Wild Fell (7 page)

He shrugged. “Probably just my imagination, never mind.”

I took a deep breath. “Daddy?”

“Yes, son?”

“Daddy, I don’t like my mirror. Can we get rid of it?”

“What do you mean, get rid of it?” He peered over at the mirror on the wall. “Is it cracked?” He sighed. “You didn’t crack it, did you, Jamie? Your mother is going to be furious if you did.”

“No, it’s not broken, I just . . . well, I don’t need it.”

“Jameson,” my father said. The switch to my full name wasn’t lost on me. “Your mirror is fine. I don’t know what this is about, but—”

I cut him off, reaching for his hand and squeezing his fingers tightly enough for him to look back at me with an expression of mild surprise. “Daddy, would you stay here with me for a little while? Until I fall asleep? I’m scared.”

His face softened. “Jamie, what’s wrong? There’s nothing to be scared of. Are you upset about the bike? We’ll get it back. You shouldn’t have gone out of our neighbourhood, but what happened wasn’t your fault. Is that what this is about?”

I glanced over at the darkened mirror hanging innocuous and now empty on the wall. “Daddy, just stay with me. Please?”

“All right. But just for a little bit.” My father lay down beside me on the bed and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me in close.

I pressed my face into his shirt and inhaled deeply. I felt my heartbeat slowing as I relaxed into the bulwark of his warm body and his warm scent. In time, I fell asleep safely against my father’s chest. He must have left the room at some point when he saw that I was asleep, turning off my bedside lamp and leaving me in the dark.

I dreamed I was astride my red Schwinn on a promontory of land overlooking a vast, dark lake.

From the centre of the black water rose an island encircled with a wild coronet of grey rock and black-green pine trees. On the island was a castle whose turrets rose above the blackened pines. The sky was streaked with thin sunset stripes of hard red, luminous orange, and bright celadon blue.

The vista was a familiar one: I knew every wave, every jutting rock, every arching pine bough stretching up to gouge the bleeding red sky. The landscape was as familiar to me as my street, but even in the dream I knew it was somewhere I had never been.

The air was raw and northern, but wondrously fresh. I was cognizant that it was late because the sun was going down and the temperature was plummeting as I sat there staring at the island. I knew I was a long, long way from my house—much farther than I had ever been before. I felt the comforting solidity of my Schwinn between my legs and I knew I needed to get pedalling or I was going to be in a lot of trouble.

There was someone standing directly behind me, but I didn’t turn my head to see who it was. I already knew who it was. Instead I just stared at the darkening twilight lake and said, “It’s late. I need to get home.”

I felt tiny fingers settle on my shoulder, and I heard a voice like glacier water whisper in my ear.

You
are
home
, Amanda said.
This
is
home.

If I woke screaming, there were no echoes of it in my bedroom when my eyes snapped open in the dark and it disturbed no one in the silent house. There were no footsteps on the floors above—either the living room directly above my bedroom, or my parents’ bedroom above the living room—no heavy adult tread taking the stairs two at a time to save me from any monster that had followed me out of my dreams and into the world.

Instead I woke to broad planks of moonlight on my bedroom floor from the open window on the other side of the room, and to the dreadful silence every child who wakes from a nightmare alone in his bedroom knows. As I lay tangled up in the maze of sweaty sheets and trapped under the suffocating blankets, the only sound in all that quiet was my own heart in my chest, and the pounding of blood in my temples.

Next to my bed, the mirror was black and opaque, as though even the moon was afraid of what it might call to life from the depths of the glass by shining on it.

I lay awake for what seemed like hours. Eventually, the sky began to turn to flush pink. When there was enough light outside to at least bring the contours of my bedroom back into the realm of the safe and the real, I slept, blissfully dreamless this time.

The next morning at breakfast, the phone in the hallway rang. My father looked at the clock and frowned. My mother shrugged and lit her second cigarette of the morning, blowing another plume of smoke into the shimmering blue cloud already hanging over the breakfast table.

My father said, “It’s a bit early for callers, isn’t it, Alice?”

