Chapter Seventeen
Throughout that summer and into the fall, as Felix settled further into life after Tuck now, he had on a stiff canvas jacket, a blue work shirt tucked into dingy trousers, and work boots.
He apologized for his appearance and she waved him off, said he looked fine.
What didn’t look fine was his aura. She couldn’t always detect auras, but his was steely, flinty.
Fractured. It hovered around him like particles waiting to fall. She said nothing about that.
They spoke for a minute about the boys, the friendship that had come out of that half-built igloo. Then they sat down. Felix seemed to want to pick up where they’d left off last time. He still didn’t have a name for her, but she had a feeling it was rolling around in his mouth.
She cast her invitation to the spirits who’d died on the Teague, and they waited with their eyes closed while she listened and focused.
Nothing. Nothing. Then something…peculiar. Something erratic. Not human.
“Did you have a dog?”
“When I was a boy,” Felix said. “We had a beagle.”
“But on the ship?”
“No. There were no dogs on the ship.”
“It’s strange. I can just barely sense a—an animal, maybe—a dog, I’m guessing—and it seems to have known you from that time.
Or a cat? Something with a tail.” The spirit was playful, wouldn’t stay still.
She asked it what it was. Asked it to come closer.
Then she made a noise that sounded like a gasp.
Felix opened one eye for just a moment and could tell from her expression that she hadn’t gasped at all; she’d stifled a laugh.
“It’s a monkey. This is a first—I’ve actually never encountered an animal before. ”
“I don’t understand,” Felix said. “I mean, I do, but I don’t. It…He…He wasn’t on the ship. Is he okay?”
“Well, he’s dead. He’s a spirit.”
“What happened to him?”
She asked, but cross-dimensional simian didn’t translate into anything she could decipher. “Why do you think he’s here?” she asked Felix.
“I don’t know.”
She took a breath. “Tell me about this monkey. Where you encountered him.”
He told her he’d gone on R the temperature had dropped and the cold needled his face and hands.
He was shaken. He couldn’t help wondering if he would have been better off never answering that ad and going to Becky Jenkins in the first place.
She’d given him, and so directly, what he’d been trying to push out of his head for the past nine years.
Exactly what he’d been trying not to be.
Because he’d asked her to. Because he’d written it across Augie’s chest with his finger.
The things that we love tell us what we are.
Something—not just the smell or the temperature or the light—was different. He’d been told, then.
He no longer thought any of it was going away, no longer believed it possible.
And he saw that he could live with that.
He felt, maybe for the first time in his life, like he might fit into the world—as himself, among the living. With Margaret, and with Tom—he saw a path there, fraught as it was at times. He saw a path he could navigate. As himself.
He returned to work, climbed back into his coveralls, and drifted through the rest of the day building undercarriages.
On the way home, he bought a Christmas tree from a young Canadian who tied it to the roof of the Plymouth without breaking a sweat.
Felix tipped the guy, wished the young couple coming onto the lot a happy holiday, while the French horns of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” wagged out of the loudspeakers.