The Searcher

THREE

Over the next few days there’s no sign of Trey. Cal doesn’t take this to mean that the matter is concluded. The kid struck him as a wild creature, even more than most, and wild creatures often need some time to percolate an unexpected encounter before they decide on their next step.

It rains day and night, mildly but uncompromisingly, so Cal takes the desk inside and goes back to his wallpaper. He enjoys this rain. It has no aggression to it; its steady rhythm and the scents it brings in through the windows gentle the house’s shabbiness, giving it a homey feel. He’s learned to see the landscape changing under it, greens turning richer and wildflowers rising. It feels like an ally, rather than the annoyance it is in the city.

Cal is reasonably certain that the kid isn’t going to screw with his place while he’s out, certain enough that on Saturday night, when the rain finally clears, he heads down to the village pub. It’s a two-mile walk, enough to keep him at home in bad weather. Mart and the old guys in the pub find his insistence on walking hilarious, to the point of driving home alongside him calling out encouragement or making herding noises. Cal feels that his car, a loud, grumpy, geriatric red Mitsubishi Pajero, is noticeable enough to attract the attention of any bored officer who might be tooling around, and that it would be a bad idea to score himself a DUI while he’s still waiting for his firearm license, which can be denied if he’s known to be of intemperate habits.

“Sure, they oughtn’t to give you a gun anyway,” Barty the barman told him, when he pointed this out.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re American. Ye’re all mental with the guns, over there. Shooting them off at the drop of a hat. Blowing some fella away because he bought the last packet of Twinkies in the shop. The rest of us wouldn’t be safe.”

“What would you know about Twinkies?” Mart demanded, from the corner where he and his two buddies were ensconced with their pints. Mart feels a responsibility, as Cal’s neighbor, to defend him against a certain amount of the ribbing he gets. “It’s far from Twinkies you were reared.”

“Didn’t I spend two year on the cranes in New York? I’ve et Twinkies. Horrible fuckin’ yokes.”

“And did anyone shoot you?”

“They did not. They’d better sense.”

“Should’ve done,” one of Mart’s buddies said. “Then we might have a barman who could put a dacent head on a pint.”

“You’re barred,” Barty told him. “And I’d’ve liked to see them try.”

“There you are, then,” Mart said triumphantly. “And Noreen doesn’t stock Twinkies anyhow. So let this fella have his rifle, and give him his pint.”

The pub, identified as Seán Óg’s by lopsided Celtic letters above the door, is in the same down-at-heel cream-colored building as the shop. During the day people wander back and forth, buying cigarettes to take back to the pub or bringing their pints into the shop so they can lean on the counter and chat with Noreen, but at night the connecting door is locked, unless Barty needs bread and ham to make someone a sandwich. The pub is small and low-ceilinged; it has a red linoleum floor with the occasional fraying piece of carpet positioned apparently at random, an eclectic assortment of battered bar stools, splitting green PVC banquettes around rocky wooden tables, a wide variety of beer-themed bunting, a plaque mounted with a rubber fish that sings “I Will Survive,” and a cobwebby fishing net draped from the ceiling. Whoever put up the net distributed a few glass balls artistically inside it, as a finishing touch. Over the years patrons have added multiple coasters, a rubber boot and a Superman figure missing one arm.

Seán Óg’s is, by its own standards, buzzing tonight. Mart and a couple of his buddies are in their corner, playing cards with two unprepossessing young guys in tracksuits whom they’ve acquired somehow. The first time Cal saw Mart and his homies bring out the cards, he expected poker, but their game is something called Fifty-Five, which they play with a speed and ferocity out of all proportion to the small piles of coins accumulating on the table. Apparently the game flows best with four or five, and when no one else is available, they try to rope Cal in; Cal, knowing when he’s outclassed, stays clear. The young guys are going to lose their wages, if they have wages, which looks unlikely to Cal.

