Blink & Caution

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Come hunting with me, Spence,” she says.

  “I can’t,” he says. “I’m busy.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re moping.”

  “I am not moping. And nothing’s in season, so you can’t hunt.”

  “Rabbits are in season. Nuisance rabbits. And Rory says he saw one that had already turned white. Why does that happen, Spence? Turning white when it’s still summer?”

  “It’s called the lethal gene, Kitty. Now, will you please leave me alone?”

  She backs off. He’s sitting at his computer. There’s a screen saver of a starry sky. She watched him go to screen saver as soon as she came into his room. Barged into his room. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” he’d said. He’s hiding something from her, and he’s never done that before.

  “You and Melody had a fight, huh?”

  “We did not have a fight.”

  “Then why’d she leave here in tears?”

  Spence turns to her. He tries to take her hand, but she pulls back. “We did not have a fight, Kitty. Just leave it alone, okay?”

  Kitty’s at the door now. “Are you going to break off the engagement?”

  Her brother throws himself back in his chair. “Don’t you ever stop?” he says.

  “You are, aren’t you?” says Kitty. Her hair is loose, and she has to hold it back from her face, like curtains.

  “We have things to discuss. That’s all. Period. Full stop. You wouldn’t understand.”

  And that’s when she knows something is really wrong. He’s home from school. He just graduated. He and Melody are supposed to be getting married, and something is up he won’t tell her about. You wouldn’t understand. Spence has never said that to her. Not ever — not once. She’s fifteen and he knows she can understand anything. Anything he’s willing to explain to her.

  When Caution wakes up this time, she is completely disoriented. She thrashes out of the bedclothes, as if trapped. Then she sits up, breathing hard, trying to make sense of this little room tucked under the eaves.

  Her mouth is caked with crud. She can barely swallow. She gets up, falls back down. How long has she been out? She gets up again, more carefully, and makes her way to the kitchen. Two o’clock? She’s been asleep for over six hours.

  She gets a drink of water from the tap. Wayne-Ray must have put something in her coffee. He didn’t trust her to stay put.

  It’s not anything you think. It’s not any more sermons . . . It’s way more important than that.

  She sits at the little table. There had been this brightness in his eyes when he’d said it, something that looked awfully like hope. She didn’t have any faith in hope, but she had to have faith in Wayne-Ray, didn’t she? Maybe not. If this thing was so important, why hadn’t he told her right off ? As the sleep clears from her brain, she could answer that easily enough. Maybe he’d wanted to tell her last night but didn’t get the chance, what with her beating the shit out of him and all.

  What could it be?

  As far as she can see, she has two choices. One, she could take off for who knows where — Vancouver, maybe. Australia. That way she wouldn’t have to be let down by whatever it was he had to say. Or two, she could hear him out and then take off for Vancouver, China, or Timbuk-fucking-tu. Her head is clear enough to know that she can’t stay in Toronto. And she can’t go home.

  But there is something she can do. She can make Wayne-Ray dinner. He’d asked her just as he left if she needed anything, if she had any money. She’d managed not to choke with laughter. She was fine, she told him, and shoved him out the door. He told her where the nearest grocery store was as she closed the door on him. So what would she make? Steak, she thinks. Shrimp. Surf and turf, with spaghetti on the side. That’s the kind of meal Wayne-Ray likes.

  She kneels on the old Raymond parlor couch and peers down at the street. No magicians out there as far as she can tell. Then she takes the extra key and skips down the stairs to the outside world.

  It’s four by the time she gets back. Her cousin was going to be home by five thirty. And the thing is, he will be home when he said he was going to be. Merlin came and went as he pleased without a word to her. The thought of him makes her weak in the knees, and she has to sit down. Weak in the knees but not in a good way.

  By five thirty she has everything ready: the spaghetti sauce is bubbling on the stove, there’s salted water ready to turn on for the pasta, a green salad in the fridge. The other stuff she’ll cook when he arrives.

