The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky Read Free Book Online Page A

foam. And in the dream, he swept through the culverts and rushed towards the sea himself, bouncing over the short falls in the ditches and fleeing into the stream that ran deep and silt-dirty under the road to the river, going exactly where he was sent by the rushing waters, arms and legs limp and dancing in the ridges and valleys of the waves. There was no point grabbing at the trees along the sides of the water; he knew that they would either give way or his hands would fail to get a propergrip, that the effort of getting out of the water would be profoundly exhausting.
    While he slept, a late-night thunder storm grumbled off to the west of the cabins, big clouds piled high and grey against the night, backlit by the occasional flash and wink of lightning, the kind of storm whose laconic travel along the horizon ticks like nature’s clock, measuring with soft and imprecise strokes.
    And he dreamt about the woman from Quebec, dreamt that he knew her, that he should know her name, that it should come to him unbidden at the simple memory of the brush strokes that shaped her face. But her name stayed disturbingly out of reach, a feathery thought that would not allow itself to be grasped.
    He dreamt that she came to the pool, alone, stepping with long, incautious steps, and walked to where he lay, his head canted back against the side of the hot tub. That she reached out and ran a long, cool fingertip across the curve of his upper lip, over that shallow valley directly beneath his nostrils; all the time without speaking, just smiling gently. And he smelled a fragrance he had not smelled since high school, a perfume that he could always place and never remember having smelled again, the perfume the wife of his grade 12 English teacher used to wear. Tall and willowy, she had always seemed to move without walking, had seemed to float past the enraptured high school boys before they were even in a position to recognize the magic of her motion.
    But when he opened his eyes, there was only the black, cool night and the gentle fizz of the sounds in his ears. This time, he knew he was smiling. And this time, he knew why.
    Dawn often starts as a grey line on the morning after a sunny day, a grey starting that widens like an eye opening slowly from sleep in a familiar room. Then the arc of the sky blues, ever so slightly, and the periphery of stars begins to fade, leaving only the most energetic behind. The first birds start to sing awkwardly, throwing out fragments of their songs, as if every morning they have to learn the full melody all over again. The streetlights turn off, one by one, their sensors snapping away their pools of orange light, and the sky fills with light like singers singing. The gradient lightens from the bottom up, and the blues of the sky develop as if they were photographs gently rocking in a tray of darkroom developing fluid.
    By the time John woke up, the sky had rinsed itself to blue. When he opened his eyes, the caretaker, an odd-looking thin man with a small head and arms too long for his body, was skimming leaves from the surface of the pool with a long-handled white net.
    John saw that the caretaker was staring at him, and lifted one wet, puffy hand in an awkward wave. And the caretaker took one hand from the net and waved back, and then quickly looked away, scooping up the leaves and the struggling insects that had been lured into the pool by the rippling nighttime lights.
    Looking towards the cabins, he could see the woman from Quebec hanging beach towels over therailings on the deck behind her cabin. The quadrangle of grass was empty, except for a small flock of star-lings hopping along, bending their heads and pecking fitfully at the ground. She turned towards him, and smiled a knowing smile, the kind of smile that is more a shared answer than a question. With one long finger, she touched her upper lip.
    And he knew then that he was rushing towards the surface, still able to feel and touch, that while