Blink & Caution (9 page)

After she eats, they sit in his front room. She curls up on his couch with her feet under her bum. He fusses with a space heater, plugging it in so it’s close to her, then switching it up to high. There’s a draft coming from behind her, bringing up goose bumps on her naked neck, but it’s all right. She flips up the collar on her jacket.

“You sure I can’t hang that up for you?” he says.

She shakes her head, smoothing down the fuzzy blue pelt. “It’s my security blanket,” she says. “I kind of empathize with it, you know?”

Wayne-Ray shakes his head. “You always were wired funny.”

He means it nicely, she tries to tell herself. But she’s afraid it’s true. Knowing that she’s capable of unthinkable things.

He sits in an easy chair, a few feet away, with a cup of tea beside him on the wide armrest. She feels the nap of the cushion under her. She knows this worn fabric, knows this couch. It used to be in Auntie Lanie’s parlor. She shakes her head. It’s as if she’s fallen down a rabbit hole. She closes her eyes. The stew and the infrared heat are making her sleepy. She can’t shake the feeling that any minute her cousin is going to remember how much he hates her. It will be so bad because she doesn’t think she has the energy to leave of her own volition, so he will have to drag her to the door and fling her down the stairs. She will understand.

“Have you . . . ?” he starts. “Have you been here all along?”

She shrugs. Shakes her head. “I was in Sudbury for a while, but it was too close. You know?” He nods.

“But you didn’t see your dad?”

She shakes her head. “I got a job up there for a few weeks, and when I had the money, I took off again.”

The only light in the room comes though the windows behind her, from a streetlight. He’d turned on the overhead, but she’d covered her eyes and begged him to turn it off again.

“So, how long since you got to Toronto?”

With her eyes closed, she can almost imagine that the warmth coming up from the heater is from a woodstove. When Spence moved to Toronto to go to school, she’d had to carry in the firewood back home. She was only nine and she’d hated it. Wished they’d had electric baseboards, like people in town. Mostly what she’d hated was Spence being so far away.

“You should’ve called,” says Wayne-Ray. “We’re family.”

She nods. Doesn’t look up.

“Everybody’s been worried sick.”

“You said that.”

“Your mother —”

“Oh, jeez, Wayne-Ray. Lay off, will ya?”

“It’s just that —”

“I’m serious, man. I hear you. And I really appreciate you taking me in. I promise . . .”

Where did that come from? Promise? What could she promise him?

“I promise I’ll get in touch . . . when I can.”

“When’ll that be?”

“When I can.”

He doesn’t say anything, and she wonders if he believes her. Why should he? But if she doesn’t want to talk about family, she has to say something. She props her eyes open, works up a tired smile.

“How’s the . . . what’s it called . . . audio engineering — how’s that going?”

“You mean TMI?” he says.

“Right, The Music Institute.”

He rubs his chin with the back of his hand, looks away. “I kinda dropped out.”

“No way,” she says. “You were so pumped — the whole recording engineer thing.”

He nods. “Yeah, it was very cool. But . . . well, things got rough there for a bit. . . .”

Something in his eye finishes the sentence for him. Dim as the light in the room is, she can see it.

“Was it because of . . . because of what happened?”

He shrugs, won’t look at her. “What do you think?” he says.

And what Caution thinks is that, yet again, she has made a big mistake.

Caution: Watch Your Step. She should never have come here. With all that stolen money, she could have stayed at a hotel — stayed right out of this. Wayne-Ray has been so good to her just now. Always was, once he got over her hanging around with him and Spence. Once he knew she wouldn’t go away no matter how much you threatened her or cajoled her. He had become like another brother. He had been good to her, but that didn’t change anything. If she stayed, she’d be waiting for him to suddenly point his finger at her, shout at her. She’d thought maybe she could tiptoe around things by asking him about school. But school ended with Spence’s death. Everything ended with Spence’s death. All this was just a slow dying.

“What are you going to do?” Wayne-Ray says, gentle as can be.

She shrugs. “I’d just like to lie low until all this blows over,” she says.

“All what?”

“This,” she says. “Life.”

She hears him sip his tea, place the cup down on the arm of the chair. He is breathing through his mouth. He’s so big. He was never this big.

The silence closes in. She picks at something caught between her teeth. Looks away.

He had come to the city to get into the recording business, but he’d also come to be near Spence. Spence had always been more like a big brother to Wayne-Ray than a cousin. And Wayne-Ray had flunked out of school once Spence died. Not because he wasn’t good enough but because his best friend in the world had been shot and killed. Kind of hard to do your homework under those conditions. She knew that much herself.

“It’s hard, eh?” he says.

And before she really knows what she’s doing, Caution is on her feet, slipping into her tired shoes, grabbing up her pink backpack from where it lies at her feet.

“What’re you doing?”

“I shouldn’t have come,” she says, pushing past him.

“Yes, you should have,” he says, his voice rising. “You should have come months ago.”

“It’s no use,” she says, shaking his hand off her arm.

“You can’t go, Kitty.”

“Watch me,” she says.

For a big guy, Wayne-Ray is still quick on his feet. He gets to the door before her.

“You don’t want me here,” she says.

“Are you crazy?”

She stamps her foot. “Yes!” she says. “Haven’t you been listening?”

Then she starts beating on him, punching him, trying to heave his massive frame out of the way. He doesn’t even try to fend her off, just lets her go at him with all she’s got, while he bars that exit, like beyond the door was some sacred shrine she planned to desecrate. And all the time he’s saying, “Ah, Kitty. Ah, Kitty. Ah, Kitty.”

