No Good Asking , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Fran Kimmel

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160 pages

English

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A profoundly moving exploration of our capacity to heal one another.Ellie and Eric Nyland have moved their two sons back to Eric s childhood farmhouse, hoping for a fresh start. But there s no denying it, their family is falling apart, each one of them isolated by private sorrows, stresses, and missed signals. With every passing day, Ellie's hopes are buried deeper in the harsh winter snows.When Eric finds Hannah Finch, the girl across the road, wandering alone in the bitter cold, his rusty police instincts kick in, and he soon discovers there are bad things happening in the girl's house. With nowhere else to send her, the Nylands reluctantly agree to let Hannah stay with them until she can find a new home after the Christmas holidays. But Hannah proves to be more balm than burden, and the Nylands discover that the only thing harder than taking Hannah in may be letting her go.

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	02 octobre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773052632
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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No Good Asking
A Novel
Fran Kimmel
To Jim
Contents Part One They All Come from Somewhere One Two Three Four Five Part Two Like Soldiers When They Come Home from War Six Seven Eight Part Three Play It Again Nine Part Four Not Quite Real Ten Eleven Part Five This Inexplicable and Titanic Shift Twelve Part Six Those Words Could Mean Anything Thirteen Fourteen Part Seven Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go Fifteen Acknowledgements Book Club Discussion Questions About the Author Copyright
Part One
They All Come from Somewhere
Friday, December 20
One
From a distance, it looked like a small smear of blood on a white blanket. Perhaps a wounded coyote, staggering along the road in the relentless wind. Eric drove on, a flurry of white surrounding his car, keeping to the faint tracks he’d made the day before. As he drew nearer, the speck transformed into a withered old man, startling him with legs, arms, torso bent into the gale. But it was worse yet. He finally recognized the shape as a young girl. People didn’t walk along his road, not out here in the middle of nowhere. Not a girl, certainly not in this weather.
He slowly pulled the car alongside her, creating new tire tracks in the snow. The girl ignored him and kept walking. A red scarf tied under her chin covered her ears; long hair fell in damp strands down her back. She looked twelve, thirteen at most. Her coat was a grubby grey felt, too small, thrift-shop variety, the kind that let the cold howl through the gaps between buttons. Her jeans were dirty and frayed at the bottom. She wore runners, not boots.
Eric opened the passenger window, letting in a blast of cold that made his bones creak. “Hey,” he shouted, to be heard over the wind.
Plodding forward, she kept her head pressed down, hands in pockets. He stopped the car along the side of the road and jumped out.
She didn’t stop moving as he caught up and walked beside her. His eyes watered from the wind. “I live down the road a ways.” He sucked air through his teeth, swallowing the sting. “You’re not dressed for this weather. It’s freezing out here. I can drive you to wherever you’re going.”
He stepped in front of her, blocking her path. She stamped her runners and peered around him with exhausted eyes, as if there was something to look at and he was obstructing her view.
“I’m going to give you a ride. You can decide where to.” For a brief second, he wished he was still in uniform. “Look, I know you’re not supposed to get into a stranger’s vehicle, but it’s your—”
“You’re not a stranger.” She sounded dazed, croaking. “You live across the road from me.”
Wilson’s place? There was no other house along this road. “You’ve walked all that way?” It was a good five kilometres back to where their houses stood facing each other on either side of the road. Who was this girl?
Her nose ran and she lifted a bare hand from her pocket and took a feeble swipe. Jesus. She didn’t even have mittens. He could give her no choice in the matter. He held out his arm, pointing to his idling car, stepping closer, forcing her to back up. Finally, she turned, trudged back to the car, pulled on the frozen latch of his back door with her bare fingers, and fell inside.
Eric hurried to his side of the vehicle, got in, and cranked the heater as high as it would go. He would have preferred her in the front beside the vent.
He turned to look at her, passing her the box of Kleenex they kept under the console. “My name is Eric Nyland.”
“I know,” she said, wiping her nose, her running eyes.
Nigel Wilson must have told her his name. What else had he told her?
“What’s your name?”
“Hannah Finch.”
Eric couldn’t fathom what Wilson was doing with a girl named Finch. Couldn’t fathom what the girl was doing in the bitter cold, so entirely unprepared, as if she were out for an afternoon stroll in September.
“Okay, Hannah. Where to?”
After an ungodly long pause—where had she been going?—she said, “I have to go home. Can you drive me back?”
There was something in the way she said home . Her shoulders slumped as she fought with her seat belt. Her fingers looked brittle, like they might snap off in pieces.
“You sure?” he said. “Because I can take you to town. Or to a friend’s.”
She shook her head. “I left Mandy with him.”
“Mandy?”
“My cat.”
