Slow River

She put her spade down carefully, not wanting to startle whatever it was, but when she got near the tangle of weeds and dead wood and what looked like it might once have been a bicycle frame, there was a flurry of movement. She squatted down, peered under the foliage. An eye gleamed, and a tail lashed in the shadows. A cat.

They stared at each other. The cat was not pretty. Its ribs were showing, and one eye was closed, probably missing altogether. She could smell its breath, a thick, hot stink as though it had been chewing on dead things.

Lore backed away carefully. It needed feeding, that was obvious, but if she left now, would it ever come back? And if it did, did she really want the responsibility of caring for a verminous, ill animal? It was probably dying. And if she went inside to get food, she would have to come out again. Run the gauntlet twice in one day.

The cat was pushed as far back against the wall as it could get. It hissed, hissed again. Its upper right canine was missing. Maybe it was old, and had come here to die. It moved its head back and forth, looking for a way past Lore.

She wondered what was in the kitchen that a cat might like to eat, and visions of the poor starved thing wolfing down cold rice, or scraps of two-day-old sushi or beans, trying to lick its whiskers afterward, made her sigh. Now she would have to feed it.

She brought out two saucers, one with raw egg, the other with defrosted ground veal. The cat was gone. She put the dishes down in the undergrowth anyway, and went back to her spade. She did not see the cat again that afternoon.

When it got dark, she went out one more time. The plates were empty. She smiled.

She watched the net but there was never anything about her kidnapping, no stories about bodies. Not surprising. She was old news: she had been taken at the end of August and it was now December. What was unusual was the absence of information about the van de Oests. Nothing.

She scanned the business then environmental sections—still nothing. It did not make sense.

And then one day, on the news, there were her father and Tok, standing shoulder to shoulder by the fountain at Ratnapida. Tok, she noticed, was taller than her father now.

“We know she’s out there somewhere,” Oster was saying, “and we want her to come home.”

Tok, circles under his eyes and a broken air to his stance, nodded. “Please,” he said directly to the camera, “Lore, come home. It’s… Everything’s sorted out.” He looked utterly defeated.

Four months ago, Tok, with just a few breathless sentences about why Stella had killed herself, had destroyed the image Lore had built of Oster over the years. She had loved her father; she had thought he loved her. But he was a monster. It had all been a lie. And now Tok—Tok, her brother, Stella’s twin—was siding with him, telling her to come home, it was all sorted out. She did not understand.

Although she and Spanner slept together, although she might owe her life to Spanner, Lore knew instinctively that letting Spanner see chinks in her armor was dangerous. So the afternoon Spanner called from the kitchen that they had run out of bread, and suggested that Lore go to the market because they needed some other things, too, Lore knew she would have to go, would have to conceal her fear and saunter casually out into the daylight on her own.

The day was thinly overcast. The clouds spread the light into an eye-aching blanket that made her wince. It was colder than it looked. Her breath, coming in great panicky gusts, froze like gauzy sheets in front of her face. She wished she had worn a hat. She did not go back for one; she knew she would not be able to leave again.

The market sign flashed three hundred yards away. Lore started walking. If she kept her eyes on the s she would be all right. She crossed at the ceramic safeway she and Spanner always used when going to the Polar Bear. Safe territory. Known. But then she was walking north along the pavement and people were walking in front of her and across her path and toward her. There was nowhere she could look where they would not be able to see her face. She walked faster.

The market was strange: small, but with that cavernous feel of tight-margin enterprise. She picked up a basket and wandered down the first aisle, trying hard to not look as bewildered as she felt. To look vulnerable was to be vulnerable. It was all bar codes and machine voices calling out prices as her basket passed. The only people she saw were shoppers.