Blink & Caution

by Tim Wynne-Jones

“No, on the street. You know — living on the street.”

  “Oh.”

  “Living hard.” You pause, the wind spilled right out of your sails, but then you don’t want to hear what she has to say about that, so you start in again. “I go into hotels to get breakfast, like what people leave on their trays outside their door when they get room service. That’s why I was there. I was in the hallway on the sixteenth floor, but I ducked into this little room where they keep the ice machine. It’s right across the hall from your father’s room — 1616. Check it out. You can ask the hotel people if you don’t believe me.”

  “Go on.”

  “So when they left, the Littlest Hulk —”

  “Who?”

  “Tank — like I told you. He just tossed the key thing — the card — and I picked it up and went in there.”

  “And?”

  “And it was smashed up all to shit.”

  “So, that’s my point,” she says. “Explain to me how that can be, if what you told me is true?”

  You swallow hard. “Well, I heard stuff being broken. I mean, I heard a crash. Then I heard a thump. You know what I mean? Like that. But it was weird, because there was no — were no — shouts.”

  “So they covered his mouth.”

  “If you say so, but there was no bumping around. No fight, no . . . nothing.”

  “It was three on one,” she says. “How big a fight could there be?”

  “Okay, you got me. I hear you. Fine. Believe what you want.”

  There is a pause. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just don’t get it.”

  “But . . .”

  “But what, Blink? I really want to know. I’m trying to understand.”

  What is it you hear in her voice? There is something there. Like she doesn’t want to believe you but doesn’t want you to stop, either. Like she’s having this fight, too, and things are crashing and thumping all around in her head, and it doesn’t make sense.

  “It’s this feeling,” you say. “It’s like, in my experience, when things get broken and fall over, there has to be other things going on, you know?” Then you figure out how to explain it. “Shit doesn’t happen in silence,” you say.

  There. You’ve made your best case. You listen closely because maybe there are cops there, wherever she is. Maybe they’re tracing this call somehow, the way they do on cop shows. You imagine some guy with earphones. CSI. You can picture it, and you can feel Captain Panic coming on, but you fight him down. Because all you can really hear is Alyson and wind sounds. There is just the two of you. Maybe you’re that big a fool, but maybe you don’t care anymore. You look up and out at the world passing by your phone booth. No one so much as looks at you. You’re used to that; right now you’re glad of it.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “Don’t thank me. I mean, it’s so freaking weird. But I wanted you to know because maybe it’s not so bad as . . . you know . . .”

  “Maybe,” she says. But her voice sounds grouchy, like she didn’t really mean “thank you,” but she was brought up proper and that’s what you say when someone is telling you stuff you don’t want to hear.

  “Blink?” she says, and her voice drops to a whisper.

  “I’m here.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “So, talk.”

  “No, I want to see you.”

  You jump back like lightning just shot right out of the phone. You jump back so far, the steel phone cable jerks your head to a stop.

  “Yeah, right,” you say.

  “I mean it.”

  “Yeah, you and the cops or whatever.”

  “No. Just us. Here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “In Kingston. Please, Blink, I need to talk to you.”

  You pause. She is so setting you up, Blink! You’ve been living on the street for near on six months now. You may be careless sometimes — you have your moments — but you aren’t anybody’s fool.

  “No way.”

  “Please,” she says, her whispering voice urgent. “I swear to God I won’t tell anyone.”

  You know you want to do it. You know you want to go to her. You set this trap yourself, even if you didn’t mean to. You are such a sap! You set the trap when you placed her picture in front of you on the top of the pay phone. You’ve been looking at her the whole time you were talking. And she’s smiling at you from her lawn, in her summer dress, with her honey-blond hair and her perky little breasts and with that wide ocean of water behind her. You close your eyes to escape from her smiling eyes. Because it’s not just her — that’s not all of what this is about. It’s coming to you now, slowly, the understanding. This greed of yours: for money, sure; but for some kind of power; attention; love.