A parallel group of guys is sitting at the bar, arguing. A third group is in another corner, listening to one play the tin whistle, a fast spiraling tune that makes the others tap their hands on their knees. A woman called Deirdre is sitting on a banquette on her own, holding a small glass in both hands and staring into space. Cal is unsure what exactly Deirdre’s deal is, although he gets the general gist. She’s somewhere in her forties, a dumpy woman with depressing dresses and an unsettlingly vague stare in her large droopy eyes. Occasionally one or another of the old guys will buy her a double whiskey, they’ll sit side by side and drink without saying a word to each other, and then they’ll leave together, still in silence. Cal has no intention of inquiring about any of this.

He sits at the bar, orders a pint of Smithwick’s from Barty and listens to the music for a while. He doesn’t have the names in here straight yet, although he has most of the faces, and the gist of the personalities and relationships. This is excusable, given that Seán Óg’s clientele is a shifting bunch of clean-shaven white guys over forty, all wearing more or less the same hardy trousers and padded vests and ancient sweaters, and most of them looking like cousins; but the truth is that, after twenty-five years of maintaining an intricate mental database of everyone he met on the job, Cal enjoys the lackadaisical feeling of not bothering to remember whether Sonny is the one with the big laugh or the one with the cauliflower ear. He has a good handle on who he should avoid or seek out, depending on whether he’s in the mood for talk and what kind, and he figures that’s plenty to keep him going.

Tonight he plans to listen to the music. Cal had never encountered a tin whistle till he moved here. He is unconvinced that he would enjoy the sound at, say, a school concert or a police bar in downtown Chicago, but here it seems fitting: it sits right with the warm, uncompromising raggedness of the pub, and makes him keenly aware of the quiet expanse spreading in every direction outside these four walls. When the grasshopper-skinny old musician brings it out, a few times a month, Cal sits a couple of stools away from the talkers and listens.

This means he’s halfway through his second pint before he tunes in to the argument going on down the bar. It catches his ear because it sounds unusual. Mostly the arguments in here are the well-worn kind that can be made to stretch for years or decades, resurfacing periodically when there’s nothing fresh to discuss. They involve farming methods, the relative uselessness of various local and national politicians, whether the wall on the western side of the Strokestown road should be replaced by fencing, and whether Tommy Moynihan’s fancy conservatory is a nice touch of modern glamour or an example of jumped-up notions. Everyone already knows everyone else’s stance on the issues—except Mart’s, since he tends to switch sides regularly to keep things interesting—and is eager for Cal’s input to mix the conversation up a little.

This argument has a different ring to it, louder and messier, like it’s one they haven’t practiced. “There’s no dog could do that,” the guy at the end of the bar is saying stubbornly. He’s little and round, with a little round head perched on top, and he tends to wind up on the wrong end of jokes; generally he seems OK with this, but this time he’s turning red in the face with vehemence and outrage. “Did you even look at them cuts? It wasn’t teeth that done that.”

“Then what d’you think done it?” demands the big bald slab of a guy nearest to Cal. “The fairies?”

“Feck off. I’m only saying, it was no animal.”

“Not them fecking aliens again,” says the third guy, raising his eyes from his pint. He’s a long gloomy streak with his cap pulled down close over his face. Cal has heard him say a total of about five sentences.

“Don’t mock,” the little guy orders him. “You’re saying that because you’re uninformed. If you ever paid any notice to what’s going on right above your thick head—”

“A crow would shite in my eye.”

“We’ll ask him,” the big guy says, pointing his thumb at Cal. “Neutral party.”

“Sure, what would he know about it?”

The big guy—Cal is pretty sure his name is Senan, and he mostly gets the last word—ignores this. “Come here,” he says, shifting his bulk around on the bar stool to face Cal. “Listen to this. Night before last, something kilt one of Bobby’s sheep. Took out its throat, its tongue, its eyes and its arse; left the rest.”

“Sliced out,” Bobby says.

Senan ignores this. “What would you say done it, hah?”

“Not my area,” Cal says.

“I’m not asking for an expert scientific opinion. I’m only asking for common sense. What done it?”

