Where She Has Gone by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page B

gust of wind sent a shower of spray against us, and Rita sank deeper into her coat. I stood behind her and instinctively opened my own coat to enfold her within it, holding her to me; and then for several minutes we stood like that without tension, staring into the falls, though it was clear in the way I held her, in the way she leaned in against me, that some line had been stepped over, that some emotion that had been hovering between us barely acknowledged had grown suddenly real. I remembered a picture in my grade-one reader of ayoung boy and girl, brother and sister, making their way along a rotting footbridge over a rocky chasm, and had the same sense of beginning a dangerous crossing. In the picture, a guardian angel had hovered over the two; but still the outcome had seemed uncertain, a matter of one careful step after another.
    The sun had almost set.
    “I guess we’ll freeze if we stand here much longer,” I said.
    We walked back to the car in silence. For a few minutes the sense of our closeness lingered between us like a note struck in a bell; but then the strangeness began to settle in.
    “Are you okay?” I said.
    “Yeah. I guess so.”
    We drove back through town toward the expressway. With nightfall, the town had taken on an eerie, dream-like quality. A few marquees had come on in neon blues and reds above some of the restaurants and museums; on the sidewalks a few straggling shoppers were making their way through the bitter cold toward home. At a traffic light an ancient big-finned Chevrolet crammed with teenagers wheeled out in front of us from the lot of a corner take-out, then rounded a corner and disappeared down a darkened sidestreet.
    Out on the expressway there was nothing for us to focus on in the growing dark but the stream of tail-lights racing ahead of us. I caught a glimpse of Rita hugging her window, staring out into nothing.
    “We could stop somewhere to eat, if you want.”
    “It’s all right. I’m not that hungry.”
    The wind had picked up. On the Burlington Skyway, a gust of it caught the car broadside and seemed ready to heave it over the rails. Then toward Toronto it began to snow, insmall, blizzardy flakes that formed shifting patterns on the surface of the highway. For some reason the sight of the city’s skyline through the snow, something distantly hopeful in it, brought a lump to my throat.
    The silence between us had begun to grow oppressive.
    “Maybe we could catch a film or something,” I said.
    But if was as if our parts were interchangeable, as if we were both merely trying to find the way to say no.
    “I don’t know. There’s some work I should probably do.”
    When I pulled up to her house, Elena was standing at the front window like a waiting parent. She stared out expressionless toward the car, arms folded over her chest.
    “I’ll call you,” I said, and though conscious of Elena watching, still I leaned over and brushed my lips against Rita’s, the barest flicker of a kiss.
    My heart was pounding.
    “I’d better go,” Rita said, and then without looking back she was out in the cold, and home.

VIII
    Sunday morning, early, there was a knock at my door. I hurried up out of bed expecting Rita again, but it was Sid Roscoe from upstairs.
    “Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to get you out of bed.”
    Sid had moved in above me in January. In his first few weeks he had come by to borrow things – tools, some paper, a bread knife, the knife coming back flecked with small, greenish bits of what I took to be hash. Then at some point I’d made the mistake of lending him a bit of money, and afterwards he had more or less dropped out of sight.
    “I just wanted to leave that cash off,” he said now, and my first irritation at seeing him abated.
    “Sure, sure. Come on in.” He was dressed in his usual street clothes, boots, jeans, leather jacket, but I couldn’t have said if he was just rising or just coming in. “You want a coffee or something?”
    “Don’t mind