by Hadley Dyer
Dad was in a good mood when he got home on Sunday, which may or may not have been drug related. I half hoped he’d had an out-of-kitty experience when he rested his bandaged hand on my shoulder. He even gave Matthew a hug and didn’t say anything smart when Matty had a little cry.
The call from Rupert came in soon after Dad and his hand had settled into his recliner. “The pamphlet says you can’t smoke,” Matty was saying when I came back into the family room. “Right here. It’s bad for healing.”
“George, get my cigarettes,” Dad said.
So, not so out-of-kitty.
“Don’t you dare,” Mum said.
“I’m staying out of it,” I said. “And I’m sorry, but I have to go out to the farm to help Rupert.”
“Like fun,” Dad said. “Don’t you have a French test next week? Go forth and conjugate.”
Mum was giving me big eyes. “Your father just got home.”
“I know, and I wouldn’t ask, but his pig escaped and he can’t find him. He’s having a meltdown.”
“There’s no one else who can do it? A neighbor?”
“I have no idea. He was hardly making sense.”
Yes, I wanted to get out there in case Francis came home early, but the truth was, I’d never heard Rupert so upset. His sentences were disjointed, and he kept repeating, “You’ll bring the old boy back, George, won’t you? You’ll bring him back,” until I said I would.
“I could go out there with her, Paul,” Mum said.
“How are you going to lasso a rogue pig out in the snow?”
He pointed to her with his bandaged hand. He’d been gesturing with it constantly since he got home, and I thought the old Dad—the Dad who wore a purple tutu while paddling a pumpkin, the Dad who used to terrorize Matty by making Halloween decorations out of frozen cows’ hearts that he picked up at the meatpacking plant—might have had a lot of sick fun with a quarter less finger.
“I meant that someone should clap their eyes on this old gentleman,” Mum said. “He doesn’t sound too good. Maybe his mind’s gone.”
“Just to be clear, there is a pig,” I said. “The same pig that got out before. The last time this happened, I found him, so.”
“Georgie, go,” Mum said. “But for god’s sake, be careful on those back roads.”
As I turned into Rupert’s long driveway, I passed a bearded man in a black hat and motorcycle jacket. I was nearly to the house before I took in that it was Bobby.
A gray-haired woman came round the barn as I got out of the car. “You Georgia?” she said.
“Yeah. Well, George.”
“George—sorry. Thank you for coming out, and I’m sorry for that phone call. Rupert insisted that if anyone could find this damnable pig it was you. I’m Janet, I should have said. Live up the road.”
“I can try, but I found him accidentally the last time.”
“Do you know how to get hold of Mick? Apparently, he just up and left on Friday night. . . .”
“Oh, no, he went to the city for the weekend. I don’t have a number, but he should be back tonight.”
“Thank god. Rupert made it sound like he was lost to the wind. Never mind. He’s not all there at the moment.”
She took my arm and we crossed the icy driveway together.
“Did I see Bobby?” I asked.
“He was lucky enough to drop by in the middle of this ruckus, yes. My husband and my boys are out looking too, and the Johnson family—except the one inside. By god, that girl is useless.”
The useless Johnson girl—a blond blob arranged in the vague outline of a human—was sitting at the kitchen table with Rupert, reading a magazine, apparently oblivious to the crumbs and sticky splotches around the plate of whatever she’d helped herself to and the tears hovering at the edges of Rupert’s eyes. I kicked my boots off and rushed in to hug him. “What happened?” I asked.
Short story, really. Back door open. Pig gone.
“Have some tea,” I said, pouring him a cup from the pot that was simmering on the back of the stove. I loaded it up with milk and sugar. “Have you eaten? You’ve probably been too worried.”
He nodded and took a few long sips.
“Better?”
He nodded again, and he did seem better. “Oh, George, he’s been smelling awful these past few days. I blame myself. Switching him to powdered milk to save a few dollars. Stale bread. Canned peas.” He whispered, “I may have accidentally given him some canned ham. You know what that could do to a mind as fragile as Shaggy’s?”
The Johnson girl rolled her eyes and flipped another page of her magazine. I brought my fist down on the table just for the satisfaction of seeing her jump. “I have an idea,” I said. “This might sound obvious, but did anyone check Francis’s room?”
“’Course,” said Rupert, but he looked doubtful, then worried.
“I’m sure you would have heard him,” I said.
“Can you imagine? I got all those people out in the cold—”
“I’ll run up. He’s not there, but I’ll run up.”
I had an alternative motive, which was to leave something for Francis in one of the books that he kept on the stool by his bedside, in case I had to go home before he returned. A lock of hair, a note—just to show I’d been at the farm and was thinking of him. But the stool was empty, like the other surfaces in the room, which was in its usual monk mode. There was nothing in place to be out of place—nothing but a large pig softly snoring on an old striped mattress.
It took some coaxing to get Shaggy off the bed, and a back knee buckled when his hooves hit the floor. He glared at me accusingly through his long lashes. “Yes, you’re very delicate.” I pointed to the door. “Downstairs.”
Janet’s husband rang a triangle-shaped dinner bell to call in the search.
