* * *
—
At Ted and Catherine Novac’s house, the last could only be finding them:
The lighter, the box and Clay’s letter.
They didn’t know because they hadn’t touched her bed yet, and it lay on the floor, beneath.
Matador in the fifth.
Carey Novac in the eighth.
Kingston Town can’t win.
Ted touched the words.
For Clay, though, what puzzled him most, and ultimately gave him something, was the second of two more items now that lay inside the box. The first was the photo his father had sent, of the boy on top of the bridge—but the second he’d never given her; it was something she’d actually stolen, and he would never know exactly when.
It was pale but green and elongated.
She’d been here, 18 Archer Street.
She’d stolen a Goddamn peg.
For Ted and Catherine Novac, the choice would make itself. If she wasn’t apprenticed to McAndrew, it would only be someone else; it might as well be the best.
When they told her, there was kitchen and coffee cups.
The clock ticked loudly behind them.
The girl stared down and smi
led.
She was pretty much sixteen, early December, when she stood on a lawn in the city, in the racing quarter, with the toaster plug at her feet. She stopped, looked harder, and spoke.
“Look,” she said, “up there….”
* * *
—
The next time, of course, was evening, when she came across the road.
“And? You don’t want to know my name?”
The third was a Tuesday, at dawn.
Her apprenticeship didn’t start till the beginning of next year, but she was already running with the Tri-Colors boys, weeks earlier than instructed by McAndrew.
“Jockeys and boxers,” he was known to say, “they’re almost the bloody same.” Both had obsessions with weight. Both had to fight to survive; and there was danger, and death, close at hand.
That Tuesday, mid-December, she was running with those lake-necked boxers. Her hair was out—she almost always wore it out—and she fought to hold ground behind them. They came down Poseidon Road. There were the usual fumes, of baking bread and metalworks, and at the corner of Nightmarch Avenue, it was Clay who first saw her. At that time he trained alone. He’d quit the athletics club altogether. She was in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. When she looked up, she saw him see her.
Her T-shirt was faded blue.
Her shorts were cut from jeans.