The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Finn and I both wait up for Gabe that night. I boil beans – infernal beans, it feels like that’s all we eat – and simmer inside my skin, planning what I will say to him when he gets here. Finn messes over the windows while I cook, and when I ask him what he’s doing, he says something about a storm. Outside the window, the night-darkening sky is clear except for some high, wispy clouds thin enough to see through, far out at the horizon. There’s no sign of foul weather. Who knows why Finn does any of the things he does. I don’t even try to talk him out of his fiddling.

We wait and wait for Gabe, my sense of betrayal simmering and then boiling and then simmering again. It’s impossible to be angry for so long. I wish I could tell Finn what it is that’s eating me, but I can’t tell him about Malvern. It’ll just make him start picking at his arms and obsessing over his morning rituals even longer than usual.

“What do you think,” I ask casually, turning the little butter bowl around and around again, so that the owl painted on the side looks at me and then Finn and then me again, “about selling the Morris – why are you laughing?”

He rattles at one of the windowpanes experimentally. “It’s not even running.”

“If it was running?”

“I might fix it tomorrow,” Finn says vaguely. I think, now, that he is using the windows as an excuse to stare outside for signs of Gabe. “I don’t want it to be out there when the storm gets bad.”

“Rain, yes, sure,” I say. “Selling it. What do you think?”

“Well, I guess that depends on why we’re selling it.”

“To get Dove better food during training.”

There is an agonizingly long pause before Finn responds. During the pause, he taps his finger all along the edge of a pane of glass before leaning in to peer at the join between glass and wood from an inch away. He seems quite content to finish experimenting with his weatherproofing before continuing the conversation.

Finally, he says, “Is better food that expensive?”

“Do you see alfalfa growing on this island?”

“It depends,” Finn says. “I don’t know what alfalfa looks like.”

“Like the inside of your dusty head. Yes, it’s expensive. It comes from the mainland.” I feel slightly bad about snapping at him. It’s not his fault that I’m cross – it’s Gabe’s. I can’t believe that I might not get to confront him tonight about Malvern’s appearance at the house. I can’t stay up for him. I have to be up early tomorrow if I’m going back to the beach again.

Finn looks mournful. I feel terrible. Maybe there’s something else we can sell, like the useless chickens that spend most of their time dying before we can kill them for dinner. The whole lot of them would buy one bale of hay and not a bite of good grain.

“Will it make her faster?” Finn asks.

“Racehorses should eat racehorse food.”

Finn casts a glance toward our dinner, beans with a lump of bacon donated by Dory Maud. “If that’s what it takes.”

He sounds like I’ve asked him to saw off his left leg. But I know how he feels. He loves the Morris like I love Dove, and what will he have left if he doesn’t have the car to putter over? Just the windows, and we only have five of them in the house.

“If I win,” I tell him, “we’ll have enough money to buy it back.” He still looks glum, so I go on. “We’ll have enough to buy two of them. A car to pull the other car when the engine stops on the first one.”

Now he has the ghost of a smile. We sit down and eat our beans with the lump of bacon. Without saying anything about it, we eat the rest of the apple cake, not leaving any for Gabe. Two people at a table meant for five. I don’t see how I’ll be able to sleep with this knot of anger inside me. Where is he?

I think about that decapitated sheep that Finn and I found on the way to Skarmouth. How are we supposed to know if Gabe’s working late or if he’s dead by the side of the road? How is he supposed to know if we’re home safely or dead by the side of the road, for that matter?

Finn is the one who says it finally. “It’s like he’s already gone.”