  “Why?” you say after about a million years.

  “Because I have this . . . I don’t know . . . Oh, this is going to sound totally whacked.”

  “What?”

  She takes a deep breath, and her voice comes back a little shaky with excitement. “I have this idea that I know where he is.”

  That was not what you expected her to say.

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. And I can’t tell anyone. Which is why I want to talk to you.”

  “This is so fucked up.”

  “I know, I know. It’s a long —”

  Then suddenly her voice is gone, and an automated voice is talking to you in French.

  “Hey!” you shout. “Alyson? Hello?”

  Now the voice switches to English, telling you that you have only one dollar left on your card.

  “Okay, okay, okay!” you shout at the voice. Then the warning is over. “Alyson?” But the line is dead.

  Caution wakes up with Wayne-Ray hovering over her.

  “I’m going to Timmy Ho’s for breakfast,” he says. “You want I should bring you something?”

  She clutches her blanket to her and realizes there is a comforter she hadn’t started out with.

  She rubs sleep from her eyes. “What time is it?”

  “It’s seven,” he says. “Sorry. I got to be at work by eight.”

  She rubs hers face. Remembers her dream. Or was it a dream?

  “Kitty?”

  “Oh, right,” she says. “Coffee. Thanks. Double-double.”

  As soon as he’s gone, she gets up to use the toilet. The shower curtain is still wet from his shower. She finds a clean towel on a shelf and strips down, wishing she’d thought to bring her stuff in here so she could change into fresh underwear. But the shower is wonderful, hot, the pressure good for such an old place. The water digs into her muscles. She wants to stay in the shower all day but realizes he’ll be back soon. She’s dressed by the time he returns.

  “Oh,” he says, seeing her wet hair. “Good.”

  “Did I stink?” she says.

  “Like someone who’d been up to her neck in skunks,” he says.

  She smiles and takes the coffee from him. There are doughnuts, too. She takes a Boston cream and wonders if he remembered it was her favorite. She doesn’t deserve this. Not any of it. She looks up into his broad brown face. She lays her hand on his chest, at a place she remembers pounding away at the night before.

  “Are you all black and blue?” she says sheepishly.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, grinning. “I’m good and tenderized.”

  “Sorry,” she says.

  He shrugs. “Rage is good,” he says.

  Caution: Use Hand Rail. She’s afraid he’s going to start in on some lecture, so she makes a big deal about setting the table in the changing room–size kitchen.

  He works at Long & McQuade, selling guitars. He likes it there. Meets lots of musicians, he tells her, as they sit across from each other at the tiny white table, their knees banging together. “I wanted to tell you something,” he says, wiping powdered sugar off his lips, trying not to get any on his work shirt. She quakes, but it’s not as if she can stop him.

  “I’m going to go back
to TMI. They said I could come back when I was, you know, ready.”

  Ah. “And you’re ready?”

  He shrugs, takes another bite of his doughnut. “Maybe next fall,” he says.

  Next fall. A year away. She can’t remember the last time she tried thinking past tomorrow.

  “That’s good,” she says. He nods. “Good for you, Wayne-Ray.”

  He glances at his watch, slurps his coffee. She can see there is more coming and that it’s time sensitive.

  “That’s just sort of a lead-in to what I wanted to say.”

  Right, she thinks, and folds her hands together on the crumbly tabletop, her head bowed.

  “I had to get help,” he says, his voice cast as gentle and low as he can. “I couldn’t, you know, do it alone.”

  “Yeah, well —”

  But he won’t let her shut him down. “I was numb. You know what I mean. I was dazed and numb. I needed someone to tell me numb was good. It serves a purpose. That’s what they said, right? Gives your emotions time to . . . time to sort of catch up.” He waits, and she guesses he must be looking at her, but she can’t seem to raise her eyes from the gravitational pull of her coffee cup.

  “The guy I was seeing. He talked about ‘Life under reconstruction.’ That’s what he called it. I went to these group meetings, too. He talked about ‘companioning.’”