I was sitting on the veranda with Shaggy, his head in my lap. It had taken all of his effort to get down the stairs and now he seemed a bit feverish, his breathing shallow. Janet dropped an afghan over him, whispering, “I think a call to the vet and to Rupert’s daughter may be in order.”
While I took care of the four-legged patient, she went inside to deal with the two-legged situation. Rupert had burst into tears when he’d seen Shaggy, from relief or embarrassment, I don’t know. I could hear Janet through the door saying again and again, “It was no trouble, dear. No trouble at all. It’s not like the rest of us thought to check upstairs.”
In the distance, Bobby’s leather-clad form was traveling along the highway, moving quickly, awkwardly, his gait strange, off somehow. He reminded me of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland going, I’m late, I’m late . . .
“We got him, Bobby!” someone called.
He didn’t respond. He stopped partway up the drive, bent over, weight on his thighs. Then he crouched down, hands clasped behind his head. And then he sat right on the frozen ground, which is when people started running.
They must have thought he was having a heart attack or something, but it didn’t look like a heart attack to me, and he didn’t look like a man who’d walked too fast and just needed to catch his breath. He looked like a man who had been moving as fast and far as he could before despair overtook him.
A sharp pain shot through my chest, like the flare I’d felt the day I met Francis—except this was fear, sudden and stabbing. I wrapped my arms around Shaggy, and pulled his warmth into me. I felt his shallow breathing, in and out, in and out. Steady, boy, steady.
Lullaby for the Cat
Thirty-One
April 1993
When I woke up the morning light was slanting through my window. I could hear newspapers rustling downstairs, the kettle settling back on the stove, Mum’s continuous murmur. Was she talking on the telephone, or were Dad and Matthew just not responding? My brother’s low grumble interrupted the flow of words. Silence, then Mum again.
The sharp pain that had run through me at the farm was now faded and had been replaced with something like a hum. I placed my
hand in the square of sunlight on my chest, felt heat. It seemed to be coming from under my pajama top, from inside me, not the sun, as though my palm were cooking over a low flame. I closed my eyes again and felt my heart’s slow burn.
“Georgie, could you come downstairs, please?”
My family was sitting at the kitchen table, oddly arranged to one side, as though they’d pulled their chairs closer together.
“Are you alright?” Mum asked.
I nodded. A little too vigorously.
“Did you see it?” Matthew asked. “Must have been . . . I mean, it was probably . . .”
Mum put her hand on Matthew’s arm and gave him a warning look.
“It” couldn’t be seen from a moving vehicle up on the road, not that many people had gone by over the past couple of days, given the weather. Only someone on foot, walking alongside the guardrail with his eyes peeled for the unusual, could have spotted Francis’s car down in the ravine, partially covered with snow. Any skid marks next to the start of the guardrail had disappeared under the ice and the gravel they put down out there instead of salt.
“No, I didn’t see it,” I said to Matty.
Janet and her husband had driven me home in Abe, another neighbor following behind in their car. I hadn’t said much since Bobby went down on the driveway, was almost as preternaturally calm then as I was now in front of my family, but it was dark by the time the officers from the New Oban detachment finished taking statements and it had started snowing again, and I kept pulling cold, damp air into my lungs so sharply that my body would occasionally jerk as though I’d jumped into the frigid bay. Janet hadn’t asked me if I wanted a drive, just steered me to my car and opened a back-seat door.
She turned around in the front passenger seat as we approached the emergency vehicles on the side of the road. “They’re pulling the car out of the ravine,” she said. “Don’t look.”
She held my eyes.
I needed to look.
“Don’t look, dear.”
She faced front again after we passed. I immediately turned my head, but could see only blurry lights through the back window. Blue and flashing. Orange and steady. Red and blinking. On. Off.
“Georgie, you must be hungry.”
On. Off.
“Georgie,” Mum said again. “You want breakfast?”
My family was staring at me like I was a carnival act. My stomach pinched, but with the burning in my chest, swallowing wasn’t doable. “No, thanks.”
“Sometimes I forget how lucky you and Matty have been. By the time I was your age, I’d buried one of my brothers, aunts, uncles, all the grandparents. But it is shocking when someone so young dies, isn’t it? Though I suppose to you he wasn’t that young.” She leaned forward and peered at me. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“No, that’s it,” I said, trying to approximate the sound of someone who is okay yet not unfeeling and not at all in the grip of an endless F-minor chord vibrating from her core. “That’s exactly it.”
“Would you like to go to the service? I doubt they’ll have the funeral here, but surely the force will have a memorial of some kind, won’t they, Paul?”
My father’s nod was so slight it was almost imperceptible. Something you learn early on when you grow up in a police household is that there is nothing more somber and steadfast than the force in mourning for someone who has served.
“I don’t think so, Mum.” I wouldn’t be able to get through a service without the kind of violent cracking up that leaves a person permanently drooling. “Can I see Rupert, though? Is someone with him?”
The last thing I heard Rupert say before he collapsed and had to be put to bed was, “I encouraged him. My god, I told him to go.”
“We called over this morning,” Dad said. “His daughter drove in from the city last night.”
“She’s the one who’s always trying to get him into a nursing home.”
