The therapist – a kind-eyed woman with a long silver braid – said that was okay, that was perfectly okay. And for the whole session, Peter would pull little cars and trucks from a toy box – there must have been a hundred of them in there; Peter figured later that the woman had cleaned out a toy store for him – and crash them together, two by two. When he was finished, she would always say the same thing: “That must have been hard for you. Your mum gets in a car to go buy groceries, a regular day, and she never comes home.”
Peter never answered, but he remembered a sense of rightness about those words, and about the whole hour – as if he was finally where he should be, and there was nothing else he should be doing except crashing those little cars and hearing that it must have been hard for him.
Until one day, the therapist said something else. “Peter, do you feel angry?”
“No,” he’d said quickly. “Never.” A lie. And then he’d gotten off the floor and taken a single green-apple Jolly Rancher from the brass bowl by the door, exactly the way he did at the end of every session – that was the deal the kind-eyed therapist had made with him: whenever he’d had enough, he could take a sweet and the session would be over – and left. But outside, he’d kicked the sweet into the gutter, and on the way home, he’d told his father he wasn’t going back again. His father hadn’t argued. In fact, it had seemed a relief to him.
But not to Peter. Had the nice therapist known all along he’d been angry that last day, that he’d done something terrible? That as punishment, his mother hadn’t taken him to the store? And did she blame him for what happened?
A few months later, Peter had gotten Pax. He’d come across a fox run over by the side of the road near his house. So soon after watching his mother’s coffin lowered into the ground, he’d felt an unshakable need to bury the body. As he’d looked around for a good place, he’d found the den, filled with three cold, stiff kit bodies and one little ball of grey fur still warm and breathing. He’d tucked Pax into his sweatshirt pocket and brought him home, and said – not asked, said – “I’m keeping him.” His dad had said, “Okay, okay. For a while.”
The kit mewed piteously all through the night, and hearing him, Peter had thought that if he could visit the kind-eyed therapist again, he’d smash those toy cars together all day and all night, all day and all night, forever. Not because he was angry. Just to make everybody see.
Thinking about Pax made the old anxiety snake tighten around Peter’s chest. He needed to get moving again, make up some time. The practice was breaking up now, boys loping in from the field, shedding equipment as they streamed past the dugout. As soon as the field was clear, he dropped from the bleachers, pulled his rucksack down, and hitched it over his shoulders. Just as he set out along the diamond, though, he saw the short-stop.
Peter hesitated. He should take off, try to blend in with the stragglers leaving the school grounds. But the rest of the team had left this kid to bag up the equipment and walk back alone, and Peter knew how that felt. He picked up a couple of balls and handed them over. “Hey.”
The boy took the balls with a cautious smile. “Hey.”
“Nice play. The last liner? That ball had hair.”
The boy looked away and scuffed at the dirt, but Peter could see he was pleased. “Yeah, well, the first baseman made it look cleaner than it was.”
“Nah, you planted that ball. Your first baseman would be lucky to catch a cold by himself. No offence.”
The boy gave Peter a real grin. “Yeah. Coach’s nephew. You play?”
Peter nodded. “Centre field.”
“You new here?”
“Oh … I don’t live here, I …” Peter nodded his head vaguely south.
“Hampton?”
“Yeah, Hampton, right.”
The boy’s face closed. “Scouting before Saturday’s game? Jerk.” He spat and walked back to the dugout.
As he left the school grounds, Peter congratulated himself on his quick thinking, covering his runaway tracks. But somehow he felt kind of bad anyway. Somehow he felt lousy, actually.
He shrugged the feeling off – what was it his dad said about feelings, something about a quarter and a cup of coffee? – and checked his watch. Four fifteen. He’d lost over three hours.
Peter pressed faster, but when he came to the town square again, he crossed to the opposite side from the hardware shop and forced himself to walk at an even pace past a library, past a bus station, past a café. Then he counted off a thousand steps before he risked lifting his head.
When he did, he checked his watch again. Four fifty. His grandfather was probably packing up his stuff now. Peter imagined him walking to his rusty blue Chevy, fitting the key into the ignition.
And with that image, his anxiety struck, knocking the breath right out of him. He scaled a low wooden fence and dropped into scrubby brush. He pushed in a good safe thirty feet, until the saplings rose up taller than he was, until his anxiety let him breathe right again, before turning to parallel the road. It was rougher going now, but fifteen minutes later he reached it: the highway.
Peter shadowed the entrance ramp, crouching low, then, at a break in traffic, ran down the culvert, scaled the chain-link fence, and dropped to the other side, his heart beating hard. He’d made it.
He loped into the trees, keeping an eye out for a likely place to cut west. And in just a few minutes, he found one: a dirt road running perpendicular to the highway. Well, not much more than an old wagon path, to be honest, but it was heading in the right direction and would be easy walking even at night. He turned in.
For a short while the trees beside him grew denser as he walked, and only birdcalls and squirrel rustlings broke the silence. Peter realised he might have seen the last of civilisation for a while. The thought lifted him.
But a few minutes later the road turned a corner and began to run along an old pasture dotted with gnarled fruit trees in ragged bloom. A stone wall bordered the field, and a low barn stood at the far corner. There were no lights on in the barn, no car or truck beside it. Still, Peter’s heart crashed. The barn looked freshly painted, and some of the roof shingles were the raw pink of new wood. This was the road to someone’s home. Worse, it might lead to a bigger road the atlas had been too old to show. In any case, it wasn’t a shortcut across the hills.
Peter dropped his pack and sank into a narrow jog in the stone wall, exhausted and starving. He tugged his boots off and peeled down his socks. Two bad blisters throbbed on each heel. They were going to kill when they broke. Peter dug out his extra pair of socks from the bottom of the rucksack and worked them on over the first pair. He rested his head back against the rough stone, still giving off a little warmth from the day’s sun, which was now hovering just over the line of trees, bathing the field in a peach-coloured glow.
He pulled the raisins out and ate them one at a time, taking small sips of water in between. Then he opened two packets of string cheese and took four crackers from the sleeve. He ate as slowly as he could, watching the sun over the orchard, surprised to find that he could actually mark its sinking movement. How had he lived twelve years and never known this about sunsets?
Peter laced his boots. Just as he started to rise, he caught sight of a deer, which bounded into the orchard from the woods beyond. He held his breath as the orchard filled – fourteen deer in all. They began to graze, and a few nibbled delicately at the low branches of the trees.
Peter squatted back down, and the closest one, a doe with a spindly spotted fawn beside her, turned her head to look directly at him. Peter raised his palm slowly, hoping to let her know he meant no harm. The doe moved between Peter and her fawn, but after a while she dipped her head into the grass again.
And then the clear twilight air was split by the screech of