Off Season - Jack Ketchum [89]
I listened to him asking her name, where she came from, how long she’d been out there, were her parents nearby. She never answered and after a while he stopped asking. She just looked at him calm and expressionless, shivering, glancing occasionally at me or the dog, and never uttered a sound or a cry though what my father was doing must have hurt some. Under the heavy wool socks her feet were almost blue from the cold. He kept at them with the warm wet cloth and after a while they were looking better.
We were both pretty tired by the time we saw her head start to nod and her eyes fall shut for longer and longer periods of time so it was a relief when my father picked her up and carried her into my room and put her down on my sister’s bed.
“I’m going to have to get these wet clothes off,” he said. “Wait outside a few minutes and I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
His tone was gentle and easy. Apparently I was forgiven for my bad behavior earlier. Even better, he sounded as though, for the moment at least, he’d shed his depression like a snakeskin.
When he called me back into the bedroom the girl was asleep beneath three layers of covers. He’d dressed her in a pair of my pyjamas. I didn’t mind. I was only happy to have my father back again, for however long it lasted.
“They’re too short,” he said, “but mine’d be too long. I don’t guess it matters. Lights out, okay?”
“Sure, dad.”
I crawled into my bed. He leaned over and kissed me good night.
I sat a long time in the dark listening to the wind in the birch tree just outside my window and the creaking familiar silences of the house, thinking about this strange new person asleep beside me in my dead sister’s bed, almost close enough to touch.
When I woke next morning she was sitting up looking at me with those big green eyes, her lips parted a little, long thin hands folded in her lap. And at first I thought she was my sister, the posture was so much alike. Then I started fully awake. She laughed.
The laugh was coy and girlish and in some way, I don’t know why, offensive to me. It sounded to me like breaking glass.
Betty chose that day to throw her litter.
I remember watching her struggle with the first one. The other two came easy but the first was hard. She whimpered and rolled her eyes, lying on the mat by the fire while my father and I waited with yet another pan of water and a washcloth. The girl watched too, sitting erect and slim and alert in a straight-backed rocking chair, wearing one of my father’s old flannel shirts that came all the way down to her knees. She’d put away three eggs, six strips of bacon and four pieces of toast for breakfast and looked none the worse for having weathered the storm last night.
But she still wouldn’t speak. My father’d tried to question her again at breakfast but all she did was smile and shrug and shovel away the food. Later on he took me aside.
“I think she might be slow, Jordy. It’s hard to say, though. She’s probably been through a lot.”
“Where’d she come from?”
“Don’t know.”
“So what are we going to do with her?”
“The phone lines are still down. Not much we can do except keep her warm and dry and fed and see what happens once the weather breaks.”
After breakfast he took us out to the barn to show us his progress on the Monitor, thinking I guess that maybe it might be of interest to her. It wasn’t. In fact she seemed repulsed by the thing, as though the ship or ships in general had some bad association for her, and I remember thinking that the sea was wrong for her somehow, I remembered thinking forest, and she went over to pet and stroke the horses instead. She wasn’t interested in the models in my room either. All the time she was with us she never touched them. Or in the magazines my father was handing her. Most of the time she just sat and stared, watching the fire or the dog, rocking, saying nothing.
The pups were all fine and one of them, the firstborn, was really a beauty—a male with rich red-brown fur, a black mask around