  “Listen, Wayne-Ray, I saw a doctor —”

  “No, you didn’t, Kitty. Not the kind of doctor I’m talking about. ’Less you mean you saw one here. I’m guessing that didn’t happen.”

  She wasn’t going to lie to him, but what was the point?

  “Hey,” he says, nudging her hand with his hand. “Sermon over. Okay?” She doesn’t look up. “Okay?” he says again.

  She nods.

  Then he clears up and brushes his teeth and collects his phone from where it’s recharging. He writes down his cell number. He has no landline, but there is a phone booth out on Roncesvalles. He tells her where. She nods through all of his solicitations, knowing this to be the price she has to pay for a roof over her head and a place to hide.

  She follows him to the door, when it is past time for him to leave, and submits to a big cousin bear hug. Then he tips her face upward.

  “I need to ask you a big favor,” he says. “I need you to be here when I get back. You understand?”

  “Why?” she says.

  “I need you not to run away. I don’t think I could stand losing you again.”

  Her throat burns. The muscles of her face contract and tighten.

  “I don’t deserve —”

  “I don’t have time to hear that,” he says. “But there is something I need to tell you. No, don’t roll your eyes — it’s not anything you think. It’s not any more sermons or like that. Promise. It’s way more important than that.”

  His face is so serious. “What?”

  “There isn’t time to tell you now. That’s why you’ve got to, got to, got to be here.”

  “Okay,” she says meekly.

  “I’m serious, Kitty. Promise me.”

  Can she promise she will still be there in eight hours? Can she even be sure she’ll be alive in eight hours?

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  And then he’s gone. She locks the door, though it’s not a lock Merlin would have any trouble destroying. He doesn’t know where you are, she tells herself, and wonders why she finds this so hard to believe. But she doesn’t wonder for long. She lies down on the couch. She just needs a bit more sleep. Just a bit.

  You race from the phone to the nearest convenience store to buy a new card. The twenty-dollar kind, and you race back to the phone, still warm from your breath on it, your hand squeezing it.

  “What happened?” she says.

  So you tell her. “Couldn’t you hear them talking to me?” you say.

  “No. Your voice cut off. Just like that.”

  “Sorry,” you say. And then you ask her what she meant about knowing where her father was.

  “It was weird,” she says. “I was watching the video on the television — it must have been the millionth time — and suddenly I got this odd feeling inside. I mean, at first all I could see was that it was him and he was okay. He wasn’t beat up . . . well, anyway.” She pauses, and you imagine her shaking a bad image out of her head. “So, my eyes sort of wandered — took in the wall behind him.”

  “Chipboard.”

  “Whatever. Yes. Chipboard. And somehow I felt I knew that wall.”

  She sniffs. You wait patiently, but a voice inside you is saying, This is the big news? She recognized chipboard? She should come look at your mother’s kitchen if she wants chipboard. Or your squat; every window is boarded with the stuff.

  “It’s pretty common,” she says, as if she’s reading your mind. “I know that. It’s just that it got me thinking, and I looked closer. I actually stopped the recording and zoomed in.”

  “And?”

  “And I thought I could see this stain. The outline of a stain.”

  Okay, you think, she’s nuts. Crazier than you. The stress has got to her.

  “I’m probably imagining it,” she says. “That’s what you’re thinking, right? I know. But listen, okay?”

  “I’m here,” you say.

  “You’re the only person I can tell this to, Blink. As weird as that sounds, it is the absolute truth.”

  The absolute truth: something beyond just plain, everyday truth. “I’m listening,” you say, real nice, because she said such magic words to you: You’re the only person . . . So who cares if she’s rowing with only one oar in the water?

  “My dad goes to this hunting lodge up north. It’s owned by QVD — that’s the company —”

  “I know. Queon.”

  “Right. So, anyone in the company can use this lodge. They have their own private lake — the whole thing. Dad goes up there to fish and hunt, when he can. He goes up with buddies or businesspeople or alone sometimes.”

