The Searcher

SIX

The next morning is all soft mist, dreamy and innocent, pretending yesterday never happened. As soon as he finishes his breakfast, Cal packs up his fishing gear and heads for the river, two miles away. On the slim chance that Trey does come back, he’ll take the empty house as an extra kick in the teeth, but Cal figures this is a good thing. Better let the kid be upset now than let him build up another head of false hope.

This is only the second time Cal has fished this river. He’s regularly gone to bed intending on fishing the next day, but the house always had more of a welcome pull on him: this needed getting under way, he wanted to see how that turned out, the fish could wait. Today that pull just feels like nagging. He wants the house far away, with his back turned on it.

At first the river feels like what he needs. It’s narrow enough that the massive old trees touch across it, rocky enough to make the water swirl and whiten; the banks are speckled orange-gold with fallen leaves. Cal finds himself a clear stretch and a big mossy beech tree, and takes his time picking a lure. Birds flip and sass each other between branches, paying no attention to him, and the smell of the water is so strong and sweet he can feel it against his skin.

After a couple of hours, though, the romance is wearing off. Last time Cal was out here, he caught himself a perch dinner in half an hour flat. This time, he can see the fish right there, picking bugs neatly off the surface, but not one of them has worked up the interest even to nibble at his lure. And he’s starting to discover what Mart meant about the sneaky cold: what seemed like a nice cool day has seeped right up through his ass to chill him from the bones out. He digs a few worms out of the rich mulch under the layers of wet leaves beside him. The fish ignore those too.

The day he planned on teaching Alyssa to fish turned out like this. She was maybe nine; they were on a log-cabin vacation in some place Donna found whose name escapes him now. The two of them sat by a lake for three hours with nothing biting but midges, but Alyssa had promised her mama she would bring home dinner, and she wasn’t leaving without it. In the end Cal looked at her red, miserable, stubborn little face and told her he had a plan. They swung by the store and bought a bag of frozen fish sticks, hooked it onto Alyssa’s rod, and came in the cabin door yelling, “We got a big one!” Donna took one look and told them that fish was still alive and she was going to keep it for a pet. All three of them were giggling like idiots. When Donna dumped the bag in a bowl of water and named it Bert, Alyssa laughed so hard she fell over.

Cal feels like, if just one damn fish would give him a good fight and then a good dinner, all the things rattling around loose inside his head would shake themselves back into place. The fish, uninterested in his emotional requirements, keep right on playing tag around his hook.

After a full half day of nothing, Cal is starting to think that the river’s reputation is a tourist-board scam and last time’s perch dinner was a fluke. He packs up his gear and starts walking home, in no hurry to get there. On the off chance that Trey does show up for another try, he needs to shoot that down without biting the kid’s head off.

Halfway home he runs into Lena, walking the other way at a good pace, with a dog rummaging in the hedges ahead of her. “Afternoon,” she says, calling the dog back with a snap of her fingers. She’s wearing a big russet wool jacket and a blue knit beanie pulled down low, so only a few strands of fair hair show. “Any fish?”

“Plenty,” Cal says. “All of ’em smarter’n me.”

Lena laughs. “That river’s temperamental. Give it another go tomorrow, you’ll catch more than you can keep.”

“I might do that,” Cal says. “This the mama dog?”

“Ah, no. She only whelped last week; she’s at home with the pups. That’s her sister.”

The dog, a smart-looking young tan-and-black beagle, is quivering and huffing with eagerness to check Cal out. “OK if I say hi?” Cal asks.

“Go on. She’s a lover, not a fighter, that one.”

He holds out a hand. The dog snuffles over every inch of him she can reach, her whole rear end wagging. “She’s a good dog,” Cal says, rubbing her neck. “How’s the mama and babies?”

“Grand. Five pups. I thought at first one of them might not make it, but now he’s fat as a fool and pushing all the others out of the way to get what he’s after. D’you fancy a look, if you’re in the market?”

Lena catches the second it takes Cal to collect his thoughts on this. “Don’t be minding Noreen,” she says, amused. “You can come see a few pups without me taking it as a proposal. Cross my heart.”

“Well, I don’t doubt that,” Cal says, embarrassed. “I was just wondering if I oughta leave it till a day when I’m not carrying all this stuff. I don’t know how far your place is.”

“About a mile and a half over that way. Up to you.”

He says, only partly to make her amused look go away, “I reckon I can manage that. Appreciate the invitation.”

