his lights off, at least not right away. Walker needs to be where he can see him coming. My boy.
Given who he is and the line he has walked with such vigilance, Walker Pike is far from careless, but sometimes you just. Get. Tired.
He closes his eyes but does not sleep. Exhaustion greases the ways and instead Walker recedes into reverie, slipping away from solid ground as smoothly as a newly launched ship; he is adrift now although he doesn’t know it, that’s how bad it is.
Put it to too many hours behind the wheel. He is stretched to the limit by proximity and the need to keep his distance. All those years keeping them safe. Lucy. The boy. He loves them so much!
‘Don’t give your heart to anyone,’ Pop said to his sons after their mother ran away, ‘look what it made of me,’ and Walker took it to heart.
He took it to heart and didn’t let go until he followed Lucy Carteret to Huntington beach that night for no known reason except that she was lovely and she didn’t know he was alive. As far as she knew, he was just the guy who fixed her grandmother’s car, a necessary piece of the infrastructure, but he was his own person by that time, with a real life three thousand miles away from Pop’s garage and the judgmental society of Fort Jude. She didn’t need to know.
She smiled at Walker without seeing beyond the smudge on his face or the grease on the coverall. He wouldn’t tell her that he’d been called home from Cambridge during exams because Pop was in the hospital. Wade phoned him, sobbing; he had to come. Nor did she have to know what the old man said to him that same night, tossing in the bed with his belly swollen and the toxic whites of his eyes the color of Betadine from the years of drinking that did in his liver and brought Walker home from MIT.
Pop was drunker than shit when he said it, Walker told himself, then and now. That damn fool pint of Jack Daniels on top of what the hospital was giving him; didn’t they frisk his friends before they let anybody in to visit him?
Pop was dead drunk when he said that terrible thing to me, Walker told himself resolutely; Pop didn’t know what he was saying; Pop was disconnected and raving. He was out of his mind with pain and alcohol and heavy duty meds compounded by whatever was in the IV flowing into him.
That night Pop raged for hours and Walker discounted it. Overturned, he took it for what he thought it was, but truth will always find you. The words followed him out of the room like a plague of hornets. Then the old lady died and for all these years he has wondered.
Were you trying to warn me, old man?
‘Walker, watch out! I see it!’ Wallace Pike rose up out of the bed in a surge of blankets like a shark attacking. Words came out of his face in a spray of spit and alcohol fumes. ‘It’s in you too.’
‘What is, Pop? What is?’
‘It’s in you, I can see it.’
‘Pop?’ He shuddered: bad memories. Certain fires. ‘Pop?’
The old man gargled words but couldn’t spit them out. What were you trying to tell me?
At the time Walker thought it was sheer agony that unhinged Pop and set him to screaming; he asked, ‘Are you in pain?’
‘Hellfire,’ Pop howled like a man running ahead of a pack of demons and it came out like vomit, ‘the flame!’ He thrashed and bellowed until the nurses came and shot him full of downers; his flame died and the next day he forgot.
By the next day, Walker was in love with Lucy Carteret.
It still mystifies him because the fact of it is so profound: that a man can fall in love in a single night. That it can happen in a flash. They went to the same school but Walker didn’t know her. He finished Fort Jude High a year ahead of his class; there was no reason for her to know him. If you didn’t play sports or do any of the stupid things that kept all those fresh-faced, privileged Fort Jude insiders at school for hours after the last bell rang, you could spend three years there without knowing anyone. Walker went home after school to work for Pop. He didn’t mix with people outside the classroom. He