Bodies and Sole (11 page)

Chapter Twenty

Hy and Finn were at the table, just about to sit down for supper, when Ian burst through the door.

“Your brother.” He pointed at Finn.

“My what?” Hy stared at both men blankly.

“Your brother. He's your brother.”

“Ian, that's biologically impossible. Don't be ridiculous.”

“He's not being ridiculous.” Finn had stayed standing. So did Hy and Ian. Mute. All three without a word.

And then they all spoke at the same time.

“I…” Hy.

“I…” Ian.

“I…” Finn.

And they all sat down. At the same time.

“Finn, is this true?” Hy felt foolish. Embarrassed. She'd had thoughts – about her brother? Ian jumped in before Finn could answer.

“Yes. Yes, it's true.”

A big grin spread across Ian's face. He knew it was true. His research had told him, but it was satisfying to see Finn acknowledge it. It was also satisfying to see Hy with the air blown out of her, her would-be lover turned into a brother.

“Half-brother,” Finn added.

Ian gave Finn a hard look, his eyes darting at Hy. “You haven't…?” He was hoping Finn was just a would-be lover, not a
fait accompli
.

“Of course not.” Finn did not like Ian's suggestion.

Hy flushed to think of how close she had hugged Finn before bed some nights. She had felt the resistance in his body, the stiffening. No wonder.

“That would mean my father…your father…”

“Yup. My father, then your father.”

“But you were never in touch before. Why not? And why the secrecy now?”

Finn pulled out his wallet. From the wallet he slipped out a piece of paper, folded many times. He unfolded it carefully, but it came apart at the well-worn seams.

It was a magazine article. An interview with Hy in her twenties, on the release of the coffee table version of her mother's seminal back-to-the-woods book. It was an American magazine interested in her connection through her deserter father. The father who'd died when out trapping in northern Canada. Who'd left her mother and the infant Hy to rough it in the woods. Who'd been responsible for her grandfather's death when the bush plane he flew in to rescue them had crashed. Killed him. Killed her mother.

“I hate my father,” Finn read from the article. “He killed my mother and he nearly killed me. I never went looking for any relatives and they never came looking. I have no family and that's fine with me.”

He passed the piece of paper over to her. It was the same article she'd given him. She hadn't looked at it in years. Her first thought was that in the photograph taken to accompany the article she looked impossibly young. Her second thought was that she looked strikingly like Finn. Not the hair. His, a shock of black, sticking out straight from his skull. Hers those red curls that so enchanted Ian.

No, not the hair. It was something in the jaw, the mouth, the eyes.

She passed it back to him.

“It hardly suggests you would welcome me, your long-lost brother.”

“Well, no…”

“I tried to open it up last night, but you shut it down.”

“True.”

“My mother never told me who my father was,” he said. “I had no one but her. That's the way she wanted it. My grandparents were dead, and she had been an only child. You're my closest living relative. She told me, finally, when she was dying of cancer. She felt guilty, I guess. She felt I should have someone. And you were innocent. Innocent of your father's crimes.”

“Crimes?”

“He ran off with your mother. He had two women pregnant at the same time. We're only a few months apart.”

“I said I hated him, and that's before I knew that.” Hy got up and grabbed a bottle of organic Merlot from the hutch beside the table. She pulled out three glasses and poured.

“So that's why you were reluctant to say who you were in our Facebook messages. But how does coming here make it any better?”

“Human contact. Human contact, always better than the machine.” He jabbed a finger at Hy's laptop, propped open on the table. Hy's message postings were open, including the one she had sent to Finn before he came to the village.

“I'm so excited you're coming. Can't wait until you get here.”

Oh brother, thought Ian. He stood up.

“Guess you two have a lot to talk about. I'll be going.”

Finn turned to Hy as the screen door squeaked and slammed behind Ian.

“Boyfriend?” Finn jutted his chin in the direction of the door.

“No…yes…sort of.”

“Maybe that's the problem.”