Lena nods and turns around, and they head up the narrow road, hedges of yellow-flowered gorse swaying at them on either side. Cal slows his pace automatically—he’s accustomed to Donna, five foot four in shoes—before he realizes there’s no need: Lena can keep up with him just fine. She has a countrywoman’s long, easy stride, like she could keep walking all day.

“How’re you getting on with the house?” she asks.

“Not too bad,” Cal says. “I’ve started painting. My neighbor Mart keeps giving me flak because I’m sticking to plain old white, but Mart doesn’t seem like the best place to get advice on interior decoration.”

Part of him is expecting Lena to come out with suggestions for color schemes—Mart’s talk must have got into his head. Instead she says, “Mart Lavin,” with a wry twist of her mouth. “You wouldn’t want to listen to that fella. Nellie,” she says sharply to the dog, which is dragging something dark and sodden out of the ditch. “Leave it.”

The dog reluctantly drops the object and trots off to find something else. “And the land?” Lena says. “What have you planned for it?”

Ironically, Mart regularly asks Cal that same question, not bothering to hide the fact that he’s trying to pry out Cal’s long-term intentions. Cal is a little hazy on those himself. Right now he can’t imagine a time when he’ll want to do anything more than fix up his house, fish for perch and listen to Noreen explain Clodagh Moynihan’s dental history. He recognizes that that time might come around someday. If it does, he figures he can do a little bit of traipsing around Europe, before he gets too old, and then come back here when he’s scratched the itch out of his feet. There’s nowhere else he needs to be.

“Well,” he says, “I haven’t rightly decided. I’ve got that piece of woodland, I’m gonna leave that the way it is; it’s about half hazel trees, and I’d eat hazelnuts all day long. I might add in a couple of apple trees, give me something sweet to go with the nuts in a few years’ time. And I was thinking of planting out another piece with vegetables.”

“Oh, God,” Lena says. “You’re not one of them off-the-grid types, are you?”

Cal grins. “Nah. Just been sitting at a desk for too long, feel like spending some time outdoors.”

“Thank God.”

“You get a lot of off-the-grid types round here?”

“Now and again. Notions about getting back to the land, and they think this is the place to do it. It looks the part, I suppose.” She nods to the mountains ahead, hunch-shouldered and tawny, shawled here and there with rags of mist. “Most of them don’t know one end of a spade from the other. They last about six months.”

“I’m OK with doing my hunting and gathering mainly out of your sister’s store,” Cal says. “I gotta admit Noreen scares me a little bit, but not enough to make me want to grow my own bacon.”

“Noreen’s all right,” Lena says. “I would say ignore her and in the end she’ll leave you alone, but she won’t. Noreen can’t see anything without wanting to put it to use. You just have to let it roll off you.”

“She’s backing the wrong horse here,” Cal says. “I’m not that useful to anyone, right now.”

“Nothing wrong with that. And don’t let Noreen convince you different.”

They walk in silence, but an easy silence. There are blackberry brambles mixed in with the gorse; a couple of thickset, tufty ponies in a field are nibbling at them, and every now and then Lena pulls a blackberry off a hedge and eats it. Cal follows her lead. The berries are dark and full, still with a tart edge to them. “I’ll get a rake of them, one of these days, and make jam,” Lena says. “If there’s a day when I can be arsed.”

She turns off the road, down a long dirt lane. The fields on either side are pasture, thick with long grass and the smells of cows. A man examining a cow’s leg lifts his head at Lena’s call and waves, shouting back something Cal doesn’t catch. “Ciaran Maloney,” Lena says. “Bought the land off me.” Cal can picture her out in those fields, in rubber boots and muddy pants, neatly outmaneuvering a frisky colt.

Her house is a long white bungalow, freshly painted, with boxes of geraniums on the windowsills. She doesn’t invite Cal in; instead she leads him round the side of the house, towards a low, rugged stone building. “I tried to get the dog to whelp inside,” she says, “but she was having none of it. It was the cattle byre she wanted. In the end I thought, what harm. The walls on it are thick enough to keep out the cold, and if she does get chilly, she knows where to come.”

“That what you and your husband farmed? Cattle?”

“We did, yeah. Dairy. They weren’t kept here, but. This is the old byre, from a century or two back. We used it mostly for storing feed.”

The byre is dim, lit only through small high windows, and Lena was right about the walls: it’s warmer in there than Cal expected. The dog is in the end stall. They squat on their haunches, while Nellie keeps a respectful distance, and peer in.

