Two hours later, he realized that he was going to nod off. The thumps of the body sliding in the trunk and the suitcases rattling around in the back seat had lost their power to keep him awake.
The body’s thumping had hardly had the power to begin with. Once the initial shock had passed, the body became an object only, a thing, a payload he had to deliver. Alan wondered if he was capable of feeling the loss.
“You were eleven then,” he said. It was suddenly as though no time had past since they’d sat on the bed and she’d told him about Auntie.
“Yes,” she said. “It was as though no time had passed.”
A shiver went up his back.
He was wide awake.
“No time had passed.”
“Yes. I was living with a nice family in Oakville who were sending me to a nice girls’ school where we wore blazers over our tunics, and I had a permanent note excusing me from gym classes. In a building full of four hundred girls going through puberty, one more fat shy girl who wouldn’t take her top off was hardly noteworthy.”
“The family, they were nice. WASPy. They called me Cheryl. With a Why. When I asked them where I’d been before, about ‘Auntie,’ they looked sad and hurt and worried for me, and I learned to stop. They hugged me and touched my wings and never said anything—and never wiped their hands on their pants after touching them. They gave me a room with a computer and a CD player and a little TV of my own, and asked me to bring home my friends.