The Searcher, стр. 39

“Well, that’s rough,” Cal says peacefully. “My girl, she did that one time. When she was eighteen. Got a bee in her bonnet about how me and her mama didn’t give her enough freedom, and off she went.” Alyssa never did any such thing. She was always a good kid, stuck to the rules, hated making people unhappy. But Sheila’s eyes have come back to him. “Her mama wanted to look for her, but I said no, let her win this one. If we go find her, she’ll be even madder, and she’ll just go farther next time. Let her go, and she’ll come back when she’s ready. You been looking for your boy?”

Sheila says, “Wouldn’t know where.”

“Well,” Cal says, “he got a passport? Can’t get too far without one of those.”

“I never had him one. He could’ve got it himself, but. He’s nineteen. Or you can get to England without.”

“Any places he wanted to see? People he talked about visiting? Our girl always did say she liked the sound of New York, and sure enough, that’s where she ran to.”

She lifts one shoulder. “Plenty of places. Amsterdam. Sydney. Nowhere I can go look for him.”

“When my girl went,” Cal says reflectively, rearranging his forearms on the gate and watching the kids take apart their chocolate, “her mama kept thinking we should’ve seen it coming. All that talk about New York, she figured that was a hint we should’ve caught. She tore herself up pretty bad about it. Boys, though, they’re different.” Cal never did like to use a daughter in his work stories; he mostly preferred to stick with his imaginary son, Buddy. Sometimes, though, a girl makes for a better angle. “They keep quiet, don’t they?”

“Brendan doesn’t,” Sheila says. “He’s a great talker.”

“Yeah? He dropped hints he was thinking about leaving?”

“Nothing about leaving. He said he was sick of it, only. Sick of having nothing to do. No money. There was a load of things he wanted, always, and he could never . . .” She throws Cal a glance that’s a mix of shame and defiance and resentment. “It wears you out.”

“That it does,” Cal agrees. “Specially if you can’t see your way out. That’s hard on a young man.”

“I knew he was fed up. Maybe I should have . . .” The wind is slapping straggles of hair across her face; she wipes them away, hard, with the back of a work-reddened hand.

“You can’t blame yourself,” Cal says gently. “That’s what I told my wife. You’re not a mind reader. All you can do is work with what you’ve got.”

Sheila nods, unconvinced. Her eyes have slipped off him again.

“The other thing that hurt her,” Cal says, “was the note our girl left. Telling us how mean we were, and how it was all our fault. Me, I figured she was just working up a good head of steam to get herself out the door, but her mama didn’t see it that way. Your boy leave you a note?”

Sheila shakes her head again. “Nothing,” she says. Her eyes are dry, but her voice has a raw, scraped sound.

“Well, he’s young,” Cal says. “Same as my girl was. That age, they don’t realize what they’re doing to us.”

Sheila says, “Did your girl come back?”

“Sure did,” Cal says, grinning. “Took her a couple of months, but once her point was made and she got tired of working in a diner and sharing a studio full of roaches, she came running. Safe and sound.”

She smiles, just a twitch. “Thank God,” she says.

“Oh, we did,” Cal says. “God and the roaches.” And then, more soberly: “The waiting was hard, though. We were worrying every minute, what if she’s fallen in with some guy that doesn’t treat her right, what if she’s got nowhere to stay. And worse things.” He blows out air, looking up at the mountain. “Tough times. Maybe it’s different with a boy, though. You worry about him? Or you figure he can take care of himself?”

Sheila turns her face away from him, and he sees the long cord in her neck move as she swallows. “I worry, all right,” she says.

“Any particular reason? Or just ’cause you’re his mama, and that’s your job?”

The wind whips strands of her hair against the sharp peak of her cheekbone. This time she doesn’t push them away. She says, “There’s always reasons to worry.”

“I don’t mean to pry,” Cal says. “Pardon me if I’ve overstepped. I’m just saying, kids do the darnedest things. Most times, it all comes out in the wash. Not always, but mostly.”

Sheila takes a quick breath and turns back to him. “He’ll be grand,” she says, with a crisp snap to her voice all of a sudden; she doesn’t sound spacey any more. “Sure, I don’t blame him. He’s only doing what I should’ve done myself, when I was his age. Are you right, now, with them socks?”

“I’m a new man,” Cal says. “Thanks to you.”

“Right,” Sheila says. Her body is half-turned towards the house. “Liam! Alanna! Get off that yoke and come in for your dinner!”

“Much obliged,” Cal says, but she’s already hurrying off across the grass. She barely turns to nod over her shoulder before she’s gone behind the house, herding the kids in front of her with sharp flaps of her hands.

Cal walks back down the mountain. Apart from the patches of spruce, trees are few and far between; just the odd lonesome one, spiky and contorted, bare for winter and blown permanently sideways by the memory of hard prevailing winds. In the crook of a hill, someone’s been dumping garbage: a rusty iron bedstead, complete with stained mattress, and a heap of big plastic bags ripped open and spilling. Once he passes the stone-wall scraps of an abandoned cottage. An old crow, perched amid the grass that’s seeded in the cracks, opens its beak wide and tells him to keep moving.

He’s come across plenty of people like Sheila, both in his childhood