His heart started pounding.
His father saw her, too. He pulled the car straight over to the visitor parking pad, not around to the driveway on the far side. He switched off the engine. The three of them sat a moment, looking up at her.
It was late in the day now, the sun over the city, light slanting back along the valley, in their eyes, the shadows of the cypress trees very long. The woman came down the steps onto the grass, then she stopped.
“I’ll go,” Ned said.
He got out and walked across the lawn. In the light, her auburn hair was gleaming. She looked amazingly beautiful to him.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t the crying type. He was taller than she was now. Hugs were awkward. He was fifteen, wasn’t he?
He liked the way she held him, though, and said his name: half reproving, half reassuring. And he liked her known scent. And that she was here. That she wasn’t in a civil-war zone where people were being blown up, or hacked apart with farm tools—even if they wore armbands that marked them as doctors come from far away to help.
He’d gotten her out. But this wasn’t just his way of drawing her from the Sudan. They needed her here. He was almost sure of it.
He was also sure trouble was coming, in a red car not far behind them.
“We didn’t expect you till later,” he said.
“Why, dear?”
A mistake. Already. His first words. Jeez.
“You said evening to Dad, didn’t you? Yesterday?”
“Did I? I must have been guessing. I was able to bump onto an earlier flight from Charles de Gaulle. The only hassle was the taxi driver having no idea how to find this place. I had to call. The woman here gave him directions.”
“Veracook?”
Meghan Marriner smiled. “That what you call her?”
“Have to. There’s a Veraclean, too.”
“That’s fun.” His mother withdrew, looking past him. “Hello, honey. Reporting for duty. Present and accounted for.”
“Meg.”
He watched his father come up. His parents kissed. His mom laid her head on his father’s chest. There was a time when he’d have been embarrassed by that.
“You going native, cher?” His mother stepped back, eyeing his father’s bare torso.
“Last of the Mohicans. It’s a long story. We’ll tell, but it would be good if you had a look at Gregory first. Do you have a kit? We’ve only got basic first-aid stuff.”
“What happened?” Her tone changed.
“We ran into some trouble.”
“Ed. What kind of trouble?”
Ned looked back; Greg was getting out of the car. You could see blood on his arm all the way from here. It had soaked through the shirt bandage.
Uncle Dave had driven his Peugeot around the far side of the house, to the driveway, out of sight. Ned heard a distant car door close, but Martyniuk didn’t appear.
“Greg got clawed by an animal,” Ned heard his father saying. “I wrapped my shirt around it.”
“A wild animal? He’ll need rabies shots. Where were you? Gregory, come and let me see that!”
Ned took note that his father didn’t answer either question.
Uncle Dave still didn’t appear. He must have entered the house through the main door on the other side, under the hill slope. Leaving us to our reunion, Ned thought.
Then he thought something else.
They hadn’t expected his mom to be here yet. And she’d know him, from Darfur. They’d been there until yesterday. There couldn’t be that many people associated with Doctors Without Borders in the Sudan. And this wasn’t the only time he’d been where she was, either.
She would go, to put it very mildly, ballistic when she figured out what he’d been doing. More trouble. But there was no way around this one, was there? Unless Uncle Dave stayed out of sight all the time. He was doing that now, but there was no . . .
They heard another car, gearing down for the last upward slope of the road. Ned turned, saw the red Peugeot approach. It stopped, idling in front of the gates.
“I’ll do the code,” he said quickly, and ran back over.
He punched the numbers. The gates swung and clanged. Aunt Kim drove through. Ned saw Steve in the passenger seat. Kate smiled at him from the back. His aunt slid her window down.
“Ned. How’s Greg?”
“He’s okay. Aunt Kim, my mom’s here. She’s checking him out, and—”
But his aunt’s gaze had gone past him. She was looking into the serene, end-of-day light towards her younger sister. Ned turned. His mother was still beside Greg but was looking back this way now, at the woman driving the red car.
