by Lucy Treloar
‘I don’t like it,’ Alejandra said.
‘Get busy, that’s the way to deal with it. Doing something helps you forget your troubles.’
‘We could sweep?’
‘There you go. Think about what’s important right now.’
‘Something for Girl to eat?’
‘That’s the way. Good girl.’
By and by we put a little of the house to rights, found a broom outside the back door and swept the living room and hallway by phone light. I laid Treasure on her quilt in the corner of the sofa and built a fire with the leaves we had swept up and some wood and kindling from a heap that Luis and Cat had found. Things began to seem not so bad. The quilts we’d brought, draped over every part of the room to air and warm, made it seem almost cosy. The water from the kitchen tap, after a groan and rush of water of unappetising colour, cleared and tasted okay. I filled a saucepan with it and rested it on the fire coals and it began to steam. The yellow light of flames scattered across the room. We were like cave people; a little warmth and something hard at our backs was enough to make us feel safe, except perhaps from our thoughts, but I should not generalise on that score. Even the house’s emptiness was reassuring. Who else at such a time of day would pass by at a moment’s notice? It seemed as old as time and in this way I felt that life, which is transitory, would continue in the same way. Food, shelter, warmth, safety; what else could a person need? Love was a luxury. Hart would be welcome company in this room. I would have liked to feel his hand in mine or to rest my head on his chest. I’d sent a boy alone onto a heaving grey sea. I imagined the boat failing and wallowing, and the boy striking out as solitary as could be. It was a lonely thought, a lonely cold way to die, worse than for Harrison Andover. A person like me did not deserve love.
Luis and Cat dragged another chair in, and went upstairs to see if there was anything else worth bringing down, as if we might stay here for a while and see what could be made of this place. I mapped the place in my mind, counted the rooms on the first floor and what was likely to be upstairs, one for each of us, and I even thought about a stove, and whether getting the power connected would be a problem or cause suspicion, just for a while. Papers – they would be the problem. Well, cooking over a fire wasn’t so bad. A trivet to hang things on would be needed. So my mind went. Presently Luis and Cat returned. They were quiet and when I said the house could be fixed up a little and maybe we could stay a few days, just lie low, they didn’t say anything when I thought they might and I didn’t like to ask any more with Alejandra there, thinking about her mother and her sister and whether she’d ever see them again.
Thank fortune I had packed some bread and butter and vegetables – carrots, onions, potatoes, the last peas in their drying pods. Shelling them gave Alejandra something to do. She gave the empty pea pods to Girl, who nibbled them politely and dropped them between her paws. She stared at the fire, her ears pricked, moving at the sounds the house made, and whined and went and scratched at the door. Alejandra let her out and came back. I hoped Girl had not gone to whelp her litter. Her time was getting near by my calculation, and what would we do then? We’d have to stay still for a few days. Girl wouldn’t let us near those pups.
I chopped the vegetables on a plate and tipped them into the water and when they’d cooked through I mashed the potato against the side of the saucepan to break it up and thicken the broth and added a little salt and it was done.
From the darkness there came a screaming, shrill and womanish. I looked at once for Cat, but she was there on the sofa near Luis, her face stark in alarm. Alejandra was on the edge of the sofa looking like she was about to scream herself.
‘Girl!’ I ran to the door and down the hall and outside, the door bouncing behind. I heard people run after me, all of us hurtling into the open mouth of darkness, the ink-black trees, the soft needle fall, with nothing to guide me but that dreadful sound coming closer. ‘Girl,’ I called again. ‘Here, Girl.’
The screaming subsided and then low crooning growls began to pulse into the night. I lit up my phone and held it aloft and moved the light around, and there she was at the base of a pine, its scaled trunk strangely white behind and her mottled black and insubstantial as fog, crouched over a creature, biting and squeezing it in her mouth to make sure of its death. Her eyes glittered, uncannily fixed in the unsteady light. She growled at me, which made me stumble as I halted my headlong rush. And then Luis and Alejandra were there.
