Blink & Caution (22 page)

“Okay, Mom. Yes. I will. Love you. Love you. Promise.”

She flips her cell closed. “I’ve got to go,” she says. “She’s totally freaking out.”

She’s done all the talking she’s going to do and lets her eyes take over. They’re on you now, and even you can’t blink away this alien tractor beam.

You snap back to consciousness and then, picking up her arm gently, twist it in order to look at her watch. Heading on to two thirty. Everything goes all right, you could be at this place by five — six at the outside. Sun won’t go down until six thirty or so. You know that well enough. So the drive back would be in the dark, but what the hell. There’s just one thing left niggling inside you.

“Okay,” you say. “But I still want to know —”

“How much?” she says.

You nod.

She stands up. “Let’s talk about that,” she says, “while we walk back to the Jeep.”

H
e sits in the driver’s seat, with Alyson leaning in the open door, showing him what’s what. Kitty situates herself at the corner of the intersection half a block away. When she thinks Blink is looking, she points to the left down a side street. Blink nods, but then he’s nodding away as Alyson indicates this and that, and Kitty has to hope that one of those nods is intended for her.

She waits at the corner of Wellington and Queen, leaning against a telephone post. As soon as the Jeep turns the corner onto Wellington, she crosses Queen and starts heading up the street. A moment later, he makes a left turn onto Queen and pulls over, and she heads around to the driver’s door. He rolls down the window.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m driving,” she says.

“No way!”

“Yes way,” she says. “Because I’ve actually got a driver’s license.”

“So do I!”

“No, you don’t,” she says. “You’re not old enough.”

“I’m sixteen.”

“As of last month. Your birthday is in September, Mr. Virgo.”

She’s got him, but he won’t give up. “So? I got my license right away.”

“Oh, really? You’ve been living on the street for six months, and you just show up at home and borrow the car to take your test? And how did you pay for it?”

“I’m driving,” he says, gripping the steering wheel with both hands, like a toddler who won’t get off the merry-go-round.

“Fine,” she says. “And when we get pulled over, you say, ‘Oh, Mr. Officer, sir, stupid me. I forgot my license at home, which, by the way, no longer exists. But that’s okay, right, Mr. Officer?’”

“I know how to drive. I’m not going to speed. We won’t get pulled over.”

“The cops don’t need a
good
reason to pull over a couple of ugly, screwed-up teens in a brand-new hot yellow car. Now move it, or we’re going to be here all night.”

He stares at her.

“What?” she says, not exactly pleased to be standing there arguing.

“You aren’t ugly,” he says.

He gives in. But he won’t talk to her. She can feel the heat of his resentment. He’s a funny boy, she thinks. She adjusts the rearview mirror and takes the opportunity to look at herself. Doesn’t he see how ugly she is?

They head northwest up Princess and north on Highway 38 out of Kingston. It’s all mapped out. There’s a voice coming out of the dashboard to tell her what to do and when. It’s dead easy. But kind of strange, too, because the voice doesn’t tell you any place-names, just gives you directions.

“Turn right in five hundred meters.”

“Thanks,” says Kitty. “What’s your astrological sign?”

“You’re talking to the dashboard,” says Blink.

“Oh, good, you’re still alive,” she says. And he goes all-over sullen again.

Fifty bucks an hour, plus expenses, plus the cost of his trip from Toronto, the trip back, gas, food, and the hotel for tonight. That’s what Alyson offered him. She told him which hotel to go to, said she’d book a room for him. He told Kitty when they first started out, before he clammed up on her.

“Where does she get money like that?”

“That’s what I said. And she said it was her university fund.”

Kitty shakes her head. “This stinks,” she says. “She’s got it all worked out. Doesn’t that seem a bit unreal?”

“Drive straight for the next forty-five kilometers.” The dashboard voice is English. Some Englishwoman.

“I’ll think about it,” says Kitty.

The money obviously doesn’t include her. So, assuming this all goes well and Alyson keeps her side of the bargain, they’re going to end up with something like three hundred dollars, split two ways. That was what Blink told her, kind of proud.

“Not exactly a million,” she says.

“That comes later,” he says, but she can hear the reservation in his voice. The reality of the thing is not living up to his daydream. Lucky he has her along, she thinks, and then hopes that she’s right about that. Maybe she’ll end up screwing things up even worse.

She sighs.

“You okay?” he says.

She smiles at him. “I’m as nuts as you are,” she says.

How far will one hundred and fifty bucks get her? Kitty wonders. Back to Toronto, sure, but is that wise? Hardly. And yet there is unfinished business there. Important business.

You come back to me, sister. Do you hear what I’m saying?

Then she remembers that she owes Brent sixty of those dollars. So where will ninety dollars get her?

You are angry at this brash girl. Mostly you’re angry because you wanted to drive, but you know she’s right. Any run-in with the law would be disastrous. But you
can
drive — you’ve been driving since you were fourteen. Taught yourself in Stepdaddy’s Grand Prick.

It was a time when he was working. Took the subway every morning and didn’t get back until after six. So there was that ugly old Pontiac sitting out front, collecting bird splatter all day long. And there were his keys just lying around in an ashtray in the front hall. It was a happenstance waiting to happen.

But you weren’t joyriding with your friends. You were looking for someone, weren’t you, boy? Up to Woodbine Racetrack, just west of the city; down to Flamboro Downs outside Hamilton; out to Mohawk Racetrack in Campbellville. Looking for a trainer by the name of Ginger Conboy. Little bandy-legged Irish fella, former jockey, who still had the Old World accent — or at least he could put it on when it served his purpose. He had a gift with horses but not much of a gift with fatherhood. Still and all, he was a better man than Stepdaddy. And what better way to find him than in Stepdaddy’s own car?