“If I was a gambling man,” Cal says, “my money’d be on an animal.”

“What animal?” Bobby demands. “We’ve no coyotes or mountain lions here. A fox won’t touch a grown ewe. A rogue dog would’ve ripped her to bits.”

Cal shrugs. “Maybe a dog took out the throat, then got scared off. Birds did the rest.”

That gets a moment’s pause, and a raised eyebrow from Senan. They had him pegged as a city boy, which is only partly true. They’re re-evaluating.

“There you go,” Senan says to Bobby. “And you making a holy show of us with your aliens. He’ll take that back to America now, and they’ll be left thinking we’re a bunch of muck savages that’d believe anything.”

“They’ve got aliens in America as well,” Bobby says defensively. “They’ve more than anyone, sure.”

“Nowhere has fuckin’ aliens.”

“Half a dozen people seen them lights last spring. What d’you think that was? The fairies?”

“That was Malachy Dwyer’s poteen. A few sups of that and I see lights too. One night walking home from Malachy’s, I seen a white horse wearing a bowler hat cross the road in front of me.”

“Did it kill your sheep?”

“Damn near kilt me. I jumped so high I went arse over tip into the ditch.”

Cal is comfortable on his stool, drinking his beer and appreciating this. These guys remind him of his grandpa and his porch buddies, who enjoyed each other’s company in the same way, by giving each other shit; or of the squad room, before a quicksand layer of real viciousness seeped in under the pretend stuff, or maybe just before he started noticing it.

“My grandpa and three of his buddies saw a UFO one time,” he says, just to feed the conversation a little bit. “They were out hunting, one evening about dusk, and a big black triangle with green lights on the corners came along and hovered over their heads for a while. Didn’t make a sound. My grandpa said they about shit themselves.”

“Ah, holy God,” Senan says in disgust. “Now you’re starting. Is there no one in here with a titter of sense?”

“Now,” Bobby says triumphantly. “D’you hear that? And you getting the vapors about what the Yank might think of us at all.”

“Cop yourself on, would you. He’s only humoring you.”

“My grandpa swore blind,” Cal says, grinning.

“Did your grandpa know any moonshiners, did he?”

“A few.”

“I’d say he knew them well. Think about this,” Senan says, turning back to Bobby and pointing his glass at him. This argument is well on its way to joining the permanent repertoire. “We’ll say there’s aliens out there. We’ll say they’ve put in the time and the technology to come all them light-years from Mars or what-have-you, all the way to Earth. They could find themselves a whole herd of zebras to do their experiments on, or a fine strapping rhinoceros, or head down to Australia and pick up a shower of kangaroos and koalas and mad yokes, for the crack. But instead of that”—he raises his voice over Bobby, who is objecting—“instead of that, hah, they come all this way and settle for one of your ewes. Are they all loopy, up on Mars? Are they soft in the head?”

Bobby is swelling up again. “There’s nothing wrong with my ewes. They’re better than feckin’ koalas. Better than your scrawny, limpy—”

Cal has stopped paying attention. The quality of the talk from Mart’s table has changed. “I bid twenty,” one of the young guys is saying, in a tone that Cal recognizes. It’s the aggrieved tone of a guy who’s going to insist, to the point of making everyone’s evening considerably messier than it needed to be, that he has no idea how that crack pipe got in his pants pocket.

“Get outa that,” one of Mart’s buddies says. “You bid twenty-five.”

“You calling me a cheater?”

The guy is in his mid-twenties, too soft and too pale for a farmer; short, with greasy little dark bangs and something that has ambitions to be a mustache someday. Cal has registered him before, a couple of times, in the back corner with the huddle of other young guys who stare for a second too long. Without ever having spoken to the guy, he would be pretty confident listing a number of facts about him.

“I’m calling you nothing if you put that pot back,” Mart’s buddy says.

“I fucking won it. Fair and square.”

Behind Cal, the argument has stopped; so has the tin whistle. The realization that he’s unarmed hits Cal with a vivid shot of adrenaline. This guy is the type who would carry a Glock to make him feel like a badass gangster, and would have no clue how to handle it. It takes him a moment to remember that this is unlikely to be an issue here.

