Here So Far Away(9)

“Keeper—”

“Tell me, Keeper, what would happen if I flipped that switch over there?”

“You’d turn on the lantern. . . .”

He flashed a mischievous smile and glided toward it, his eyes never leaving mine. I waited until he had his hand on the switch.

“. . . and blind us. You have to flip it and run.”

The switch was for a small lightbulb on the ceiling. The real lantern switch was wired down to the service room, but you had to leave the lighthouse to see the effect, and I wasn’t ready to let him go yet.

He slumped. “If you can’t play with the big toy, what do people do for fun around here?”

“Depends on what you mean by fun. Shunning outsiders?”

“Talking is nice.” He took off the cap and handed it to me, and I felt the flare in my chest again. “How about Long Fellows? Is that a good place?”

I shrugged, made a noncommittal so-so face. Did he think I was old enough to get into a bar? Bill claimed I could pass for nineteen, the drinking age Down East. He was always trying to get me to pick up liquor for him, but when your dad’s a cop, you know how to measure risk. I drank, but not too much, stayed away from drugs, although that was more because my friends couldn’t stand to be around me when I was high.

How old was he anyway, this Come From Away? Twenty-five? He wasn’t nearly as tall as Joshua or as stocky as Bill, but he was more present than any boy I knew, more substantial somehow, and as I watched his shirt pull about the roundness of his shoulders as he leaned against the window frame, I thought— You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

Sylvia Plath.

“Are you worried about something?” he said.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“Poetry. I read some great stuff in your high school diary.”

He grinned. “Are you a poet?”

“God, no. Do I look like a poet?”

He studied me. “As a matter of fact, you do.”

I kissed him. Stepped through the beam of sunlight that had turned the lantern lens into a giant gold jewel and kissed him. Even as I felt his whiskers against my skin, his lips on mine, his tongue, blessedly, nowhere, it seemed impossible that I was doing what I was doing, but from his startled look when we pulled away, I knew that I had.

I also remembered that I’d been smoking and probably had potbelly-stove mouth.

“Sorry, I needed to replace a bad sensory memory,” I said.

My heart was thudding so hard it felt like my shirt was moving.

“How bad is bad?”

“It made me hate being a mammal.”

Now he was laughing. “Oh man, did you tell the guy?”

“Of course not!”

“So, he’s still out there, thinking he’s okay? What if he goes his whole life and no one tells him? Wouldn’t you want to know? I’d want to know. At least, I think I’d want to know.”

I had a feeling he thought that if he kept talking we wouldn’t have to deal with the question of what happens next. I didn’t even know his name. He was a complete stranger, a grown-up. And yet I had a hankering to do something insane—more insane than kissing him—to grab him, climb him, bite him till he bled.

“Oh, there he is! The pig!” And with that, the stranger sprinted down the perilously steep staircase.

I couldn’t see anything piglike, near the trees or anywhere else, was sure he was trying to escape me, that I had literally repelled him back up the mountain. But as I stepped out of the lighthouse to watch him bounding through the fields after the invisible pig, he turned, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted, “See you at Long Fellows!”





Five


When Dad first joined the RCMP, my parents had to relocate every few years and never knew where in the country they’d end up. Which might sound exciting, but we’re talking rural detachments, from the northern wilds of Nowheresville to the windswept grasslands of Greater Middle of Nowhere. Then, some luck: Dad was transferred to a detachment in the valley, so they got to start their family close to where they grew up, and Matthew and I got to spend our formative years visiting Nan on Sundays, which is probably why Matty is still today a nervous wreck. She dropped her teeth into everyone’s glass from time to time, but she definitely chose his the most.

Lisa and I met in a skating class when we were five, added Natalie in fourth grade, and the boys in seventh grade, and through all those years we thought that I was always on the verge of leaving, that my family could be transferred to Who Knows Where at any time. But Dad stayed at that detachment for almost nine years, and then he went to another valley detachment, and in the end, it was Sid who moved, just because his parents wanted to try living somewhere else, and Vancouver is about as different and far away from the valley as you can get. It seemed the only way the rest of us would get out of there, including me, was by making sure we had somewhere to go.

Which is why Lisa and I were in Veinot that afternoon, a town with five traffic lights and a mall with a bookstore that stocked a grand total of one book about theater. She was hoping to be chosen as the director of the school play to help her application to a program at Aurora University next year.

“I’ll give you five bucks if you ask the old lady at the counter for The Joy of Sex,” I said. “Got it right here in my pocket.”