Off Season - Jack Ketchum [88]
It was just what I’d wanted. And now I had it.
And now it was my turn to suffer.
I sat in bed wondering how I was going to make it up to him, trying to get up the nerve to go apologize. I thought about my mother and sister and knew he was every bit as lonely and unhappy as I was. Probably more so.
I’d been a little shit and I knew it.
I felt like crying.
I was still trying to fix the right words in my mind, to get up the courage to go out and say something when I heard a knock at the door.
Not a loud knock. Almost hesitant, soft. Politesounding. Which was strange because the night was absolutely wild, cold wind howling and the snow streaming by my window so that tomorrow was going to be a replay of today weather-wise, and here’s this sound at the door like a neighbor come to visit on a bright sunny summer day. I heard my father get out of his armchair and cross the floor and heard the door open and than I heard his voice, excited, though I couldn’t quite make out the words. I heard stamping feet and our pregnant hound Betty growling and my father shushing her and then the door slammed shut.
I sat up in bed and it was the slamming door that did it, all at once—all of a sudden I was frightened. As though whatever was out there that isolated us on that winter night was inside with us now and the closing of the door made it final. I knew instinctively that whatever it was, it was not going to go away, and that scared me too. It was the first time in my life I’d ever had the sense of something, yet I knew immediately that it was a completely true sense like any other, like sight, taste or touch, and for a moment its sudden presence in my life blinded me. In my mind I saw something dark moving along a forest floor, something that lived and belonged there, a human shape yet belonging to the forest.
Not in here.
I was just a boy. I didn’t understand.
I heard my father call and walked out of my bedroom, knowing I wasn’t just shaking from the cold air swirling over my feet. The dog was growling again low and steady. My father ignored her this time. He was full of purpose, eyes moving fast over the girl who stood in front of him as he brushed her down, threw a blanket over her and moved her gently toward the fire.
I’d never seen anybody so pale.
She looked to be eleven or twelve, with light brown hair and wide green eyes. She wore a dirty woolen coat over a thin white cotton blouse and a faded floral-print skirt that came down to her ankles over a pair of old galoshes that looked nearly frozen to her feet. My father positioned her so that her feet pointed away from the fire so they wouldn’t warm too quickly. Her face was streaked with dirt. So were her wrists and hands.
“Turn on the stove, Jordy,” he said. “Put up some water.”
I did what he said while he rubbed her arms and legs. The girl just sat there silent. Then she looked at me in the kitchen by the stove as though she’d noticed me for the first time.
And I remember thinking, here is somebody who has probably almost died out there, and it astonished me, because her face betrayed nothing—no fear, no pain, and no relief. Her face was the flat even surface of a pond on a windless day. It was as though she’d been out for a stroll and was back at someplace familiar, just as expected.
When the water was warm he poured some into a bowl and used a warm wet cloth to wipe down her face and hands and told me to put the kettle back on for some tea. By then she had a little color in her face. Betty had stopped growling. She lay in the corner by the stack of firewood looking very pregnant and basset-hound mournful and somewhat uncomfortable in her skin. The girl shifted closer to the fire and sipped her tea while my father worked slowly