No Good Asking

by Fran Kimmel

  No Good Asking

  Fran Kimmel

  To Jim

  Contents

  Part One

  They All Come from Somewhere

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Part Two

  Like Soldiers When They Come Home from War

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Part Three

  Play It Again

  Nine

  Part Four

  Not Quite Real

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part Five

  This Inexplicable and Titanic Shift

  Twelve

  Part Six

  Those Words Could Mean Anything

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Part Seven

  Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go

  Fifteen

  Acknowledgements

  Book Club

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Part One

  They All Come from Somewhere

  Friday, December 20

  One

  From a distance, it looked like a small smear of blood on a white blanket. Perhaps a wounded coyote, staggering along the road in the relentless wind. Eric drove on, a flurry of white surrounding his car, keeping to the faint tracks he’d made the day before. As he drew nearer, the speck transformed into a withered old man, startling him with legs, arms, torso bent into the gale. But it was worse yet. He finally recognized the shape as a young girl. People didn’t walk along his road, not out here in the middle of nowhere. Not a girl, certainly not in this weather.

  He slowly pulled the car alongside her, creating new tire tracks in the snow. The girl ignored him and kept walking. A red scarf tied under her chin covered her ears; long hair fell in damp strands down her back. She looked twelve, thirteen at most. Her coat was a grubby grey felt, too small, thrift-shop variety, the kind that let the cold howl through the gaps between buttons. Her jeans were dirty and frayed at the bottom. She wore runners, not boots.

  Eric opened the passenger window, letting in a blast of cold that made his bones creak. “Hey,” he shouted, to be heard over the wind.

  Plodding forward, she kept her head pressed down, hands in pockets. He stopped the car along the side of the road and jumped out.

  She didn’t stop moving as he caught up and walked beside her. His eyes watered from the wind. “I live down the road a ways.” He sucked air through his teeth, swallowing the sting. “You’re not dressed for this weather. It’s freezing out here. I can drive you to wherever you’re going.”

  He stepped in front of her, blocking her path. She stamped her runners and peered around him with exhausted eyes, as if there was something to look at and he was obstructing her view.

  “I’m going to give you a ride. You can decide where to.” For a brief second, he wished he was still in uniform. “Look, I know you’re not supposed to get into a stranger’s vehicle, but it’s your—”

  “You’re not a stranger.” She sounded dazed, croaking. “You live across the road from me.”

  Wilson’s place? There was no other house along this road. “You’ve walked all that way?” It was a good five kilometres back to where their houses stood facing each other on either side of the road. Who was this girl?

  Her nose ran and she lifted a bare hand from her pocket and took a feeble swipe. Jesus. She didn’t even have mittens. He could give her no choice in the matter. He held out his arm, pointing to his idling car, stepping closer, forcing her to back up. Finally, she turned, trudged back to the car, pulled on the frozen latch of his back door with her bare fingers, and fell inside.

  Eric hurried to his side of the vehicle, got in, and cranked the heater as high as it would go. He would have preferred her in the front beside the vent.

  He turned to look at her, passing her the box of Kleenex they kept under the console. “My name is Eric Nyland.”

  “I know,” she said, wiping her nose, her running eyes.

  Nigel Wilson must have told her his name. What else had he told her?

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hannah Finch.”

  Eric couldn’t fathom what Wilson was doing with a girl named Finch. Couldn’t fathom what the girl was doing in the bitter cold, so entirely unprepared, as if she were out for an afternoon stroll in September.

  “Okay, Hannah. Where to?”

  After an ungodly long pause—where had she been going?—she said, “I have to go home. Can you drive me back?”

  There was something in the way she said home. Her shoulders slumped as she fought with her seat belt. Her fingers looked brittle, like they might snap off in pieces.

  “You sure?” he said. “Because I can take you to town. Or to a friend’s.”

  She shook her head. “I left Mandy with him.”

  “Mandy?”

  “My cat.”

  “Never did own a cat,” he told her as he turned the car around. He’d seen his share of runaways during his twenty years with the force. If he’d spotted this girl at the shopping mall, he would have thought her a go-to-church, finish-your-homework, listen-to-your-mother type.

  He kept on talking to help put her at ease. “Dog people, our family. Down to one mutt at the moment. My father’s dog, Thorn. That’s the dog’s name. He’s a big, fat black lab mostly. Poops all over the house. Guess he can’t help it because he’s so old and doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore. Falls down if he barks too loud. It’s sort of sad. Woof, woof, and down he goes.”

  She shifted slightly in the back seat. “I’ve seen him. Sometimes he comes down to the road.”

  So why had he never seen her? He’d brought his family back here nearly a year ago. “Thorn wolfed down a whole bag of dog food one time. One of those giant twenty-pound sacks you get at Costco. That dumb dog found it while he was sniffing around the shed. Tipped it over somehow, chewed through the corner of the packaging, got his head inside, and gobbled it all up. He waddled out of that shed looking mighty sorry about what he’d done, his stomach stretched so low it swept the ground. Took three full days to work all those nuggets through. Stunk so bad we made him sleep on the porch.”

