Blink & Caution (36 page)

Auntie Lanie is sitting in the front passenger seat, and she nods. And Kitty just holds tight to the wheel and thinks how strange it is that Spencer’s name can now be mentioned like this, as a passing fact in a conversation rather than the whole sad subject. She feels a hand on the side of her head and leans into it without taking her eyes off the road.

“Look at you,” says Aunt Lanie, and chuckles.

Kitty’s hair has grown back — well, three inches of it — the reddish color grown out. It’s in jaggy layers with lots of product. She had looked at her face in the mirror that morning, chubbier now, living at home. She is plumper all over. She warned Blink in her last e-mail. She hopes he will still find her pretty.

She is finishing high school by correspondence. There was no way she could return to school, where everyone knew her and what she’d done. There were kids her age who had known Spence, kids he’d coached in soccer. No, that was not something she could do. But she had noticed sometimes when she was in town that people would say hello to her. Just hello. And she was learning how to say hello back.

There had been talk of her going to school up the road in Sudbury, living with her dad. But while she spent weekends with him now and then, she wanted to be at the house. She wanted the daily reminder of her brother. She wanted him nearby to talk to, out on the frosty meadow or down by the frozen lake. She didn’t want to trouble him anymore with her heartbreak and wretched guilt. So she tried to tell him things he would be interested in.

“I finished
Anna Karenina,
” she told him one day. “I’m glad things work out between Kitty and Levin. Too bad about Anna. I didn’t ever really like Count Vronsky. Did you?”

There were other books on his shelf she was tackling. If she could read a novel with over eight hundred pages, then she could read anything.

One day, she sat at the end of the dock, where she had found him. She was tying on her skates. She told Spence about Brent. How when he jumped off the end of the dock into the boat, it had been, for her, this totally unexpected, wrenching experience. She had no idea why at first. She had screamed, she told Spencer. Luckily no one heard her.

“Eventually, I figured it out,” she told him. “It was as if it were you, Spence. As if Blink were you. You, finally escaping the end of the dock, jumping into this silver boat . . . well, aluminum. It was like I was letting you go. I don’t know. Something like that.”

She knows, of course, that she will never let him go.

Her favorite things to tell Spence are about what Serina is up to. She e-mails regularly with Tamika, who sends pictures all the time. As soon as Wayne-Ray learned that Kitty had returned home, he insisted she get in touch with Tamika, because there was something important Tamika needed to tell her. Kitty figured it would be about the money again. All that money shoved through the mail slot in the dead of night with that pathetic little note.

But that was not the most important thing Tamika needed to say to her, although the money had been a huge surprise. It was being held in a trust by a lawyer. One day, Kitty was going to have to claim it because Tamika wanted nothing to do with it. Kitty didn’t want anything to do with it, either. So Tamika suggested she might give it to some charity. That was something to think about. No, this was not the most important thing.

Merlin would never see the money. He was in jail. Brent found out. He’d become a compulsive newspaper reader. Merlin had been nabbed for possession and resisting arrest. The police ransacked Merlin’s apartment and found enough drugs to keep him off the streets for a long time. But this wasn’t the most important thing, either.

The most important information — what Tamika had not had the opportunity to say to Kitty on that terrible October night, with Merlin tracking her down — was that Serina was not Spence’s child.

“What do you mean?”

“Not his birth child is what I mean, Kitty.”

“But —”

“You listen to me, sister,” Tamika said to her, firmly but with such love. And she listened and learned.

Spence was the closest thing to a father Serina had. The real father had been an accident. He had no knowledge of the child he had sired. Spence had become friends with Tamika after she conceived and had been there through it all, right up to her labor. He was with her when the baby was born. He had been as close to the child as any father could be. The love that drew Spence and Tamika together grew more slowly, without Spence even knowing it at first. So Serina was his first love, and then he fell in love with the baby’s mother.

Kitty had so wanted Serina to be her niece — her
real
niece — that at first this news almost rebroke her heart. If Serina were her real niece, it would mean that there was a part of Spence still left in the world.

“I know,” Tamika had said in an e-mail. “It would be so convenient, wouldn’t it?”

