She smoked her cigarette and we listened to the night. In neighboring houses, candles moved like restless ghosts behind darkened windows. The backyard opened onto a stretch of marshy, unimproved land where bullfrogs croaked out what Mama Laura used to call “that jug o’ rum noise.” Jenny and I had caught a huge bullfrog there, a year or so before puberty began to complicate our relationship. The frog was six inches snout to tail—I had held it still while she applied a tape measure from her mom’s sewing box. The frog had croaked all night in a box in Jenny’s garage, and in the morning her parents had made her turn it loose.
“Must be strange for you,” she said, “being back here.”
I shrugged.
“It is for me,” she said. “So many memories kind of overlapping, you know, like a multiple exposure. Things we did back in the day. I look at Geddy and I still see the chubby, awkward kid he used to be. All the crazy enthusiasm he couldn’t keep inside himself. You ever think about that stuff?”
“Sometimes.”
“About your family?”
“Sure. Sometimes.”
“Because I think it must be strange, coming back here, your father on his deathbed or close to it, and you and me about to hand Aaron a nasty ticket to obscurity.”
I almost wished I could tell her I had spent sleepless nights worrying about it.
“I have a different family now,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t sound callous, but whatever love I got in this house, I got mainly from Grammy Fisk, and she’s been gone a long time. I’m sorry for my father. I really am. But I was never much more to him than an afterthought and a distraction. He fed me and he tolerated me and he allowed me a place in his house. And I guess that’s worth thanking him for. But it’s nothing like love, and I can’t say I ever really loved him.”
Jenny looked at me as if from a great distance. “Actually,” she said, “yeah, that does sound a little callous.”
“The first people who took me into their home with genuine love were two old women with a big house in Toronto. I expect my father would call them a pair of rich old dykes. I still live in that house when I’m not on the road. I love everyone who lives in it with me. One of those women—Loretta—died a couple of years ago. Cancer, not very different from my dad’s. I cried when she passed, and I feel her absence every day, even now. I know what grief is, Jenny. I know where it comes from, and I know how people earn it.”
She sighed a plume of smoke to the starry sky. “Okay,” she said. “The funny thing is, that’s how I used to feel about this house, back when my folks were drunk or arguing or both. I came here because Grammy Fisk was nice to me, and Mama Laura never yelled, and I liked being with you, and Geddy was pretty entertaining. And if Aaron ignored me, that’s just because he was older and so good at everything. Some nights the only way I could get to sleep was by pretending this was my family, and that the only reason I had to go home was because I’d been born at the wrong address.”
It was a memorable phrase. Born at the wrong address.
“So maybe I think about those days more than you do,” Jenny finished.
“Maybe so.”
“But I doubt it, because some things you just don’t walk away from.”
“I walked away from here a long time ago.”
She smiled, a humorless compression of her lips. “Well, one thing hasn’t changed. You’re still a lousy liar.”
“I hope that’s not entirely true. The work I do these days, I’m a kind of diplomat. I help Tau negotiate deals with other Affinities. I need to lie from time to time. I’m one of the best liars we’ve got.”
She stubbed out her cigarette on the rim of one of Mama Laura’s big ceramic planters. “Then God help Tau, and God help us.”
* * *
I tried twice more to call Trevor Holst, without success. I needed to talk to him, but it looked like I wouldn’t be doing that before morning. It was late now. Mama Laura was tidying up the kitchen for the night, and the rest of us huddled around the radio, learning nothing. Geddy began to yawn.
Then there was a terse knock at the front door. “I’ll get it,” Mama Laura called from the kitchen. Twice tonight we had had visitors come to the door: neighbors who were running portable generators, offering to let us join them if we needed anything. Probably more of the same, I thought, until I heard Mama Laura’s stifled screech of alarm.
We all leaped up, but I was first to grab a flashlight and reach the door. Mama Laura stood in the door frame with her hand to her mouth. I aimed the light outside and saw what had scared her: a huge dark-skinned man with elaborate facial tattoos and blood oozing from a gash above his right eye.
“Trevor, Jesus,” I managed.
“Sorry,” he said meekly. “I would have called first, but…”
“Adam,” Mama Laura said, “do you know this man?”
“Yes. He’s a friend. Mama Laura, this is Trevor Holst.”
She relaxed visibly and exhaled a pent-up breath. “Oh. Then come on in, Mr. Holst. You seem to be hurt—I’ll get the iodine and some washcloths.”
Trevor clearly needed to talk to me privately, but we were obliged to do introductions and explanations. I took him to the living room. The candlelight made him seem even more intimidating than usuaclass="underline" his kirituhi tats looked inky black, and drops of blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried on his cheeks like tears. He wedged himself into a chair and put on his biggest hey-I’m-harmless smile, but even that seemed somehow vulpine.
I introduced him as a Tau friend who had been traveling with me and who had taken a room at the Holiday Inn for the weekend. Trev blamed the cut on his head on the blackout: “Streetlights went dark and I walked into a lamppost. Back at the hotel there was a bunch of folks trying to get rooms—a bus broke down at the town line and the driver couldn’t contact anybody for help. So I gave up my room for an older couple from Tennessee. Figured I’d transfer to the Days Inn, but they’re full too. Which is why I came by here to tell you I’ve got no place to stay and maybe get a recommendation—one of those motels up the highway closer to the county line, I’m thinking.”
By this time Mama Laura had come downstairs with a bowl of warm water and towels. She put the bowl on the coffee table and bent down to swab Trevor’s forehead. “Any other night,” she said, “I would recommend you get the folks at the Creekside Clinic to put in a couple of stitches in this cut. You gashed yourself pretty good. It might heal to a scar. But a cotton bandage will keep body and soul together for now. As for those motels on the highway, they’re chock full of bedbugs. You can stay here tonight, Mr. Holst.”
“That’s very generous, Mrs. Fisk—”
“You’ll have to sleep in the bed in the attic, I’m afraid, even though you’re too long for it by half. Is that all right?”
“Very much all right. Thank you. Please call me Trevor.”
“Everyone calls me Mama Laura.”
“Thank you, Mama Laura.”
She smiled. “You’re very welcome. You say you’re traveling with Adam?”
“From New York back to Toronto by way of Schuyler.”
“Then shame on Adam for leaving you at the Holiday Inn. His friends are always welcome here.”
Trev shot me an amused look. Yeah, shame on you. “It was my choice. I didn’t want to intrude on a family gathering.”
“Thoughtful of you, but I think it stopped being just a family gathering when the lights went out.”
* * *
Making up the bed in the attic, Mama Laura came across an ancient portable radio to supplement the one in the living room. Geddy installed fresh batteries and took it upstairs when he and Rachel retired.
Which left me and Trev and Jenny free to talk. Trev told Jenny he’d be driving when we left Schuyler and that he would make sure she was safe. Jenny gave the bandage on his head a careful look. Clearly, the plan had already gone awry. But she nodded her agreement and went upstairs without further questions.