The Endless Knot

stood at my bedroom window watching the wind whip the branches of the evergreens in our yard and the snow pelt the window, I felt my nerves twang. Anything could happen. From his place beside me, Willie stared at the blizzard, unperturbed.

I scratched his head. “ ‘Winter is iccumen in,’ ” I said. “ ‘Lhude sing Goddamm.’ ” Literary allusions were lost on Willie; nonetheless, he cocked his head thoughtfully and followed as I went to the basement to unearth the storage bin that held our boots and the larger one in which we stowed winter jackets, mitts, and toques. I found our parkas, Taylor’s new boots, and my old Sorels, went back upstairs, and started layering up. Finally, equipped to battle the elements, I opened the front door and stepped into a suddenly wintry world. The streetlights were still on, and snow was swirling through the halos of light they cast. It was a familiar sight, but one I wasn’t ready for.

Nor, as it turned out, was I ready for the sidewalks. Before we reached the Albert Street Bridge, I’d slipped twice. I gave Willie’s leash a tug. “We’re cutting our run short, bud.” We covered half our route, doubled back, and came home to a silent house. I filled Willie’s dog dish, poured myself a cup of coffee, and went back up to my bedroom to check my e-mail. There was a note from Charlie, thanking me for my hospitality and wishing Zack luck. I scrolled down to the quotation Charlie had chosen for his e-mail signature: Life is Painless for the Brainless.

As he’d promised, Charlie had attached an MP3 file of excerpts from his interviews with the Too Much Hope kids. I clicked it on and went over to the chair by the window to watch the snow and listen.

What I heard shouldn’t have shocked me. I had read Kathryn Morrissey’s book. I knew the histories of her subjects: the ones who had been discarded like toys their parents had acquired on eBay and had tired of; the ones who had been caught in the crossfire of toxic marriages; the ones who had been freighted with their parents’ baggage or whose lives had been appropriated by their parents to fulfill their own needs. And I had read Kathryn’s meticulous accounts of her subjects’ confused, raging, blighted lives. What I wasn’t prepared for was the agony in their young voices. Clearly whatever their failings, Kathryn’s subjects weren’t brainless.

I was so absorbed in the voices on the tape that I didn’t hear Taylor come in.

She was still in her pyjamas, and she was exuberant. “It’s snowing,” she said. She ran to the window seat and knelt among the cushions so she could peer out the window. “Sweet, eh?” she said.

“Sweet,” I agreed.

For a few moments she knelt with her back to me watching the snow, then the voices on the computer entered her consciousness and she turned to face me. “What’s that you’re listening to?”

“An MP3 file that Charlie sent me of his interviews with the people in Too Much Hope.”

Taylor settled with her back against the window, her legs crossed in front of her. When a female voice began to describe how, within weeks, she had gone from model child to truant, sexual predator, and druggie, Taylor wedged her hands between her thighs and leaned towards me. “That’s Olivia Quinn, the one who got raped.” Taylor’s lips were tight. “She tried to tell her mother, but her mother didn’t believe her.”

I walked over to my computer and turned off the interview. “Taylor, you know you can tell me anything, don’t you?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I know.”

I sat beside her on the window seat. “Is something wrong?”

She was still for a moment, tense with indecision. Then she leapt to her feet. “There’s something I need to show you.” She came back with the padded envelope I’d taken from our mailbox. It had been opened. I reached inside and took out Soul-fire: A Hero’s Life, Part IV. Like its predecessors, Part IV opened in the grey world of alienation and nihilism. Finally, shunned and miserable, the hero takes the pentangle from its secret place in the crypt, drapes the emblem around his neck, and is transported into the brilliantly coloured world of Soul-fire. The enemies Soul-fire encountered were familiar to me from his earlier exploits, but this time, he was not alone. On this quest, he was joined by Chloe, a light-boned young girl with huge brown eyes and fashionably hacked dark hair. The comic ended with Soul-fire and Chloe hand in hand on a verdant sanctuary called the Island of Celestial Light. Behind them, the city was burning.

Taylor was watching my face. “What do you think?”

“Ethan’s very talented,” I said carefully.

“What do you think about Chloe?”

“I think Chloe’s you.”

Taylor’s voice was small. “That’s what I think too,” she said.

“If this is too much for you, I could talk to Ethan – or maybe to his mother.”

“No! That would just make things worse. I can handle it.”

“Okay,” I said. I slid my arm around her. “When I saw it was snowing, I brought up the new boots we bought you last spring at Aldo.”

In one of those quicksilver mood shifts that signal the onset of adolescence, Taylor was suddenly ecstatic. “The orange ones? Sweeeet. I love those boots. This is going to be the best day.”

I wasn’t so confident. Soul-fire: A Hero’s Life might have moved off Taylor’s personal screen, but Ethan’s disturbing portrait of the artist as a young man had stayed on mine. I was reading through A Hero’s Life seeking reassurance when Zack called.

“Finally,” he said. “I’ve tried this number about forty times. I thought you were stuck in a snowbank somewhere.”

“Sorry. I forgot to turn my cell on. Did you try our land line?”

“Yep, and it was busy forty times.”

“Taylor must have left it off the hook,” I said.

“As long as you’re safe,” Zack said.