The Searcher(107)

He goes back indoors and starts cooking breakfast. The smell of frying bacon brings Trey out of the bedroom, barefoot and crumpled. Her fat lip has gone down some, but the eye is even more spectacular in daylight, and there’s an ugly bruise on her cheekbone that Cal didn’t notice before. Her hoodie and her jeans are crusted with patches and smears of dried blood. Cal looks at her and has no idea what to do about her. The thought of sending her out of this house makes him want to barricade everything and spend his time with his gun pointing out a window, in case someone comes for her.

“How you doing?” he asks.

“Shite. Hurts everywhere.”

“Well, I took that for granted,” Cal says. The fact that she’s walking and talking fills him up with a relief that makes it hard to breathe. “I meant apart from that. You sleep OK?”

“Yeah.”

“You hungry?”

The kid looks like she wants to say no, but the smell is too much for her. “Yeah. Starving.”

“Breakfast’ll be ready in a minute. Sit down there.”

Trey sits, yawning and flinching as the yawn stretches her lip. She watches Cal while he turns the bacon and butters the toast. The way she’s sitting, with her shoulders high and too much weight on her feet, reminds him of the way she used to stand when she first started coming around: ready to run.

“You want another painkiller?” he asks.

“Nah.”

“Nah? Anything hurt worse than last night?”

“Nah. I’m grand.”

With her face messed up, Cal finds it even harder than usual to tell what’s going on in her head. “Here you go,” he says, bringing the plates to the table. “Cut it up small, and don’t let it touch that lip. The salt’ll sting.”

Trey ignores that and attacks the food, still keeping a wary eye on Cal. Her hand is better; she holds the fork clumsily, trying not to bend her fingers, but she’s using it.

“Miss Lena just left a few minutes back,” Cal says. “She’s got work. She might be back later, depending.”

Trey says brusquely, “Sorry I came here. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“No,” Cal says. “Don’t be sorry. You did right.”

“Nah. You told me not to be coming around any more.”

All of Cal’s relationships, which seemed perfectly straightforward and harmonious last night, appear to have got themselves out of joint while he wasn’t looking. Never mind Brendan Reddy: the real mystery to which Cal would love an answer is how, while doing everything right as far as he can tell, he somehow manages to fuck everything up.

“Well,” he says. “This was an emergency. That’s different. You called it right.”

“I’ll go after this.”

“No hurry. Before you go anywhere, we need to decide what you want me to do.”

Trey looks blank.

“About last night. You want me to call the police? Or CPS—child protective services, whatever you call it?”

“No!”

“CPS isn’t the boogeyman, kid. They’ll find you somewhere safe to stay for a while. Maybe get your mama some help.”

“She doesn’t need help.”

The kid is glaring, holding her knife like she’s all ready to stab Cal with it. “Kid,” he says gently. “What she did to you wasn’t OK.”

“She never done that before. She only done it this time ’cause they made her.”

“So what if they make her again?”

“They won’t.”

“ ’Cause what? You learned your lesson, now you’re gonna behave yourself?”

“None a your business,” Trey says, with a defiant glance.

“I’m asking you, kid. I need to figure out what to do here.”

“You don’t need to do anything. If you call child services, I’ll tell ’em you done this.”

She means it, too. “OK,” Cal says. Seeing this amount of fight out of her makes his spine go weak with relief. He got up this morning afraid to see her in case he found her smashed inside, a girl-husk that stared right through him, that had to be steered stumbling from place to place and sat with a bite in her mouth till she was reminded to chew and swallow. “No child services.”

Trey eyeballs him for another minute. Apparently she believes him, because she goes back to her food. She says, “I know that was all bullshit, what you told me. About Bren going to Scotland. So’s I’d fuck off and leave you alone.”

Cal gives up. Whatever he was trying to do there, it hasn’t worked. “Yeah,” he says. “Donie gave me sweet fuck-all. Only I was bullshitting you about the leave-me-alone part, too. Truth is, I got no problem with you coming around. I enjoy your company.”

Trey looks up at that. She says, “I don’t want your fucking money.”

“I know that, kid. I never thought you did.”

She goes still, rearranging her mind around that. The loosening in her face hooks Cal right under the breastbone. “So how come you said all that shite?” she demands.

“For Christ’s sake, kid. You think no one noticed what the two of us were up to? I got warned to back off. This right here”—he points his fork at Trey’s face—“this is exactly what I was trying to avoid.”