  They dipped into the valley, forcing his eyes to the road and keeping them there. During the warm months—all two of them—the view was of mustard-yellow canola fields, farms dotting the distance. Today, Eric saw nothing but blowing snow.

  “I hear house cats are pretty smart,” he said.

  Hannah sat perfectly still, her hands folded over a button on her flimsy coat.

  “They know how to pace themselves. You can fill their bowl and they’ll nibble a bit here, a bit there, dainty-like, all day long. Not a black lab. No sir. Put down a bowl and they make it their job to suck up every morsel like a vacuum. Sometimes they forget to chew, they’re in such a hurry, and end up choking it back out again.”

  He adjusted the vents, raising his voice to compensate for the added noise. “Tell me about Mandy,” he said, delaying his real questions until he could catch her eye.

  “She’s a dainty eater.”

  “Like I thought,” he said. “Have you had her a long time?”

  “Since I got my tonsils out. Mom brought me home from the hospital and told me to look on my bed. Mandy was in a shoebox with just her pink nose sticking out of the towel. She was crying, so I picked her up and she stopped.”

&
nbsp; “How old were you when you got your tonsils out?”

  Her eyes shone right at him in the mirror. “Five. Now I’m eleven. Almost twelve.”

  She sat taller and pressed herself against her seat belt. They crawled along, still a ways off.

  “So where were you headed, Hannah?” She’d walked all that way without turning back. “Your mom will be worried, don’t you think?”

  She looked at the mirror and caught his stare. “My mom’s dead.” She gave a little shiver.

  “I’m sorry, Hannah. That must be tough.”

  She shrugged.

  “So Nigel Wilson is your dad?” Stepdad, whatever.

  “No. He was with my mom, so he got me.”

  “Nigel and I used to go to school together.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t think he’d hurt Mandy, do you?”

  She looked down at her hands on her lap.

  “Because you know there are laws against hurting a cat. Or a kid.” Nigel Wilson was a snivelling excuse for a human being. “If there’s anything like that going on at your house, we can make it stop. I mean the police can make it stop. But you have to tell them so they can help.”

  The girl was done talking. She kept her head down and said nothing more as they inched along the empty road.

  “Almost there.” Eric looked in the mirror; her cheeks were the greyish colour of week-old mushrooms. “You okay back there?”

  She nodded, though she was clearly not. She seemed to be panting a little. He flipped on his turn signal out of habit, although there was no one in the barrenness to see it.

  He took the last corner slowly. Barely clearing the deep snow, two weathered mailboxes, one of them Wilson’s, were nailed high on posts beside a dead-end sign. The narrow tunnel of a road felt closed in and too dark. Giant aspens loomed on either side, frozen branches hanging low and so overwhelmed with snow they nearly scraped the car top. Old snow was piled in man-sized shelves along the road’s edge.

  “Please,” she said. “Stop the car.”

  Eric turned his head, attentive to the panic in her voice. She’d already unbuckled her seat belt and had her fingers wrapped around the door handle. Their houses were not yet in view, just snow being lifted by the wind and swirling about the car’s windows.

  “Whoa. Slow down, Hannah.” She couldn’t be planning to go out there again, not with him sitting three feet in front of her, not with that wind screaming through the tiny cracks in the glass.

  “Please.” She jerked on the handle. “Hurry. I have to get out.”

  “It’s all right, Hannah. Just give me a minute until the road opens up a bit and I can pull over.”

  “I’m going to be sick. I’m gonna throw up in your car.”

  Vomit had been a frequent back-seat occurrence in his former line of business. Eric braked more firmly than he’d intended, all four tires skidding out of the earlier tracks and into deep, wet snow, the car crunching to a halt, angled across the road.

  “Hang on, hang on. I’ll get your door.” Eric stepped into a gust of icy cold. He scrambled around the car, intending to help her to the bank, but she was already out and falling forward into snow up to her knees.

  Eric came up behind her.

  He grabbed the back of her coat as she bent low, her retching so noisy and violent he worried she’d crack a rib. “That’s right.” There was nothing to do except stand behind her heaving body and hold a fistful of coat.

  It kept coming and coming, a trail of the steaming stuff running down the white slope toward her snow-buried calves. Nigel Wilson needed to get her checked by a doctor.

  “All done then?” He cupped her shoulder with his other hand, trying to hold her steady. The wind shot under his coat collar, under his cuffs. She brought her arm up and wiped her face with her sleeve. Her breath came out in short, choppy puffs that caught on the wind.

  “Come on, Hannah.”

  She’d started to shake so badly she nearly fell sideways. She turned her head toward him, blowing snow clinging to her lips and lashes. She was a frozen sparrow cemented in winter.

  Eric wanted to place his hands on her waist and lift her out of the snow, but not even ex-cops were to touch kids that way, especially young girls. So he held his arms out to her instead, and she twisted and grabbed on, and as he stepped backward, she fell into him.

