Blink & Caution

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “I’m not sure,” she says. But you get the feeling she does. “What about you?”

  “I’m not sure, either,” you tell her, but you have a pretty good idea yourself. You glance at her, and she blushes.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” you say.

  You grew up sometime last night. Even before Kitty came into your bed. You grew up when you were talking to Niven. When you could put together what it was he was talking about, because it mattered to you — because it was a matter of life and death. Because you had read up on it.

  She turns south on 115, easing down to 401. About ten minutes later, the cell phone goes off in your hands — tinny rock ’n’ roll. It is just before noon.

  “You ready?” she says.

  You think a bit, nod, push Talk.

  “Ontario Provincial Police,” you say. “How may I direct your call?”

  You wait. There is nothing. And then the phone goes dead. In another couple minutes, it rings again. This time you don’t bother with the snappy answer.

  “Hey,” you say.

  “Brent?”

  “No, this is Tank, Mr. Niven.”

  “What is going on?”

  You hold the cell phone up, and Kitty beeps the horn. “Did you hear that?” you say into the cell.

  “I gather you’re on the road,” says Jack. He doesn’t sound annoyed. He’s all business, and that’s intimidating. “You do realize you are driving a stolen vehicle and that it is being tracked, don’t you? Right this minute.”

  “Yeah,” you say. “We’ve been expecting the cops all morning. Oh, or maybe you didn’t go to them.”

  “Have you forgotten our little conversation? Do you really expect that anyone would believe your story?”

  “Nope. But there’s two of us,” you say. “They might believe two people telling the same story. Oh, and there’s some saved messages on this cell phone that sure sound suspicious. Tank doesn’t have a password, so it was really easy to listen to them.”

  There. You finally slowed him down. But you wait, breathlessly, for the next move. It’s like when you played chess with Granda, and you’d do something clever and hope he hadn’t noticed that his king was exposed.

  “Brent,” he says, “I thought we had a deal.”

  “We did have a deal. And then, after I accepted the deal, you decided to lock me up. That wasn’t part of the deal. So, I guess it was a kind of open-ended deal.”

  “Nobody locked you up. You were a visitor, lost and far from home. We offered you accommodations. You’ve got a very active imagination.”

  It sounds as if he isn’t really talking to you anymore. It makes you nervous.

  “Well, I didn’t like my accommodations,” you say.

  “What is this about, Brent?”

  “It’s about Tank trying to kill me. It’s about getting away, okay?”

  “Do you have some new extortion scheme up your sleeve?”

  You hold your tongue. You’re not sure.

  “Is that it?” he says. “Are we entering round two of negotiations?”

  Does he really mean he might offer you more? Get a grip, Blink! Have you learned nothing? Can you really trust this man? Please, boyo, get it through your head: something for nothing is a fool’s game.

  “How about forty-eight million?” you say.

  Kitty whoops with laughter.

  “I see,” says Jack, and the two words send shivers down your spine, as if he really can see — see you and Kitty and this yellow Jeep. As if he were the Wicked Witch watching Dorothy in her glass ball. You grasp at straws.

  “You try anything, and we just hand over this phone to the cops,” you say, your voice more wobbly than you would like. You sound a lot like a sixteen-year-old talking to the CEO of a big mining operation.

  “Good-bye, Brent,” he says. “For now.” And the line goes dead.

  Kitty doesn’t ask you what he said. It’s as if she can tell. You are nervous again, and it’s his fault. You were fine five minutes ago, on top of the world. Now you’re angry. You open your window and want to toss the phone out.

  “Don’t!” she yells. And you roll the window back up. Then you sit there in silence watching the road, the cell lying in your lap. You want only to be somewhere — anywhere. So many things you have thrown away lately.

  Without any warning, Kitty tells you her story, the story that led her to Toronto. It’s the story you’ve only heard snatches of that you weren’t entirely sure were true. She tells you everything. How she was shooting in the meadow out back of their place up north and how she missed the target Spence had set up and how that stray bullet passed through an acre of bush and across rough ground the length of three football fields and lodged in the base of her brother’s skull. She tells you how the bush was dense and there was no way in a million billion years such a thing could have happened but it happened anyway. It was a shot no marksman could have made. A tragic fluke. The most terrible thing that had ever happened in the history of forever.