The sound of a gentle summer rain closed the evening around them.

They sat in silence. Brother and sister. It was a lot for Hy to absorb. But like the summer rain, it was comforting.

She was no longer alone in the world.

The next morning found Hy at Ian's, after Finn took off with Dot to walk the shore. There was another fine mist, but the village men were out on their mowers despite it. It had rained, mostly overnight, ever since Marlene tried to issue her no-mow edict. The village men were determined not to appear as if they were co-operating. The grass was wet and hardly needed mowing, but got it anyway.

Marlene had picked herself up and dusted herself off after the unsuccessful meeting at the hall. And she'd learned a few things.

She had devised a new scheme and another flyer. In this one, she spelled The Shores correctly.

“No mention of a public meeting.” Hy grazed the paper she'd brought in from Ian's mailbox.

“So she can't err there.”

“Beware.” Hy held up a finger and waited.

“Err. There. Beware.” Jasmine loved rhymes.

Ian groaned. “Now she'll be all over that for weeks.” He stood up and stretched, his back sore from hunching over the computer. “So what's it about?”

“It's a survey. Looks like Marlene's cutting her losses. It says: ‘Tick the box that best describes how long you'd be willing to leave your grass uncut. One week, six days…” It goes all the way down to one day.”

“But nowhere that says ‘not at all'?”

Hy shook her head.

“That's where she's made her mistake.” Ian smiled a sly smile. “Plenty of people would answer her survey if they had that option.”

Ian was right. No one answered the survey. Marlene considered taking the spark plugs out of the local mowing machines, except she wouldn't know how to do it. Instead, she hatched another plan.

A few phone calls to the Tourism Department and John Deere soon had her grinning as she created her next flyer.

She popped it in boxes. Villagers patiently pulled it out. Those who crumpled it up and threw it away before reading it soon dove back into their recycling bags, straightened it, and filled it out.

Finn and Dot strolled on the shore, and Dot fell in love all over again with her birthplace, through Finn's eyes. Finn was from Boston and knew as much about the shore as she did, about the water and its ways, the gulls and theirs, and the shellfish that were tossed up on the shore and abandoned by the tide.

They were easy in each other's company, as if they had known each other for years. They were both also in a temporary, transitional time in their lives and open to where it would lead them.

At the moment, it was leading them away from the sea rock to the far cape, away from the skull that had surfaced again. It had been hiding for some time in a pile of cape rock. No one had discovered it yet. But it had been in the water for fifty years. It could bide its time on the beach a little longer.

And then the skull could, perhaps, rest in peace.

But it wasn't going to be found today.

The water had tickled it up from the rocks and deposited it on a clump of sand.

Quite visible now.

But not to Finn and Dot, who only had eyes for each other.

www.theshores200.com

Occasionally a pre-Columbian artifact will be found on the shore. Or a shard of a Ming dynasty treasure. They're the last remains of a millionaire art collector who lived in a fabulous A-frame on a very precarious overhang of the cape. It came crashing down in a savage storm several years ago, a storm that threw hundreds of lobster traps up on the shore and ended the season early.

Hy left Ian's, happy that the distance between them was easing now that Finn was no longer a reason for tensions. She smiled at how foolish she'd been to fall for her brother. Well, half-brother. Still. She was getting used to the idea of having family, after having been alone in the world for so long. She was connected to Finn now. And through Finn to Dot. And, through Dot, linked even more closely to Gus.

Family. It felt good.

Her pleasant thoughts were interrupted by the mewling coming from the roof of the Sullivan house. It was pitiful.

Whacky?

Hy jumped on her bike and pumped so hard she lost her footing on the pedals. She bumped over the clamshell driveway, and threw the bike down before she had fully dismounted, scraping and bruising her leg.

There was Whacky on the highest peak, apparently terrified to come down. Hy had heard that cats can always get down from the places they climb up, but she wasn't so sure about that.

The pitiful creature was staring right at her, desperate appeal in its eyes.

She'd better do something.

