AllFreeNovel
Share Us
1
BORIS AND NATASHA
Beckett Hughes wasn’t expecting the crows.
“Nah, it’ll be good,” he was saying to his five-year-old son, Troy, as they walked across the courthouse square in Sinful, Montana. “Same as in Oz, and you liked school there. You’re here in time to start kindergarten, like all the other kids. Playing,” he continued, somewhat lamely. “Learning things. All that.”
Troy, whose hand Beckett was holding, didn’t answer, just took another lick of his ice cream, which was melting all over his hand. Beckett had finally realized that you had to grab an extra serviette every time, though, so he was marginally prepared.
As for Janey, she’d finished eating her own ice cream—tidily, especially considering that it didn’t come in a neat block here and was instead mashed messily into a dripping cone—and was walking a step ahead, possibly because Beckett and Troy weren’t cool. There were other kids hanging about on this hot August day, and some of them might presumably be going to her school in a few weeks. God forbid they’d think Janey had a parent instead of being hatched from an egg.
Beckett had never assumed he was cool, but he’d never assumed he wasn’t, either. Dads didn’t get to be cool, apparently.
“How do you know it’ll be the same?” Janey asked, forgetting to ignore him. “It’s not the same. It’s a whole differentcountry.Troy and I don’t exactly have friends here, either.”
“You have me,” Beckett said.
“It’s not the same thing,” she said.
“Go with what you’ve got,” Beckett said. “Which is me.” They were strolling back to the car after that stop for ice cream, but he was clearly going to have to think of something else fun to do, now that he’d taken a half-day off that he couldn’t afford in order to enroll the kids in school. In the heat of summer with a body of water nearby, any self-respecting Aussie knew what that would be. You went to the beach. Unfortunately, with Troy, that was out. What else did you do in a small town? He was coming up blank.
There was so much about this decision that he hadn’t thought through well enough.
“If we got a dog,” Troy said, “I wouldn’t be lonely even if I never have any friends again in my whole life. Dogs are friends already.”
“You mean ‘automatically,’” Janey said. “And Dad told you. We don’t even have our own house, and there’s nobody at home to take care of a dog during the day anyway. It’s not like before Mum died, when she was there when we got home. It’s going to be like last year, except we have to go to Mrs. Hobarts’ house instead of Tillie’s. Mrs. Hobarts isn’t going to want to take care of a dog. Simply not possible.”
She pulled out the “simply not possible” as if she’d read it in a book, which she probably had, and Beckett thought somewhat guiltily about Mrs. Hobarts.Hewouldn’t have been rapt to spend many hours in that fussy little house, and she was older than God. She was also just down the road from the place that Brett Hunter, his boss, had loaned him until the new house was ready, and it wasn’t easy to find childcare in the States. Mrs. Hobarts was going to have to be it.
Troy said, “I know. I just wanted a dog,” in a sad little voice, and Beckett gripped his hand tighter and thought,I’m not doing enough here.He didn’t think,Was this a mistake?because there was no point in thinking that. It was done, and this was their new start. All their worldly possessions were loaded into a container on a ship that was currently in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hunter had offered the post as construction manager on his upscale new ski resort, and had said he’d put him to work on the next job when that came up. Beckett had accepted, because he’d had to do something, and here he was.
He stopped thinking about it, because Janey said, “Those birds are attacking that lady, Dad!”
Troy said, “They’re swooping at her! They’re going to peck her!” He was off, then, wrenching his hand from Beckett’s and running as fast as his legs would carry him toward the woman. His ice cream fell from the cone onto the footpath, and he didn’t even notice.
The woman was striding along toward the building’s entrance, long-limbed and purposeful, in a sleeveless black dress that reached her knees. As Beckett picked up the pace, he realized she was … talking? to the big black birds, who were definitely swooping around her, cawing in their harsh croaks. Those were crows, and she certainlylookedlike she was having a conversation with them.
Odd.
The crows cawed some more and flew patterns over her head, and Troy jumped up and down at them, waving his arms and screaming. The crows began swooping at him, then, and the woman called out and ran toward him.
Beckett was a second behind, with Janey bringing up the rear. He’d have collided with the woman, in fact, if he hadn’t skidded to a stop just in time. Troy was sobbing in fear, his arms over his head, and a half-second after the woman reached to pull him in, Beckett scooped him up in his arms and held him close. The crows, meanwhile, cawed and swooped some more.
Somebody had made a film about this once, hadn’t they? It hadn’t ended well.
Janey said, “Dad!” and Beckett took one hand off Troy and put it on her, feeling as if he’d stepped into some surreal alternate universe, or possibly that film. And they saidAustraliahad aggressive wildlife.
The woman was telling Troy, “They’re harmless. They’re my friends. Boris and Natasha. They thought you were attacking me, that’s all.”
Beckett said, “You’ve got ice cream on you now, sorry.” Because she did. Either she’d grabbed at Troy or he’d grabbed at her, because there was a glob of chunky brown on her dress. To be precise, on her breast. He stopped looking, pulled that extra serviette out of his pocket, handed it to her, and made a vague gesture in the general vicinity.
She wasn’t as fussed as he’d have expected. She looked down at her breast, said, “Ugh,” and began wiping the stuff off. And Beckett did not watch.
It was a simple dress. It was also what you’d call aslimdress, and she filled it out nicely, from his point of view. Australian style, he’d call that body, long and lean and athletic, like a surfer. But he wasn’t watching.
She said, “I wasn’t expecting an adventure today. You never know, I guess.”
Janey asked, “Are you trying to be a witch?”