“You heard me say twenty,” the chubby guy says to his pal. “Go on and tell them.”

The pal is lanky and big-footed, with buckteeth that keep his long jaw hanging and a general air of being the last person to figure out what just happened. “I wasn’t listening right,” he says, blinking. “Sure, it’s only a couple of quid, Donie.”

“Nobody calls me a cheater,” Donie says. He’s getting a bull-eyed stare that Cal doesn’t like.

“I do,” Mart informs him. “You’re a cheater, and d’you know what’s even worse, you’re fecking useless at it. A babby’d do a better job.”

Donie shoves his stool back from the table and spreads his arms, beckoning Mart. “I’ll take you. Come on.”

Deirdre lets out a halfhearted yelp. Cal has no idea what to do, and this fact baffles him further. At home this is the point where he would have stood up, after which Donie would have either settled down or left, one way or another. Here, that doesn’t seem like an option—not because he’s short his gun and his badge, but because he doesn’t know how things are done in these parts, or whether he has a right to do anything at all. That feeling of lightness overtakes him again, like he’s perched on the edge of his stool like a bird. He finds himself wanting Donie to go for Mart, just so he’ll know what to do.

“Donie,” Barty says from behind the bar, pointing at the young guy with a glass-cloth. “Out.”

“I did nothing. This prick called me—”

“Out.”

Donie folds his arms and slumps down on his stool, bottom lip jutting, staring mulishly into space.

“Ah, for fuck’s sake,” Barty says in disgust. He throws down his cloth and comes out from behind the bar. “Give us a hand,” he says to Cal, on his way.

Barty is a few years younger than Cal and not much smaller. Between them they pick Donie up by the armpits and maneuver him the length of the pub, dodging stools and tables, towards the door. Most of the old guys are grinning; Deirdre’s mouth hangs open. Donie goes limp and makes himself into dead weight, his feet dragging on the linoleum.

“Stand up like a man,” Barty orders him, wrestling with the door.

“I’ve a full pint back there,” Donie says, outraged. “Ow!” as Barty semi-accidentally whacks his shoulder off the door frame.

On the sidewalk, Barty hauls Donie backwards for maximum momentum, then gives him a hefty swing forwards and lets go. Donie flies staggering across the road, arms flailing. His tracksuit pants come down and he falls over them.

Barty and Cal watch, getting their breath back, while he scrambles to his feet and hauls at his pants. He’s wearing tighty whities. “Next time get your mammy to buy you big-boy underpants,” Barty calls across to him.

“I’ll burn you out of it,” Donie yells, without much conviction.

“Go home and pull your lad, Donie,” Barty calls back. “That’s all you’re fit for.”

Donie casts around and spots a discarded cigarette packet, which he hurls at Barty. It falls six feet short. He spits in Barty’s direction and stamps off up the road.

There are no streetlights, and only a couple of lights are on in the houses lining the road; half of them are empty. He’s invisible in seconds. His footsteps take longer, echoing off the buildings away into the dark.

“Thanks,” Barty says. “On my own I’d’ve put my back out. Fat little fucker.”

The lanky guy comes out of the pub and stands on the step, silhouetted against the yellow light, scratching his back. “Where’s Donie?” he asks.

“Gone home,” Barty says. “You go on, too, J.P. You’re done here for tonight.”

J.P. thinks this over. “I’ve got his jacket,” he says.

“Then bring it to him. Go on.”

J.P. lopes obediently off into the darkness. “That guy make trouble often?” Cal asks.

“Donie McGrath,” Barty says, and spits on the sidewalk. “Fuckin’ latchico.”

Cal has no idea what this means, although the tone implies something akin to a bum. “I’ve seen him in here before.”

“Now and again. The young lads mostly go into town, looking for the ride, but if they haven’t the money for that, then they come in here. He’ll stay away for a while, anyway. Then he’ll swan in with his pals, pretending it never happened.”