  She tells you about the inquest and the therapists and the breakup of her parents. She tells you about leaving home. No one blamed her. Everyone knew how much she loved her brother. But there was this one person who couldn’t stand her anymore: Kitty Pettigrew.

  Then she stops talking, and you sit there and sift through it all, like the victim of a fire looking for anything that might have been saved from the blaze. She has told you everything, and when you can speak, you say, “And the worst thing is you were mad at him when it happened, right?”

  She is watching the road, watching the speedometer, her hands on the wheel at ten and two, her back straight, like this is a driving test. She shakes her head. “No, the worst thing is that he is dead.”

  You don’t argue. Of course she’s right. But you know, somehow, that you were right, too.

  There is a huge shopping center in Pickering, just east of metropolitan Toronto, and Kitty pulls off the highway. It’s midafternoon, and the place is crawling with kids your age. You are just another couple of teens, hanging out at the mall. But you have about three hundred and fifty dollars, and your purpose for being there is anything but casual. You divvy up the money and go to work.

  You buy nice clothes — not the kind of clothes you like — nice clothes. Well, cheap nice clothes. “You’re all kitted out,” says the salesman, who looks relieved that you want to trash the clothes you came in wearing. “Were you, like, at a costume party?” he asks.

  “Something like that,” you say. He looks pleased, as if he just helped to do something good, as if selling you these clothes was an act of charity. You’ve made his day.

  At the cash register, you buy sunglasses, too. Yellow for her, blue for you.

  Then you go to get your hair cut. You come out stylish and blond. This is real camouflage gear, Blink. Time to blend in.

  Kitty does the same. When she arrives at the food court, you’re already digging into a large French fries and a gallon of Coke.

  “What do you think?” she says, just like a girlfriend might.

  Her hair is almost gone, buzzed down to a fine nubble. She’s wearing a Fair Isle sweater dress in a cool rainbow of colored stripes, an icy-blue faux-leather jacket, icy-blue tights, and argyle low-tops.

  “I think you look hot,” you say. And she blushes. Then you hand her the yellow sunglasses. “A present.”

  She gets some Japanese noodles and joins you, sitting on your side of the table. “Let’s move here,” she says.

  You look around. “That’s cool with me,” you say. “We could live here forever.” And then suddenly she’s crying again, softly, leaning on your shoulder. The game of the day has just about drained completely away.

  It’s five by the time you head outside again, but you are in no hurry to go to the Jeep and possibly walk into a trap in your nice new clothes.

  So many clothes you’ve gone through lately. Like snakes growing so fast, you have to shed every few hours or so.

  You watch the
Wrangler for a long time, trying to figure out if it’s under surveillance. You parked in a far corner of the lot, which thins out more quickly as closing time approaches. You both look for someone sitting in a car reading a newspaper. Someone hanging around.

  “We could just leave it,” you say after a while. “I think the GO train comes all the way out here.”

  She shakes her head. “I need it,” she says. You don’t ask why. You have shared so much, become so intimate, and yet your separation from one another is this secret — an unspoken pact. The time is fast approaching when you will have to say good-bye — at least for now. There is nowhere you can go together, though you keep thinking about it.

  Your next stop is the Yorkdale Shopping Centre in the north end of the city. It’s a place from which you can catch the subway south.

  “Are you going to be all right?” she says, taking your face in her hands.

  You nod. “You?”

  She nods.

  “I’ll miss you,” you say. She rolls her eyes, and you both laugh nervously. Then she leans her forehead against yours.