The mama dog is tan and white, curled up in a big wooden box around a squeaking mass of pups wriggling over each other to get in close. “That’s a fine-looking litter,” Cal says.

“This here’s the runt I was telling you about,” Lena says, reaching in and scooping up a fat pup mottled in black, tan and white. “Look at the size of him now.”

Cal reaches to take the pup, but the mama dog half-rises, a low growl starting in her chest. The other pups, disturbed, squeak furiously. “Give her a minute,” Lena says. “She’s not as well trained as Nellie. I’ve only had her a few weeks, haven’t had a chance to put manners on her. Once she sees her sister doesn’t mind you, she’ll be grand.”

Cal turns his shoulder to the litter and makes a big fuss of Nellie, who soaks it up joyfully, licking and wriggling. Sure enough, the mama dog sinks back down among her pups and, when Cal turns back, allows him to take the runt from Lena with only a lift of her lip.

The pup’s eyes are closed tight and his head wobbles on his neck. He gnaws at Cal’s fingertip with tiny toothless gums, looking for milk. He has a tan face and black ears, with a white blaze running up his nose; the black patch on his tan back is the shape of a ragged flag flying. Cal strokes his soft floppy ears.

“Been a while since I got a chance to do this,” he says.

“They’re nice to have about, all right,” Lena says. “I’d no wish for puppies—or for two dogs, come to that. I fancied having the one, so I got Nellie out of a shelter, after the pair of them were left on the side of a road. The people that took Daisy didn’t bother spaying her; when she came up pregnant, they dropped her back to the shelter. The shelter rang me. At first I said no, but in the end I thought, why not?” She reaches into the basket to tickle a pup’s forehead with one finger; the pup nuzzles blindly into her hand. “You take what comes your way, I suppose.”

“Mostly doesn’t seem like there’s much choice,” Cal agrees.

“And of course the pups are some mad mix. God knows who’ll want them.”

Cal likes the angle of her next to him: not tilted towards him like a woman who wants him or wants him to want her, off balance as if he might have to catch her any minute, but planted solid on her feet and shoulder-to-shoulder with him, like a partner. The byre smells of cattle feed, sweet and nutty, and the floor is scattered with strawy golden dust. The riverbank cold is starting to thaw out of his bones.

“Some retriever in there, I’d guess,” he says. “And that one at the end’s got a little terrier around the ears.”

“Pure mutt, I’d say. No way to know if they’d be any good for hunting. And beagles are no use as guard dogs. You’d get more savagery out of a hamster.”

“They any good as watchdogs?”

“They’ll let you know if someone’s on your land, all right. They notice everything, and they want to tell you about it. But the worst they’ll do to him is lick him to pieces.”

“I wouldn’t ask a dog to do my dirty work for me,” Cal says. “But I’d want one that’d let me know if something needs doing.”

“You’ve a good way with them,” Lena says. “If you want one, you can have one.”

Cal wasn’t aware, till that moment, that he was being evaluated. “I’ll take a week or two to think it over,” he says. “If that’s all right.”

Lena, her face turned to him, has that amused look again. “Did I give you a fright, with all that talk about the blow-ins packing it in after one winter?”

“It’s not that,” Cal says, a little taken aback.

“I told you, most of them last six months. You’re here, what now, four? Don’t worry, you won’t be setting any records if you cut and run.”

“I want to be sure I’ll do a dog justice,” Cal says. “It’s a responsibility.”

Lena nods. “True enough,” she says. There’s a slight lift to her eyebrow; he can’t tell whether she believes him. “Let me know whenever you make your mind up, so. Is there one that takes your fancy? You’re the first person I’ve offered; you can have your pick.”

“Well,” Cal says, running a finger down the runt’s back, “I like the looks of this one right here. He’s already proved he’s no quitter.”

“I’ll tell people he’s spoken for,” Lena says. “If anyone asks. If you want to come up and see how he’s growing, give me a ring first to make sure I’m about—I’ll give you my number. I work odd hours, some days.”

“Where do you work at?”

“In a stable the other side of Boyle. I do the books, but sometimes I give a hand with the horses as well.”

“Did you use to have those? As well as the cattle?”

“Not of our own. We boarded a few.”

“Sounds like you had a pretty serious operation here,” Cal says. The runt has rolled over in his palm; he tickles its tummy. “This must be a big change.”

He’s not expecting her swift curl of a grin. “You’ve got it in your head I’m a poor lonesome widow woman devastated by losing the farm where she and her man worked their fingers to the bone. Haven’t you?”