They hadn’t seen each other, he thought, in something like twenty-five years. There was an ache in his throat, a rawness. You could think about the endless story they’d stumbled into here and call twenty-five years nothing, a blink. Or you could know that they were a good part of two lifetimes, never to return or be reclaimed.
He thought of Brys. The latest body buried in Les Alyscamps. The druid had spent so long trying to get something back. It couldn’t be done, Ned thought. Even if you thought you’d achieved it, what returned couldn’t be the same as what had been taken away.
“I’ll park the car,” Kimberly said quietly.
Ned stepped back and watched as she drove around the far side. With everything that was happening, this felt like one of the hardest things. He wanted to fix it, but he was feeling like a kid again, and that was hard, too. It occurred to him that, in a way, this was what the druid had been doing: trying to fix something that couldn’t be made right. How did you undo conquered Gauls on a Roman arch?
How did you undo twenty-five years of silence?
He watched his aunt walk back around the side of the house. Kate and Steve were behind her but they stopped. Kim went over the grass towards her sister. The two women looked so much alike—even with the entirely white hair and the dark red—seeing them together just made it obvious.
Ned started back that way. He saw his father’s face, the apprehension there. Greg looked worse, actually, as if he could rattle off a dozen places he’d rather be just now. He made as if to back away, but Ned’s mother, holding an end of the blood-soaked shirt-bandage, said sharply, “Hold still!”
“She needs a good look, Greg,” said Aunt Kim, stopping beside them. “Do we have antibiotics here?”
“I do,” said Meghan Marriner, uncovering the wound. “Hello, Kim.”
“Hello, Meg. How does it look?”
“Fairly shallow. More messy than dangerous. Clean and stitch. But he’ll need rabies shots.”
“Uh-uh,” said Greg. “Dr. Marriner, I don’t, it was a scratch, not a bite. And we don’t have time.”
“I do love it when my patients treat themselves. Makes me wonder why I did seven years of medical training. You can guarantee with mortal certainty no saliva got on those claws, Greg? Really? You’ll bet your life on it?”
Ned knew that tone of his mother’s. He’d grown up with it. Her response to illogic.
Greg didn’t waver, though. He kept on surprising.
“Can’t guarantee that, but I do know, Doc—and the boss and Ned know, too—that it wasn’t a rabid wolf.”
“It was a wolf?” Meghan said, her voice rising.
They hadn’t told her, Ned realized.
“Same ones we saw before, Ned?” Aunt Kim asked quietly.
He swallowed. “Maybe. I’m not so good at telling them apart, and it was dark the other time. They were spirits, though, from Beltaine.”
“Oh, Christ!” his mother snapped. “I absolutely refuse to start in with—”
Ned touched her arm. She stopped. Looked at him. He could see fury in her eyes.
“Mom. Please. You have to start in. You have to listen, or you can’t help. They were coming for me, Mom.”
His mother stared at him. He saw anger slipping, replaced by something trickier to define. �
�What does that mean?”
Ned looked at his father for help. Edward Marriner said, gravely, “It was pretty clear they were there to kill Ned, honey. And that they were ordered to do so.”
“Ordered? Ed are you—”
“Meg, I’m neither insane nor addled. I’m desperately glad you are here because we need your thinking, and in a hurry. But honey, you have to be thinking, not fighting us.” He hesitated. “Meg, I killed a wolf today in Les Alyscamps. And it was going for our son. It was given orders by a druid, Meg.”
Ned saw his mother’s eyes widen. “Oh, my! A real druid? Did he wave his mistletoe at you?”
A small silence.
“No,” her husband said. “He was killed when they attacked us.”
He didn’t say, yet, who had killed him.
Meghan looked at Ned again, then at Greg, wounded.
Greg shrugged. “I got in the way, ma’am. He’s telling the truth.”
Aunt Kim was still saying nothing. It was hard to read her expression.
Edward Marriner stepped closer. “Meg, this isn’t some grand conspiracy to make you revisit your family history. Something’s going on here, and that may mean that more than you think went on back then . . . but that isn’t the point now. Please listen when I say this. Please look at me and believe me.”
