tornado. If you close your eyes, you can still feel her fingernails scrape your palm as she lifts every last bill from your palm. You squeeze your eyes tight to fight back the tears.

It seems that the world is achingly full of people who want to rip you off. Pretty people, which is what makes it worse.

You have six or seven dollars in your pocket in change, and that’s it. Well, if Alyson expects help, she is going to have to pay for it. Big-time. You aren’t going to let anything like this happen to you ever again. And getting money out of her was always part of the plan, wasn’t it, boyo?

A man comes along with a noisy cart, and you are able to afford a sweet thing that the wrapper claims to be a Danish. It’s cold and hard and stale.

You close your eyes, but she’s waiting there for you. April. She flits in blue across your mind’s eye. Fast. Too fast for you. But you catch her, anyway, tackle her. Take the money back.

You’re not sure which is worse: the loss of the cash or the burning humiliation.

It’s about three hours to Kingston. You let the girl in blue go, and when you do, you feel giddy inside about what lies ahead, like when you were a kid at Canada’s Wonderland, lining up for Top Gun, hoping you’d be tall enough to get to ride it this time. You are going to enjoy this trip despite what happened. You stare out across the gray-green water, the light bouncing off the steely flatness into your blinking, tearing eyes. You squint and see a sailboat. Then, even as you watch, the sailboat keels, capsizes, sinks. All hands lost.

Captain Panic is at work. He isn’t happy about the incident at the train station. It confirms his most terrible fears about you. He doesn’t want you to think about what might be possible. He only ever wants you to reflect on how stupid you are.

Shhh,
you hear another voice inside you whisper. An Irish voice. You aren’t stupid, not a bit. Forget the fact that you are heading into what has all the outward signs of being some kind of trap. You are not blind. You told Alyson you’d be arriving by bus at four. Not by train at eleven. That’s how un-stupid you are.

T
he train rolls on into overcast and leaves the lake behind. There are fields and woodlands, cows, an occasional barn, a silo. Then a glimpse of a highway to your left, clogged with cars heading west toward the city.

You close your eyes but fight off sleep. Fall asleep now and who knows where you’ll end up? You rake your hands through your hair, catch a whiff of yourself, examine your fingertips, shake your head in sorry disbelief. There wasn’t time for shopping this morning, let alone a cleanup. And now there’s no chance of that. You have enough change to use a pay phone. That’s it.

Keep on keeping on, keep on keeping on, keep on keeping on, keep on keeping on, keep on keeping on. Keep on keeping on. Keep on keeping on. Keep on keeping on.

The rhythm of this train.

There is a newspaper abandoned on the seat across the aisle from you. You pick it up, sit back down, stretch your feet out.

There have been developments in the case of the missing mining magnate. A Toronto man has been picked up for questioning. You have a pretty good idea who that might be.

You imagine Stepdaddy being rounded up by the cops with the BlackBerry in his pocket. But the smirk you had ready for this item doesn’t quite make it to your face. Where did this little act of revenge get you? It turned around and bit you — that’s what.