  A passerby might have mistaken the kiss that follows for two suburban teens at the end of a first date. The kiss is so tentative, nervous, as if the matinee is over and the movie wasn’t all that good and neither of you are sure there’s going to be another date. It’s not nerves; it’s fear: fear that if you kiss her like you want to kiss her, then the next bit — the hard bit — would be impossible. You’d both just have to climb back into that bright yellow time bomb and take off to who knows where and keep traveling until the money runs out. Which would be in one more tank of gas.

  She pulls away and rests her hand gently on your arm. She looks at you and grins. “Now I owe you way more than sixty bucks,” she says.

  You nod. “And I want it back, okay?”

  She nods. Then she writes Wayne-Ray’s phone number on your arm. You watch her do it so carefully and think how odd it is that just that morning in the motel you had scrubbed off what was left of Alyson’s number from pretty much the same spot. She finishes and then kisses your arm, and you have to wipe the wet ink off her lips.

  “Is that where you’re going?” you ask.

  She shakes her head. “But he’ll know where I am. What about you?”

  You write a number on her arm, amazed that you still remember it.

  The next kiss isn’t a good idea, but it is inevitable. You hold her head in your hands. As much as you love the flesh of her, you love the bones of her, too, this tough skull. Your lips are chapped but so are hers, and it doesn’t matter even though it stings a bit. Your hands slip down the length of her to her waist. You feel her arms around your shoulders, and you are glad for that because you feel as if you might fall right over were she not holding you up.

  “You saved my life,” you say. “Did I tell you that?”

  “You saved mine,” she says.

  For a moment it looks as if there will be a third kiss, but you both come to your senses.

  “Phone as soon as you can,” she says. “As soon as you . . . you know . . .”

  You more or less know what this thing is that cannot be named because it is so uncertain: home. Phone when you find a home.

  It’s after nine when Kitty pulls wearily into the sprawl of the mostly empty parking lot of the Northgate Shopping Centre in North Bay. It’s been a day of shopping centers, but none of these stores is open. She is completely exposed. She parks the Wrangler, leaving the keys under the floor mat and locking the doors manually. She walks away, then runs. All day she has expected to be caught and has been philosophical about it, to a point. When Brent was with her, it hardly mattered if they got arrested. They lent each other strength neither of them had on their own. But now that she is on her own, she must face the fact that she wants her freedom desperately. She starts crying as she runs. She crosses the highway — the Trans-Canada — darting through traffic, putting herself as far as she can from the Jeep and everything it stands for.

  In a McDonald’s, she makes the call. It’s Saturday night and either Mom will be at Auntie Lanie’s, or Aunt Lanie will be at Mom’s. Wahnapitae is over an hour away.

  “Sit tight, honey,” says Lanie. She has to take over the conversation, because Mom can’t talk, she’s sobbing so much. “You hear me?”

  “Yes,” says Kitty. “I won’t budge. Promise.”

  The cottage in the Beaches looks just as you remember it. Smaller perhaps. It feels like half a lifetime ago you were last here. Then you notice in the light from the porch something that isn’t the same. The postage-stamp front garden is overgrown with weeds. Granda used to keep it neat as a pin. You used to help him sometimes: watering things, raking, planting stuff with his big hands guiding yours so that the bulb went into the hole just so.

  You imagine the worst. And you almost leave — almost give up, just like that — as if nothing has really changed inside you, even though you know that everything has. You stop yourself from running. You walk up the cracked path to the front door that is the same blue you remember but not so brilliant any longer. There are bits of white showing through. You ring the doorbell, knowing a stranger might answer and being prepared for that, even though you have no idea — no idea in the whole wide world — what you will do if that happens.

  “Coming,” says a voice inside. And you dare to think it is Nanny’s voice. She cracks the door just a wee bit and looks out at you.

  “What is it?” she says. She’s older, of course. And like the house itself, she seems even smaller, her eyes no longer as brilliant. But it is her all the same.

  “It’s Brent,” you say.

  She looks confused. “He doesn’t live here,” she says. “I told the policeman that.” And then she tries to shut the door. You stop it with your foot.

  “No, Nanny,” you say. “It’s me. I’m Brent.”

