Here So Far Away

by Hadley Dyer

After a moment, Lisa leaned forward again and stage-whispered to me, “You know she can’t help how she is.”

  Francis stopped the car about a block from Lisa’s house. “You can walk from here,” he said.

  “You aren’t going to tell my parents?”

  “Put on a good show.”

  “Oh, I’ll be very convincing. I only had, like, five beers.”

  “I meant the play.”

  “Oh, right. Thank you! I will!”

  “I know you will.”

  Christina was next, then Keith.

  As we drove on, Francis didn’t look at me, didn’t speak. It was so strange to be sitting together in upright silence, belted in, staring out the window, when under all those layers of clothes was a body I knew so well that there was no part I couldn’t describe precisely, down to the blue veins crossing the double tendon under his left wrist. If this wasn’t a police car, I might have chanced it, sliding over so that my leg, just my leg, was touching his. Just to see.

  Francis took off his hat, placed it on the seat between us, and ran his hand over his chin. Freshly shaved. Jaw like a blade.

  I was still furious with him, but the reasons were becoming murkier as we passed through shadows and streetlights. For wanting to talk about how hopeless this was, was that it? Or for keeping his cool when he saw me and letting everyone off?

  “Were you drinking?” he asked.

  “Couple slugs of Screech.”

  “Do you have the bottle?”

  “In my bag.”

  Silence again, my mind working overtime. We were not driving in the direction of my house. Or the farmhouse, the detachment, or anywhere we’d stolen time together. At some point it occurred to me that he didn’t know where we were going, that he was just driving, thinking.

  Finally, he pulled over by a wooded area on the outskirts of town. He got out of the car, walked around, and opened my door. “Bring the Screech.”

  There was nothing in his posture that suggested we would be sharing a nightcap as we walked down a rough path into the woods lit by his flashlight. The snow had melted here and the ground was uneven where muddy footprints had frozen. Eventually, we came to a clearing with a crumbling brick bunker surrounded by fallen trees that had been taken out by storms. The shrill call of coyotes in the night.

  The flashlight flicked off. I felt Francis behind me, his hand heavy on my back through my jacket. Down my spine and around to my belt buckle. Then he stopped. He waited until I leaned into him, sank into the heat of him, feeling upward to his bare neck, before sliding his hand into my jeans.

  On the way back to the car, the bouncing light beam illuminated a large tree that had come up from the roots, its huge base like a secret entrance to another world.

  An old man was walking his dog along the shoulder of the road. “Evening,” he said, looking bewildered until his eyes landed on the bottle of Screech under Francis’s arm. “She won’t be the only one you find back there tonight. Unless the coyotes get them first.”

  As we pulled away from the curb, Francis said, “I had a very long conversation with a woman from the lighthouse heritage society this week. Those window locks have a remarkable history.”

  “Did you have to buy a ticket?”

  “I sure did.” He tightened his grip on the wheel. “George, after they gave me the medal, I felt so—”

  “Ashamed.”

  His voice was low and reassuring, but regret was already setting in, I could tell. It was there in the tightness of his hands, the way he kept his eyes on the road ahead.

  “Yes,” he said. “Ashamed. It was easier when I was far away from you, in the city, to decide to do the right thing.”

  “The right thing being to stop.”

  “When we’re together, this big gap opens up between who I am and the person I wish I could be.”

  I wouldn’t cry. He was being grown-up and reasonable and there was nothing to blub over. It wasn’t like the world hadn’t given us solid reasons to stay apart. But to hear him describe us as a wrong thing, saying he was ashamed of himself when he was with me and that I made him feel like he was failing, it more than hurt. It was humiliating.

  “I know you don’t like yourself when you’re with me,” I said, looking up at the stars to keep the tears from rolling down. “But I like myself a lot better when I’m with you.”

  He reached over and rested his hand on my thigh, his hand warm through the denim. “When we got together, I’d already made up my mind that I wasn’t staying. I would wait until your dad was confirmed to return to his position or not before giving my notice.”

  “And go where?”

  “Maybe nowhere. Maybe stay with Rupert, get the farm going again. And then they gave me the medal. . . .”

  “And you realized that you might be police, after all.”

  “No. What we’re doing is incompatible with wearing the badge.”

  “But you saw that you could do it, right? Or you could if it weren’t for me.”

  He nodded. “I could make a life here. I like waking up at the farm. It’s just . . . I’m still not sleeping. Can you understand?”

  “What if you did the counseling they offered you. . . .”

  “What good is counseling if you can’t talk about the most important person in your life?”

  I took a second to absorb this.

  “That’s you.”

  “Yes.” The Bishop yes. I heard myself doing it all the time now.

  “The fact is, we’ve crossed a line,” he said. “A new line.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t be around you and not be with you, George. I end up prowling after you the way Rupert prowls after ‘stamps.’”

  “I’m your hooch.”

  “You’re my hooch.”

  I thought he was going to tell me to quit my job at the farm, that I would lose not only him but any nearness to him. Somehow it hadn’t sunk in before that I might also have to give up polishing his shoes, his dirty teacups, his scent lingering in the hallway.

