Blink & Caution (35 page)

“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.”

T
he 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.

D
espite 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.

When you are settled in at Nanny’s place, you try to write down everything you know; what Niven told you; what Alyson told you; what the newspapers have told you; and how it all weaves together. You made a deal with Niven that you wouldn’t go to the press, but you want to have it all written down, clear as you can make it, in case the police come calling again. They were here, Nanny said, when they were looking for that BlackBerry. Your mom must have told them you might be there. Anyway, if they do come back, you don’t want to stutter and stammer and lose your cool. Those days are over.

More than the papers or the police, you wish you could contact Alyson and tell her that you didn’t steal her car and abandon it, that you carried out the mission she had set for you. You remember her cell phone number. It has long since been erased from your arm, but it is etched in your memory. You’d like to set the record straight. But something in you holds back. Something in you says enough is enough. No use tempting Providence, as Nanny would say. There might be something in that.

Then, barely a week after your escape, Niven is in the news again. He’s been picked up on a road near Owen Sound. You look it up on a map: Owen Sound is nowhere near the hunting lodge. You’re not surprised. When he’s picked up, Niven says he has no idea where he is or where he was kept captive. SPOIL has driven him there blindfolded and let him go, he tells the police — just like that. Simultaneously, SPOIL sends out a news release stating that they feel they have made their point, and they want to show their goodwill by letting Niven free. But the speculation in the media is that things were getting too hot, that they let him go out of fear. The police are extending their search for the phantom terrorist organization. Meanwhile, there are those who believe the whole thing was phony.

Ah, the story you could tell, Brent.

You talk it over with Kitty. You e-mail back and forth to her. She reminds you of how close you came to getting your fool head blown off — except she doesn’t say it that way. She says she’ll back you, whatever you decide to do, but maybe it would be best to lie low. You wonder. But as you are wondering, you are learning how to read the business section of the newspaper; how to read the stocks. Queon is not doing well. You’re taking a course in business at high school. The teacher explains it to you.

The protest up at Millsap Lake just won’t go away. The tide of public pressure has built and built. The government is willing to talk to QVD again about buying the land off them, but they aren’t offering nearly as much as they did before.

And then in late January, you see on the front page of “Report on Business” in the
Globe and Mail
that QVD has been bought out by the Japanese company ANS. Niven has beenrelieved of his post as president and CEO but has been kept on as a consultant, whatever that means. In a sidebar, there is an interview with him. He needs a rest, he says. He needs time to be with his family. He needs to reconsider his options.

And somehow, that is enough. You feel pretty much the same way, don’t you, Brent?

In the spring, Kitty, her mother, and aunt drive down to Toronto with a baked ham for Wayne-Ray. He’s so busy now, balancing school and his job at the music store, that they bring Easter to him. He has been able to go back to school early. Kitty helped him decide.

She is to drive because she knows the city better than her mom or Lanie. This is a truth she would rather not admit. They do not talk about the time she was gone, only that she is back.

As they cross the top of North Bay, they pass the shopping center where she left the Jeep six months earlier. She half expects to see it there, but of course it is gone.

The car veers onto Highway 11, heading south to “the Big Smoke,” as her mother calls Toronto. Her mom is sitting in the backseat. She leans forward.

“Only was ever in the Big Smoke three times,” she says. “Once, when I was a kid for the Royal Fair, once with Byron for a little getaway weekend, and that one time we brought Spencer down to set him up in his new apartment.”