  She opens the door another inch, no more, and stares at you good and hard, curious who this boy could be with the blond hair. You stand still under her gaze, waiting for her to see herself in your eyes, waiting and hoping you haven’t left it too long.

  “By the saints,” she says. “Brent?”

  “Nanny Dee,” you say. And only then do her eyes light up. Because if she’s not entirely sure she knows you, she knows her own name, for goodness sakes. And there is only one person in the world who ever called her that.

  “Brent,” she says. And there — now it’s official.

  “Yes, you can stay. As long as you want, as long as you need. We always said that. Can you have forgotten?

  “And, yes, I’m lonely without Trick. But, oh, no, Brent, Granda’s not dead. Just gaga, my son, that’s all. In a home now — in the locked ward, so he can’t wander off and get himself lost. They cook onions every evening at five so that the residents don’t wander away,” Nanny tells you. “Sundowner’s syndrome they call it. The poor old ladies and gents just want to go home for their tea. We’ll visit him, but don’t be alarmed if he doesn’t know you, Brent. He scarcely knows me. Well, he does of course. He’s just not sure who I am.”

  The next day is Sunday and you go. You and Nan. There is a code to get in, and you must clean your hands with special soap so that you don’t infect the fragile souls inside with the infections of the great wide world.

  Granda is not in his room.

  “Not likely,” says Nanny. “He’ll be down in the lounge entertaining the troops. Granda the storyteller. Even now, when he can’t remember his own wife, he can remember his stories.”

  But when you get to the lounge, the crowd is watching cartoons, and Trick is over by a window looking east at where there is a garden, though there are no flowers in it so late in the fall. You wonder if he is dreaming about flowers, about gardening. He seems so frail, sitting in his wheelchair. He who hoisted baggage onto trains for all those years. He who got your kite in the air for you, running along the beach.

  “Trick,” says Nanny. “Look who the cat dragged in, will you.”

>   He turns his wheelchair to face you both. His eyes go directly to the voice. He doesn’t see you right off. He smiles at Nanny as if this is a face he likes.

  “Oh?” he says.

  “Look who’s come back,” she says, her hand pushing your elbow to make you step forward.

  You do — a little reluctant, a little scared. And now he sees you. His eyes are cruelly blind. Not entirely blind, Nanny had explained, preparing you for the sight of him. Macular degeneration, it’s called. She’d said, “Put your fist up to the bridge of your nose and try to see around it. That’s what he’s got left of his sight.”

  But he is seeing you. Some of the smile he had for Nanny is still there.

  “Is this that boy?” he says.

  “It’s Brent, darling. Ginger’s son.”

  “Hello, Granda,” you say.

  He nods. “Brent,” he says speculatively, as if he’s tasting something new to see if he likes it, to see if he wants a second helping.

  “I told him how much we’ve missed him all these years,” says Nanny. “How Linda wouldn’t allow him to see us, she was that mad at Ginger. But he’s come on his own. And he’s going to stay with me, aren’t you, Brent, and help out around the place — with the shopping and whatnot. He’ll go to school, of course . . .”

  And on she goes chatting away while the old man just stares at you, nodding, nodding.

  “Brent,” he says again. As if he’s taken another mouthful. Then, “Brent!” As if — no, it can’t be — and yet . . . “Brent. Yes.”

  Nanny stops her chatter and looks at you happily. As if she’s saying, There, what did I tell you?

  He reaches out a shaky hand to you. You take it, all dry bones wrapped in paper.

  “Brent, my boyo,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about you for days now.”

  “Yeah?” you say.

  “Oh my, yes,” he says. Then his other hand comes up to join the first, and now he is holding your hand with both of his. “I have such a wonderful story to tell you,” he says.

  Despite what you said to Niven on Tank’s cell phone, there is nothing all that incriminating in his voice-mail. Niven would never have been so foolish as to say anything important to Tank. After all, he had been planning to leave his very own BlackBerry behind in that hotel room, assuming it would be found by the cops, and you doubt there was anything but business calls on it; business calls and calls from his wife and the daughter who was his password.