  “So I guess it’s a good thing that you applied to the city schools,” he said, “because I don’t think I can end this on my own.”

  He checked the rearview mirror to be sure no one was behind us before he took my hand and kissed it, holding it until the sharp left turn that would return us to town forced his hand back onto the wheel.

  Twenty-Seven

  In early March, Dad had a state-of-the-union meeting with his division commander, disability case manager, career adviser, and a whole bunch of other people who were monitoring his progress. I wondered whether he told them, after shuffling in with his walker, that napping had become his part-time job.

  When he got home, he went straight to his recliner and fell asleep in front of cartoons.

  “Dad?”

  “Huh—what?”

  “Sorry to wake you up.”

  “No, I was reading.” He picked up the book on his chest. “Have you read this yet?”

  It was his favorite, the history of the valley, with chapters on the logging industry and the Apple Harvest Parade and equally tedious subjects.

  “No offense,” I said, “but I think I’ve had my fill of superexciting local history from superexcited local historians.”

  “It wasn’t written by a historian. It was written by a guy who lives ten miles up the highway. Plumber by trade, insomniac by nature. He used to go down to his basement every night to write after his family went to bed.”

  I’d never met an author before, never considered that people who wrote books might come from a place like the valley. I thought of Miss Aker with her suitcase full of rejection letters. Had to admire her for trying.

  “Good. So, what did the team have to say?”

  “Looks like I’m not getting into the history books, which I could have told them back in July. We’ll reassess in the fall, but it’s safe to say that the dream of having the first peg leg serving active duty is over.”

  On the other si
de of the window Mum was furiously shoveling the walkway. She knew, I thought. That is why she took that job.

  “So then what?” I said, trying to keep cool. “Do they kick you off the force?”

  “No, then we’ll see if there’s another suitable position to be had. Could be civilian.”

  “I know this isn’t the most important thing, but what does that mean for us, as far as . . .”

  “Money-wise? It means we are unlikely to be eating squirrel next winter.”

  How could he be so nonchalant about the fact that he’d sabotaged his big chance to do something important? All he’d had to do was follow the program they’d given him. When had he made up his mind that he wasn’t even going to try?

  “Dad? Aren’t you disappointed?”

  He let a breath out slowly. “Well, George, it’s like this. The job has certain requirements that I can’t fulfill. Nothing to get emotional over; I had a good couple of decades on the force and no regrets. When you get older, you’ll understand that none of us is entitled to any more than that.”

  I thought of how proud I’d been to visit my father at the detachment when I was a kid. I loved the clacking and hum of the typewriters, the smell of stale coffee and the stubby brown cigarettes that the staff sergeant smoked at his desk, talking to the receptionist through the hole in the window that separated her from the public. How people straightened up when Dad entered a room. He was the walking embodiment of responsibility: for your community, your fellow officers, your family, your own personal conduct.

  Now, as I watched him light another cigarette, I felt, for the first time, a little ashamed of my dad. Not because he couldn’t be an RCMP officer anymore, but for making it sound like it was all the universe’s doing, not his own.

  We used to have a cat named Priscilla. After she got sick and went to the vet for three days, we were never sure we’d brought home the right animal. Gone was the midnight yowler who went mousing at night for balled socks and once almost tore my hand off for trying to take a pair away from her. It became impossible to sit when she was in the room because she was suddenly so full of love that she would climb onto your chest, put you in a stranglehold of a hug, and try to lick your face off.

  That was how I felt in the weeks after Francis and I got back together, like I’d had an out-of-kitty experience and was filled up with more feelings than I knew what to do with, even just watching him fork hay across the barn floor.

  “How long are you going to stand there watching me?”

  “I like what I see. Why don’t you give us a spin?”

  Well, he whipped around that pitchfork like it was a stripper pole, and I did not want to think about how he could have that move at the ready.

  “Change of scenery for Shaggy,” he said when I uncovered my eyes. “Poor guy’s got cabin fever.”

  Shaggy had already burrowed into a pile, and his head and back rose out of the hay like a pink crocodile floating in a lake. “Thank god,” I said, crouching down to give him a scratch. “Rupert fights me every time I try to let him outside.”

  I stretched out beside Shaggy and looked up at the rafters. “My dad found out that he’s not returning to his job.”

  I’d been sitting on this for more than a week. I needed time to consider what it meant. That Francis would probably stay, yes, but also how that made him all the righter about our fall expiration date.

  “I know,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Your father called. They might not tell me for a while since nothing is official, so he wanted to give me a heads-up.”

  “That was surprisingly decent of him.”

  He joined me and Shaggy on the hay. “Is he upset?”

  “Weirdly, no.”

  “Are you upset?”

  “Not anymore,” I said truthfully. “This could make things simpler. For us.”

  I felt around the hay for his gloved hand. “I was thinking, maybe if you stay, I stay.”

  His hand flexed in surprise, which he tried to cover by giving mine a squeeze. “You’ve been talking about getting out of here since I first met you.”

