The Lost by Jack Ketchum Page A

there for some reason that neither of them could quite understand but that would eventually become clear to them and the kids had gone on ahead a week before with their grandmother. So they sat for over an hour and a half at a table in the crowded airport bar, Schilling drinking scotch even though that was a good part of what had got them there in the first place and Lila drinking vodka tonics and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. At first it was across the table and then he slid in beside her into the booth and they held one another and kissed and cried and tried to fathom what had happened here, what kind of beast had savaged them and what this meant. How could two people have no future together when they clung so ferociously even at future’s end? It made no sense. Even in their final hour and a half as a couple there was a sweetness he would not know again. He was aware of it even then. To deal with that fact, to experience it fully was why they’d arrived so early at the airport. Somehow they’d known they’d need the time.
    You could not love like this more than once. It would never happen to either one of them again.
    But at least he’d had that much with her. At least they’d had the touch. He was never even in the ballpark with the kids. Probably he wasn’t meant to have kids in the first place. His job was his passion and second to that was Lila and third to that was drinking, a product of the first passion probably mixed with plain old genetics he guessed. His parents had had that problem too.
    His kids had got the short end.
    Will had been difficult from birth and did not get any easier. He talked to Lila and the kids on a weekly basis and it was still true. Will was angry and defiant and running with an equally fuck-you crowd and Lila was worried. Schilling had treated him with very little patience and had always wanted more from him self-discipline-wise than the kid was prepared to give. He loved him but the fact was that Will exasperated him and stirred his anger, and it had always been that way and no matter how he tried to hide it, it always showed.
    With Barbara he was a little better. Barbara was a quiet little girl by nature, an early reader who spent more time with her books and toys than with other kids. She’d sit outside by the brook all day with a well-thumbed book and be happy as a clam. The problem was that when Schilling finally got around to admitting it he realized that his daughter really didn’t interest him. He was proud of her reading skills and delicate fair good looks—she got that from her mom—but he probably didn’t understand young girls enough to wonder much about them or about what was on their minds. She was not the kind of demonstrative child who always wanted to sit on her father’s lap or have him tell her a story at bedtime. She didn’t ask and he didn’t volunteer. So largely he guessed he ignored her. He was ashamed of that, but it didn’t stop him knowing it was true.
    He’d been a lousy father, a slightly better husband and what he had for his thirteen years of married life was empty hands and memories and a woman who had once been his lover who was now his friend and a heart that rarely even ached anymore. He hadn’t had a woman in years. Not since Steiner/Hanlon.
    At first after he realized Lila wasn’t coming back to him he’d searched out women with a kind of manic fervor like someone dashing around the house scrambling for gauze and bandages after shooting himself in the foot. That had lasted a few months. He couldn’t sustain it.
    After Lila it was mostly nonsense to him. The touch was gone.
    It occurred to him that he was probably still in mourning.
    Since then he’d had plenty of offers, bold and subtle. That wasn’t the problem. You drink in a bar, unless you’re Quasimodo you get offers and maybe you get them even then. He didn’t have the energy most of the time even to want a woman much less court one.
    Someone once said that