how Noreen and Angela are half cousins via a great-grandmother who may or may not have poisoned her first husband, and discuss what the new water park up beyond town might mean for Ardnakelty. Normally he would be happy to spend half his day on this, but if Lena sees him she’ll want to talk about the pup, and Cal isn’t going to take the pup.
For the first time since he arrived, Ireland feels tiny and cramped to him. What he needs is thousands of miles of open highway where he can floor it all day and all night long, watching the sun and the moon pass over nothing but ochre desert and tangled brush. If he tried that around here, he would get about fifty yards before running into an unjustifiable road twist, a flock of sheep, a pothole the size of his bathtub or a tractor going the other way. He goes walking instead, but the fields are so sodden they squelch like bog under his feet, and the road verges are churned to extravagant pits and ridges of mud that stop him from ever finding a rhythm to his stride. Mostly these inconveniences wouldn’t bother him, but right now they feel personally targeted: pebbles in his shoes, small but carefully chosen for their sharp corners.
Cal refuses to let his unsettled feeling faze him too badly. It’s natural enough, after the disturbance Trey brought. If he lets it be and does plenty of hard work, the feeling will pass. This is what he did at times when, for example, his marriage or his job pinched him around the edges, and it worked: sooner or later, things shifted themselves around enough that he felt at ease amid them again. He reckons by the time he has the house ready for winter, he should have worn the restlessness down.
In the event, he doesn’t get the chance. Less than two weeks after he sends Trey packing, he’s sitting in his nice spiffed-up front room, in front of a wood fire. It’s a high-tempered, unruly night, windy enough to make Cal wonder if his roof is as sound as he thought. He’s reading the skinny local paper, and listening for the sound of smashing roof slates, when there’s a knock at the door.
The knock has an odd quality, rough and sloppy, more like an animal’s pawing. If it hadn’t come in the lull between two gusts, Cal might have put it down to the wind hurling a branch up against the door. It’s ten at night, past farmers’ bedtime unless something is badly wrong.
Cal puts his paper down and stands for a moment in the middle of his front room, wondering whether to get his rifle. The knock doesn’t come again. He crosses to the door and cracks it open.
Trey is standing on his doorstep, shaking from head to toe like a whipped dog. One of her eyes is purple and swollen shut. Blood is streaked across her face and pouring down her chin. She’s holding up one hand, curled into a claw.
“Aw, shit,” Cal says. “Aw, shit, kid.”
Her knees are buckling. He wants to pick her up and carry her inside, but he’s terrified to touch her in case he hurts her worse. “Get in here,” he says.
She stumbles inside and stands there, wobbling and panting. She looks like she doesn’t know where she is.
Cal can’t see anyone coming after her, but he locks the door all the same. “Here,” he says. “Come on. Over here.” He guides her to the armchair with his fingertips on her shoulders. When she drops into it she lets out a sharp hiss of pain.
“Wait,” Cal says. “Wait there. Hold on.” He gets his sleeping bag and duvet from his bedroom and tucks them around the kid, as gently as he can. Her good hand fastens on the duvet so hard the knuckles whiten.
“There you go,” Cal says. “It’s gonna be OK.” He finds a clean towel and squats by the armchair to stem the blood dripping off her chin. Trey flinches away, but when he tries again she doesn’t have the focus to stop him. He blots till he can see where the blood is coming from. Her bottom lip is split open.
“Who did this to you?”
The kid’s mouth opens wide, like she’s going to howl like a broken animal. Nothing comes out but more blood.
“It’s OK,” Cal says. He gets the towel to her mouth again and presses. “Never mind. You don’t have