Cuts Like a Knife Read online

  Cuts Like a Knife

  Darlene Ryan

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2012 Darlene Ryan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ryan, Darlene, 1958-

  Cuts like a knife [electronic resource] / Darlene Ryan.

  (Orca soundings)

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-0121-9 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0122-6 (EPUB)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings (Online)

  PS8635.Y35C88 2012 JC813’.6 C2011-907830-9

  First published in the United States, 2012

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011943733

  Summary: When Mac begins saying goodbye to everyone she knows,

  Daniel becomes convinced he has to save her from hurting herself. Or worse.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover photography by Getty Images

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO Box 5626, Stn. B PO Box 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  15 14 13 12 • 4 3 2 1

  For Lauren, who has grown into

  an exceptional young woman.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter One

  It started out like any other day. Nobody wants to believe that. People say, “Well, you must have missed something,” or “How could you not know?”

  I think it makes them feel better. I think it makes them feel that if they had been me, if they’d been in the same place at the same time, they would have somehow done it better than I did.

  I know I didn’t do it perfectly, but I did the best that I could—at least I did something—and I hope that was enough.

  That day, Mac was already at the old lodge in the park when I came up the hill. I could see her up on the balcony off the main level. On the front of the old building, the door is at ground level and you can walk right inside. On the back, because the lodge is built into the hill, the main part is two stories in the air, so the balcony is maybe fifteen or sixteen feet off the ground.

  We weren’t even supposed to be on the balcony—nobody was—because there were “issues” with some of the decking boards. That’s city-government-speak meaning some of the wood was rotting. There was a chain blocking the bottom of the outside stairs. A yellow Keep Out, Danger sign hung from the heavy metal links.

  An old lady with a walker could have stepped over that chain. To keep kids out of somewhere, you have to do better than just a droopy chain. And those Keep Out, Danger signs? They just make some people more determined to get in. People like Mac, for example. Okay, and me. Call it teenage rebellion. That’s what my mother calls it.

  So, anyway, Mac was there first, up on the rotten wood balcony, on top of the railing. Yeah, I mean on the railing, as in walking across it like she was that guy who wanted to walk over the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, although Mac was on a six-inch-wide piece of wood instead. Now, see, some people would say that was a sign, but I don’t think it was. Mac was always getting up on that railing, holding out her arms and walking from one end of the balcony all the way to the other end.

  Sometimes she’d close her eyes. Once she stopped in the middle and pretended she was jumping rope. She scared the piss out of me every time she got up there, but I knew not to let on that it bothered me, because if I did, then Mac would do something more over the top and maybe she would fall.

  I stepped over the chain and went up the stairs, getting to the top just as Mac got to the end of the railing. My heart was pounding in my chest, the way it always did when she got up there, but I just looked at her with a half smile and said, “Hey, Mac.”

  “Hey, Daniel,” she said. She jumped down and pointed at the Tim’s bag I was holding. “What’ve you got?”

  I opened the top, and she looked inside. Then she looked at me. “Okay, so what do you want?” she said, glaring at me through her bangs.

  I pulled the bag away and went over to sit against the wall of the building. “I don’t want anything,” I said. “Jeez, Mac, it’s just a freakin’ donut.”

  “Yeah, well, since when do you buy me donuts?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “But they’ve got this contest thing they’re doing and I won a chocolate glazed donut, which I don’t like but you do, and so I figured I’d give it to you. But if you don’t want it, I can just find a squirrel or something to eat it instead.”

  Mac came over and sat down beside me, bumping me with her shoulder. “You are such a girl sometimes, Danny Boy,” she said with a grin. She took the chocolate glazed donut out of the bag and I pulled out the dutchie I’d bought for myself, and we sat there taking turns drinking the coffee I’d gotten too.

  So maybe there was a sign after all. Maybe the fact that I’d won a stupid donut at Tim’s—and believe me, I never win anything—and of all the donuts they sell, it was Mac’s all-time favorite. Maybe that did mean something. At the time, I thought it was just a donut. Maybe I was wrong.

  “So where were you all day?” she asked after the coffee and both donuts were gone.

  I leaned my head back against the rough shingles and closed my eyes. “Helping my mother clean out the basement,” I said. I wouldn’t have said that to anyone else, but I knew Mac wouldn’t make fun of me.

  “That’s nice,” she said. I felt her lean back against the wall too.

  “You going over to the school later to work on your composition?” I asked after a moment. “Hanson said he’d be there so we can get into the music room.”

  “Nope. I’m done.”

  I opened my eyes wide and turned to look at her. “What do you mean you’re done? How the hell can you be done?”

