Free Blink & Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones Page A

thinks of something she can say. “I’m up to my neck in skunks, Wayne-Ray.”
    He smiles, a Charlie Brown smile. His whole face is kind of crooked. He’d broken his nose bad playing baseball when he was a kid, had a scar on his chin the shape of a ground-rule double.
    “Up to your neck, eh?”
    It was something they used to say, although the skunks they were referring to way back then weren’t vicious, sadistic drug dealers whose stash had been pinched.
    “You hungry?” he asks.
    “Oh, God, yes.”
    He nods. “Okay.” But there’s a question in his eyes, and she braces herself.
    “What the hell’d you do to your hair?” he says.
    She sits with a bowl of stew at a tiny white table in a spotless kitchen about the size of a changing room. It’s venison stew. He was home a week or so and came back with gallons of the stuff.
    The stew is hot, the gravy rich, the meat tender. Auntie Lanie never bothered much with vegetables. Caution has a hold of her spoon like she’s six years old and wants the bowl to never be empty.
    After she eats, they sit in his front room. She curls up on his couch with her feet under her bum. He fusses with a space heater, plugging it in so it’s close to her, then switching it up to high. There’s a draft coming from behind her, bringing up goose bumps on her naked neck, but it’s all right. She flips up the collar on her jacket.
    “You sure I can’t hang that up for you?” he says.
    She shakes her head, smoothing down the fuzzy blue pelt. “It’s my security blanket,” she says. “I kind of empathize with it, you know?”
    Wayne-Ray shakes his head. “You always were wired funny.”
    He means it nicely, she tries to tell herself. But she’s afraid it’s true. Knowing that she’s capable of unthinkable things.
    He sits in an easy chair, a few feet away, with a cup of tea beside him on the wide armrest. She feels the nap of the cushion under her. She knows this worn fabric, knows this couch. It used to be in Auntie Lanie’s parlor. She shakes her head. It’s as if she’s fallen down a rabbit hole. She closes her eyes. The stew and the infrared heat are making her sleepy. She can’t shake the feeling that any minute her cousin is going to remember how much he hates her. It will be so bad because she doesn’t think she has the energy to leave of her own volition, so he will have to drag her to the door and fling her down the stairs. She will understand.
    “Have you . . . ?” he starts. “Have you been here all along?”
    She shrugs. Shakes her head. “I was in Sudbury for a while, but it was too close. You know?” He nods.
    “But you didn’t see your dad?”
    She shakes her head. “I got a job up there for a few weeks, and when I had the money, I took off again.”
    The only light in the room comes though the windows behind her, from a streetlight. He’d turned on the overhead, but she’d covered her eyes and begged him to turn it off again.
    “So, how long since you got to Toronto?”
    With her eyes closed, she can almost imagine that the warmth coming up from the heater is from a woodstove. When Spence moved to Toronto to go to school, she’d had to carry in the firewood back home. She was only nine and she’d hated it. Wished they’d had electric baseboards, like people in town. Mostly what she’d hated was Spence being so far away.
    “You should’ve called,” says Wayne-Ray. “We’re family.”
    She nods. Doesn’t look up.
    “Everybody’s been worried sick.”
    “You said that.”
    “Your mother —”
    “Oh, jeez, Wayne-Ray. Lay off, will ya?”
    “It’s just that —”
    “I’m serious, man. I hear you. And I really appreciate you taking me in. I promise . . .”
    Where did that come from? Promise? What could she promise him?
    “I promise I’ll get in touch . . . when I can.”
    “When’ll that be?”
    “When I can.”
    He doesn’t say anything, and she wonders if he believes her. Why should he? But if she doesn’t want to talk