کتاب 07-04

4

When Harper’s pulse had settled down, she checked Father Storey’s—holding his thin wrist in her fingers and monitoring the thump of the blood in his arteries. His heartbeat was slight and not altogether steady, but she thought it had a little more zip than the day before. When she stroked a fingernail up his bare foot he curled his toes and made a soft snort of amusement. When she had tested him that way last week, she might as well have been tickling a loaf of bread.

She couldn’t ask Nick if he had heard Father Storey speak, of course—the only time his deafness had ever frustrated her. She wanted desperately for someone, anyone, to have heard him. She considered sending for Carol. Perhaps Tom would respond to his daughter’s voice. By some accounts, he had before. Even if he didn’t stir again, Carol had a right to know her father had spoken today.

But after turning the thought over, she rejected it. Carol would rejoice to hear her father was recovering—but the rejoicing could wait. Harper wanted to talk to him before anyone else did. She wanted to see what he remembered, if anything, about the night he had been clubbed in the head. And she wanted to warn him about what the strain of the last months had done to Carol, how the winter had left her ravaged and feverish and mistrustful. He needed to know about the slaughter on Verdun Avenue, and children marching around camp with rifles, and people forced to carry stones in their mouths to shut them up.

No: in truth, Tom didn’t need to know those things. Harper needed him to know those things. She wanted the old man back to make things right again. How she had missed him.

She sat with him the rest of the night, his hand in hers, stroking his knuckles. She spoke to him sometimes. “You hibernated through the whole winter, just like a bear, Tom Storey. The icicles are dripping. The snow is almost all gone. Time to wake up and crawl out of your cave. Nick and Allie and Carol and John are waiting for you. I’m waiting, too.”

But he did not speak again, and at some point close to dawn, she dozed off with his hand in her lap.

Nick woke her an hour later. The rising sun shot through the mist outside, turned it shades of lemon and meringue, sweet as pie.

“He looked at me,” Nick told her with his hands. “He looked at me and smiled. He even winked before he went to sleep again. He’s coming back.”

Yes, Harper thought. Like Aslan, he was coming back and he was bringing the spring with him.

Just in time, she thought. He’s coming back just in time and everything is going to be okay.

Later, she would remember thinking that and laugh. It was either that or cry.