“He actually gonna try and burn you down?”

Barty snorts. “Jaysus, no. Donie hasn’t the guts of a louse. And that’d be too much like hard work.”

“You reckon he’s harmless?”

“He’s pure fucking useless,” Barty says with finality. Behind him the tin whistle starts up again, neat and jaunty. He dusts Donie off his hands and heads back into the pub.

Nobody else seems particularly unnerved by the incident, either. Mart and his buddies have reshuffled and started a new round of Fifty-Five; the argument at the bar has shifted to the merits of this year’s hurling team. Barty gives Cal a free pint. Deirdre finishes her drink, casts a long hopeless look around the pub, and drifts out when nobody meets her eye.

All the same, Cal hangs around, making his freebie last, till Mart and his buddies finish up their game and start gathering their things. Mart was the one who called Donie a cheat. When he offers Cal a ride home—which he does every time, purely for the pleasure of ribbing Cal when he turns it down—Cal says yes.

Mart is moderately drunk, enough that he drops his keys in the footwell of the car and has to get out again to fumble around for them. “Don’t be worrying,” he says with a grin, reading Cal’s expression and giving a slap to the side of his car, a decrepit blue Skoda covered in mud splatters and smelling strongly of wet dog. “This yoke knows her way home from the pub, even if I fall asleep at the wheel. She’s done it before.”

“Great,” Cal says, retrieving the keys and handing them over. “I feel better now.”

“What happened to your hand?” Mart inquires, clambering painstakingly back into the car.

Cal’s hand is healing up fine, but he still has that Band-Aid on so no one can see the tooth marks. “Caught myself with a saw,” he says.

“That’s what you get,” Mart says. “Next time you’ll listen to me and go to them websites.” He fires up the car, which coughs, shudders and springs off up the road at an alarming pace. “What was that big lump Senan going on about? Was it Bobby’s ewe?”

“Yeah. Bobby figures it was aliens. Senan doesn’t agree.”

Mart wheezes with laughter. “I’d say you think Bobby’s mad as a brush, do you?”

“Nah. I told him about the time my grandpa saw a UFO.”

“You made him a happy man, so,” Mart says, turning off the main road and shifting gears with a nasty crunching noise. “Bobby’s not mad. All that’s wrong with him is he spends too much time at the farm work. It’s grand work, but unless a man’s pure thick, it can leave his mind restless. Most of us have something to look after that: the family, or the cards, or the drink, or what-have-you. But Bobby’s a bachelor, he’s got no head for the drink, and he’s that bad at cards we won’t have him in our game. When his mind does get restless, he’s got no option but to head up the hills hunting UFOs. The lads want to buy him a harmonica, give him something else to occupy him, but I’d rather listen to him go on about aliens any day.”

Cal considers this. It seems to him that aliens are probably a healthier antidote to restlessness of the mind than some of the others on Mart’s list. The way Mart is driving supports this theory.

“You don’t reckon the aliens got his sheep?” he asks, just to yank Mart’s chain.

“Arrah, fuck off, would you.”

“He says there’s nothing round here that would do it.”

“Bobby doesn’t know everything that’s round here,” Mart says.

Cal waits, but he doesn’t elaborate. The car bumps over potholes. The headlights illuminate a narrow streak of road and waving branches on either side; a pair of luminous eyes flare suddenly, low to the ground, and are gone.

“There you go,” Mart says, slamming to a stop in front of Cal’s gate. “Safe and sound. Just like I told you.”

“You can drop me up at your place,” Cal says. “Just in case you’ve got a welcoming committee.”

Mart stares at him for a second and then laughs so hard he doubles over coughing, slapping the steering wheel. “Well, begod,” he says, when he recovers. “I’ve got my own knight in shining armor to escort me home. Surely to God you’re not worrying about that little scut Donie McGrath? And you from the big bad city.”

“We get guys like him in the city, too,” Cal says. “I don’t like them there either.”