She went around to the back door. When she disappeared from sight, Whacky's crying became even more pitiful, signaling to Hy that it really was in distress.

She knocked on the door. No response. Rang the Victorian doorbell. Nothing. Then looked at the driveway. No vehicle. Of course, why hadn't she noticed?

She would need a ladder.

The shed. There it was, hooked along the side of the building. Extension ladder. Would it be long enough?

It would have to be.

She hauled it off its hooks and half-carried, half-dragged it around the house.

Whacky was alert, waiting for her to return, big eyes glued to her every movement.

She set up the ladder. It wasn't going to be long enough. Behind her, there was a wooden picnic table. She shoved it forward, and wrestled the ladder into position on top of it. Better. She looked up the length of it, still coming several feet shy of the cat. Terrifying height. She tested the ladder's stability, a hand on the bottom rung. It shook. Vibrated.

Was she crazy?

She began to mount the rungs, taking it slowly, testing each new step before she put her full weight on it. The cat's mewling had turned to whimpering. She inched up, rung by rung.

And then she stopped.

She stopped because of what she saw through the second floor window. The sight made her dizzy.

A creature? A man? What?

And another, or something like it, just barely visible through the window of the next room.

Vera Gloom's art? Giant balsawood insects?

Hy was frozen in place, her eyes trying to make sense of what she was seeing, something so bizarre she couldn't comprehend it.

She closed her eyes.

Opened them again.

He – it – appeared to be waving at her.

She shook her head. That made the ladder tremble. She was trembling, too. Trembling at what she was seeing.
Human?

The cat began a new racket of mewling and meowing. Hy barely noticed it, she was so mesmerized by what she was seeing through the window.

Human?

A gust of wind came up.

Alive?

The ladder shifted.

“Are you nuts?”

The voice cut through the mist of confusion.

Hy looked down. Almost lost her balance. The ladder pulled away from the house, and then slammed back, hard.

Jamieson.

Jamieson had crawled up onto the picnic table and was gripping the ladder.

She had seen Hy from the road. She'd braked, backed up without checking her rearview mirror and pulled into the driveway, spitting clamshells as she sped over the grass to the picnic table, leaving ruts in the lawn.

“Get down!”

“Easy for you to say. I've got your cat up here.”

“That's not my cat, that's – ”

At the sound of Jamieson's voice, the tiny creature peeked from behind the dormer where she was hiding.

“Get her, and get down.”

Right, thought Hy. Now we know where her priorities are.

Whacky was perhaps just close enough now to grab. Hy stretched forward. The cat pulled back.

She was now well out of reach. Hy stretched out both arms towards the cat, but it didn't budge. She called “kitty, kitty, kitty,” but still it didn't move. Then she remembered she had shells in her pocket. They would rattle and they would smell of salt. She pulled them out and shook them in her hand.

The wind came up. Wafted the salt scent at the cat.

Whacky caught the scent and inched forward.

Still out of reach.

“I can't. I can't reach her,” Hy yelled down at Jamieson. The ladder shifted. Jamieson tightened her grip on it.

“Climb up on the roof then.”

“Now it's you who's nuts.”

Whacky meowed plaintively. Looked directly with her big cat eyes into Jamieson's.

If Jamieson could ever be said to melt, she did then.

And then she did the most unusual thing.

She began to purr. Human volume. But a cat's purr. The little creature's ears twitched.

It responded to Jamieson, purr for purr, stealing slowly forward toward Hy.

When Whacky was close enough, Hy grabbed her, and the cat dug her claws right into her shoulder. Hy tried to ignore the pain shooting through her, and felt with one foot to the rung below. And then the next. And the next, glad of Jamieson's sure hands on the ladder.

Jamieson's knuckles were white, her teeth clenched as she mentally helped propel Hy and Whacky down to safety. As soon as Hy's feet hit the picnic table, Jamieson let go of the ladder and it came shuddering down, clattering to the ground, scraping the shingles as it collapsed on the lawn.