Except you never did. People knew of Ginger. Somebody told you he’d headed west — maybe California. Somebody else thought maybe he was dead. You never found him. But you did learn to drive.

It was Ginger Conboy who took you to a hotel, just that once. He would show up sometimes out of nowhere. This was before Stepdaddy moved in. And there he was one bright Saturday morning, like a leprechaun springing up out of the ground, wanting to see his one and only, all cheery and full of blarney. Your mother didn’t want to have anything to do with him, but she was glad enough to see the back of you, Blink, my lad, for a day or two, and so off you went with Da. That’s what he wanted you to call him: “Da.”

He took you to the Delta Chelsea. He’d come into some money, he said, and you wondered — prayed — that this meant he and your mother could get back together now. But all it meant was the one night at the Delta Chelsea. You never saw any money after that. Never saw much of Ginger again, either. But what a night it was, flipping channels, watching a movie, right there in the room. You could order anything you wanted from room service, and they brought it right up, all nice on a trolley with the silver cover over the hamburger to keep it warm and the ketchup in a little bowl with its own little silver spoon and all. And when it was done, you just shoot the tray out the door into the hall and let someone else take care of the dishes.

So these are the things you learned from Ginger: how room service works and how to drive a car to try to find a father.

“Bear right at the next intersection.”

“Oh, I was thinking maybe I’d just crash into the yield sign instead,” says Kitty. “Thanks for the suggestion.”

“Stop doing that,” says Blink.

“I hate her know-it-all voice,” says Kitty. “And she’s English. What’s with that? They drive on the opposite side of the street.”

“You can change it,” he says. “You want a guy’s voice? You want it to speak to you in French? German?”

“It can do that?”

“That’s what Alyson said.”

“Hmmm.” She thinks a minute. “How about Bart Simpson? No. How about Homer Simpson? Even better.”

“Then we’d have to stop at every donut place,” says Blink.

“Like, you see any donut places?”

“Well, I can’t help it if we’re in the middle of frigging nowhere.”

He’s not really angry anymore, she figures. They’re on a road trip. Who can stay angry on a road trip? And even though she knows that the GPS means that someone can track where they are, she finds it hard to believe anyone could find them out here.

She had almost forgotten this feeling of being out in the larger world. Which is funny, because when she was at home and tried to imagine Spence at school in Toronto, she always thought that the city was the larger world — a heck of a lot larger than Wahnapitae. But driving on this winding highway, heading north, catching glimpses of lakes and distances, she wonders. Her time in the city seems like a trap to her now. A nightmare. She has the urge to turn off this wooden woman’s voice doling out directions and just keep on driving, heading north until she finds the Trans-Canada. It must be up here somewhere. Find the Trans-Can and head west. Let them try and keep track of her! There are places, she knows, that are beyond the range of satellite signals.

She glances at Blink. He’s looking out his window. He feels distant, although he’s only an arm’s length away. She wants company. So why does she jump all over him whenever he says anything? If she’s going to watch his back, she could at least try being a bit friendlier.

“We had this dog,” she says. “Scooter. He was a Lab. He was really nuts. And he kept getting lost. So, Spence — he’s my brother — suggests we look into getting a dog-locator device. It’s this thing you attach to the dog’s collar. And if he runs away or gets stolen, you can just track him down.”

Blink has shifted in his seat. Out of the corner of her eye, she is aware of him looking at her.

“I really wanted us to get it — this dog gizmo. I loved Scooter, and I was afraid he’d get so lost we’d never find him again. Or maybe, you know, wolves would get him. Or a bear. But the thing is I got kind of mixed up. I thought that this thing would guide him home, you know?”

She glances quickly at Blink. He nods.

“I thought it would guide
him
home,” she says again. She wants him to say something, laugh — anything. “Pathetic, huh?”

“Not really. I mean, you were like this kid, right? What do kids know?”

She doesn’t answer. There is no answer.

The forest is pimped up with fall colors, ludicrously bright. Over-the-top bright, even on this mostly sunless day. The leaves seem to exude their own light. She imagines they might actually shine at night, though she knows well enough that that isn’t so.

The trees are barer than back in Toronto, Kitty thinks, but there are so many more of them. It feels a bit like home, although the maples back home hardly ever amounted to much. She almost wants to pull over and turn off the engine and listen to the sound of nothing. Of air and birds.

“It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” she says.

“No way,” he says. “It’s freaky. I’ve never been out of the city until this morning. Not ever.”

“Sometimes in Toronto, I’d go out to High Park or the Forest Hill ravine and close my eyes and try to pretend I was home again,” she says. “Out in the country again. But even with my eyes closed so I couldn’t see the joggers and dog walkers, there was always the hum of it. The city. The machine — that’s what I called it.”

She glances at him.

“For me, it was this huge machine that never got turned off. I kind of loved it at first. The worst thing in the world is silence,” she says. Then she stops, because without really meaning to, she’s gotten too close to the truth.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Nothing.”

In silence she had to face the screaming in her head. That’s what she meant. The city was like a drug that took the edge off the scream, hid it at least. Her scream merged with a million other screams. On the street, pretty well everybody she met looked as if they had some major scream going on inside their skulls. There was this thin wall of bone holding it in. She could see it in their eyes. She wondered what would happen if all the lonely people let it out at the same time. She imagined the city quaking, collapsing like in some apocalyptic movie —
The Day After Whatever.
She remembers expecting it to happen any day. Waiting for it. But now, up here, driving north, she wonders if the scream she took with her to the city is even in her anymore. In her hurry to leave, did she leave it behind?

“I’ve never seen so many fucking trees,” says Blink.