“Thanks, Dad.”
“I’ll dig out some better-fitting clothes for you tomorrow.” Phil patted Jared’s hand. “You want to call anyone? Feel free to use my phone.”
“Maybe later.”
His dad sighed. “Jared, don’t you think you should call your mom?”
—
Can you dream if you’re in a dream? The TV downstairs was now tuned to a hockey game and someone was clattering dishes in the kitchen. The headlights from passing traffic punched rays of yellow light through the crocheted curtains as his eyes grew heavy.
His dreaming mind showed him coy wolves, dying. A dusty, rocky field filled with writhing fur and teeth and claws, so many he stumbled around, bouncing off flanks and fending off bites. He could save them, but he didn’t. Some of the wolves were in human form, a child clinging to his mother. The unfamiliar stars burned above them while fireflies swirled in dense clouds. The thin air choked him and the wolves. They died ugly, contorted deaths, kicking up dust on the dry, hard ground. Their jaws clenched. Their moans faded. Then they went still.
Your fault, his dreams told him.
His mom accused him of having a tender heart, but that was a lie. If you’d done something terrible, did that make you terrible? All the good things he’d done, the people he’d tried to help, what did it mean? Did killing the pack blacken his entire life, a creeping mould that all the bleach in the world wouldn’t erase?
They’d died there, he thought. He’d died too, but he came back, still Jared but not.
He’d been afraid of monsters. Now he was one.
2
REGRET TASTES LIKE DIET SODA
Phil slid scrambled eggs onto Jared’s untouched plate of bacon and toast. Jared grabbed some ketchup and mushed the food around. His dad studied him.
“Destiny just called to say there’s Missing posters of you on the Facebooks,” he said.
Phil still had a flip phone and he said this seriously. Jared suspected his dad didn’t know the difference between any of the social media. His stepsister had switched over to Instagram because of the drama on her Facebook wall with the baby daddy, his angry wife and the wife’s swarming friends.
“I’d know if I was missing,” Jared said.
“Maybe you should tell your mother you’re okay.”
Jared poked the eggs. He didn’t have a great relationship with his mother, but he still had one. When she found out he was a Trickster, maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe she’d think he’d been playing her. Maybe she’d stop considering him her son.
“I think I’m a monster,” Jared admitted to his dad.
“Everyone relapses,” Phil said. “You made it a year on your first go. That’s not nothing.”
He turned back to the stove and cracked a couple more eggs into the cast iron pan. Jared wondered what Phil would do if he saw Jared turn into a raven. Remembered the blue-black feathers poking through his skin, remembered soaring in a multicoloured sky. He willed away his memories of flight, the thrilling caress of wind.
Philip Martin, the man Jared considered his only real father, sat across from him and they ate like normal human beings, even if one of them was a fraud.
Fake it till you make it, Jared thought.
—
Face the music, he told himself. Start dealing.
Jared sat at the kitchen table and stared out the window at his dad, who was mowing the lawn one last time, mulching the fallen leaves with the grass instead of blowing them around, pausing once in a while to empty the mixture into large brown-paper lawn bags. When he finished, he mowed the lawns of the adjoining townhouses, stopping to chat with a neighbour who brought him a half-dozen brownies as a thank you. His dad shut off the motor. Shirley drained the water from the boiled potatoes and ladled out some half-smoked salmon for supper. She brought Jared a small plate. He said thank you and she side-eyed him. The mower started up again. Shirley left a plate for Phil and then took her own plate to her bedroom. Jared could hear her deadbolt click. Her TV blared to life. He picked up his dad’s flip phone.
Phil had given him his mom’s number. Apparently they had a better relationship now she’d moved to Winnipeg with her boyfriend and there were fifteen hundred miles between them. Jared could phone his mom and say he was alive and leave it at that. He got up and started a new pot of coffee. Maybe it was better to just get it over with instead of dreading it all day and worrying about it all night.
The phone rang and rang. Jared waited to record a message, but before he could, his call was disconnected. He poured himself another coffee and tried to remember Mave’s number, but they’d mostly texted. He hadn’t called her land line, ever. Maybe Shirley had a more modern phone and he could ask to borrow it to check the online phone books.
His dad’s phone vibrated. The display showed “HER” in glowing lights.
“I’m busy, Phil,” his mom said when Jared picked up. “Keep it short.”
He cleared his throat. “Hey.”
Maggie cried. She wept on the phone and Jared found himself staring at a cobweb in the corner, waiting for her to stop. Alternate universe, he thought. This version of Maggie was more emotional. Kind of hard to listen to. Kind of hard not to react, hearing her broken.
“Phil?” Mave said suddenly into his ear. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s me,” Jared said.
“Jared! Where are you?”
“At Dad’s place.”
“Oh, thank God.” And then, muffled, “It’s Jared. He’s at Phil’s.”
He could hear his mom in the background, still crying. He hadn’t heard her cry like that since Phil left them and she had no idea how she was going to pay the mortgage.
“Jared?” Mave said. “I can book you a plane ticket if your dad can drive you to the airport.”
“I don’t have any
