Blink & Caution (33 page)

A
t some point you feel her lurch behind you, and she must have ditched the rifle, because the next thing you know her right arm is clutching you as well. Her head is pressed against your back, and she is sobbing, huge choking sobs that threaten to heave you both off the ATV. You hang on for dear life. You are astonished and filled with something bigger than strength.

You shake the stinging rain from your eyes and glance at the dense bush to either side of the cone of light, wondering if you could veer into it if a car was approaching. There would be no room for two vehicles on this rough path. Part of you wonders if you would just crank up the acceleration and hold your path. Die big.

Then you are at the turn, you swing left, and a tense few minutes later, you are at the Jeep. Kitty seems to almost fall off the ATV, and then she stumbles away from you, away from the car, and you are afraid she is going to take off into the cedars, leave you standing there. But all she needs is to throw up.

The sound that comes from her is like some monster’s death throes. You want to go to her, steady her, because she is shaking like a leaf. You’re still sitting on the ATV with the headlights on. In your head, Tank is running in Hulk-like strides up the road, maybe sweeping up the abandoned rifle on his way. But you don’t say anything. Finally she straightens up, and without looking at you, she finds the keys to the Wrangler in her pocket and hands them to you. You take her elbow and guide her to the passenger seat, like you imagine you would with a girl you were taking to the prom. Some prom.

Only after you’ve started the Jeep do you get out and stop the ATV. You hurl its ignition key into the bush, climb back into the Jeep, and take off.

The road south is as empty as it was coming north and twice as lonely. Neither of you speak, not in words at least. But you wonder if maybe your blood is talking to her blood. It courses through you like a wild imprisoned thing that hasn’t yet realized you have been set free. You glance at her, stooped over in the seat beside you, her hands collected together in her lap. She might be a girl in church sitting in silent prayer. She might only be asleep. Then she sniffs, and you are so glad to hear it.

The cell phone rings, making you both start.

“Don’t answer it,” she says, which is odd because she’s the one holding it now; you gave her the thing when you took the wheel. When it stops, she stares at its face. As a passenger on the way up, you had a chance to look around the cab and so you know where the inside lights are. You turn them on, and she checks the voice mail. It’s another one of those cell phones, like Niven’s, with a fat antenna that can get reception from anywhere. There’s no password on Tank’s cell.

“Hey. This thing might take a while. Feed the boy some breakfast, eh? Don’t do anything foolish.”

“Wallace,” you say.

Then she turns off the lights, and you are in the comforting darkness again. She’s still shivering, worse than you. You turn up the heat but not too high. Already the effects of adrenaline are wearing off, and you have no idea how long this drive is going to be.

At first you thought she was letting you drive because getting stopped by the cops was not a problem anymore, not as far as you can see. But the truth is she couldn’t have driven. What she did back at the lodge sapped every ounce of strength from her, as far as you can tell. She needs you, Blink. How’s that feel?

After another little while, you hear her breathing change, and, glancing sideways, you see that she is asleep, her head against the window. Your right hand snakes out and touches her hands, still clasped together in her lap. Wet and cold despite the warm air pouring into the vehicle from the heater.

You’re on the beach with Granda. He’s carrying the kite in one hand and holding your hand with the other. He’s saying something about your dad, something about how he and your mother can’t seem to make it work. You gaze at his belly, at the kite folded up under his arm. Mikey the Monkey. You didn’t want to stop flying Mikey the Monkey. You wanted it to lift you right up into the crazy wheeling summer sky. But Granda said it was time to go, and maybe you even knew what that meant — that there was something he and Nanny had to talk to you about — the thing you didn’t want to hear.

“Whatever happens,” he says. “Nan and I will still be your grandparents, lad. Don’t forget that, will you, boy? Hold on to that.”

“BLINK!”

You jolt awake, and Kitty’s hand is on the steering wheel trying to get the Jeep back on the road.

You take control, breathing hard, your eyes opening and closing worse than ever.

“Sorry,” you say when at last you’re on an even keel.

“Bad dream?”

You wipe the sleep off your face. A dream? No. Something you had forgotten. Granda had told you not to forget it, but you had until just this moment.

You reach Highway 7, look both ways, then turn west.

“Where we going?” she says.

You shrug. “Not to Kingston,” you say. It’s as good an answer as any. A few minutes later, the Jeep rolls past an Ontario Provincial Police station. There are two cruisers parked in the parking lot. You slow down.

“Don’t stop,” she says.

“I wasn’t. Just don’t want to be speeding.”

Then Sharbot Lake is left behind, and you’re on a long deserted stretch of two-A-empty highway.

“The cops aren’t going to be any help,” she says.

You don’t bother to answer.

You see the motel ahead and start to slow down. It’s after three, and your little snooze at the wheel back on 509 only really reminded you how deep this well of tiredness is that you’re carrying around inside you. You’re fading fast.

You pull off onto the gravel lot, and Kitty jerks awake. She must have drifted off again and figures you’re heading into a ditch.

“Where are we?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

She leans forward to peer at the motel. “This looks like a setting for a horror movie,” she says.

“Yeah, but there’s a vacancy.”

“You’re not kidding,” she says. “There’s not one single car here.”

“Good,” you say as you pull up to the office, hoping that the lights on in there means somebody’s on duty. “That way we can pick any room we want.”

You turn off the motor and turn to look at her.

“I don’t like this,” she says. “They can track the car.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Unless Tank had another cell phone somewhere, nobody knows what happened.”

She stares at you, her eyes quizzical. “What happened to you?”

“Back there? Not much.”

“I’d say a whole lot. You sound like . . . I don’t know. You sound like you’re forty or something.”

“Is it that bad?” you say.

She doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even smile, but her eyes look at you as if you’ve changed. Well, maybe you have. Then suddenly you swear under your breath and smack yourself in the forehead. “The van! I totally forgot the van.”

Kitty reaches over and pats your leg. “I didn’t,” she says.

You stare at her, but all she does is smile. So you shrug and reach for the door handle, but now it’s Kitty’s turn to cry out in alarm. “Wait a second,” she says, grabbing your arm. She turns to stare at the motel. “What are we going to do about money?”

Tired as you are, you can’t stop yourself from grinning. You pat her on the leg. “Leave it to me. I’m forty, remember?”

B
y unspoken consent, neither of them turns on a light in the room. Light from the parking lot drifts in through a slit in the curtains. Blink doesn’t ask, just heads to the bed farthest from the door, where he starts stripping off his jeans and sweatshirt — not what he arrived at the lodge wearing. His brand-new clothes from the Army Surplus are gone.

Too tired to care, she strips herself down to her bra and panties, and climbs into her bed, shivering at the touch of sheets they might have been keeping in a deep freeze. She curls up tight.

“Night,” he says, but she wonders if he’ll even remember having said it in the morning.

“Night,” she says. The cold has woken her up a little, though the clanging baseboard heater is pumping out some kind of second-rate warmth, tinged with the scent of mildew, household cleaner, and stale cigarette smoke.

“Kitty?” he says, his voice only half conscious.

“What?”

“Thanks.”

She can’t speak. Thick hands seem to have come right out of the mattress under her and wrapped themselves around her neck, choking off her windpipe. The horror movie she had been afraid of.

By the time she has recovered enough to respond, she knows Blink is asleep. She lies there, listening to his breath go in and out. She listens as a car drives by, waiting for it to slow down, turn into the motel, and stop — expecting it to. What was this place even called? She hadn’t noticed. Journey’s End? They have not gotten away; she has resigned herself to that. She will keep on escaping and keep on being caught. This could go on for millions of years. It will be tiring, she thinks.

Spence is lying on the end of the dock.

“Hey,” she says. “No goofing off.”

He doesn’t move, and as she approaches him, she sees the way his arm lies under his body, the palm up in a way that would be too uncomfortable to bear.

Then she sees his iPod dangling just above the surface of the water, still plugged into his ears. There is a fly on his cheek. A tiny red stain on the back of his collar. A hole at the base of his skull.

Her arms are around you, her face pressed against your back. She is sobbing. You are confused. You are back on that ATV hurtling through the night. But somehow now you are naked, and as she presses her body against you, you realize that she is mostly naked, too. So it’s a dream, but if it’s a dream, why is she crying like this?

Her hands claw at your chest, as if she can’t hold you tight enough. She is holding on for dear life, hurtling through some other darkness, far worse than this cheap and musty room.

You want to turn and face her, hold her, and kiss away her tears. It isn’t love she’s after — you know that. She’s clinging to you the way the survivor of a shipwreck clings to a piece of door, anything that will float. She loves you like a raft, Blink.

Her breasts are pressing hard against your back. And now her legs coil themselves around your legs as if to keep them out of the treachery of the waters. There are sharks down there, circling this queen-size bed. You are her raft — all that separates her from cruel, unforgiving teeth and the freezing darkness of the deepest ocean.

She is struggling, and you are struggling. She’s wearing only her underthings. You’ve never been this close to a girl wearing this little, but even when she loosens her grip on you enough for you to turn and face her, you know that holding her is all that is going to happen for now, despite the crying out in your body.

Her wrenching sobs slacken, and then the tears come, staining your face. You wipe her tears away with your free hand, while the other cradles her head. After a few light-years, she starts to relax, and her arms hold you less in desperation now and more as if in passion. A part of you — that restless male part — will not listen to reason. It pokes away at her with a mind all its own, and you pray that it will not drive her away because holding her is enough right now.

She isn’t fighting. And you worry that maybe she thinks there might be a price to pay to have climbed onto this raft that is you.

“Shhh,” you say into her hair. “It’s all right.” And what you mean is just that — this is all right. You expect nothing more than this. And you wonder if this is what love might be. And you wonder if you knew it would take so much for it to happen. And you wonder how anything that felt like this could ever die. And then, because you can’t help yourself, you wonder again if you
are
dead and this isn’t purgatory anymore but a kind of heaven suitable for the likes of street urchins and losers. And you know that it is enough of a heaven as long as it includes her.

There’s one good thing about thinking you’re dead: the merciless poker down there between your legs has stopped prodding away. There is sadness in that, but it makes things a little easier.

“Shhh,” you say again, you’re not sure to whom. “It’s all good.”

She sniffs and hugs you.

“I wouldn’t mind,” she says. “If you want to.”

“It’s okay,” you say, your voice just a tattered bit of white cloth now, a flag of surrender.

“I would like it,” she says.

You press her head into your bony shoulder. “This is good,” you say, your voice raw with emotion and weariness and thankfulness.

She sniffs again. “Sometime,” she says. You can hear the sleep in her voice taking her over. It is so sweet.

“Sometime,” you say.

You wake up and she’s gone.

It’s light outside, dim inside. You roll over and look at the other bed. She’s not there. From where you are lying, you can see the bathroom door, open, dark.

She is gone. What did you expect, Blink? Did you really expect that you deserved anything so good to happen?

You hurt all over. So many bruises. Falling into boats. Falling out of windows. Falling in love. None of it gets you anywhere. You shift your gaze to a chair by the window. The foolish designer jeans Wallace gave you hang over the back, nicely folded. You left them in a heap on the floor. You left the money in the pocket — what was left after you paid for the motel room.