“That’s between them.”
“What’s important,” Mum said, “is that he has family to help him through the shock of all this. And she arrived in time to be there when the pig went, thank goodness.”
“What do you mean?”
“Terrible timing, to have to put a pet down on top of everything else.”
“They put down Shaggy?” My voice broke as a sob came roaring up.
Dad opened his mouth to speak but Mum clasped his arm. Now she was holding on to both my father and my brother like she was about to rodeo-ride a pair of wild ponies, and it was plain they all thought I’d lost my mind, which I had.
“More like they just . . . helped him over the line, dear. By the time the vet got out to the farm, his heartbeat was very faint.”
“Shaggy’s dead? He’s dead?”
Through the blur of tears, I saw my father remove something from the table with his good hand, which he appeared to be holding on his lap. I became aware of the smell of bacon.
“You know he was quite old,” Mum said. “And he’d had a good life, sounds like. He slipped away peacefully with loved ones around him.”
“It’s so unfair!”
“Do you want to go to his funeral?” Matthew asked. “Ow, Mum, you’re cutting off my circulation.”
I sniffed and wiped my nose on the sleeve of my robe. “Are they having one?”
“Why don’t you go back upstairs to bed?” Mum said. “You’ve had a big shock.” I nodded. “Okay? Off you pop, then. Don’t hurry back down.”
“So, she isn’t completely heartless,” I heard Matthew say before Mum shushed him. “She can get right emotional over a pork chop.”
Thirty-Two
“What’s wrong, baby?” Keith asked.
Homeroom, ten minutes before the bell. Lisa and Christina were huddled over a newspaper, Nat sitting off to the side with another copy. Lisa held it up, tapped the headline. RCMP Hero Killed: Deadly Accident.
There was no photo, so it took Keith a minute with the article to put together that this was the cop who had busted up the shack party.
“Holy crud.”
“He saved that tourist in the bay last year,” Lisa said. “I wish I’d known that was him when he drove us home. Remember when he told me to put on a good show? I was like, I have a play, and he was all, I know it’ll be good. That was the last thing he said to me.”
She smiled bravely and Keith put his arm around her. “I remember,” he said. “The next morning you were like, I know what I have to do.”
As Sid often complained, one of the worst things about girls was how there wasn’t a tragedy they couldn’t make about themselves. Not that I doubted Lisa felt sorry about Francis; it was just the way she needed everyone to know she did.
I was sitting sidesaddle at my desk, my knapsack warming my lap, not knowing what to do with my various parts—where to set my hands, how to position my mouth like a normal person. I used to watch people go into stores and shovel their walkways and sit behind the wheels of their cars and thrill to the fact that they had no idea that I, George Warren, the supposedly heartless girl, was in love—sometimes, at that very moment, still throbbing with sex—and now I wondered how anyone could be in a room with me and not detect this never-ending vibration, like a single bass note sounded on a piano. Alone in my bedroom, it was almost comforting. Now I had to move around in the world as though the hum weren’t there, and try to focus on the problems in front of me. How to dress myself. How to get to school. I’d left Abe in the driveway that morning, sleepwalked to the bus stop, following the path that Matthew made in the snow.
I wasn’t going to get through the day. I needed a reason to go home—flu, allergies, political dissention. I’d think of something by the time I got to the office. I would impale myself on the metal divider in my pencil case, if need be.
Lisa caught my wrist as I passed her. “How well did you know him?”
She obviously wanted to keep talking about it, this little brush she’d had with celebrity, which was irritating only
because she didn’t know what she was scratching at.
“Not well,” I said.
“But you worked for him?”
“Mostly I helped out his landlord when he wasn’t around.”
Nat was shaking her head at Lisa, who released my wrist and leaned back into Keith.
“He was nice. He didn’t have to let us go,” Christina said, grabbing her bag and following me to the door. “’Course, George probably sucked him off.”
I’d never hit anyone before and had no idea it would hurt so much. Hurt me, that is. I assume it hurt Christina from the noise her face made as my fist made contact and the way she gasped and Lisa crying, “You bitch!” I looked down at my throbbing knuckles, astonished that they had done what they had done.
“We do not tolerate violence in this school, as you well know,” Mr. Humphreys said over the sound of my mother’s weeping. “But . . .” He sighed. “There are two sides to every story, and experience tells me that students, especially female students, rarely lash out like this without being provoked.”
We were sitting in his office, my mother and me on hard wooden chairs designed for maximum discomfort. The back on mine felt like it could eject me at any moment.
“No, I deserve to be suspended,” I said a little too sincerely.
Shit. Now he was looking at me with even more interest.
“Mr. Humphreys is giving you a chance to explain yourself,” Mum said. “So explain yourself.”
I shrugged. “Christina has had it in for me all year cuz her boyfriend used to have a crush on me. I got sick of it.”
The truth is, just before my knuckles slammed into her cheekbone, it registered that Christina was sort of smiling when she said what she said. The tiniest possibility that she had been teasing was threatening to sink in.
“Mrs. Warren, do you know what the other students call your daughter? The Enforcer.”
So that was a thing. Bill and Sid were the only ones who called me that to my face.