Free Three Days by Russell Wangersky Page A

with her ability to go stomping off righteously after the slightest provocation, her chin firmly in the air and ready to hold on to the slight for years; nor Heather, whose skill at winning any argument had left the rest of her siblings unwilling to talk to her about any important topic, let alone engage in debate. But he did miss the things they’d had, the things they’d done together — summers in Maine, for example, sailing small boats on the Eggemoggin Reach near Mount Desert Island. Rowing to any one of the small, empty islands along the reach to dig through ancient shell middens for arrowhead fragments or wandering the beaches collecting sand dollars.
    Art could remember heading out through the roiling tidal currents with his mother in the family canoe, his brother Dave in the middle, Art in the bow, pulling hard past one of the big houses on the shore, a Rockefeller relative or something with a great barn of a boathouse down on the shore, a seaplane nestled up at the top of the boathouse ramp like a stiff-winged bird waiting to be startled into instant motion, into uncatchable escape. Art could remember his mother saying that the salt water was riskier canoeing but better for the canoe, especially in the several places where beaching the craft had chipped the dark green paint away. “Salt water won’t help,” she had said, “but it won’t rot the canvas either.” He could remember the taste of that salt too, licking it off the back of his hand, his left hand, the hand that most often took the bottom grip on the canoe paddle. He remembered the day as being dark, glowering, the water particularly choppy, but all his reference points were gone: his mother, dead twenty years now, and Dave, buried some six years later after four long months of cancer fingering ungently through his bones. Art hadn’t been back to Maine for at least a decade; he wasn’t even sure that the map in his head was right.
    There was no one left to ask about it, Art thought, realizing — again — that his version of the experience was now the truth, merely by being the only one left in existence. It could have been sunny that day, he thought. I could have gotten it wrong. His mother might only have told him about the seaplane; the doors to the boathouse might have been tightly closed, the rest of it in his head.
    It might not have been the Rockefellers at all, although he knew for certain they’d had summer homes there.
    And he did get it wrong sometimes. Several times, years earlier, he’d told his brothers and sisters about something he remembered, only to be met with blank stares and incomprehension.
    â€œYou have the most vivid imagination.” That would have to have been Eleanor, who, if nothing else, was always certain that her version was absolutely, impeccably right. Dismissive.
    Now, Art thought, she would have been the right one to be the survivor — but she’d gone, and gone quick, too. One morning she’d called a nearby friend, another retired and widowed woman, who’d arrived in a rush to find every single coffee maker in the house taken apart and laid out on the counter: glass percolator, French press, filter drip. Every piece laid out in order like a mechanic’s tear-down manual, as if she were trying to figure out just exactly how each of them worked. It was a startling combination of scientific rigour and absolute bewilderment.
    â€œAll I want is a cup of coffee,” the normally prim Ellie had told her friend. “And I don’t care what the fuck you have to do to make it.”
    Two months later, she was dead too, also cancer, tumours cropping up in her brain and everywhere else like weeds filtering up through a lawn, travelling along unseen, unmarked tangles of underground roots.
    â€œIt wasn’t anywhere until it was everywhere,” her doctor told Art on the phone, at the same time managing to make it sound as if he felt he had