Free The Cuckoo's Child by Margaret Thompson Page A

expenditure of willpower. Ordinary tasks like cooking and cleaning demanded more energy than I could command. As far as school work was concerned, I was an automaton, on automatic pilot in a strangely muffled world. Day after day, I trudged endlessly through a featureless wasteland, exhausted and aimless.
    One end came the day I accidentally spilled a small vial of nitric acid on the top of the lab bench. It seethed venomously on the wood. I could not remember what to do with it. I stood there, Lot’s wife, unable to move or think. An immense weariness overcame me, and I sank onto a stool and laid my head down on my arms. My grade 9 class found me, apparently asleep, quite unresponsive, while a small puddle of acid at my elbow smoked and gnawed at the bench top, filling the air with its stench. The sight apparently cowed even the brashest boy in the class to silence.
    I floated on an uncharted sea, and events arranged themselves around me. The school board hastily granted me extended leave. The substitute teacher who had stood in for me before was summoned again. Somebody decided I should go for a while to Mum and Dad in Vanderhoof; they would look after me, and I could have a good rest, they said.
    So, you materialized again to escort me north, Stephen, and on a sparkling April day, I let Neil pack me into your battered pickup.
    As we turned onto the highway, I looked back. The lonely figure standing at the door, one arm raised, and Maisie twining her ginger form about his ankles, made my eyes prickle. The act of leaving felt significant in an undefinable way. There was portent in Neil’s arm held in still salute, in the clanging approach to the dark hold of the ferry, in the widening gap filled with churning water as the boat pulled away from the dock at Langdale, in the seagull that for a time kept pace with us as we crossed the Sound and then, its mission completed, suddenly veered away and was gone.
    That sense of a door closing, of finality, was still with me when we stopped for the night in Hope. We stayed at the Swiss Chalet motel. Remember the tiny cabins with heart-shaped holes in their front doors?
    We went to the Kan Yon restaurant and ate Chinese, or rather, you did while I picked at some fried rice, and then the empty evening loomed. The thought of sitting in my cabin appalled me. So did the effort of conversation.
    â€œWhy don’t you go and watch TV ?” I suggested. “I fancy a bit of a walk.”
    Your face instantly took on an anxious doggy look.
    â€œYou sure? You’ll be all right on your own? You don’t know the place—perhaps I’d better come too. It’ll be dark.”
    â€œNo!” It came out too sharp. “No, don’t be silly. How can you get lost in a town this size? I won’t be long, just need a bit of air.”
    You were reluctant. Wary too, now that I think about it, but you gave in and opened your own front door.
    â€œSee you then,” you said.
    I headed out of the back entrance of the motel and found myself on a road beside a large stand of firs. A wind stirred them gently, soft black feathers in a fan; it was quiet. The few steps I had taken had shut off the noise from the highway, muted the garish lights on the main drag. Another door closing behind me.
    I walked along the road. My white runners gleamed in the half-light. Soon the path angled downward, and I passed the driveways of old wooden houses half buried in bushes and trees that obviously rested on the bank of the river. I could hear the soughing of the water. The path turned and dipped again. Now it led straight to the Fraser’s edge. Overhead, the narrow highway bridge made a dark bar against the sky. Headlights stuttered by its railings and tires zinged across the metal road bed.
    Down where I stood, the sounds and lights were an irrelevance. The river filled my consciousness. Its mass rolled by, even and unstoppable, its sombre green streaked occasionally by a little