  He pulled her toward the dirtier, more packed snow of the road, where she stamped her feet feebly, one at a time, and then he led her to the car and helped her get settled into the front seat, close to the heat. She said thank you as he closed her door. His ears stung, and his right thumb, the arthritic one from his football days, throbbed as he trudged through the snow to his side of the car.

  As he buckled in beside her, Hannah ran her palms up and down her thighs. She wouldn’t look at him. He thought she might be embarrassed, so he played with the heater and revved the engine a few times. If a truck came along, there would be no way to pass with his car parked sideways across the road. But no vehicle came along. Winter was a lonely, desolate place along their road.

  They couldn’t idle there indefinitely. The kid was traumatized and smelled like puke. She needed a hot bath and bed. He maneuvered the car back and forth into the snow, tires grabbing, until they were centred again in the tracks laid down earlier, facing toward Hannah’s place.

  “Hannah, are you okay? Put your hands close to the heat.”

  She spread her fingers wide in front of the vent, tipped her head back, and closed her eyes. Eric studied her mottled, thawing face. Her skin purpled around her closed eyes, making it look like she’d been smacked.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” She kept her eyes closed.

  “I hate throwing up,” he said, easing the car forward at a steady crawl.

  “Me too.” Her nose started to run again but she sniffed it back.

  “I do anything to avoid it.”

  “Me too.”

  They were out of the trees and into the open again. Eric could see smoke coming from Wilson’s chimney. He couldn’t see his own place on the other side of the road; their house was tucked far back on the cleared driveway.

  He could have thrown a stone and easily hit Hannah’s front door. He’d always wondered why the Wilsons had rooted themselves right there. Why they had hunted for property in the middle of nowhere and then built so close to the road they could hand lemonade to passersby through their kitchen window. There was nothing but the small two-storey house and a half-buried Ford station wagon. No garage, no barn, no motor home or boat. Not a tree or a fence. Nothing to show where Wilson’s property ended and the next began. Just billowing heaps of snow, whipped to a frenzy in the driving wind.

  Eric parked the car next to Wilson’s Ford. He kept the engine running and aimed the warm air at the windshield. He couldn’t get her any closer. Wilson had shovelled a path no bigger than a deer trail. The house was the original, pre-1940s. A war house as the townsfolk liked to call them, shutters over the upper-floor windows, a glassed-in porch that could double as a freezer in winter and sauna in summer.

  “Here we are, Hannah. Ready?”

  She turned her head and looked at him, eyes wide, as if he’d managed to surprise her by getting them this far.

  “I have something for you.” He wished he could give her one of his old RCMP cards with the horse and rider in his scarlet jacket, but those days were behind him. He reached into his inside pocket for one of his flimsy security guard cards and a pen, printed his cell number across the top, and handed it to her.

  “I want you to call if you need anything. Anytime. Or stop by our place. A few of us are usually home. We’re your neighbours. I mean it, Hannah.” And he did. He wondered if Wilson had food in the fridge, or if he’d plugged in that Ford.

  They sat beside each other, not
talking. Eric kept his eye on the house, thinking it strange that Wilson didn’t come to the door. He had to know she was out there. Eric’s idling car made a hell of a racket.

  “I have to go now,” she said.

  “Okay,” Eric said.

  “Okay,” she echoed, stepping into the biting wind. Eric trudged along behind her on the skinny path.

  They crowded into the empty porch, so cold inside the useless room Eric could see Hannah’s breath curl around her dry mauve lips. She pointed her finger at the doorbell beside the bevelled glass door and pushed twice before she stepped through. Eric thought about why she might have to ring her own bell. Why hers was the kind of house you couldn’t walk into without announcing yourself first.

  Nigel Wilson came down the stairs and stood before them, arms crossed. It had been decades since they’d spoken to each other, since Eric had stepped inside this house. The small living room was still filled with the furniture of their childhoods: velveteen chairs, stuffed couches, floor lamps with tasseled lampshades. Eric had been in this room often as a little kid, he and Nigel swapping Star Wars figurines and cold germs. When school started and Eric had a choice, he looked elsewhere, preferring the company of the rowdy kids over the brooding boy from across the road. Now Wilson just stood there. His pose irritated Eric, who thought Wilson ought to have been worried about Hannah, or alarmed at least to find Eric with her. Nigel was a big guy, bigger than Eric remembered, his muddy eyes still spaced too closely together. He wore a white pressed shirt tucked inside a pair of dark pressed trousers, hair combed back respectably behind his oversized ears. This too irritated Eric, who thought he could have spent less energy dressing and more tackling the driveway, watching out for this girl.

  “Eric,” Wilson said, stepping forward and taking Eric’s hand firmly. “It’s been a long time. Thought we might have bumped into each other before now.”

  Eric had waved a few times as their vehicles passed on the road, but Wilson had not acknowledged him.

  They stood eye to eye. Wilson smelled faintly of cheap aftershave, like rubbing alcohol. Christmas hadn’t yet entered this room. No stockings hung by the chimney with care. No tree garnished with the decorations Hannah had made at school over the years. There was a sour smell leaking from the kitchen at the back of the house. He could have taken out the garbage, Eric thought, adding another strike against him.