Crow Lake by Mary Lawson Page B

open. “How’re you doin’, Laurie? Come on in.”
    Laurie stopped a few feet from the door. “Naw,” he said. “It’s okay.”
    “Come in,” Luke repeated. “Come have a glass of juice or something. What can we do for you?”
    Matt and I had come to the door too and Laurie looked briefly at us, dark eyes just flicking over us. He shook his head and said, “Naw, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter.” And he turned and left.
    That was all.
    We watched him fade back into the woods. Matt and Luke looked at each other. Luke let the door close gently.
    “Odd,” Matt said.
    “You think something’s wrong?”
    “No idea.”
    We thought no more about it. Matt and I went back to the dishes, and Luke put Bo to bed, and that was that.
    Looking back, I think he must have come hoping to talk to either Luke or Matt. I can’t think what else he could have come for. He knew both of them better than almost anyone outside his own family—they’d been working side by side with him in his father’s fields for years— and if he trusted anyone, he probably trusted them.
    Against that, I can’t actually imagine Laurie Pye talking to anyone. I can’t see that stark white face, those disturbing eyes, and imagine him uttering the words that he must have so badly needed to say.
    The only other possibility I can think of is that he came almost accidentally. He’d gone out for a walk and suddenly found himself outside our house—though even that suggests that, consciously or unconsciously, he was looking for someone to talk to.
    Whatever the reason, he stood outside in the gradually increasing darkness, looking in. Watching. I can imagine how it looked to him. The stress and anxiety Matt and Luke were still labouring under, Bo’s vulnerability, my own still-traumatized state—none of that would have been visible to him. What he would have seen was the clean, orderly house, the quiet, cheerful domestic scene, the four of us getting on with our lives, helping each other, the eldest carrying the youngest in his arms. It must have looked idyllic. It must have made the idea of coming in and talking about what was going on in his own home seem impossible, completely out of the question. If Bo had been screaming or Matt and Luke arguing or even if we hadn’t all been together in that shining kitchen, it might have been possible. He’d just picked a bad night.
    No jobs turned up in town that would take Luke for the peculiar hours he wanted to work, but he got himself a job working at the McLeans’ store. I have my doubts, thinking about it now, that Mr. and Mrs. McLean really needed help. They’d been running the store for twenty years and had always managed just fine. Still, they let on that they could use Luke for a couple of hours a day, and it didn’t occur to any of us that perhaps it was another act of charity.
    They were a strange family. Strange individually and stranger still as a family group. If you took any group of children and set them on one side of a room and any group of parents and set them on the other and then were told to match them up, Sally would have been positively the last child you matched with Mr. and Mrs. McLean. For a start, they were small and mousy, both of them, while Sally was quite tall and had that startling hair. Then there was the fact that Mr. and Mrs. McLean were famous for being shy, while Sally, particularly in her teens, was famous for being the reverse. Her body language, for example; the way she stood, pelvis forward, breasts lifted, chin delicately raised—I am sure that was not a language Mrs. McLean ever spoke, or Mr. McLean ever understood.
    The other thing they were famous for was loving children. They would stand together behind the long dark counter that ran half the length of the store and if a child walked in, those shy smiles would change to beams of purest pleasure. They should have had a dozen of their own, but Sally was their only one. They must have been well into their