Off Season (42 page)

I ran straight into a pair of arms, which closed around me and drew my face into the shoulder of a Shetland sweater. I knew without being able to see that it would be blue. It smelled of seawater and wood smoke and the sweet sweat of a boy, smells out of another time . . .

He pulled me closer, so close that every inch of me fit sweetly against him. His warmth was heaven, life-giving, life-saving. I felt it fill and melt me until I sagged against him completely, and he held me up.

“I can’t breathe,” I whispered, and he put his mouth to mine. I felt his soft, chapped lips and he whispered, “Take mine. Take my breath.”

I did. I knew at that moment that I had never really known that total completion existed. Not this kind. Not in this world.

“It was you all the time, wasn’t it?” I whispered, giving him back my breath.

“I’ve been here all along,” Jon said.

Epilogue

T
he boy got into his truck to turn it toward home—his home, not his mother’s; he went there only when he had to—and then put his foot on the brake.

A cat. There had been a cat, hadn’t there? He cast back into his mind, to the second time he went into the woman’s house at the urging of his mother, letting his eyes slide over the pretty woman where she sat at the table, head on her arms, gray eyes open but narrowed as if she had been laughing, slight smile on her mouth. In her curled hand had been a faded, dried osprey feather. He had started to pluck it out, then left it. It looked right.

He’d known he could not help her; he had called Laurie and Toby Halliday on his cell phone and the whole process of death in this house had started over again. She would now, he knew, be on a plane or train home to Virginia, and out of his life forever.

But a cat, in this weather, with no food. He slewed the truck around and gunned it out onto the road, followed it, and plunged down the driveway toward the McCall cottage. The big fir had been split and sectioned and laid aside on the lawn, and the one that had blocked the main road was gone, but there were branches and needles and shingles strewn everywhere, as if a giant had taken out its rage on a dolls’ house.

The boy screeched to a stop in front of the house and ran inside. The door had not been locked.
No need, now,
he thought. He walked through the dark room calling, “Kitty, kitty—here, kitty, kitty, kitty . . .”

When he reached the kitchen he saw and then heard the cat. It was a big, clumsy bullet-headed cat with a chunk out of one ear and slitted yellow eyes. It sat on the counter by the sink, as if waiting for an appointment.

“It’s about time,”
the cat said grumpily.

“Well, I just remembered you,” the boy said.

“Thank heaven for small favors. Are we going?”

“You want to eat first, or go home?” the boy asked, not yet noticing that he was talking to a cat who talked back.

“Home,”
the cat said.
“So long as it’s warm.”

“Well, it’s not much, just a doublewide on a kind of cove down the bay a little, but it’s warm and it’s clean and it's full of stuff to eat,” the boy said. “I’m game if you are.”

The big cat clicked across the floor and launched himself into the boy’s surprised arms. Instinctively he drew the cat close and wrapped his fleece parka around it.

“I’m sorry about your mama,” he said.

“Me too. But she’s okay now.”

The cat buried his icy nose in the boy’s neck, took two great, rattling sniffs, and began making a horrendous grinding, metallic noise that the boy only belatedly recognized as a purr.

Old Silas knew home when he smelled it.