“Something like that,” Cal admits, grinning back. He always did have a weakness for women who were a step ahead of him, although look where that got him.

“Not a bit of it,” Lena says cheerfully. “I was only delighted to be rid of the bastard. We worked our fingers to the bone, all right, and Sean never stopped worrying that we’d go bankrupt, and then he started drinking to ease the worry. The three things between them gave him the heart attack.”

“Noreen told me he died. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“It was almost three years back. I’m getting used to it, bit by bit.” She rubs behind the mama dog’s ear; the dog narrows her eyes in bliss. “But I held it against the farm. Couldn’t wait to get the place off my hands.”

“Huh,” Cal says. It occurs to him that Lena is talking pretty freely to someone she’s hardly met, and that most people he’s known to do that were either crazy or looking to lower his guard for their own purposes, but from her it doesn’t make him wary. He’s aware that, however revealing this conversation might appear to be, the vast majority of her is held so far apart as to be imperceptible. “Your husband wouldn’t leave it, huh?”

“Not a chance. Sean needed the freedom. He couldn’t stick the thought of working for some other man. For me”—she tilts her head at her surroundings—“this is freedom. Not the other. When I walk out of work, I’m done. No being dragged out of bed at three in the morning because a calving’s going wrong. I like the horses, but I like them even better now that I can leave them at the end of the day.”

“Makes plenty of sense to me,” Cal says. “And it worked out that simple?”

She shrugs. “More or less. Sean’s sisters were bulling: the family farm, sold away before he was even cold in the ground, that kind of thing. They wanted me to let their sons work it, then leave it to them when I die. I decided I could live without them better than I could live with this place still on my back. I never liked them much anyway.”

Cal laughs, and after a moment Lena does too. “They think I’m a cold bitch,” she says. “Maybe they’re right. But there’s ways I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.” She nods at the runt, who’s flipped himself right side up and is squeaking furiously enough that his mama’s ears prick up. “Will you look at that fella. I don’t know where he’s going to put it, but he’s looking for more.”

“I’ll let you all go back to business,” Cal says, sliding the pup gently back into the box, where he squirms in among his brothers and sisters, heading for food. “And I’ll get back to you about this little guy.”

Lena doesn’t invite him in for a cup of tea, or walk him to the main road. She nods good-bye outside her front door and goes inside, Nellie bouncing after her, without even waving him off. All the same, Cal leaves her place feeling more cheerful than he has all day.

This mood lasts until he gets home, when he discovers that someone has let the air out of all four of his tires.

“Kid!” he yells, at the top of his lungs. “Get out here!”

The garden is silent, except for the rooks jeering back at him.

“Kid! Now!”

Nothing moves.

Cal cusses and digs his jump-starter, which has a built-in tire inflator, out of the back of his car. By the time he has the damn thing set up and working, and the first tire back in shape, he’s calmed down enough that something occurs to him. It would have been quicker and easier to slash the tires than to let the air out. If Trey bothered to do this instead, it’s because he wasn’t aiming to do real damage. He was aiming to make a point. Cal isn’t clear on what that point is—I’m going to hassle you till you do what I need, possibly, or maybe just You’re a dick—but then communication never has been Trey’s strong suit.

He’s moving on to the second tire when Mart and Kojak show up. “What’re you at with the prize pony?” Mart inquires, nodding at the Pajero. Mart, having come upon Cal waxing it one day, feels that Cal’s attitude to it is altogether too precious and citified for a back-country beater. “Putting ribbons in her mane?”

“More or less,” Cal says, giving Kojak’s head a rub as Kojak checks out the evidence of Lena’s dogs on his pants. “Topping up the air.”

Luckily Mart has more important things on his mind than the fact that Cal’s tires are flat as a witch’s tit. “A young lad’s after hanging himself,” he informs Cal. “Darragh Flaherty, from over the river. His father went out this morning to do the milking and found him hanging from a tree.”

“That’s a damn shame,” Cal says. “Give my respects to his family.”

“I will. Only twenty years of age.”

“That’s when they do it,” Cal says. For a second he sees Trey’s tense face: He didn’t go off. He goes back to screwing the inflator onto the valve stem.

“I knew that lad wasn’t right, the last while,” Mart says. “I seen him at mass in town three times this summer. I said it to his father, to be keeping an eye on him, but sure you can’t watch them day and night.”

“Why shouldn’t he go to church?” Cal asks.