  Mac’s face was tipped up to the sky like she was soaking up the sun, except there really wasn’t any. About two weeks ago she’d suddenly cut off all her long red hair for a short, chopped cut with messy bangs. I was still getting used to it.

  “I mean I’m done. Fini. Completo. I wrote out the rest of the music. I recorded it. I burned the cd. I’m done.”

  The composition project was half of our term music mark. I couldn’t believe Mac was finished while I was still struggling to get the notes on paper—that is, if I’d actually had any music in my head to write down.

  I let my head fall back against the wall again and stared up into the gray April sky. “Friday, you weren’t any further ahead than I am. What did you do? Spend the whole day in the music room?”

  I f
elt her shrug beside me. “Last night, mostly,” she said.

  “You lie,” I said, letting my eyes slide sideways so I could see her without moving my head. “There was a dance last night, so Hanson would have been in the gym making sure none of the guys on the hockey team were drinking or putting their hands down some girl’s thong.”

  Her lips twitched with a hint of a smile. “Great visual, Danny Boy. But just so you know, some of us don’t go for the butt-floss look.”

  I reached over and gave her shoulder a shove. “Yeah, well, thanks for that visual, Mac.”

  She grinned, but she kept her head against the brown shingles, and her eyes stayed closed.

  I stretched my legs across the wooden deck and slid down until the back of my head was the only thing still against the building. “Seriously, how’d you get into the music room?”

  “Maybe I broke in. Maybe I picked the lock with a paperclip and a toothpick. Maybe I swiped pointy-faced Mrs. Robinson’s keys. Or maybe…”

  She let the word hang in the air for a long moment. “Maybe Mr. Hanson went in to get a guitar, because some suck-up suggested he sit in with the band for a song. And maybe he didn’t lock up behind himself the way he should have.”

  She opened her eyes then and jumped to her feet. “C’mon, Danny Boy,” she said, jerking her head toward the steps. “Let’s go.”

  “What are you on?” I said, squinting up at her. “I spent all day hauling boxes of crap that came from my grandparents’ house out of the basement of my parents’ house. Leave me alone. Let me sleep.”

  I closed my eyes, but she bent down, grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet. Mac was kinda short—she only came up to my shoulder—but she was strong. I could feel her fingers digging into my wrist through my sweatshirt, and I pretty much had to go with her, because she wasn’t letting go and I was going to fall on my ass going down those stairs if I didn’t keep up.

  Chapter Two

  “Where are we going?” I said as Mac cut across the grass, headed for the hill that led down to the street.

  She’d let go of my arm, and I was following her, mostly because what the hell else did I have to do on an almost Saturday night?

  “I wanna show you something,” she said.

  “Show me what?”

  She turned around and started walking backward. “See, the thing is, Danny Boy,” she said, making a big sweeping movement with one hand, “when someone wants to show you something, you have to actually see it.”

  “So where’s everyone else tonight?” I asked, partly because I really did want to know, and partly because I knew she wasn’t going to tell me where we were going and I didn’t want her to think I cared about knowing that much. Yeah, I know that’s warped.

  She pressed her fingers to both sides of her head and squeezed her eyes shut. She was still walking backward, and I don’t know why she didn’t fall, but she didn’t. It was just like being up on the railing. “I’m trying, I’m trying,” she said, and then she opened her eyes and gave me a big fake shrug. “Sorry, my psychic abilities aren’t working at the moment.” She looked around.

  “I think all the trees are screwing with the reception.”

  “Yeah, ha, ha, ha,” I said. She was in a weird mood. Not weird in the way that I should have been worried. I’ve thought about that a lot too. She was just crazier than she usually was. And no, it wasn’t like she’d taken something. That wasn’t Mac’s thing.

  She waited for a red suv to go by, then shot across the street. I stopped at the curb, looked both ways, and when there were no cars coming, I walked over to her. She stood on the sidewalk shaking her head, but she didn’t say anything for once. A lot of the time she called me Gramps because I always waited for the light, or if there were no walk lights, I waited until there weren’t any cars coming, unlike Mac, who thought crossing the street was like running some kind of obstacle course.

  Me, I still remembered, back in grade six, seeing Kevin Kessler get hit by a car that ignored the red lights and passed the school bus that we’d just gotten off. I was already on the other side of the street, and as I turned to say something to Kevin, the car hit him. He flew through the air, arms reaching like he was trying to grab on to something, his mouth open for a scream that never came out, and landed in the ditch to the left of me. I remember scrambling down the bank through the gravel and the weeds, screaming for someone to come help and trying not to puke, swiping at my face because I didn’t want anyone to see me crying.

  “Are you going to tell me where you’re taking me?” I said as we headed along the sidewalk. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to bug her. But I couldn’t seem to help doing it anyway. We were going in the general direction of the university. Was that where we were headed? Mac? Not likely.