“Donie wouldn’t come next nor near me,” Mart says. The last of the laugh is still creasing his face, but there’s a flat note to his voice that startles Cal. “He knows better.”

“Humor me,” Cal says.

Mart giggles, shaking his head, and starts the car again. “Go on, so,” he says. “As long as you’re not expecting a good-night kiss.”

“In your dreams,” Cal says.

“Save them for Lena,” Mart tells him, and he laughs all the way up the road.

At Mart’s place—a long white cottage with undersized windows, set well back from the road amid neglected grass—the porch light is on and Kojak is there to greet him when he opens the door. Cal lifts a hand and waits while Mart tips his tweed cap in the doorway, and while the inside lights go on. When nothing else happens, he heads for home. Even if Donie McGrath shows an uncharacteristic flash of initiative, Kojak is pretty good backup. But something about the sight of Mart in his doorway, at ease amid the fields and the huge wind-roamed dark, Kojak wagging beside him, has left Cal feeling slightly ridiculous, although not in a bad way.

His gate is about a quarter-mile from Mart’s. The sky is clear and the moon is big enough to keep him on the road with no need for his flashlight, although once or twice when the tree shadows crowd in he gets addled and feels one foot sink into the deep grass of the verge. He keeps an eye out for whatever crossed in front of the car, but it’s either gone or turned cautious. The mountains on the horizon look like someone took a pocketknife and sliced neat curves out of the star-thick sky, leaving empty blackness. Here and there, spread out, are the yellow rectangles of windows, tiny and valiant.

Cal likes the nights here. The ones back in Chicago were overcrowded and fractious, always a raucous party somewhere and an argument getting loud somewhere else and a baby howling on and on, and he knew too much about what was going on in the hidden corners and might spill out at any moment, demanding his attention. Here, he has the soothing knowledge that the things happening in the night aren’t his problem. Most of them are self-contained: small wild hunts and battles and matings that require nothing from human beings except that they stay away. Even if there is anything going on, under this great mess of stars, that needs a police officer, Cal is irrelevant. It belongs to the local guys, up in that two-horse town, who presumably would also prefer him to stay away. Cal can do that; is, in fact, savoring it. The kid called Trey, by making nighttime back into a place that required vigilance and action, brought home to him just how little he had missed those. It’s occurred to him that he might have an undiscovered talent for letting things be.

His place is as undisturbed as Mart’s. He cracks open a beer from the mini-fridge and sits out on his back step to drink it. Somewhere down the line he’s going to build himself a back porch and get a big-ass chair to go on it, but for now, the step does fine. He leaves his jacket on; the air has a bite to it that says autumn is here for real, no more playing.

An owl calls, out over Mart’s land. Cal watches for a while and catches a glimpse of it, just a scrap of denser shadow floating leisurely between trees. He wonders whether, if events had gone differently, he might have been this all along: a guy who fixed things and sat on his porch with a beer, watching for owls and letting the rest of the world take care of itself. He’s not sure how he feels about that. It makes him uneasy, in ways he doesn’t fully understand.

To get away from the sudden restlessness that’s come down on him like a cloud of mosquitoes, Cal pulls his phone out of his pocket and calls Alyssa. He calls her every weekend. Mostly she answers. When she doesn’t, she sends him a WhatsApp later on, usually at three or four in the morning his time: Sorry I missed you, was in the middle of something! Catch you later!

This time she picks up. “Hey, Dad. How’re you doing?”

Her voice is brisk and blurred at the edges, like she’s got the phone caught under her jaw, doing something else at the same time. “Hey,” Cal says. “You busy?”

“No, it’s fine. Just cleaning up some stuff.”

He listens, trying to figure out what, but all he can catch is random rustles and thumps. He tries to picture her: tall and athletic, her face a miraculous blend of him and Donna—Cal’s blue eyes and level eyebrows, Donna’s mobile upswept features—that blows him away. The problem is that he still sees her running around in cutoff jeans and a big sweatshirt, her hair caught up in a glossy brown ponytail, and he has no way of knowing whether any of this still touches the reality at any point. Last time he saw her was Christmas. She could have chopped her hair short, dyed it blond, bought suits, put on twenty pounds and started wearing a faceful of makeup.

