Cal waits, but he doesn’t elaborate. The car bumps over potholes. The headlights illuminate a narrow streak of road and waving branches on either side; a pair of luminous eyes flare suddenly, low to the ground, and are gone.
“There you go,” Mart says, slamming to a stop in front of Cal’s gate. “Safe and sound. Just like I told you.”
“You can drop me up at your place,” Cal says. “Just in case you’ve got a welcoming committee.”
Mart stares at him for a second and then laughs so hard he doubles over coughing, slapping the steering wheel. “Well, begod,” he says, when he recovers. “I’ve got my own knight in shining armor to escort me home. Surely to God you’re not worrying about that little scut Donie McGrath? And you from the big bad city.”
“We get guys like him in the city, too,” Cal says. “I don’t like them there either.”
“Donie wouldn’t come next nor near me,” Mart says. The last of the laugh is still creasing his face, but there’s a flat note to his voice that startles Cal. “He knows better.”
“Humor me,” Cal says.
Mart giggles, shaking his head, and starts the car again. “Go on, so,” he says. “As long as you’re not expecting a good-night kiss.”
“In your dreams,” Cal says.
“Save them for Lena,” Mart tells him, and he laughs all the way up the road.
At Mart’s place—a long white cottage with undersized windows, set well back from the road amid neglected grass—the porch light is on and Kojak is there to greet him when he opens the door. Cal lifts a hand and waits while Mart tips his tweed cap in the doorway, and while the inside lights go on. When nothing else happens, he heads for home. Even if Donie McGrath shows an uncharacteristic flash of initiative, Kojak is pretty good backup. But something about the sight of Mart in his doorway, at ease amid the fields and the huge wind-roamed dark, Kojak wagging beside him, has left Cal feeling slightly ridiculous, although not in a bad way.
His gate is about a quarter-mile from Mart’s. The sky is clear and the moon is big enough to keep him on the road with no need for his flashlight, although once or twice when the tree shadows crowd in he gets addled and feels one foot sink into the deep grass of the verge. He keeps an eye out for whatever crossed in front of the car, but it’s either gone or turned cautious. The mountains on the horizon look like someone took a pocketknife and sliced neat curves out of the star-thick sky, leaving empty blackness. Here and there, spread out, are the yellow rectangles of windows, tiny and valiant.
Cal likes the nights here. The ones back in Chicago were overcrowded and fractious, always a raucous party somewhere and an argument getting loud somewhere else and a baby howling on and on, and he knew too much about what was going on in the hidden corners and might spill out at any moment, demanding his attention. Here, he has the soothing knowledge that the things happening in the night aren’t his problem. Most of them are self-contained: small wild hunts and battles and matings that require nothing from human beings except that they stay away. Even if there is anything going on, under this great mess of stars, that needs a police officer, Cal is irrelevant. It belongs to the local guys, up in that two-horse town, who presumably would also prefer him to stay away. Cal can do that; is, in fact, savoring it. The kid called Trey, by making nighttime back into a place that required vigilance and action, brought home to him just how little he had missed those. It’s occurred to him that he might have an undiscovered talent for letting things be.
His place is as undisturbed as Mart’s. He cracks open a beer from the mini-fridge and sits out on his back step to drink it. Somewhere down the line he’s going to build himself a back porch and get a big-ass chair to go on it, but for now, the step does fine. He leaves his jacket on; the air has a bite to it that says autumn is here for real, no more playing.
An owl calls, out over Mart’s land. Cal watches for a while and catches a glimpse of it, just a scrap of denser shadow floating leisurely between trees. He wonders whether, if events had gone differently, he might have been this all along: a guy who fixed things and sat on his porch with a beer, watching for owls and letting the rest of the world take care of itself. He’s not sure how he feels about that. It makes him uneasy, in ways he doesn’t fully understand.
To get away from the sudden restlessness that’s come down on him like a cloud of mosquitoes, Cal pulls his phone out of his pocket and calls Alyssa. He calls her every weekend. Mostly she answers. When she doesn’t, she sends him a WhatsApp later on, usually at three or four in the morning his time: Sorry I missed you, was in the middle of something! Catch you later!
This time she picks up. “Hey, Dad. How’re you doing?”
Her voice is brisk and blurred at the edges, like she’s got the phone caught under her jaw, doing something else at the same time. “Hey,” Cal says. “You busy?”
“No, it’s fine. Just cleaning up some stuff.”
He listens, trying to figure out what, but all he can catch is random rustles and thumps. He tries to picture her: tall and athletic, her face a miraculous blend of him and Donna—Cal’s blue eyes and level eyebrows, Donna’s mobile upswept features—that blows him away. The problem is that he still sees her running around in cutoff jeans and a big sweatshirt, her hair caught up in a glossy brown ponytail, and he has no way of knowing whether any of this still touches the reality at any point. Last time he saw her was Christmas. She could have chopped her hair short, dyed it blond, bought suits, put on twenty pounds and started wearing a faceful of makeup.
“How you doing?” he says. “You get rid of that flu yet?”
“That was just a cold. It’s gone.”
“How’s work?” Alyssa works for a nonprofit in Seattle, something to do with at-risk teenagers. Cal missed the ins and outs of it when she first told him she was applying for the job—she applied for a lot of jobs, and work and Donna were taking up most of his mind around then—and it’s gotten too late to ask.
“Work’s good. We got our grant—big relief—so that should keep the show on the road for another while.”
“How about that kid you were worried about? Shawn, DeShawn?”
“Shawn. I mean, he’s still coming, which is the main thing. I still think things are pretty bad for him at home, like really bad, but he freezes up whenever I try to ask. So . . .”
She trails off. Cal would love to come out with something useful, but most of his techniques for making people open up were designed for situations that don’t have much in common with this one. “Give him time,” he says in the end. “You’ll do fine.”
“Right,” Alyssa says, after a moment. She sounds tired all of a sudden. “I hope.”