  “The universe has been conspiring against that. With some help from my dad.”

  “And what does the universe want?”

  “For me to go to Noel. I don’t want to take off just when it starts to become okay to be with you. The city, and everywhere beyond the city, they aren’t going anywhere.”

  “You know it’ll be a long time before anyone will think this is okay.”

  “I know. But it’ll stop being something you could lose your job over a lot sooner than that. In the meantime, I could swing residence if I got a student loan, or board at the farm. In the maid’s room. Then it wouldn’t be a problem if people saw us together.”

  “Incremental acclimatization.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’d be happy at Noel.”

  “I think so.”

  If I got in, and stayed in. I had been worrying about how things were going to average out on my final transcripts. They could send an acceptance letter in May only to send a rejection later.

  “Will you have friends there?”

  I shrugged. It honestly didn’t matter to me anymore. I didn’t need anyone but him.

  “George, have I gotten between you and your friends? When I busted up that party—”

  “Oh, those weren’t my friends. I hang with a different group.”

  Francis propped himself up on his elbow. “You know as well as I do that I could be relocated at any time. Even with a permanent position, I’ll still be transferred within three, four years. If I can bring myself to leave the farm, and that’s a big if.”

  “In three, four years, I could be done with my degree.”

  I couldn’t read him. “You’ve thought it through,” he said in a way that made it clear he hadn’t.

  “I’m sorry. God, it’s too much. I’m freaking you out.”

  He gave me a fierce look. “George, you’re the only thing I’ve ever been sure about. I know that sounds like a line from a shitty love song—”

  “It actually is a line from a shitty love song.”

  “But it’s true. I don’t want you planning your life around me when I can’t promise to do the same.”

  “I’m not.” I sat up. “I’m not.”

  “Okay. You’re not.”

  “I wish . . . I wish we could get out of here, just for a while.”

  He’d be able to picture it better, being together. We’d see who we were away from the valley.

  He saw me struggling, the floodwaters rising. “How about this,” he said. “I know someone in the city who’s gone to Guatemala for a year. She gave me a key to her place in case I wanted a break from the countryside. I don’t know how we’d both get away the same weekend without people putting two and two together, but—”

  “Leave that to the professional.”

  At this, Shaggy made a noise like someone was letting all the air out of him.

  “You’re not coming,” I said.

  “So you and I will go,” Francis said. “And we’ll figure this out. Because I love you, George. You commie bastard.”

  “Well, get in line, son. My friend Bill says I’m the girl all the boys want to haul into their boat.”

  As I said it, sunbeams poured in through the barn windows. Francis stared at them and he stared at me. “What?” I said. “I didn’t do it.”

  If anything, it was the gods stating their approval. Then I noticed the rainbows, dozens of them all around us from the prism-shaped sun-catchers in the windows. “That might be over-the-top,” I said after we watched them, mesmerized, dancing over the rough wooden planks, the hay bales, and the walls.

  Francis said, “I need you to say something to me before I go.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Work. Say something incredibly romantic.”

  “Never.”

  “Do it for all the star-crossed lovers, George.” H
e wasn’t joking now. “I know you have it in you.”

  “You’re . . . Ugch. You’re a part of me.”

  “And?”

  “I’m a part of you. And for the record, you can’t follow someone who’s a part of you.”

  He took off one glove and one of my mittens and held my bare hand in his. “Thank you.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Rupert thought I was working on a big journalism assignment all weekend, and since Francis would be in the city until Sunday night, he arranged for Bobby the Biker Crooner to look in on him. He was worried that Rupert would find the timing suspicious, but Rupert was too huffed up about the suggestion that he couldn’t make do on his own to be making connections.

  I couldn’t come up with an artful lie for my parents. There were so many ways for them to poke holes in my story if I said I wanted to visit relatives or go on a school trip or any other excuse I might concoct. The simplest thing, I’d decided, would be to just drive away. Leave a note on my bed that said I was going somewhere on a bus, then meet Francis over at Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey’s place. They were elderly neighbors who’d gone to Florida for the winter, so I could park Abe out of view in the driveway behind their house. If we took Francis’s car, no cops could set their sights on Abe’s license plates—though, if the note said I’d be back by Sunday night, my father probably wouldn’t send the troops after me. He wouldn’t announce that he couldn’t control his own kid if he didn’t have to. I’d get a serious grounding, but it was worth it.

  That left Bill, who’d been hoping we could hang out that weekend. “Ugch, two whole days with crazy Uncle Burpie,” I said as we shot hoops after school. I wasn’t great at sinking baskets, but pounding the ball against the floor helped settle my nerves. “You’ve got, like, twenty minutes to give me an injury that gets me out of it.”

  More like nineteen. I had to make an appearance at home before meeting Francis at eight.

  I passed the ball to Bill and he immediately threw it back to me—or at me. So hard, my fingers snapped back.

  “I was kidding!” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you?” He looked right pissy, as he had all day. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was talking to Lisa.”