The Searcher(120)

After a moment Trey rolls her eyes to heaven, heads into the bedroom and bangs the door behind her. “You’ve got yourself a teenager,” Lena says, amused.

“She’s had a long couple of days,” Cal says. “She’s not at her best.”

“Neither are you. You look about ready for bed yourself.”

“I could sleep,” Cal says. “If it’s not too early for you.”

“I’ll read for a while.” Lena finds her book and her clip light amid the stuff on the table, kicks off her shoes and makes herself comfortable on one of the mattresses—she has, sensibly, come wearing a soft-looking gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, meaning she has no need to change. Nellie is checking out the new space, snuffling into corners and under the sofa; Lena snaps her fingers, and Nellie lollops over and curls up at her feet. Lena props herself up on her pillow and gets to reading. Cal isn’t in the mood for sleepover chitchat either, but he’s irritated that she made the point before he did.

Trey opens the bedroom door, wearing the pajamas, and skids her dirty sweatshirt and jeans across the floor. Cal realizes that the pajamas are boy-type stuff with some kind of race car on the front. He still has trouble thinking of Trey as an actual girl.

“You want me to sit with you awhile?” he asks.

For a second she looks like she might, but then she shrugs. “Nah. I’m grand. Night.” As she heads back into the bedroom she throws him a lopsided grin over her shoulder. “Call me if you need your arse saving,” she tells him.

“Smartass,” Cal says to the closing door. “Get outa here.”

“Looks like she oughta be the one telling you a bedtime story, tonight,” Lena says, glancing up over her book.

“This isn’t a joke,” Cal says. Lena’s comfy sweat suit is annoying him all over again. He has no intention of asking for her help getting changed, which means he’s going to have to sleep in his blood-covered clothes.

“Seems to me you’re the one that hasn’t been taking it seriously enough,” Lena points out. “Are you done doing stupid things yet?”

“I’d love to be,” Cal says. He’s been trying to work out the least painful way to bend over for Trey’s clothes. He gives up on the whole damn thing and heads for his mattress. “I just can’t see any way around them.” Lena flicks one eyebrow and goes back to her book.

Cal is almost dizzy with fatigue. He turns his back to Lena and keeps his eyes open by poking his sore knee till Lena’s light clicks off, leaving the house dark, and till he hears her breathing slow down. Then, as quietly as he can, he disentangles himself from the bedding, gets up and inches the armchair over to the window. Nellie opens one eye at him, but he whispers, “Good dog,” and she thumps her tail once and goes back to sleep. He lays the Henry along the windowsill and sits in front of it, looking out at the night.

There’s a three-quarter moon, a rustler’s moon, high over the tree line. Under its light the fields are blurred and unearthly, like a mist you could lose yourself in, an endless sweep of it crisscrossed by the sharp black tangles of hedges and walls. Only small things move, flickers among the grass and across the stars, intent on their own business.

Cal thinks of the boys who have left their lives out there on that land: the three drunk boys whose car soared off the road and spun among the stars up beyond Gorteen, the boy across the river with the noose in his hands; maybe, or probably, Brendan Reddy. He wonders, without necessarily believing in ghosts, whether their ghosts wander. It comes to him that even if they do, even if he were to take up his coat now and go walking the back roads and the mountainsides, he wouldn’t meet them. Their lives and their deaths grew out of a land that Cal isn’t made from and hasn’t sown or harvested, and they’ve soaked back into that land. He could walk right through those ghosts and never feel their urgent prickle. He wonders if Trey ever meets them, on her long walks homewards under the dimming sky.

“Go get some sleep,” Lena’s voice says quietly, from her corner. “I’ll watch.”

“I’m fine here,” Cal says. “Can’t get comfortable on that thing. Thanks, though.”

“You need sleep, after the day that’s in it.” He hears a ruffle of movement and a grumble from Nellie, and Lena’s shape rises up off the mattress and pads across the floor to him. “Now,” she says, laying a hand on his good shoulder. “Go on.”

Cal stays put. They look out the window, side by side. “It’s beautiful,” he says.

“It’s small,” Lena says. “Awful small.”

Cal wonders if things would have been any different for all those dead boys if they had had, stretching out beyond their doorsteps, one of those days-long empty highways he was dreaming of a few days back: something else to sing in their ears at night, instead of the drink and the noose. Probably not, for most of them. He’s known plenty of boys who had the highway handy and still picked a needle or a bullet. But he wonders about Brendan Reddy.

“That’s what I came looking for,” he says. “A small place. A small town in a small country. It seemed like that would be easier to make sense of. Guess I might’ve had that wrong.”

Lena lets out a small, wry puff of breath. Her hand is still on his shoulder. Cal wonders what would happen if he were to lay his hand over hers, stand up out of the chair and take her in his arms. Not that he could do it even if he was sure he wanted to, given his various injuries, but still: he wonders whether she would lie down with him, and whether, if she did, he would wake up in the morning knowing, for better or for worse, that he was here for good.