‘Girl,’ Alejandra said. ‘Poor Girl, what is it?’
Just in time I grabbed her arm as she went past, swinging her back. ‘Stay here. She doesn’t want company. She’s caught something. We need to leave her be.’ Girl continued her biting and tearing, taking the furred creature apart. ‘She’ll be back when she’s ready, when she’s done.’
‘What is it?’ Alejandra said at my side.
‘Squirrel maybe.’
Girl’s soft song of satisfaction and warning was unnerving. Luis held his light high so it shone on her. We could see the red about her mouth. ‘Bigger than that,’ he said.
‘Well, never mind.’ I started back, with my hand on Alejandra’s shoulder so she had to come with me. I felt her reluctance to turn from the sight, and her revulsion in the shiver that she gave. She looked over her shoulder. Girl had surprised her and it made her uneasy.
We left the door open and returned to our meal, dipping cups into the soup and drinking from them. Then we took turns holding turkey patties over the coals using a toasting fork that hung at the fireside.
Girl slunk in later, head down between her shoulders, as if she was still stalking her prey. She did not seem one of us, neither approaching nor really taking us in. She sat by the fire apart from us all and commenced to clean herself, licking the blood from her paws where she had held the creature down. There was blood about her mouth too. The thick fur about her neck and shoulders looked rough and yanked around, as a forest does after a storm. Alejandra watched her and looked at me as if she was asking a question. I could see that she understood without being told that Girl was not one of us yet. ‘In a while you can pet her again,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You will. It’ll fade from your mind. You just need a little time. You both do.’
Much later I stood by the fire and Girl touched her nose to my hand. ‘Hey, Girl,’ I said. And touched the back of her head and felt down her neck. There were long hard dried clumps in there, of blood that had run down the fur and stuck it together. So the creature had given something back before it died. Her muzzle was scratched too and there was a gouge over one eye. She’d been lucky.
We were tired by then, and person by person – Cat taking Alejandra – we went out to relieve ourselves behind whatever bush we found. Cat changed Treasure and fed her and we chose our places to sleep: Alejandra sandwiched between Luis and Cat, and quite late Girl came and lay alongside me. And so we passed the night.
It was still on the dark side when I woke next morning, shadowy dawn just stirring the sky, and the trees separating from the dark mass of night without yet revealing their colours. Alejandra was snoring softly and she was curled on her side with her hands to her mouth, like she was praying. Cat and Luis’s hands formed an archway above, barely touching as if they had gone to sleep clasping them or were reaching for each other in the night. I pushed back my quilt and stepped quietly to the door and eased it ajar. Girl came with me on her soft hunting feet. We went outside and came back in, still moving softly, and seeing the stairs before me, and wondering what might be up there and whether there might be anything useful, moved upwards through the guts of the creaking house. Near the top, I felt a prickling misgiving. The smell was worse here, bad meat. Girl faltered at my side.
It was not a big house. There was a landing up there with a window looking out over the woodland and the clouded dawn and a short corridor with doors off it. In the first room, the
door already open, was an old bed with a curved bedhead and tall posts of brightly varnished pine and a sagging mattress halfway across the floor, as if it had run out of puff while leaving. The other doors were closed. In one, a dark jacket hung in an opened cupboard. The next had another bed, a packing crate by its side, a bong and burned-out cigarettes and ash that had overflowed a saucer and scattered to the floor. A patch of its aqua-coloured carpet was scorched black and I wondered if that was the smell that I didn’t care for and which was making Girl uneasy. By then, I think I was hoping that was all it was. There was just one more door, and I wish now that I had turned away from it. Girl wanted me to, I know that. She whimpered and hung back. Anyway, I had to know by then. Curiosity can be an evil curse of a thing.