  Mac acted like I hadn’t said anything, which is what she always did when she didn’t want to talk about stuff. Since she wasn’t going to answer my questions, I just walked along beside her, sneaking little looks at her when I figured she wasn’t paying any attention to me.

  I liked looking at Mac. She didn’t smile that often, but it made her look like some kind of hot supermodel when she did. And she had a great laugh. It made you want to know what was so damn funny when you heard it. Sometimes I tried to make her laugh just because the sound was so freakin’ good.

  “Why are you looking at me, Danny Boy?” she said all of a sudden.

  Busted.

  “What makes you think I want to look at your ugly self?” I said, bumping her hip with my own.

  She just rolled her eyes and didn’t say anything else.

  At the corner we crossed over—there weren’t any cars coming in either direction—and Mac headed up the hill. I’d pretty much given up on getting her to say anything about where we were headed or why, so I didn’t ask again. I just walked beside her and made sure she didn’t catch me checking her out again.

  We ended up on a little side street about halfway up the hill, in front of a small green house. The yard was partly dug up, and the whole house was surrounded by portable chain-link fence, maybe six feet high.

  Mac led me around to the backyard. “Where are you going?” I hissed as I scrambled over the rutted dirt and chewed-up grass that looked like it used to be a driveway. She dragged her fingers along the fence and then stopped so quickly I almost bumped into her. My foot slipped on the muddy ground, and I grabbed a skinny maple tree to keep from ending up on my ass in the dirt.

  Mac pulled back a section of the fence like she was pulling back a pop-top and squeezed through the opening she’d made. She kept one hand on the wire, pushing it out so the opening was still there for me. “C’mon, Danny Boy,” she said impatiently.

  “What are you doing? This is trespassing,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t,” she said. “Are you coming or not?” I could see the challenge in her dark eyes, and I knew if I didn’t go, then she’d just take off for the house and leave me standing there like some kind of dork.

  So what if I got arrested for trespassing? So what if I got a criminal record and didn’t get a music scholarship to university and ended up having to wear a baby-blue tuxedo and play the piano at the Starbright Lounge in the Wayfarer Inn six nights a week for all the old ladies who smell like cough drops and the occasional little old man with his pants up under his armpits? It was better than having Mac think I was a wuss.

  Chapter Three

  I squeezed through the hole in the fence. The back of my sweatshirt got caught for a moment, but I twisted loose and stood up, bending the wire back in place so anyone walking by probably wouldn’t notice the gap.

  Mac had already picked her way across what was left of the lawn to the rear of the little house. She was doing something at the back door. Oh sure, why not add breaking and entering to trespassing while we were at it? If I was going to have a criminal record, it might as well be a long one.

  She got the door open and jammed something into her pocket just as I got to her. “Wait a minute,” I said.
“You have a key to that door?”

  She looked back over her shoulder at me. “Standardized testing was wrong,” she said. “The boy does have a few brain cells left.” Then she went in, and I followed her.

  We were standing in a small hallway at the back of the house. To my right there was a bathroom. I could see a tub, a toilet, a sink in a white cabinet, and some kind of blue tile with flowers on the wall. On the other side, a narrow set of steps led upstairs.

  I glared at Mac. “Stop screwing with me,” I said. “Whose house is this?”

  She was already on her way up the stairs. They were covered in faded gold-colored carpet. “It’s mine,” she said over her shoulder.

  I scrambled up after her. “What do you mean it’s yours? How can you have a house?”

  She stopped, turned around and leaned forward just a little, so her face was pretty close to mine. “It’s mine,” she repeated. Then she went the rest of the way up, two steps at a time.

  When I got to the top, Mac was in the room to the left. There were only two rooms up there. One took up the left side of the space, and one took up the other side. There wasn’t really as much room as you’d think on that floor, because the roof was slanted and it was like standing in a big triangle in a way.

  I stopped in the doorway. Mac was in the center of the room, which had been painted pale purple. “So you dragged me over here just so I could see this old house that you’d like to have?”

  She shook her head. “I take it back,” she said. “There are no functioning brain cells left after all.” Then she walked over to me and smacked the top of my head with her hand. “Hello! Is anything working in there?”

  I twisted away from her. “Oh yeah, you’re really funny, Mac,” I said.

  She dropped her hand to my shoulder and gave me a small smile. “I brought you here to see this.” She gestured to the room. “This is my room.”

  And then I got it. I don’t know why I’d been so slow before. Mac used to live with her grandmother. I didn’t know what had happened to her mother or her father, because she wouldn’t talk about them ever. I figured they were probably dead.