Here So Far Away(63)

He nodded and took a few long sips.

“Better?”

He nodded again, and he did seem better. “Oh, George, he’s been smelling awful these past few days. I blame myself. Switching him to powdered milk to save a few dollars. Stale bread. Canned peas.” He whispered, “I may have accidentally given him some canned ham. You know what that could do to a mind as fragile as Shaggy’s?”

The Johnson girl rolled her eyes and flipped another page of her magazine. I brought my fist down on the table just for the satisfaction of seeing her jump. “I have an idea,” I said. “This might sound obvious, but did anyone check Francis’s room?”

“’Course,” said Rupert, but he looked doubtful, then worried.

“I’m sure you would have heard him,” I said.

“Can you imagine? I got all those people out in the cold—”

“I’ll run up. He’s not there, but I’ll run up.”

I had an alternative motive, which was to leave something for Francis in one of the books that he kept on the stool by his bedside, in case I had to go home before he returned. A lock of hair, a note—just to show I’d been at the farm and was thinking of him. But the stool was empty, like the other surfaces in the room, which was in its usual monk mode. There was nothing in place to be out of place—nothing but a large pig softly snoring on an old striped mattress.

It took some coaxing to get Shaggy off the bed, and a back knee buckled when his hooves hit the floor. He glared at me accusingly through his long lashes. “Yes, you’re very delicate.” I pointed to the door. “Downstairs.”

Janet’s husband rang a triangle-shaped dinner bell to call in the search.

I was sitting on the veranda with Shaggy, his head in my lap. It had taken all of his effort to get down the stairs and now he seemed a bit feverish, his breathing shallow. Janet dropped an afghan over him, whispering, “I think a call to the vet and to Rupert’s daughter may be in order.”

While I took care of the four-legged patient, she went inside to deal with the two-legged situation. Rupert had burst into tears when he’d seen Shaggy, from relief or embarrassment, I don’t know. I could hear Janet through the door saying again and again, “It was no trouble, dear. No trouble at all. It’s not like the rest of us thought to check upstairs.”

In the distance, Bobby’s leather-clad form was traveling along the highway, moving quickly, awkwardly, his gait strange, off somehow. He reminded me of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland going, I’m late, I’m late . . .

“We got him, Bobby!” someone called.

He didn’t respond. He stopped partway up the drive, bent over, weight on his thighs. Then he crouched down, hands clasped behind his head. And then he sat right on the frozen ground, which is when people started running.

They must have thought he was having a heart attack or something, but it didn’t look like a heart attack to me, and he didn’t look like a man who’d walked too fast and just needed to catch his breath. He looked like a man who had been moving as fast and far as he could before despair overtook him.

A sharp pain shot through my chest, like the flare I’d felt the day I met Francis—except this was fear, sudden and stabbing. I wrapped my arms around Shaggy, and pulled his warmth into me. I felt his shallow breathing, in and out, in and out. Steady, boy, steady.





Lullaby for the Cat





Thirty-One


April 1993


When I woke up the morning light was slanting through my window. I could hear newspapers rustling downstairs, the kettle settling back on the stove, Mum’s continuous murmur. Was she talking on the telephone, or were Dad and Matthew just not responding? My brother’s low grumble interrupted the flow of words. Silence, then Mum again.

The sharp pain that had run through me at the farm was now faded and had been replaced with something like a hum. I placed my hand in the square of sunlight on my chest, felt heat. It seemed to be coming from under my pajama top, from inside me, not the sun, as though my palm were cooking over a low flame. I closed my eyes again and felt my heart’s slow burn.

“Georgie, could you come downstairs, please?”

My family was sitting at the kitchen table, oddly arranged to one side, as though they’d pulled their chairs closer together.

“Are you alright?” Mum asked.

I nodded. A little too vigorously.

“Did you see it?” Matthew asked. “Must have been . . . I mean, it was probably . . .”

Mum put her hand on Matthew’s arm and gave him a warning look.

“It” couldn’t be seen from a moving vehicle up on the road, not that many people had gone by over the past couple of days, given the weather. Only someone on foot, walking alongside the guardrail with his eyes peeled for the unusual, could have spotted Francis’s car down in the ravine, partially covered with snow. Any skid marks next to the start of the guardrail had disappeared under the ice and the gravel they put down out there instead of salt.

“No, I didn’t see it,” I said to Matty.

Janet and her husband had driven me home in Abe, another neighbor following behind in their car. I hadn’t said much since Bobby went down on the driveway, was almost as preternaturally calm then as I was now in front of my family, but it was dark by the time the officers from the New Oban detachment finished taking statements and it had started snowing again, and I kept pulling cold, damp air into my lungs so sharply that my body would occasionally jerk as though I’d jumped into the frigid bay. Janet hadn’t asked me if I wanted a drive, just steered me to my car and opened a back-seat door.