“Church,” Mart tells him, pulling his tobacco pouch out of a jacket pocket and finding an undersized rollie, “is for women. The spinsters, mostly; they do like to get themselves in a tizzy over whose turn it is to do the second reading, or the altar flowers. And the mammies bringing in the childer so they won’t grow up heathens, and the aul’ ones showing off that they’re not dead yet. If a young lad starts going to mass, it’s a bad sign. Something’s not sitting right, in his life or in his head.”

“You go to mass,” Cal points out. “That’s where you saw him.”

“I do,” Mart acknowledges, “now and again. There’s great chats at Folan’s, after, and the carvery dinner. I get a fancy sometimes to have my dinner cooked by someone else. And if I’m looking to buy or sell stock, I’d go to mass all right. There’s many a deal done in Folan’s after noon mass.”

“Here I had you down as just a prayerful kinda guy,” Cal says, grinning.

Mart laughs till he chokes on smoke. “Sure, I’ve no need for that carry-on at my age. What sins would I commit, an aul’ lad like me? I haven’t even got the broadband.”

“There’s gotta be a few sins available in these parts,” Cal says. “How ’bout Malachy Whatshisname’s poteen?”

“That’s no kind of sin,” Mart says. “There’s what’s against the law, and then there’s what’s against the church. Sometimes they do be the same, and sometimes they don’t. Did they never teach you that, in your church?”

“Might’ve done,” Cal says. His mind isn’t entirely on Mart. He would be happier if he had a clearer sense both of Trey’s capabilities and of his boundaries. He has a feeling that both are flexible, determined almost entirely by context and need. “Been a while since I was a churchgoing man.”

“We wouldn’t meet your requirements, I suppose. Ye’ve all them churches where they play with the snakes and speak in tongues. We wouldn’t be able to offer you any of that round here.”

“That darn Saint Patrick,” Cal says. “Chasing away our equipment.”

“He couldn’t foresee Yanks arriving in on us. Sure, ye weren’t even invented back then.”

“And now look at us,” Cal says, checking the tire pressure gauge. “Getting everywhere.”

“And welcome. Sure, wasn’t Saint Patrick a blow-in himself? Ye’re the ones that keep our lives interesting.” Mart crushes the end of his rollie under his boot. “Tell us now, how’ve you been getting on with that aul’ wreck of a desk?”

Cal glances up sharply from the gauge. Just for a second, he thought there was a slant to Mart’s voice that put more into the question. Sections of Mart’s land have a perfect view of Cal’s backyard.

Mart cocks his head inquisitively, guileless as a kid.

“Doin’ OK,” Cal says. “Some staining and varnishing, and it’ll be back on the road.”

“Fair play to you,” Mart says. “If you ever need the extra few bob, you can set up as a carpenter: have your workshop in that shed there, find yourself an apprentice to give you a hand. Just make sure you pick a good one.” And when Cal looks up again: “Did I see you heading into town there, yesterday afternoon?”

Cal fetches Mart’s cookies and shoots the shit with him till Mart gets bored, whistles for Kojak and heads off up the field. The tires are back in shape, for the time being, anyhow. Cal packs away his jump-starter and goes inside. At least the house is undamaged, as far as he can see.

The sandwiches he brought to the river seem like they were a long time ago, but he doesn’t feel like cooking. Yesterday’s restlessness has built itself into outright worry, the sharp buzzing kind he can’t pin down, let alone crush.

It’s still early in Seattle, but he can’t make himself wait. He goes out back, where the reception is less crappy, and phones Alyssa.

She answers, but she sounds blurry and breathless. “Dad? Is everything OK?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I had a minute, so I figured I’d go ahead and call now. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Oh. No, it’s fine.”

“How ’bout you? You doing OK?”

“Yeah, everything’s good. Listen, Dad, I’m at work, so . . .”

“Sure,” Cal says. “No problem. You sure you’re OK? That flu didn’t come back?”

“No, I’m fine. Just got a lot on my plate. Talk to you later, OK?”

Cal hangs up with that worry getting bigger and more fractious, gathering speed as it prowls his mind. He could probably use a shot or two of Jim Beam, but he can’t make himself do it. He can’t shake the feeling that some emergency is heading towards him, someone is in danger, and he needs to keep all his wits about him to have a chance of fixing things. He reminds himself that anyone else’s danger isn’t his problem, but it doesn’t take.