‘Okay, Girl.’ I opened the door. It was a pitiful thing, which I felt as much as saw, being so overcome by the smell and the horror of it. I retched into the crook of my elbow and pulled back. A window, a mattress beneath, a thing, a person curled beneath a blanket. The blanket moved and I thought the person was merely ill, but a rat shot out and disappeared through the fireplace. I grabbed Girl’s ruff before she could lunge, and looked: grey hair like dead grass, stubble, the body sunken, the carpet dark all around. His yellow teeth were bared and the flesh was gnawed and the bones beginning to show. The room stank of everything you could imagine, and we had spent a night below. There was a plate and a cup by the body. I backed out, not wanting to turn from it, to feel death at my back, and pulled the door closed. Girl was waiting at the top of the stairs, wanting to run.
‘Wait.’ I turned back and pushed the door narrowly ajar.
Cat was dragging herself from her bed when I returned – Luis had gone out for wood, she whispered – and Alejandra was moaning and stirring.
‘We should get going,’ I said to Cat.
Her eyes moved across my face; she knew what I had seen. ‘Yes,’ she said, and she put her hand to Alejandra’s shoulder, very gently. ‘Come on, honey. Let’s get you up now.’
Alejandra rubbed her hand to her eyes and sat up. Luis came back with an armload of wood and we stoked up the fire and boiled the water again.
‘Will we see Mama today, Luis?’
Luis shrugged. ‘Maybe. We’ll see – if she’s where she’s supposed to be, we might be lucky.’
Luis made coffee, Cat and I put things in the car, Alejandra and Girl went poking about in the garden. She came back with two russet apples from a tree down the back.
‘Any more there?’ I asked.
‘I can look.’
I found her a bag and she went out and came back with five more. Something or someone must have pollinated them. Maybe it wasn’t so long ago the people left. They might have meant to come back for that old man. I made sure to leave the back door open, to let every spirit depart from that house that wished to do so. I’m not sure I believe in that sort of thing. Still.
That was the first place we stayed.
Chapter 16
We treated Girl with caution for a day or so after. She kept her distance and waited. She was not what everyone had thought she was. I knew the feeling of mistrust. It would take time for her to be Girl again to them, rather than the wild creature we’d seen crooning in the darkness. Cat drew back from her, though, and was careful never to leave Treasure near Girl. I understood. We look after the thing we love most, that we are designed to protect. Cat was so certain she’d be able to keep Treasure safe. It’s not so easy when your child sees the world beyond your arms. But they are what they are too. What if they don’t care to be kept safe in the way you have in mind? I had only to think of Claudie setting her life on other tracks than mine, or to look at the way Cat had broken free of her parents (or Josh from his), to know that. Sometimes we fail, as I did with my children. I couldn’t help thinking, then, of the young prisoner on death row, wondering whether someone – or life itself – had failed him, or he had seen some excitement that he couldn’t resist? What thoughts filled his mother’s mind? Did she wonder what she might have done better, as I did with Tobe and Claudie? I didn’t know a thing about her, but sometimes she didn’t feel so far away.
At a gas station in a nearby town we stopped to fill the tank and ask for directions.
‘Don’t see many of them round these days,’ the till lady said, nodding out of the window at the Silverado. She might have been a grandmother, a different style of one from me, cushiony, comfortable, powdery-cheeked, but she was nice.
‘Fortune to run.’
‘Yuh. You’re the first millionaire through this morning.’
I let out a short hoot. ‘That tank should just about get us through to the next town.’
‘Where you heading?’
I told her the name of the town near the prison where Luis and Alejandra’s mother was incarcerated.
‘A two-tank journey I’d say.’ She chuckled at her joke.
I asked her the route and she showed me an old map she had tucked away under the counter. ‘Here.’ She shut the cover and pushed it across. ‘You take it. Cluttering things up. Roads have changed anyway. If it’s any use to you.’ Someone came in behind me.
‘Thank you,’ I said and she gave a little nod, as if she’d embarrassed herself now, overstepped some mark.