“Well, it’s ringing,” my mother replied tautly. “Either answer it or don’t answer it. I don’t care. But it’s ringing.” She took another sip of her black coffee. My mother wasn’t generally much of a conversationalist at breakfast, at least until she’d had her very own particular breakfast of caffeine and nicotine. All three of us knew it, and neither my father nor I attempted to engage her seriously until after the breakfast dishes were done, preferably by him, preferably with no audible clattering of crockery and silverware in the sink.

My father pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. “So it is,” he said. “It
is
ringing. Excuse me, my dear.”

Out in the hallway, his voice rose and fell. There was a long pause, then another soft volley of words. Then I heard him hang up the phone. When he returned to the table, his face was ashen. He sat down heavily and rubbed his chin the way he did when he was thinking about how, or whether, to say something painful or difficult.

I put my spoon back in my bowl of Froot Loops. “Who was it, Daddy?”

My father took a deep breath. “Well, Jamie, the police found your bike. We can go over and pick it up after breakfast.”

My mother perked up. “Really? Really, Peter? They found Jamie’s bike? Where? Did they catch the thief?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as though the prospect of my Schwinn coming home wasn’t anything she’d ever seriously entertained. It occurred to me that she sounded disappointed that the long, punitive lesson she’d hoped to teach me about responsibility was now lost to her forever, or at least until my next major cock-up.

My father delicately ignored her question, turning to me instead. “Jamie, you said you don’t know the name of the boy who took your bike, right? You’d never seen him before yesterday?”

“Right, Daddy. Was that him on the phone?”

“No, Jamie,” my father said slowly. “That was a policeman. I called them yesterday and told them what happened and gave them a description of the bike. The boy . . . well, his name is Terry Dodds. Damnedest thing. His kid brother brought the bike in to the police station this morning and told them Terry had stolen it and he wanted to give it back.” Something indefinable in my father’s face stayed my euphoria. I waited for him to continue, but my mother cut in before he could.

“His
brother
brought it in?” She exhaled smoke into the air above her. “And he just waltzed into the police station and confessed that his brother
stole
it from Jamie? What on earth would prompt him to do something like that? Not that I’m complaining, but it seems very unlikely.”

“His brother is in the hospital, Alice,” my father said. “In the intensive care unit. He had some sort of an accident this morning, apparently.”

Reflexively she stubbed the cigarette into the saucer of her coffee cup. “A car accident?” She lit another cigarette. “Good Lord. Is he all right?”

“No, not a car. Something . . . well, something else. According to the policeman, this boy was riding the bike around in the field where he stole it from Jamie. They think he must have run over a nest of wasps. Maybe it fell out of a tree or something. In any case, they swarmed. It’s pretty bad, apparently. He can’t speak.”

It was as though all the air was suddenly sucked out of the room. I felt dizzy and the kitchen swayed and dimmed around me. For a moment I thought I might faint. I steadied my hands on the edge of the kitchen table for balance.

We’ll make him shut up, I promise. And we’ll get your bike back.

When the vertiginous moment passed, my father was still speaking to me. He hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong. “The constable asked me if I wanted to press charges,” he was saying. “Of course, under the circumstances I said no, of course not.” He cleared his throat. “Jamie, the boy’s aunt would like to meet you at the hospital. She’d like to have her nephew—the thief’s brother—apologize to you on behalf of the family. Her sister, Mrs. Dodd, is with Terry in the ICU. Apparently some of the family is with her. The aunt and the younger boy want to speak with you. How do you feel about that? Shall we go down to the hospital after we pick up your bicycle at the station?”

In a very small voice I said, “Okay.”

“Are you sure, Jamie? You’re not nervous, are you? They just want to say they’re sorry. Apparently the police really gave the young fellow a good what-for about his brother stealing the bike from you. Told him it was your first bike and everything, and that you’d just gotten it for your birthday.”

“No, it’s okay, Dad. I just feel bad for the kid, even if he did steal my bike.”

“You’re going to be nice to them, aren’t you, Jamie? Even if the boy’s brother did take your bike?” My father looked at me hopefully. “They’re pretty upset, and it’s a hard time for their family, especially the boy’s mother. This would be a good time to be kind.”