  “And that’s where he is? At a hunting lodge?”

  “Just let me say this?” she says, like it’s a question but snappish, too. Then, “Sorry,” like she needs you to hear her out. You hope the story isn’t more than twenty dollars’ long.

  “When I was a kid, I wanted so much to go up there. Some of the guys in the company would take their sons up there, and I couldn’t understand why Dad never took me. So then he gave in, this one time. I was ten or eleven, I guess. It was going to be just the two of us, a little weekend fishing trip.

  “We get there, and it’s not very, you know, glamorous. I’m not sure what I was expecting. The lodge looks kind of grand from the outside, but it’s pretty run-down. It’s, like, cavernous, with log beams and rafters and all, but it’s really, really basic, with no plumbing or anything. An outhouse. I mean, really basic.”

  You listen, enthralled, not so much by the content of what she’s saying but because it feels so much like a conversation. Like you might be sitting down at Balzac’s with a coffee, chatting to this beautiful girl. This was what you bought into, isn’t it, Blink? All that money, sure, but the chance of something more.

  “Right off I start bitching,” she says. “And at first Dad just laughs because he had told me exactly what it was like and I was the one who wanted to come and . . . well, you know. So, anyway, there we are.”

  “And it’s really bad?”

  “The weather is not great, either. It’s cold and rainy. Suddenly this totally big-deal weekend with my dad is beginning to look like a bust. So I turn into this A1 brat. Pretty well right from the start. Dad plays it cool, trying to make it fun, but I’m just so ‘Let’s go home, I hate this,’ until he finally gets mad. He’s a sweetheart most of the time. I mean, he is so tolerant and fair and all that, but he loses it. It’s not even noon on Saturday, and he just snaps — tells me to pack up.”

  She laughs but not much. “We had some lunch before we headed off. Lipton’s chicken noodle soup. I
remember that really well. I wouldn’t eat it. Dad got severely pissed off. ‘There’s nothing else,’ he says, ‘And there’s no place to stop on the way home, so if you want to go hungry, that’s your business.’ You know the kind of thing parents say to bratty kids.”

  “Right.” Sure.

  “And I just throw my bowl at him. Just like that. I pick it up and hurl it. Smash!”

  “Wow. Really?”

  “I know. Such a bitch.”

  “So . . .” you say, leaving lots of space for her to jump in. “So?”

  “So that’s why I remember that wall. The one behind him in the ransom video.”

  “You can see a chicken noodle soup stain on the chipboard?”

  “Well, no. Not so much. Okay, not at all. But it rang a bell. And his hands are in front of him, right? Like they’re resting on a table? Do you see what I mean?”

  You’re not sure. Is this wishful thinking or what?

  “I have to find out,” she says urgently, her voice dropping in case anyone else might hear her other than you. You can imagine her leaning forward, clutching her cell phone tightly, her blue eyes trained on you, pleading. “I have to know, Blink.”

  “I don’t get it,” you say.

  She kind of growls and then apologizes, and you think maybe you are really stupid, because this probably makes perfect sense, just not to you.

  “It’s what you said, Blink. Don’t you get it? What you implied.” She’s whispering now. “If my daddy’s in on it; if he, you know, arranged this thing; well, I can’t — cannot — tell the cops.”

  “But why would he?”

  She makes an impatient sound. “There might be a reason. Something . . . a possibility. But there’s no way I can talk about it on the phone. Can you get here?”

  “Where?”

  “Kingston.”

  You don’t want to tell her that you have no idea where Kingston is. You remember the license in her father’s wallet, and it was an Ontario license, so — okay — Kingston is in Ontario and, hell, Ontario is only about as big as Europe. But you have money. Some. And you want to go. That’s the thing. You want to. But it’s still totally —

  “Blink?”

  “Uh, I guess so.”

  “Oh, great. Thank you. Thank you so much!” You can hear her sigh of relief, and it sounds real. “Oh, and Blink? You can drive, right?”