Here So Far Away(64)

She turned around in the front passenger seat as we approached the emergency vehicles on the side of the road. “They’re pulling the car out of the ravine,” she said. “Don’t look.”

She held my eyes.

I needed to look.

“Don’t look, dear.”

She faced front again after we passed. I immediately turned my head, but could see only blurry lights through the back window. Blue and flashing. Orange and steady. Red and blinking. On. Off.

“Georgie, you must be hungry.”

On. Off.

“Georgie,” Mum said again. “You want breakfast?”

My family was staring at me like I was a carnival act. My stomach pinched, but with the burning in my chest, swallowing wasn’t doable. “No, thanks.”

“Sometimes I forget how lucky you and Matty have been. By the time I was your age, I’d buried one of my brothers, aunts, uncles, all the grandparents. But it is shocking when someone so young dies, isn’t it? Though I suppose to you he wasn’t that young.” She leaned forward and peered at me. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“No, that’s it,” I said, trying to approximate the sound of someone who is okay yet not unfeeling and not at all in the grip of an endless F-minor chord vibrating from her core. “That’s exactly it.”

“Would you like to go to the service? I doubt they’ll have the funeral here, but surely the force will have a memorial of some kind, won’t they, Paul?”

My father’s nod was so slight it was almost imperceptible. Something you learn early on when you grow up in a police household is that there is nothing more somber and steadfast than the force in mourning for someone who has served.

“I don’t think so, Mum.” I wouldn’t be able to get through a service without the kind of violent cracking up that leaves a person permanently drooling. “Can I see Rupert, though? Is someone with him?”

The last thing I heard Rupert say before he collapsed and had to be put to bed was, “I encouraged him. My god, I told him to go.”

“We called over this morning,” Dad said. “His daughter drove in from the city last night.”

“She’s the one who’s always trying to get him into a nursing home.”

“That’s between them.”

“What’s important,” Mum said, “is that he has family to help him through the shock of all this. And she arrived in time to be there when the pig went, thank goodness.”

“What do you mean?”

“Terrible timing, to have to put a pet down on top of everything else.”

“They put down Shaggy?” My voice broke as a sob came roaring up.

Dad opened his mouth to speak but Mum clasped his arm. Now she was holding on to both my father and my brother like she was about to rodeo-ride a pair of wild ponies, and it was plain they all thought I’d lost my mind, which I had.

“More like they just . . . helped him over the line, dear. By the time the vet got out to the farm, his heartbeat was very faint.”

“Shaggy’s dead? He’s dead?”

Through the blur of tears, I saw my father remove something from the table with his good hand, which he appeared to be holding on his lap. I became aware of the smell of bacon.

“You know he was quite old,” Mum said. “And he’d had a good life, sounds like. He slipped away peacefully with loved ones around him.”

“It’s so unfair!”

“Do you want to go to his funeral?” Matthew asked. “Ow, Mum, you’re cutting off my circulation.”

I sniffed and wiped my nose on the sleeve of my robe. “Are they having one?”

“Why don’t you go back upstairs to bed?” Mum said. “You’ve had a big shock.” I nodded. “Okay? Off you pop, then. Don’t hurry back down.”

“So, she isn’t completely heartless,” I heard Matthew say before Mum shushed him. “She can get right emotional over a pork chop.”





Thirty-Two


“What’s wrong, baby?” Keith asked.

Homeroom, ten minutes before the bell. Lisa and Christina were huddled over a newspaper, Nat sitting off to the side with another copy. Lisa held it up, tapped the headline. RCMP Hero Killed: Deadly Accident.

There was no photo, so it took Keith a minute with the article to put together that this was the cop who had busted up the shack party.

“Holy crud.”

“He saved that tourist in the bay last year,” Lisa said. “I wish I’d known that was him when he drove us home. Remember when he told me to put on a good show? I was like, I have a play, and he was all, I know it’ll be good. That was the last thing he said to me.”

She smiled bravely and Keith put his arm around her. “I remember,” he said. “The next morning you were like, I know what I have to do.”

As Sid often complained, one of the worst things about girls was how there wasn’t a tragedy they couldn’t make about themselves. Not that I doubted Lisa felt sorry about Francis; it was just the way she needed everyone to know she did.

I was sitting sidesaddle at my desk, my knapsack warming my lap, not knowing what to do with my various parts—where to set my hands, how to position my mouth like a normal person. I used to watch people go into stores and shovel their walkways and sit behind the wheels of their cars and thrill to the fact that they had no idea that I, George Warren, the supposedly heartless girl, was in love—sometimes, at that very moment, still throbbing with sex—and now I wondered how anyone could be in a room with me and not detect this never-ending vibration, like a single bass note sounded on a piano. Alone in my bedroom, it was almost comforting. Now I had to move around in the world as though the hum weren’t there, and try to focus on the problems in front of me. How to dress myself. How to get to school. I’d left Abe in the driveway that morning, sleepwalked to the bus stop, following the path that Matthew made in the snow.