  She’s excited, impatient. She finds herself kneeling at the gable window again, looking down on the street, craning her head to see out to Roncesvalles, like she’s the little wifey in a fifties movie, waiting for her hubby to get home. And there he is, suddenly, filling out his voluminous white shirt, striding along the sidewalk. Her dear and wonderful cousin. And then she sees the Nissan.

  “It’s impossible,” she says.

  “You never talked about me,” he says. He’s sitting, holding her hands.

  “Never!” She gets up to look out the window, but he stops her, pulls her back.

  “He might see you,” he says, and he looks instead, while Caution throws herself down on the couch, shaking uncontrollably. She swears, the same word over and over again.

  “There are lots of blue Nissan Sentras, you know.”

  “Not with a rusted-out roof rack and a dent in the hood.”

  Wayne-Ray looks again, says nothing.

  “He hit the hood with a tire iron one day when he got a flat.”

  Wayne-Ray grunts. “As far as I can tell, he’s just sitting there,” he says.

  “I told you he was a magic man.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Then how do you explain that frigging car out there?”

  Wayne-Ray throws out his hands, and they flap back down against his sides, helplessly. He peers again out the window and then sits beside her.

  “What does he want, Kitty?”

  She shakes her head. She can’t begin to explain.

  “Okay, don’t tell me,” he says. “But he’s dangerous?”

  She nods vigorously. She wants to scream at her cousin. Was he not listening when she said that about the tire iron? “I’ve got to get out of here,” she says. “I don’t know how he found me, but I’ve got to get out of here.”

  She grabs Wayne-Ray’s arm, squeezing it hard. She’s lying to him, of course. She does know how Merlin found her. He was meant to find her. It was all part of the big picture in which Caution Pettigrew pays for her crime. Merlin is her death sentence. The minute she let him pick her up that freezing March day outside the Eaton Centre, with his shiny eyes turned up to ten and his cute little story about how good she looked in her fancy hat, she had committed herself to this sentence. It had all been a long, exhausting trial with the verdict already decided.

  “Okay,” Wayne-Ray says. “I think I’ve got a plan.” She looks at him. His face is grim. “There’s a fire escape,” he says, “just outside my bedroom window.” She starts to rise, but he yanks her down again. “Listen to me,” he says. “Listen good.”

  His eyes demand an answer. She nods.

  “There’s somewhere I want you to go. Someone I want you to meet.”

  She throws her head back. “I don’t want help,” she says.

  “You do,” he says. “You just don’t know it.”

  “Wayne —”

  But she can’t even get his name out before he’s grabbing her by the shoulders. “Stop it!” he says, not loud, but with every fiber of his body, every ounce of his deep goodness.

  She gives in, covering her face with her hands because she is such a horrible person and does not deserve this kindness.

  He gets up and goes out to his bedroom, coming back a minute later with a piece of paper. There is an address on it. He pokes the paper at her hand, until she realizes it is there and takes it from him. It’s an address on Major Street.

  “You know where that is?”

  “Th
e lower Annex?”

  He nods. “Go there. Go straight there!”

  She holds the paper with two hands. Suddenly she laughs. “I feel like we’re in some war movie, and this is a safe house.”

  “Seems to me like this is a war,” he says. “Not just him,” he adds, gesturing with his head toward the window. “The whole thing.”

  The whole thing. Spencer Pettigrew’s death, he means.

  “So who is this . . . ?”

  “Woman,” he says. “I’ll phone her and say you’re coming. But I’m going to let her tell you, okay?”

  “Jesus, Wayne-Ray, give me a break here.”

  “I am,” he says. “I’m giving you the biggest break I can. And I’m not trying to be mysterious or nothing like that.”

  “What if she’s out?”

  “I’m guessing she won’t be. If she is, phone me and we’ll figure out something else. She’ll have to decide whether she wants to tell you what she knows.”