It had seemed to Kitty a cold thing to say, maybe even spiteful. But it wasn’t meant that way.

“Oh, heavens, Kitty. Think, will you?
You
are the part of Spence still left in the world.” Kitty had never thought of that before. And she came to understand that Tamika wanted her for a sister and wanted her for an aunt for little Serina, as much as Kitty wanted those things.

“I want the baby to know you and to know him through you. You get that? Is that clear?”

And Kitty got it. It was clear.

So on this road trip, they would visit Wayne-Ray and Tamika and Blink. Kitty’s mother wanted to meet the young man who had saved her daughter’s life.

“Don’t blow it,” she told Blink on the phone. “Act like a hero.”

He had laughed so hard.

They are having a lady’s kind of high tea at Tamika’s when the doorbell rings. Everyone grins at Kitty.

“That’ll be your gentleman caller,” says Auntie Lanie. Then she laughs and slaps her knee.

Kitty makes her way down the narrow hallway with Serina toddling after her. There is no way to send her back to the others. The two-year-old holds out her arms to be picked up. Holding her close, Kitty decides that it is nice to have a beautiful shield with her.

He has grown taller, thicker through the chest and shoulders. She isn’t sure if he looks younger or older. His hair is brown again; he has let his camouflage fade. He was so emaciated when she met him that he looked kind of bony and older. But he also looked like a frightened rabbit half the time, which didn’t help.

“Hey,” she says, stepping out onto the porch and pulling the door closed behind her. She will invite him in, of course, but she wants this time alone with him — well, almost alone. She can’t really speak, she’s so tongue-tied.

“Hey,” he says.

And then they are kissing, which isn’t easy with a giggling child in your arms, squished between you.

“This is Serina, right?”

Serina beams and shows off her Easter-egg–yellow dress, which Blink tells her looks very nice. That is all the child needs, and the next thing Kitty knows the toddler is leaning out to Blink, her arms up.

He takes her without hesitation. Figures out how to hold her, lets her feel his cheeks with her chubby hands.

“Hey,” says Kitty again, chuckling, as if she had forgotten entirely how to talk. Her hand touches his hand, now full of shining, golden Serina. Her hand rubs his arm, and he finds a way around the toddler to kiss her again. He’s as tongue-tied as she is, but she can see words in his tea-colored eyes and almost hear them assembling on his lips. Deep inside her, words are forming, too, possibly the same words he is slowly putting together. Yes, she thinks that’s likely from the look in his eyes. His eyes. She touches his cheek and looks into his eyes, and he looks back at her, unblinking.

When I was sixteen, a friend of mine was shot and killed by his younger brother in pretty much the same way that Spencer Pettigrew was shot and killed. It was a freakish accident — a statistical improbability that was right off the scale. That death has always haunted me. And the fate of the person at the other end of the rifle has haunted me equally. Whatever anyone might try to tell you about how it’s people who kill people, not guns, they’re wrong.

I’d like to thank Kristina Watt, Xan Wynne-Jones, Geoff Mason, Martine Leavitt, Jim King, and Amanda Lewis — always Amanda — for various bits of help and encouragement they have provided. Oh, and Nicole Feret for the tonsorial advice.

The stately hotel at the corner of Bloor and Avenue Road has gone under more than one name in the time I have known it and I have taken the great liberty of giving it another, fictitious name for the sake of this novel. (If Blink hadn’t been quite so hungry, he could have gotten himself a free and delicious lunch across Avenue Road at The Church of the Redeemer. They’ve been feeding street people really good food for a very long time.) I’ve also added an extra lake to the wild and beautiful countryside of Eastern Ontario. There is no Millsap Lake, but if there were, you’d have to be crazy to want to spoil it by putting a uranium mine anywhere nearby.

TIM WYNNE-JONES
has won numerous awards for his work, including an Edgar Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and a
Boston Globe–Horn Book
Award. He is a faculty member at Vermont College, teaching courses in the MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, as well as the author of more than twenty books for children and young adults, including the novel
The Uninvited
and the popular Rex Zero books. Tim Wynne-Jones lives in Ontario with his family.