“Never did own a cat,” he told her as he turned the car around. He’d seen his share of runaways during his twenty years with the force. If he’d spotted this girl at the shopping mall, he would have thought her a go-to-church, finish-your-homework, listen-to-your-mother type.
He kept on talking to help put her at ease. “Dog people, our family. Down to one mutt at the moment. My father’s dog, Thorn. That’s the dog’s name. He’s a big, fat black lab mostly. Poops all over the house. Guess he can’t help it because he’s so old and doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore. Falls down if he barks too loud. It’s sort of sad. Woof, woof, and down he goes.”
She shifted slightly in the back seat. “I’ve seen him. Sometimes he comes down to the road.”
So why had he never seen her? He’d brought his family back here nearly a year ago. “Thorn wolfed down a whole bag of dog food one time. One of those giant twenty-pound sacks you get at Costco. That dumb dog found it while he was sniffing around the shed. Tipped it over somehow, chewed through the corner of the packaging, got his head inside, and gobbled it all up. He waddled out of that shed looking mighty sorry about what he’d done, his stomach stretched so low it swept the ground. Took three full days to work all those nuggets through. Stunk so bad we made him sleep on the porch.”
They dipped into the valley, forcing his eyes to the road and keeping them there. During the warm months—all two of them—the view was of mustard-yellow canola fields, farms dotting the distance. Today, Eric saw nothing but blowing snow.
“I hear house cats are pretty smart,” he said.
Hannah sat perfectly still, her hands folded over a button on her flimsy coat.
“They know how to pace themselves. You can fill their bowl and they’ll nibble a bit here, a bit there, dainty-like, all day long. Not a black lab. No sir. Put down a bowl and they make it their job to suck up every morsel like a vacuum. Sometimes they forget to chew, they’re in such a hurry, and end up choking it back out again.”
He adjusted the vents, raising his voice to compensate for the added noise. “Tell me about Mandy,” he said, delaying his real questions until he could catch her eye.
“She’s a dainty eater.”
“Like I thought,” he said. “Have you had her a long time?”
“Since I got my tonsils out. Mom brought me home from the hospital and told me to look on my bed. Mandy was in a shoebox with just her pink nose sticking out of the towel. She was crying, so I picked her up and she stopped.”
“How old were you when you got your tonsils out?”
Her eyes shone right at him in the mirror. “Five. Now I’m eleven. Almost twelve.”
She sat taller and pressed herself against her seat belt. They crawled along, still a ways off.
“So where were you headed, Hannah?” She’d walked all that way without turning back. “Your mom will be worried, don’t you think?”
She looked at the mirror and caught his stare. “My mom’s dead.” She gave a little shiver.
“I’m sorry, Hannah. That must be tough.”
She shrugged.
“So Nigel Wilson is your dad?” Stepdad, whatever.
“No. He was with my mom, so he got me.”
“Nigel and I used to go to school together.”
“I know.”
“You don’t think he’d hurt Mandy, do you?”
She looked down at her hands on her lap.
“Because you know there are laws against hurting a cat. Or a kid.” Nigel Wilson was a snivelling excuse for a human being. “If there’s anything like that going on at your house, we can make it stop. I mean the police can make it stop. But you have to tell them so they can help.”
The girl was done talking. She kept her head down and said nothing more as they inched along the empty road.
“Almost there.” Eric looked in the mirror; her cheeks were the greyish colour of week-old mushrooms. “You okay back there?”
She nodded, though she was clearly not. She seemed to be panting a little. He flipped on his turn signal out of habit, although there was no one in the barrenness to see it.
He took the last corner slowly. Barely clearing the deep snow, two weathered mailboxes, one of them Wilson’s, were nailed high on posts beside a dead-end sign. The narrow tunnel of a road felt closed in and too dark. Giant aspens loomed on either side, frozen branches hanging low and so overwhelmed with snow they nearly scraped the car top. Old snow was piled in man-sized shelves along the road’s edge.
“Please,” she said. “Stop the car.”
Eric turned his head, attentive to the panic in her voice. She’d already unbuckled her seat belt and had her fingers wrapped around the door handle. Their houses were not yet in view, just snow being lifted by the wind and swirling about the car’s windows.
“Whoa. Slow down, Hannah.” She couldn’t be planning to go out there again, not with him sitting three feet in front of her, not with that wind screaming through the tiny cracks in the glass.
“Please.” She jerked on the handle. “Hurry. I have to get out.”
“It’s all right, Hannah. Just give me a minute until the road opens up a bit and I can pull over.”
“I’m going to be sick. I’m gonna throw up in your car.”
Vomit had been a frequent back-seat occurrence in his former line of business. Eric braked more firmly than he’d intended, all four tires skidding out of the earlier tracks and into deep, wet snow, the car crunching to a halt, angled across the road.
“Hang on, hang on. I’ll get your door.” Eric stepped into a gust of icy cold. He scrambled around the car, intending to help her to the bank, but she was already out and falling forward into snow up to her knees.
Eric came up behind her.
He grabbed the back of her coat as she bent low, her retching so noisy and violent he worried she’d crack a rib. “That’s right.” There was nothing