Napier's Bones by Derryl Murphy Page A

tables in use
right now, a couple sharing quiet and intimate talk, and a family of five
making a lot more noise, but all of it happy, the youngest shrieking with joy
from his high chair as an older sibling made open mouth faces while chewing on
pizza. “These people all have it pretty good,” he finally said. There was a
slight choke in his voice, but Jenna chose to ignore it for the moment.
    “What do you
mean?” asked Billy.
    Jenna held up
her hand. “I think I know,” she said. “You had what I didn’t, right? A good
family life.”
    His lips pursed,
Dom paused for a moment before finally nodding his head. “Yeah. Loving parents,
a little sister who looked up to me.” He fiddled with his beer mug for a
second, then took another drink. “But the numbers, they fuck you over something
serious. I did the same thing your mother did, Jenna, except I did it a lot
earlier. She waited until after she’d had you, but the numbers, they first
spoke to me when I was twelve. I mean, I’d been seeing them all my life, I’m
pretty sure, but I didn’t know what they were until then, much less what I
could do with them. And when they did crash down on me, I managed to hold them
back for almost four whole years.”
    “And then?”
Jenna closed her eyes, remembering her mother and anticipating what was coming
next.
    “I left.” He drained
his beer, waved at the waitress for a refill. “Walked out on my family and
never looked back. Been more than eight years since I last saw them. It still
took me a year or two to figure out what my numeracy meant; worked odd jobs for
quite awhile until I got the hang of it.”
    “Have they
looked for you?” asked Billy. “I have a sense that in my first life I did no
such thing, but this is a story I’ve heard more and more over the decades.” He
stopped talking when the waitress arrived with another beer, who nonetheless
had likely heard him talking with the accent and different voice, based on the
look she cast back at him as she headed over to the noisy family’s table.
    “Yeah, they
tried to find me. I know the cops were in it for awhile, but their numbers were
easy to avoid, especially since there was nobody involved who knew they
existed, much less how to control them, and every day away, I got better at
handling them. I finally phoned one day, when I knew my parents would be out.
Talked to my sister, told her that I was okay and that they should stop trying
to find me.”
    “What was her
answer?”
    “She
was pretty pissed off. Yelled at me, called me all sorts of names, then backed
off, told me she loved me and they wanted me to come back home. Tough language
from someone who was only eleven at the time.” He grinned at the memory, took
another swallow. “They were in a car accident a few months later. Dad’s in a
wheelchair now, and Mom and my sister were hurt pretty bad, but they got
better. I still arrange for some money to mysteriously appear in their bank
account whenever I can.”
    It
had been hard for Jenna to lose her family the way she had, and must have been
even more difficult for Dom, walking away like that and then not being there
for them after the accident. It was appalling to think about, and for just a
second she wondered if she should get up and walk away, get off this path to a
life of hunting for numbers and secrets that Dom had buried himself in.
Perversely, though, she caught the look of despair that had ever-so-briefly
crept onto Dom’s face, and thought of her mother and what she had left behind,
chasing the numbers in the face of the same sort of loss, and realized that she
was in this every bit as deep as they were now.
    That realization
didn’t answer everything for her, though. “Then why are you still away?” she
asked. “When all is said and done, how is it that you can’t just let your
family know that you’re still around, maybe show up for Christmas once or
twice.” Her voice caught, and for a second she was sure she was going to