  Caution laughs, but there is not a shred of humor in it.

  “It’s the best I can do,” says Wayne-Ray. And she sees how much that is in his eyes, even if she has no idea what he’s talking about. She owes him this much.

  She sighs. He places his hand on the side of her face, and she rests her hot cheek against it, kissing his fleshy palm, salty with sweat.

  He gets up and looks out the window. “Does this cat have a blond ponytail?” he asks.

  Caution moves like a cat down the rusted-out fire escape. But she didn’t leave without warning Wayne-Ray how dangerous Merlin could be. He dug a baseball bat out of his closet. He used to bat in the high three hundreds in Little League. That’s where he’d gotten the broken nose — sliding into home. The catcher was in the hospital for weeks.

  She drops to the ground. There is a weed-choked backyard, a fence with a door that creaks alarmingly. Then there is an alley. She’s out on Roncesvalles in no time. She should head north up to Bloor. Major Street is only four subway stops away on the Bloor line. But she stands on the sidewalk in the new darkness so that people have to walk around her.

  “Freak,” a man says, dodging to avoid making contact with her.

  “You have a point,” she says, calling after him. Then she turns and heads south until she comes to the corner of Wayne-Ray’s street.

  From behind a telephone pole, she can see the Nissan, three cars down. It’s empty as far as she can tell. The sidewalk is as well. She digs her keys out of her pocket and makes her move.

  The car is locked, and she fumbles with the key, drops it, picks it up again, swearing to herself. She ducks low and glances over the hood, up toward Wayne-Ray’s place. Nothing.

  She tries the key again, yanks the door open, and jumps in. The car starts right up. She revs too high in her excitement. Then she engages the clutch and pulls out onto the street. She cruises by the boardinghouse unseen, turns south on Sunnyside, left again at the first street she comes to, and then heads south on Roncesvalles. The car smells of L’Homme and marijuana. That gives her an idea.

  Roncesvalles ends at Queen, where she turns east. She calms herself down, concentrates on her driving; last thing she needs is a cop pulling the beater over when it smells like this. It’s busy on Queen, the end of the rush hour, the start of the nightlife. She knows she promised Wayne-Ray she’d go straight to the mystery address, but she’s following her instincts right now. Whatever magic might have led Merlin to Wayne-Ray’s, she’s pretty sure the man can’t fly. So if he’s going to pursue her, he’s going to have to do it on foot. Might even have to rely on public transportation like ordinary mortals.

  It’s closing on seven when she reaches Parliament and turns south. She pulls a U-ey south of Front and heads back, pulling over right in front of the Fifty-first Division headquarters of the Toronto Police Service. With her eye trained on the entranceway, she unzips her Little Mermaid backpack and pulls out the Baggie of weed. She chucks the bag into the backseat, gets out, locks the car, and takes off north in a big hurry. There are no other cars parked in front of the police headquarters. It’s a no-parking zone.

  There is something going down at the squat. There is light around the boarding covering the downstairs windows. Maybe there’s a fire. Maybe it’s just Thursday night — party time. You stand on the cracked concrete path and wait, your arms folded around you, shivering in the cold. Voices are yelling; things are flying. This is the second time in two days that you’ve stood outside a place where violent things are going on. It’s like a curse. Like you carried this with you from your mother’s house, and everywhere you go there will be rooms full of anger and mystery.

  You stand there, shivering, because it is the middle of October, despite the warm days, and it might snow. It’s so effing cold, and this piece-of-shit Gap whatever-it-is you stole from a Jarvis boy’s locker wasn’t really meant to keep out the elements. You had all day, Blink; you could have picked up a jacket somewhere, spent some of that filthy lucre. But you were afraid to spend anything, in case it cost a lot to get to Kingston. How would you know? But why couldn’t you see as far into the future as the night?