It was a fair way to the prison, as she’d said, a whole morning’s drive east. Cat spelled me once. Luis and Alejandra sat behind, as usual. It was easier for them to hide there, Cat said. She was right about that. The first police we saw were flagging people in at a roadside stop ahead. I slowed right down. ‘On the floor quick,’ Cat said without looking back. ‘Both of you. Put everything on top.’ They moved fast. Cat reached back with a couple of coats from the floor and they disappeared. Girl wanted to join them. I told her to sit still, and she did. It sounds slow, written, but was a whirl at the time, believe me. Treasure squawked and Cat pulled her top up to feed her. It was a good distraction when it came to our turn to open the window. The trooper peered in and then stepped back fast.
‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said.
Cat shrugged and smiled. ‘She’s a hungry one.’
Girl filled the window as she stared out. I thought the trooper at my window might mention her, but he merely complimented me on the truck, asked where we were headed, tipped his cap and sent us on our way. I was calm at the time, but shaking afterwards when Luis and Alejandra came out all flushed and their hair mussed. Luis’s manner reminded me of the way he was the day they arrived on Wolfe, when he was running and felt danger coming behind. It looked like it had been a game for Alejandra. She practised diving down and covering herself as fast as she could. ‘Time me,’ she said. ‘Time me again.’ It seemed like we’d got off lightly until the shrillness in her voice made me look back. Her eyes were bright with waiting tears. ‘Kitty, again, again.’
‘Luis, your sister,’ I said. He pulled her onto his lap. ‘Sweetheart, listen to me,’ I said. ‘No one will get you. I won’t let them. I’ll get them first. I promise you that, do you hear?’ I looked from mirror to road and back.
She stared at me in the mirror. ‘But I was fast,’ she said.
‘So fast. No one could catch you.’ Finally she quit her game.
Cat told me one or two stories from when she and Josh were ‘railroading clients’. She usually concluded by saying ‘assholes’ or ‘fucking assholes’, meaning any person they came up against.
‘You miss it,’ I said.
‘No, I don’t. It was not the excitement. That was Josh.’ Treasure, sitting on Cat’s lap, grabbed Cat’s hand and gnawed at a finger. Cat stroked her cheek. ‘It was doing something because it was right and the opposite was wrong. It was interesting, though.’
Outside, it was turning to winter before our eyes. Frozen rain splintered on the windows. It made me think of my mother, of a story of hers that is part of me now. I don’t remember a time I didn’t know it. She told it to m
e in snatches, as if it was a piece of art or a making that she added to and looked at and put a little more on, bit by bit, as I got older. Perhaps in the beginning it was no more than: ‘My mother died one cold winter when I was just a girl.’
‘My God, it’s freezing,’ Cat said when we got out to stretch our legs around mid-morning. Our breath sent more white into the world, standing stark and disappearing, and driving flecks of ice stung our cheeks. Girl went romping and bounding into the trees, though slower now she was so heavy with pups.
‘Cold,’ I said on my return. ‘This is nothing.’ We got back into the truck. The falling ice needles grew larger and began to slow in their descent, the flakes drifting like spiderlings across a meadow.
As I got older I asked my mother more, I remember that, and perhaps my imagining has added to it so it’s not clear which parts are true, or which happened, which is not the same thing. It is all true to my mind. I can’t remember now how much of it I passed on to Claudie – some of it, I think. I hope enough for her to remember. I suppose I thought of it then also because of the cold of the first house we stayed in and the dead man and the ground at the roadside turning white with snow. I squatted and began to form handfuls of snow into balls.
‘What are you doing?’ Cat asked.
‘Making a snow lantern with the first snow.’
‘Because?’
‘Superstition. To light the way home for travellers in a storm probably. Makes sense. Like putting a lamp in a window.’
They made snowballs and passed them to me to place. I built a low igloo with chinks to let the air in. The soft snow matted on my mittens. When it was done I eased one of the bottom snowballs out a little. ‘Now a light.’ A phone flashlight would be something, at a pinch. ‘Cigarette lighter in the car,’ I said. I got a handful of twigs burning and poked them carefully inside, with a few more sticks on top, and pushed the snowball back in place. The snow glowed pale yellow and the light flickered. It came alive from nothing.