Before I could answer my father, my mother interjected again. “What on earth would have possessed the boy to return the bike on the same day his brother had that accident? I would have thought that’s the last thing he’d be thinking about. The whole affair is rather odd. Still, I feel badly for the other boy, even if he’s a thief. And his poor mother must be beside herself. On the other hand, how very odd to be worrying about apologizing to Jamie at a time like this. If it were me, that would be the very last thing I’d be concerned about.”

I said, “I think it’s nice.”

“Hmmm,” my mother said, lighting another cigarette.

“Bad luck,” my father said. He rubbed his chin again. “Bad luck.”

“Well, it’s certainly more than
bad luck
, Peter, isn’t it? It’s a rather serious accident, all told. The boy could sustain a brain injury from those stings.” My mother could always manage to picture the worst possible outcome for any given situation, with or without the benefit of actual facts.

“No,” my father said. “That’s not what I mean, Alice. The boy’s brother—that’s why he brought the bicycle to the police station. He told the policeman at the front desk that it was bad luck. He didn’t want it in his house. He was afraid something would happen to him, too.”

Later at the hospital, with his Aunt Prudence standing behind him, Stevie Todd said that his brother was sorry for what he’d done.

“Thank you for not bringing charges against my brother,” Stevie said in a stilted voice. There was nothing spontaneous or natural in it. He had obviously been coached. Stevie was my age, eight. When Aunt Prudence told him to shake my hand, he started to cry.

“Stevie, shake Jamie’s hand,” she insisted. Under the harsh, unforgiving whiteness of the hospital’s overhead fluorescent lights, Mrs. Dodd’s sister’s face was puffy and blotched. Her eyes behind thick glasses were swollen and red from crying, bruised with plum-coloured smudges of exhaustion. If this was how her sister looked today, I couldn’t imagine how Terry’s mother must look. But still, Aunt Prudence pushed Stevie toward me. “I mean it. Come on now. He and his father are being very nice to us by not calling the juvenile authorities about your brother.”

“I don’t want to!” Stevie wailed. He shrank back from my extended hand as though it were leprous. “I said I was sorry. I don’t want to shake his hand.
Why do I have to?
”

“Stop it!” she practically shouted. Roughly, she grabbed Stevie by the shoulder and shoved him towards me. “
Shake Jamie’s hand
!”

My father raised his own hands in a gesture of gentle conciliation. “It’s all right Mrs. . . . ?”

“
Miss
,” Aunt Prudence said. “I’m not married. My name is
Miss
Prudence Rogers.”

“Miss Rogers, Stevie doesn’t have to shake Jamie’s hand. It’s fine. More than fine. The boy’s obviously upset about his brother. Thank you for inviting us to come and meet you. We don’t want to take any more of your time. You should be with your sister and Terry now.”

“I’m so sorry.” Aunt Prudence’s face appeared to fall in on itself. Her voice sounded raw and chapped, almost as though it was bleeding. “We’re all so upset. I thought this would be a good idea, you know. That the boys should meet. My nephew . . . Stevie that is, not Terry . . . well, he said he had a bad dream last night that something bad was going to happen. He won’t tell me about it. I just thought it would be a good idea for him to . . . to . . .” She began to cry. “My sister—Mrs. Dodd,
Arlene
Dodd—well, her husband passed away last year. It’s just she and the two boys, and me. I live with them and try to help out. Terry isn’t a bad boy, Mr. Browning, he’s just a little lost without his father around. And then this happened this morning. When the ambulance came for him, he was unconscious. Oh God, I’m so worried about my poor sister. If anything happens to Terry, too. His
face
 . . .”

“Miss Rogers, please go to your sister. We’ll see ourselves out. My wife in particular asked me to send her best wishes for Terry’s recovery. I’m so, so sorry.
We’re
sorry, I mean. And thank you, Stevie, for being so honest. Your mother and aunt should be very proud of you.”

Stevie nodded dumbly and followed his aunt down the hallway toward the elevator to the ICU. Aunt Prudence called out to the two women who were in the elevator just as the doors were beginning to swing shut. One of the women reached out her hand and held the door till they reached it.

Stevie Dodd looked back just once. When our eyes met, his were full of a black dread that aged him beyond his years, far beyond childhood, maybe even further. Then they stepped into the elevator and the doors glided shut.