His wife stared at him. Her body was rigid with tension. Ned had never seen her like this. She turned to her sister.
“What have you done?” she said.
Aunt Kim stared back. It occurred to Ned, after, that if Uncle Dave had been beside them on the grass, she might not have reacted as she did. But he wasn’t.
“Oh, how perfect!” Kimberly snapped. “A flawless question, Meg. What comes next? We revisit how I dyed my hair white to fool everyone? How I got married and ran away just to reject you? Are you still a teenager?”
Meghan Marriner didn’t back down. “I never said me. I said your mother, too. Our mother. And you know it.”
“Our mother did a very good job of keeping close, Meghan, to the end of her life. She visited us, and you know it. We spoke all the time, and wrote, and visited. You know that, too. You made a point of staying away when we did. And she never, ever told me she was hurt by anything I’d done.”
“You’d expect her to say it? Mother? Oh, come on, Kim, you know better than—”
“I knew her as well as you did, Meghan. And she understood me a whole lot better than you did. I left because I couldn’t pick up the life I’d lived. I wanted to, I thought I would. I couldn’t. Too much had happened. You were the only person who mattered who didn’t see that. Want to talk about hurting someone? Meg, I came down here when I realized what had already happened to Ned. I’m trying to protect him. And get Melanie back. This is not about you and me.”
This is not just about the three of them.
The druid had said that, at least twice. He might even have been right. Just as Aunt Kim might be right, or not. Because maybe this was, in some hard way, about the two sisters . . . and him. Maybe there were places where the past didn’t go away, and maybe there were people for whom it stayed.
Ned looked at his father. Edward Marriner had the posture of a man desperate to say something, but having no idea what words would do more good than harm.
Which was pretty much how Ned felt.
Aunt Kim was still angry. He hadn’t seen her this way yet, either. “Meg, I said goodbye to my own mother in Toronto a full month before she died. I didn’t go to her funeral because she asked me not to. Said it would be too hard for you if I were there. You want to think about that?”
Hearing this, Ned was suddenly even more certain there was nothing he—or anyone—could say. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know any more about it. Greg looked stricken, as if he very badly wanted to get away, over by Kate and Steve at the drive. Way out of earshot.
Ned watched his mother. She looked shaken. “No, I don’t, actually,” Meghan Marriner said. “Not right now. I don’t want to think about that.”
Aunt Kim shrugged. “You thought I just didn’t bother to come. That I didn’t care enough. Of course, I could be lying about this, too. The way I lied about my hair. The way your husband and son are lying now about the wolves. You could decide that, Meg.”
Ned’s mother shook her head. “False choice, Kim. It doesn’t have to be truth or lie for them. People make mistakes, people get misled.”
“Mom!”
“Honey, that isn’t—”
“Meg, why would I mislead them? Listen to yourself!”
A silence as the three overlapping voices subsided.
Meghan Marriner looked from one to the other. “I feel like I’m being ganged up on.”
“You are,” Ned said. “But Mom—”
“Dr. M., can I say one thing?”
They all looked at Greg, with the blood on his arm. “I was clawed by a wolf just now. And it was given orders by a little guy who was a druid. I know that last for sure because of something he did to me last night. And that same guy was killed about an hour ago, and three of the wolves.”
Meghan Marriner looked at Greg for a long time.
“That was more than one thing,” she said.
Greg shrugged. “Sorry.”
Ned was watching his mother struggle with something embedded in herself. This was hard for him. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for her. He said nothing. He really, truly, didn’t know what he could say.
She drew a breath, finally. “All right. Fine.” Meghan turned to her sister. “I’m too old, I guess, for a certain kind of fight. I’m not very good with changes, though. Too old for that, too.”
“None of us are good with changes,” Kimberly said, quietly.
Meghan looked at her. “You’ve grown into the white hair, at least.”