Finally, there is nothing left in her — not one precious joule of energy, not one swear word. He guides her back to the couch, his hand cupping her elbow like she’s some old lady he’s helping cross the street. He gets her sitting down, then kneels, laboriously, and slips off her sneakers. When he’s sure she’s not going to bolt, he goes into the bedroom and comes back with a pillow and a blanket. He tries to coax her to lie down, but she won’t. He tries to unzip her jacket, but she slaps his hand away. Puffing from the ordeal, he finally backs off.

He leaves and comes back a moment later with his guitar. He sits in the easy chair and starts playing a ballad she should recognize but doesn’t. She covers her ears until he stops.

“Hate me!” she says.

“What?”

“Hate me, Wayne-Ray. It’s the least you could do.”

“No,” he says.

“I’m not going to ever get over this.”

“I know,” he says.

“It’s never going to go away.”

“I know.”

“And don’t you
dare
tell me I’ve got to be strong.”

“I won’t.”

Which is when she screams. She screams so loud and so long that somebody downstairs thumps on the ceiling. Then she stops.

“Sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay,” says Wayne-Ray. “Them and I don’t get along, anyway.”

She chuckles. It’s a sad little excuse for laughter. More like a white flag of surrender than anything else.

She doesn’t lie down so much as fall over. She drags the blanket out from behind her and haphazardly flings it over her aching body. When she is next conscious of anything, the apartment is plunged into darkness and she is sore all over, as if someone has been using her as a punching bag.

Some time later, she senses Merlin hovering over her. Without letting him know she’s awake, she makes her face as ugly as she can. She hopes there is enough street light in the room for him to see just how ugly she is. She hopes he finds the spittle drooling from the corner of her mouth truly disgusting. She lets herself sag into the springs of the couch, disguising any shapeliness she may possess. She even manages to snore in a most unappealing manner. Meanwhile, her hand searches under the covers for
Anna.
She was reading it before bed, wasn’t she? If worse comes to worst and he tries anything, she’ll be ready.

Step one: a Russian classic to the face.

Step two: a couple of handy long-necked beer bottle empties, applied one to either ear, as if she were a cymbal player in the orchestra and Merlin’s head the crash site of the symphony’s climax.

But then she’s not sure if there really are any beer bottles on a coffee table in front of this couch, or whether that was some other couch, some other place. So confusing. So many couches. Such a long day. And
Anna
is nowhere to be found. So it seems that only her ugliness can save her now. How lucky she is, she thinks, to be so deeply, profoundly ugly.

“‘Everything is finished,’ she said. ‘I have nothing but you. Remember that.’”

The words came to her, but she had no idea why. No idea who “you” might be.

Y
ou call Alyson from a pay phone a block west of the squat. You wrote her cell number down on your arm before you ditched the BlackBerry. You phone her on a ten-dollar phone card. It’s eight o’clock. She answers with this annoyed voice, but you aren’t upset. It’s just that her caller ID doesn’t know you.

“Alyson,” you say, “this is Blink.”

There is a pause — long enough to wonder if you just made a very big mistake.

“Who?”

“I phoned you about —”

“You!” she says. “But why aren’t you —?”

“I ditched the BlackBerry. But the cops should find it soon. I didn’t like chuck it or anything.”

There is another pause. And you look around you as if maybe the GPS on that thing can stick to a person even when he’s unloaded it.

“Why are you calling me?” she asks.

It’s a good question — a complicated question. It has something to do with a picture of a girl on a lawn overlooking a lake.

“Hello?”

“I’m here,” you say. “I’m calling because I want to explain what I saw.”

“You said my father left the hotel
with
some people.”

“Yeah. With. Not abducted or nothing.”

“So you didn’t see the footage?”

“Footage?”

“The CCTV footage from the hotel. Closed-circuit television? It was on the news.”

“No way,” you say. “What about it?”

She pauses. It’s quiet right now down at Trinity and Front, which is where you are standing, shivering a little. You can hear her swallow.

“There was duct tape on his mouth,” she says. “And around his wrists. And the men were all in balaclavas.”

“In what?”

“Those ski masks that go right down over your whole face.”

“Not when I saw them,” you say. “Honest to God.”

“They were holding him tightly by the arms. Real rough and kind of pushing him down the stairs . . .” She says it like she’s trying to convince you.

“All I’m saying is that it didn’t look like that kind of shit was going down.”

You don’t say more, because maybe you are crazy and this is all a crazy dream. Then she is crying.

“Alyson.”

“What?” she says, angry, sniffing hard. “And how do you know my name?”

She’s not thinking clearly — who can blame the girl. But get to the point, Blink. “There was three guys in the video, right?”

“Were,”
she says angrily. “There
were
three guys.”

“Okay, ‘were.’” Jesus. “Could you tell from the video that, like, one of them was a big dude, real tall and, you know, big like a bear. And one was real wiry, and one was short but built like a brick shithouse? Could you tell that from the pictures?”

She sniffs again. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess. Yes.”

“The little one, the brick . . . Well, his name is Tank.”

There is dead quiet at the other end of the line.

“You got their names?”

“Just his.”

She laughs, like you said something funny, but it’s just this nervous thing, because there is nothing funny about her voice. “What’d you say your name was?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just wanted you to know that what I saw didn’t look like . . . didn’t look bad. Unless they tricked him or . . .” You shut up because you’re ruining it.

“Blink,” she says. “Was that what you said? Is that your name?”

Now it’s your turn to keep quiet.

“Blink, we need to talk.”

There. Was that what you wanted, you reckless, greedy boy?

“About what?”

“If you know stuff —”

“I don’t know squat. All I know is what I saw. These guys were with him. They were talking together. And they busted up the room — sure — but there was no yelling or anything. I was right outside the door practically.”

The pause again, but this one is stiff and listening.