“How you doing?” he says. “You get rid of that flu yet?”

“That was just a cold. It’s gone.”

“How’s work?” Alyssa works for a nonprofit in Seattle, something to do with at-risk teenagers. Cal missed the ins and outs of it when she first told him she was applying for the job—she applied for a lot of jobs, and work and Donna were taking up most of his mind around then—and it’s gotten too late to ask.

“Work’s good. We got our grant—big relief—so that should keep the show on the road for another while.”

“How about that kid you were worried about? Shawn, DeShawn?”

“Shawn. I mean, he’s still coming, which is the main thing. I still think things are pretty bad for him at home, like really bad, but he freezes up whenever I try to ask. So . . .”

She trails off. Cal would love to come out with something useful, but most of his techniques for making people open up were designed for situations that don’t have much in common with this one. “Give him time,” he says in the end. “You’ll do fine.”

“Right,” Alyssa says, after a moment. She sounds tired all of a sudden. “I hope.”

“How’s Ben doing?” Cal asks. Ben is Alyssa’s boyfriend, has been since college. He seems like an OK guy, a little earnest and a little talky when it comes to his opinions on society and the things everyone should be doing to improve it, but then Cal is sure he himself was a pain in the ass at twenty-five, one way or another.

“He’s OK. He’s going nuts in that job, but he’s got an interview next week, so fingers crossed.”

Ben’s current job is in Starbucks or somewhere. “Tell him good luck from me,” Cal says. He’s always had the sense Ben isn’t crazy about him. At first he didn’t give a damn, but at this point it seems like he should try to do something about it.

“I will. Thanks.”

“You hear anything from your mom?”

“Yeah, she’s good. How about you? How’s the house going?”

“Getting there,” Cal says. He knows Alyssa doesn’t want to talk to him about Donna, but sometimes he can’t help it. “Slowly, but hey, I got time.”

“I got those pictures. The bathroom looks great.”

“Well. I wouldn’t go that far. But at least these days it doesn’t look like I’ve been holed up in there fighting off zombies.”

That gets Alyssa to laugh. Even as a little kid she had that great laugh, big and rich, an outdoors laugh. It makes Cal catch his breath.

“You should come visit,” he says. “It’s beautiful here. You’d like it.”

“Yeah, I bet. I should. Just, getting time off work, you know?”

“Yeah,” Cal says. And after a second: “Anyway, you should probably wait till I get the place in shape. Or at least till I have furniture.”

“Right,” Alyssa says. Cal can’t tell if he’s imagining the touch of relief in her voice. “Let me know.”

“Yeah, I will. Soon.”

Away across the fields, a tiny lit window extinguishes itself. The owl is still calling, cool and relentless. Cal wants to say something else, to keep her on the line a while longer, but he can’t think of anything to say.

“You should get some sleep,” Alyssa says. “What time even is it over there?”

When Cal hangs up he has the same empty feeling he always gets after talking to Alyssa these days, a sense that somehow, in spite of having been on the phone for all that time, they haven’t had a conversation at all; the whole thing was made of air and tumbleweed, nothing solid there. When she was a little kid she would trot along holding his hand and tell him everything, good and bad, it all poured straight from her heart to her mouth. He can’t remember when that changed.

The cloud of restlessness hasn’t cleared. Cal gets himself another beer and brings it back to the step. He wishes Alyssa would send him pictures of her apartment. He asked once, she said she would, and then she never did. He hopes this is because she never got around to it, rather than because her place is a shithole.

In the hedge at the bottom of the garden, a twig cracks.

“Kid,” Cal says wearily, raising his voice to carry across the grass. “Not tonight. Go home.”

After a pause, a fox steps delicately out of the hedge and stands staring at him, something small and limp hanging from its mouth, its unfathomable eyes glinting in the moonlight. Then it dismisses him as immaterial and trots off along its route.