Ned drew a breath. He saw Aunt Kim close her eyes. When she opened them, they were suspiciously bright. One sister might be the crying type.
“I like that red on you,” she said.
His mother made a face. “Once a month. Jean-Luc on Greene Avenue. I’d be sad and grey without him.”
She looked around at the others. Something had changed. The rigidity was gone. “Let’s get Greg cleaned up,” she said, “then you’ll tell me what’s going on. I need to know about Melanie.”
“All right,” said Kim, “but there’s a lot to tell. We’ll need wine.”
“I can do that,” Ned’s father said, almost too brightly.
Glancing across the grass, Ned saw Kate Wenger looking awkward and apprehensive, as if she felt she didn’t belong here. He wanted to go reassure her, but he couldn’t. Not yet. Something else, first.
“Can someone please ask Verawhatever to boil water?” Meghan Marriner said.
“I got that,” Ned said.
He took the terrace steps two at a time. Inside, he gave Veracook the request and told her there’d be two more for dinner. Then he went looking for his uncle.
He found him in the main-floor ensuite, off the bedroom Kim and Kate had shared. Melanie’s room.
He was shaving. That was why he hadn’t come out.
Grey and brown hairs were in the sink and on the tiled floor. Martyniuk had laid down his scissors and was lathered up, using a razor on the stubble that remained. He was working too fast and had cut himself a couple of times.
“You really think that’ll do it?” Ned asked from the bathroom doorway.
His uncle glanced at him from behind shaving cream. “We are all doomed if it doesn’t, right?”
“Not me,” said Ned. “You are. I had zip to do with this one.”
“Abandon me to my fate?”
“With my mother? Damn right.”
“What happened out there?” Dave Martyniuk was swooping the razor across his cheeks and neck.
Ned hesitated. “So far, okay. Better than I thought.”
“No explosion is better than I thought. How do I look?”
“Almost as bloody as Greg,” Ned said.
<
br /> His uncle scowled at his reflection. “I’ll deal with that. But do I look different enough?”
Ned nodded. “I think so.”
“Give me five more minutes.”
“They’re boiling water to clean Greg’s wound. Slow down, you’ll attract sharks.”
His uncle grinned. “I like it. I have a witty nephew.” He suspended the blade a moment. “Only one I’ve got.”
Ned looked at him. “Don’t you . . . I thought you had a brother and . . .”
“Two nieces there. Older than you.”
Ned swallowed. “And you and Aunt Kim never . . . ”
Dave Martyniuk shook his head briskly. “No, we never did. Is it too late for me to teach you a post-up move to the hoop?”
Ned tried to smile. He was old enough to know there was more to this. “I’m not tall enough. Perimeter game, defence, that’s my thing.”
His uncle shook his head again. “Uh-uh. The good guards have to know how to post-up when they get a mismatch. We’ll find a basketball net later.”
“I know where there are courts here.”
Martyniuk was shaving too rapidly again. “Good,” he said. Then swore, as the blade nicked his throat. “Go on back, I’ll be there in a few, unrecognizable.”
“OH MY GOD!” Meghan Marriner said.
She had looked up from where she was treating Greg at the dining-room table. “Ivorson? What are you doing here? I don’t—”
She stopped, very abruptly. Ned could see her figuring it out. Already. You could almost chase succeeding thoughts as they crossed her face.
Dave Martyniuk, a dab of Kleenex on each of two cuts that hadn’t stopped bleeding, paused in the doorway to the dining area. Aunt Kim hurried over to him. They hugged each other, hard, then she stepped back.
Ned’s father’s introduction died on his lips.
Greg was in a chair at the table. Meghan had been wrapping a bandage. Pots of boiled water stood on trivets beside clean cloths and white spools of gauze and tubes of antibiotics.
Turning from beside her husband, Kimberly straightened her shoulders and looked at her sister, as if ready for a blow. Ned, with Kate by the glass doors to the terrace, felt a massive surge of anxiety. They were a long way from being out of the woods on this. He looked at his uncle.
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