lap like she doesn’t have the energy to move them. She looks like a long cruel tension is leaching out of her, notch by notch, leaving her whole body slack to the point of helplessness.
“Not just for now. For the rest of your life.”
“I know.”
“You swear. Word of honor.”
Trey looks at him. She says, “I swear.”
Cal says, “ ’Cause I’m taking a pretty big chance here.”
“I took a chance on you last night,” Trey points out. “When I let them lads go.”
“I guess you did,” Cal says. He has that shaky feeling up under his breastbone again. He can’t wait for it to be tomorrow, or next week, or whenever he’ll have got his strength back enough to react to things like his normal self. “OK. Give me a week. Say two, to be on the safe side. Then come back.”
Trey takes another long breath. She says, “What do we do now?”
The idea of a world with no quest in it has left her lost. “You know what I want to do today,” Cal says, “is go fishing. That’s about all I’ve got in me. You think us beat-up stray mutts can make it that far?”
Trey makes sandwiches. Cal lends her an extra sweater and his padded winter coat, in which she looks ridiculous. She helps him get into his jacket. Then they walk, taking it slowly, down to the riverbank. They spend the afternoon sitting there, without saying a single word that doesn’t relate to fish. When they have enough perch to feed Cal, Trey’s family, and Lena, they pack up and go home.
They split up the fish, and Cal finds a plastic bag to hold Trey’s old clothes and her pajamas. Lena, on her way back from work, stops by to pick Trey up. She stays in the car, but when Cal comes out to her she rolls down her window to look at him. “Give me a bell when you’re through doing stupid things,” she says.
Cal nods. Trey gets into the car and Lena rolls up her window, and Cal watches them drive off, with the darkness gathering above the hedges and the headlight beams glittering on the falling rain.
TWENTY-ONE
The rain holds steady, day and night, for more than a week. Cal mostly stays indoors, letting his body heal. His collarbone appears to be only bruised or cracked or something along those lines, rather than broken outright; by the end of the week he can use that arm for small stuff without too much pain, as long as he doesn’t try to raise it above shoulder height. His knee, on the other hand, is banged up worse than he thought. The swelling takes its time going down. Cal straps it up with bandages and ices it regularly, which helps some.
The enforced idleness and the misty rain give that week a dreamy, suspended feel. At first Cal finds it strangely easeful. For the first time he can remember, he doesn’t have the option of doing anything, whether he wants to or not. All he can do is sit by his windows and look out. He gets accustomed to seeing the mountains soft and blurry with rain, like he could keep walking towards them forever and they would just keep shifting farther away. Tractors trudge back and forth across the fields, and the cows and sheep graze steadily; there’s no way to tell whether the rain doesn’t bother them, or whether they just endure. The wind has taken the last of the leaves; the rooks’ oak tree is bare, exposing the big straggly twig-balls of their nests in the crook of every branch. In the next tree over, there’s a lone nest to mark where, sometime along the way, some bird infringed on their mysterious laws and got taught a lesson.
The shaky feeling lingers on for a couple of days, rising up to pierce Cal at random things like a dead wren in his backyard or a nighttime squeal in the hedges. A few good nights’ rest gets rid of it. It came out of Cal’s body, mainly, not his mind. The beating didn’t shock his mind deeply. Men fight sometimes; it’s in the natural course of things. What was done to Trey is a different thing, and harder to leave behind.
He knows that his duty is to take what he’s learned to Officer Dennis. There are so many reasons why he won’t be doing this, all of them so inextricably tangled together, that Cal has no idea which