The Searcher(128)

Instead he gets up and fetches a roll of paper towels. He puts it down by Trey and sits against the wall next to her while she cries. Her arm crooked over her face makes him think of a broken wing. After a while he lays his hand on the back of her neck.

In the end Trey runs out of crying, for now. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her face on her sleeve. She’s red and blotchy, with her good eye swollen almost as small as her black one and her nose swollen almost as big as Cal’s.

“No need,” Cal says. He hands her the roll of paper towels.

Trey blows her nose loudly. She says, “Just seems like there oughta be some way to fix it.”

Her voice wavers, and for a second Cal thinks she might break down again. “I know,” he says. “I’ve never quite come to terms with that myself.”

They sit there, listening to the rain. Trey catches the occasional long shuddering breath.

“Do I still haveta go into Noreen’s today?” she asks, after a while. “I’m not having any of them nosy fuckers seeing me like this.”

“No,” Cal says. “That’s taken care of. Those guys won’t be bothering any of us any more.”

That gets Trey’s attention. “You beat ’em up?”

“I look like I could beat anyone up right now?”

The kid manages a watery grin.

“Nah,” Cal says. “Just talked to ’em. But it’s OK.”

Trey refolds her wad of paper towel to find a clean patch and blows her nose again. Cal can see her taking in, piece by piece, the ways things have changed.

“That means you can go home now,” he says. “I enjoy having you around, but I think it’s time you went home.”

Trey nods. “I’ll go. Later, just. In a while.”

“Fair enough,” Cal says. “I can’t drive you, but Miss Lena will, once she’s finished work. You want me or her to come in with you? Help you explain things to your mama?”

Trey shakes her head. “I’m not gonna say it to her yet. Not till you get that proof.” She glances up from her wad of paper towel. “You said a few days.”

“Give or take,” Cal says. “But there’s one condition. You gotta give me your word of honor that you won’t try to do anything about this. Ever. Just put it down and go back to normal, like you said. Put your mind into going to school, hooking back up with your friends. Maybe making it through a few days without pissing off your teachers. Can you do that?”

Trey takes a deep, shaky breath. “Yeah,” she says. “I can.” She’s still slumped against the wall; her hands, holding the paper towel, lie in her lap like she doesn’t have the energy to move them. She looks like a long cruel tension is leaching out of her, notch by notch, leaving her whole body slack to the point of helplessness.

“Not just for now. For the rest of your life.”

“I know.”

“You swear. Word of honor.”

Trey looks at him. She says, “I swear.”

Cal says, “ ’Cause I’m taking a pretty big chance here.”

“I took a chance on you last night,” Trey points out. “When I let them lads go.”

“I guess you did,” Cal says. He has that shaky feeling up under his breastbone again. He can’t wait for it to be tomorrow, or next week, or whenever he’ll have got his strength back enough to react to things like his normal self. “OK. Give me a week. Say two, to be on the safe side. Then come back.”

Trey takes another long breath. She says, “What do we do now?”

The idea of a world with no quest in it has left her lost. “You know what I want to do today,” Cal says, “is go fishing. That’s about all I’ve got in me. You think us beat-up stray mutts can make it that far?”

Trey makes sandwiches. Cal lends her an extra sweater and his padded winter coat, in which she looks ridiculous. She helps him get into his jacket. Then they walk, taking it slowly, down to the riverbank. They spend the afternoon sitting there, without saying a single word that doesn’t relate to fish. When they have enough perch to feed Cal, Trey’s family, and Lena, they pack up and go home.

They split up the fish, and Cal finds a plastic bag to hold Trey’s old clothes and her pajamas. Lena, on her way back from work, stops by to pick Trey up. She stays in the car, but when Cal comes out to her she rolls down her window to look at him. “Give me a bell when you’re through doing stupid things,” she says.

Cal nods. Trey gets into the car and Lena rolls up her window, and Cal watches them drive off, with the darkness gathering above the hedges and the headlight beams glittering on the falling rain.





TWENTY-ONE


The rain holds steady, day and night, for more than a week. Cal mostly stays indoors, letting his body heal. His collarbone appears to be only bruised or cracked or something along those lines, rather than broken outright; by the end of the week he can use that arm for small stuff without too much pain, as long as he doesn’t try to raise it above shoulder height. His knee, on the other hand, is banged up worse than he thought. The swelling takes its time going down. Cal straps it up with bandages and ices it regularly, which helps some.

The enforced idleness and the misty rain give that week a dreamy, suspended feel. At first Cal finds it strangely easeful. For the first time he can remember, he doesn’t have the option of doing anything, whether he wants to or not. All he can do is sit by his windows and look out. He gets accustomed to seeing the mountains soft and blurry with rain, like he could keep walking towards them forever and they would just keep shifting farther away. Tractors trudge back and forth across the fields, and the cows and sheep graze steadily; there’s no way to tell whether the rain doesn’t bother them, or whether they just endure. The wind has taken the last of the leaves; the rooks’ oak tree is bare, exposing the big straggly twig-balls of their nests in the crook of every branch. In the next tree over, there’s a lone nest to mark where, sometime along the way, some bird infringed on their mysterious laws and got taught a lesson.