  Something big crashes to the floor, making you step back off the sidewalk right onto the street. Might be Sonya. She’s sweet, mostly, but a lunatic when she goes off her meds. Or it could be Wish-List, in which case a knife is a real possibility. You are tired. Desperately tired. You just want to sleep but not in that hellhole.

  You hear a siren. There are always police sirens, because the Fifty-first Division is only three blocks away, so it doesn’t mean anything, except it’s what they call the straw that breaks the camel’s back. You are out of there, Blink, my fine humped creature. Lope down Cherry Street and good-bye. Good-bye to the few scraps of clothing and the piece of foam and the orange Salvation Army blanket. Good-bye to it all. You are back on the street. Then tomorrow you are going to Kingston, wherever that is.

  A car pulls a U-ey on Parliament. You jump back, raise your fist, and swear at the driver. She doesn’t even notice.

  You head along Front Street, past the St. Lawrence Market all closed up for the night, past the little restaurants and bars sucking people in and spilling people out like they’re breathing and their air is people. You stop in front of the dimly lit window of a photography gallery. The place is closed, but there are rich people in there, too. Tiny and framed: the children of rich people, in spotless shirts, hair mussed up on this boy here, but like they paid a hundred dollars to make it look like that. Twin girls dressed up like little ladies from some other time. A handsome Asian boy with a cricket bat resting on his shoulder. But all you really see is yourself in the dark glass; you in your breakfast clothes, which you have worn now for three days in a row and which are on the verge of disintegration. You don’t want Alyson seeing you like this. You’ll shop tomorrow, you tell yourself, if you can afford to after you buy your bus ticket.

  You’re really going through with this, Blink?

  You bought that story?

  Like there won’t be cops waiting there the minute you step off the bus?

  You pass by the Hummingbird Centre just as a show gets out. Swan Lake. Folks with little girls in tow — big-eyed from being out so late. They’re all dressed in finery, black suits and glittering dresses under warm coats, climbing into Mercedes and Cadillacs. A little princess glares at you and leans into her father’s leg.

  You drift down the damp steps into the subway at Union Station and find a bathroom. You look at yourself in the cracked mirror. You push your filthy hair out of eyes steeped too long and dark, bitter. Alyson is not going to like you. Alyson is going to take one look at your collar and suddenly realize she has a ballet to go to or something.

  Anyway, that story of hers . . . What were you thinking?

  It’s after eleven, but you phone her from the GO station. Might as well get it over with.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Yes . . . well, not really. What is it?”

  Her voice is soft and ful
l of sleep. Her bed is probably like something from a movie. White. Everything white. With a soft light and a Persian cat. You imagine her in white silk pajamas. Well, too bad.

  “I’m not coming.”

  She clears her throat, and you imagine her sitting up now.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. I can’t . . . I mean, I can’t get away.”

  There is a pause, and you think, Just hang the fuck up. But you don’t.

  “I think you’d better,” she says.

  There is no sleepiness in her voice now.

  “Well, that’s your opinion —”

  “No, listen,” she says urgently but quietly. “It’s for your own good.”

  Captain Panic wakes right up when she says that. “For your own good” is a phrase you’ve heard before, way too often. Usually what comes next has a buckle on it.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “They are looking for you is what I mean.”

  “They who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Nobody is looking for me. And now I’m just gonna hang —”

  “Brent,” she says.

  And you freeze.

  “Brent, do not hang up,” she says.

  The Captain smacks his open palms against the bulkhead. Once, twice, three times. You can’t speak. From where you’re standing, you can see a drunk in the shadows pissing against a wall. He’s waggling his dick around as if he’s writing something.

  “What’d you call me?”

  “Brent. Brent Conboy.”

  You look down the echoing corridor of the station past the drunken graffiti artist. There’s a wind whistling down the tunnel. An underground wind. No one is watching you in the urine-colored light. No one you can see, that is. They could be anywhere.

  “How’d you . . . ? There’s no way . . .”

  “Listen,” she says. “You kind of blew it, okay? Left fingerprints all over the hotel room.”