He bets the damn kid is watching him from somewhere, but Mart is out in his field doing something with his sheep; if Cal shouts, he’ll hear. Cal walks the perimeter of his garden, tramps his back field and circles his patch of woodland, without finding anything but a couple of rabbit holes. When he replays that phone call in his head, Alyssa’s voice sounds wrong, worn and beaten down, worse every time.

Before he believes that he’s actually going to do it, he’s phoned Donna.

The phone rings for a long time. He’s on the verge of giving up when she answers.

“Cal,” she says. “What’s up?”

Cal almost hangs up right there. Her voice is absolutely, totally neutral; he doesn’t know how to respond to that voice coming out of Donna. But hanging up would make him feel like such a damn fool that instead he says, “Hey. I’m not gonna hassle you. Just wanted to ask you something.”

“OK. Go ahead.”

He can’t tell where she is or what she’s doing; the background noise sounds like wind, but it could just be the reception. He tries to figure out what time it is in Chicago: noon, maybe? “Have you seen Alyssa lately?”

There’s a slight pause. Every conversation he’s had with Donna since the split has been peppered with these pauses, while she evaluates whether answering his question would fall within the new rules she’s single-handedly established for their relationship. She hasn’t communicated these rules to Cal, so he has no idea what they are, but he sometimes catches himself deliberately trying to break them anyway, like some shitty little kid.

Apparently this question is allowed. Donna says, “I went out to them for a couple of weeks in July.”

“Have you been talking to her?”

“Yeah. Every few days.”

“She seem OK to you?”

The pause is longer this time. “Why?”

Cal feels aggravation rising. He keeps it out of his voice. “She doesn’t sound too good to me. I can’t tell what it is, if she’s just overworked or what, but I’m worried about her. Is she sick or something? Is that Ben guy treating her OK?”

“What are you asking me for?” Donna is fighting hard to keep that neutral voice, but she’s losing, which gives Cal a tiny bit of satisfaction. “It’s not my job to be you guys’ go-between any more. You want to know how Alyssa is, ask her yourself.”

“I did. She says she’s fine.”

“Well there you go.”

“Is she . . . Come on, Donna, give me a break. Is she getting shaky again? Did something happen?”

“You ask her that?”

“No.”

“Then go ahead and ask.”

The heaviness seeping through Cal’s bones is so familiar it makes him tired. He and Donna had so many of these fights, the year before she left, fights that went on forever without ever getting anywhere or even having any clear direction, like those dreams where you run as hard as you can but your legs will barely move.

“Would you tell me?” he asks. “If there was something wrong?”

“Hell no. Anything Alyssa doesn’t tell you, she doesn’t want you to know. That’s her choice. Even if there was something, what are you gonna do about it from there?”

“I could come over. Should I come over?”

Donna makes an explosive noise of sheer exasperation. Donna always loved words and used plenty of them, enough to compensate for Cal’s shortages, but they never were enough to contain what she was feeling; she needed her hands too, and her face, and a mockingbird’s array of noises. “You are unbelievable, you know that? For a smart guy, my God . . . You know what, I’m not doing this. I don’t do your thinking any more. I gotta go.”

“Sure, you do that,” Cal says, his voice rising. “And give my love to Whatshisname,” but she’s already hung up, which is probably a good thing.

Cal stands there in his back field for a while, with the phone in his hand. He wants to punch something, but he knows that would do nothing but bust his knuckles. Having that much sense makes him feel old.

Evening is filtering into the air; there are streaks of cold yellow above the mountains, and in the oak tree the rooks are having their evening conference. Cal goes back to the house and puts some Emmylou Harris on the iPod. He needs someone to be sweet to him, just for a little while.

He takes that bottle of Jim Beam out onto the back steps after all. He can’t see any reason not to. Even if someone is in some kind of danger, it seems the last thing they want is any help from him.

He also can’t see any reason not to let himself sit there and think about Donna, seeing as he already fucked up and called her. Cal never had much time for nostalgia, but thinking about Donna seems like an important thing to do every now and then. He sometimes gets the feeling that Donna has methodically erased all their good times from her memory, so that she can move on into her shiny new life without ripping herself up. If he doesn’t keep them in his, they’ll be gone like they never happened.

What he thinks about is the morning they found out Alyssa was coming. He can remember clear as day how Donna felt when he hugged her, her skin hotter than normal like some engine was firing on new cylinders, the stunning gravitational pull of her and the mystery inside her. He sits on his back steps, watching green fields turn gray with evening and listening to Emmylou’s sad gentle voice drift out his door, and tries to work out how on earth he got from that day to this one.