The Restoration Artist by Lewis DeSoto Page A

way,” I said. “The boy. And I thought it was Piero, that he’d come to stop me, to call me back.”
    She nodded. “Suffering can make us imagine things, it can make us behave in ways we cannot understand.” She sounded like she knew more than I’d told her.
    “I know he is
not
Piero. And I know I haven’t imagined him. He is as real as you and me. I’ve seen him, I’ve touched him. Just the other day, in fact, practically right outside your door.”
    “Here? What do you mean?
    “The whole thing was quite strange.” I told her about hearing the odd musical sounds in the woods. “It was the boy, standing there with his goats like some mythological faun, making this strange music on a clarinet.”
    “Ah, that explains it,” she said.
    “What?”
    She strode over to an instrument case sitting on the counter, snapped the catches open and brought out a clarinet. “Like this one?”
    “It looks exactly the same.”
    “The other day I came home and found my clarinet lying on the kitchen counter. I never leave it lying about when I’m not playing. This instrument is very precious to me, it has a special history, and I always put it back in its case. I couldn’t understand how it came to be on the counter. I’m never absent-minded about it. And you say he was actually playing it?”
    “Well, yes and no.” I tried to explain what I’d heard.
    “How odd. Did you try and talk to him, to find out who he is?”
    “I think I went about it in completely the wrong way and frightened him off.” I told her about trying to grab and hold onto the boy.
    “It’s likely he is afraid of you. He must have been terrified when he saw you fall. Too scared to even go for help. And he probably feels some responsibility for what happened on the cliff, even though he’s only a child. But I don’t understand why a boy that age is not in school. Why is he tending goats and running around shirtless? What about his parents?”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “Have you tried to find out?”
    “Not directly. I wanted to talk to him first. It would seem a bit odd for a stranger to be asking questions about some local boy, don’t you think?”
    She frowned slightly. “What do you really want from this boy, Leo?”
    I wasn’t sure myself, but I said, “Do you have children?”
    She shook her head.
    “Then you can’t really understand,” I told her. “I know about loss.”
    My eyes went again to that faint vestige of the bruise on her cheek. I sank back wearily on the couch. “You’re right, ofcourse. But you have to understand that I can’t just let it end. I have to know who he is. He is a kind of phantom right now. Maybe just knowing that he is an ordinary boy like any other will help me.”
    She walked over to the table and picked up a pack of cigarettes. I watched her as she crossed the room. She was wearing a thick oatmeal-coloured sweater and a black skirt that came down to her calves, and a pair of old-fashioned lace-up boots. Her thick hair was disorderly from the wind and she raked it back on each side of her head with her fingers as she sat down. She lit the cigarette with a battered old brass Zippo that gave off a strong smell of lighter fluid, and I picked up the cigarette package.
    “Lucky Strike. I used to smoke Luckies for a while when I lived in New York.”
    “Are you American?”
    I shook my head. “Canadian.”
    She said, “I started smoking these at the end of the war when the American soldiers handed them out.”
    “Were you here in the war?”
    “Paris. Other places.” She looked away, gesturing at the cigarettes. “Have one.”
    “I never took to it,” I said. “But I like the smell.” I set the package on the cushion between us.
    “I really think you should put a bandage on that scrape,” she said.
    I didn’t object when she rummaged in the first aid tin and brought out a roll of adhesive bandage. She tossed her cigarette into the fireplace, then cut off a strip of bandage and