Here So Far Away(47)

Now that we’d been apart for so long, and now that I had Francis to remind me every day that high school wasn’t forever, it was easier to feel bad for her. But what could I do? She’d chosen her stage manager. Christina was sitting on the edge of the stage, kicking someone on the floor below her, and gave me a smug look when she spotted me in the doorway.

“I WANT TO PLAY OUTSIDE!”

I closed the door and gave Bill a two-knuckle punch for startling me. He’d brought the plastic lawn chair inside and was shaking it at me. It was strapped to a pair of children’s skis. “I’ll let you take the first ride,” he said.

“Where did you get that?”

“They made it in shop class this morning when the power was out. There’s loads more.”

I resisted the urge to check my watch, but could feel it ticking on my wrist. “I gotta get out to the farm.”

“Aw, come on. You said the old guy doesn’t care when you show up, but you’re always bailing on me to go to work.”

“Not always.”

Just when I got an unexpected chance to see Francis.

“Nat’ll go sledding with you.”

“Where is she?”

“I dunno. Lisa’s in there.”

“She throws up when she runs in deep snow. Besides, I’ll never get her out of rehearsal, and she’s always in rehearsal, and please can we go play? Please, please, please . . .”

I felt the watch tick again. “Okay, Billy. For a minute.”

All manner of sleds were shooting down the steep hill beyond the school fields. The makeshift magic carpets—mostly cardboard wrapped in a garbage bags—were getting the best distance, judging from the number of kids wrapped around trees at the bottom.

Bill launched me in the chair with a big push. I made it about three-quarters of the way down before wiping out, sending someone else arse-over-teakettle with me. He raised his head out of the snow: Joshua Spring.

“Geez, sorry,” I said, crawling over to him. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s cool.”

He shook the snow out of his hair, and without thinking, I brushed it off his cheeks. They flushed pink. Not a guy who could hide his feelings, Joshua. Some people weren’t built for secrets.

“Do you . . .” He glanced around—for Christina, no doubt. “Want to try that again? I mean going down. Down the hill.” He flushed redder.

“Sorry, I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got to—”

“Okay. Yeah, whatever.”

“No, I would, but I have to be somewhere.” A bead of blood had appeared on his lower lip. I pointed to my own lip. “I think you bit yourself.”

He put his hand to his mouth, then looked down at the red blotch on his mitten. “Great.”

“Here, let me . . .” I took a tissue from my pocket and reached over, but he blocked me with his monster-sized mitt.

Enough. I waved to Bill and power-walked to my car. I couldn’t phone Francis, had no way of letting him know I would be late. Our dates often went sideways, usually because he got caught up at work. I was used to that, unfortunately. When I was a kid, how many times had my dad sat down to dinner only to be called back out again? It got so that I’d get stressed out if the phone rang on special days, like when I had a soccer game or a school concert. He missed my sixth birthday because of a house fire, and my ninth because someone was murdered. I guess you’re not supposed to complain about that.

Now Dad spent most of his time snoozing, reading, and watching TV, Mum waiting on him hand and foot. So to speak. He rarely bothered to patrol me anymore. With my two jobs and good grades and all the Saturday nights I’d spent with Rupert, he had little reason to doubt that I was playing Yahtzee when I was actually slipping away to meet Francis, who didn’t always show. So, there was a lot of sitting in cold cars, fretting about whether he’d come and gone and how long I should hang around to be certain.

It was well after four and getting dark when I arrived at the parking lot, and there was no sign of Francis. If he’d made it, he must have given up. Stupid, slow-moving plow.

I drove on to the lighthouse and sat in the dark car. It was tempting to go to the farm, make up some reason to check in on Rupert, and see if Francis had gone home, but I was trying not to do too much of that, and maybe he’d gone somewhere else before his shift.

I let myself into the lighthouse. In the wintertime I was only there half days on Saturdays, spent most of my time cleaning already clean things and doing homework, so that the air would have hardly thawed before I turned down the heat and locked myself out again. It was especially chilly within the glass walls surrounding the lantern, where I could see the farmhouse lights beckoning from the ridge. I went down a level to the service room and flipped the switch, remembering again Francis’s mischievous look when he’d put his hand on the wrong one. Then I wound my way down the metal stairs to the keeper’s quarters and waited.

My truest, most visceral memory, the one I can still feel on my skin today, is the moment the lighthouse door opened. A half hour had passed. I’d already turned the lantern off and was zipping up when Francis appeared with a gust of cold air. As we stumbled back into the lighthouse, Francis wrestling off my coat, his mouth warming mine, I understood why people said it was like a part of them was missing when someone they loved went away. Everything felt right again, like all of the pieces of the world had snapped back into place with a resounding click.