Signs and Wonders by Alix Ohlin

Author:Alix Ohlin [Ohlin, Alix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780307743794
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2012-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

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The bus stops at the other end of the park. Coming out of the rec center, snapping her gum (which seems to lose its tensile strength in the cold, and she wonders, briefly, why), the day-care attendant notices a man in a gray wool coat get off and start across the park in the direction of her charges. The only reason she notices him is to think that her boyfriend is better-looking and taller and more muscular, and she can’t wait until she sees him tonight. She’s got a one-track mind, that attendant.

A child runs up to Rebecca and doesn’t say anything, just stands in front of her, a strand of blond hair leaking out from underneath a fleece cap. Crouching down, Rebecca can see it’s a girl, who removes her hand from the pocket of her snowsuit and shows it to her, shyly, like an injury of which she is ashamed. Their eyes meet.

“It’s okay,” Rebecca says mechanically, and the child nods. “Come here.”

She fits the mitten over her small, white hand and tugs it up over her wrist, the girl so close that Rebecca can smell the sour yet wholesome scent of her skin. The two of them look at each other, the child still holding up her mittened hand as if Rebecca isn’t finished yet. What’s left to do? A kiss on the forehead, a “You’re dismissed”? What’s the protocol? Then she realizes she put the mitten on wrong, that the girl’s thumb isn’t fitting into its slot. So she has to pull the mitten off and start over again, the child staring all the while. Rebecca’s starting to wonder if something’s wrong with the kid, with the whole lot of them, and that’s why they’ve been abandoned in the park to play by themselves.

Tori, meanwhile, is standing next to her, standing there in her red coat, her long blond hair snaking down her back. From the back, of course, she looks just like Rebecca. Only one thought exists in her mind: Frank.

The man coming toward them, the gun warm in his hand, could be Gabriel or Frank or even Tommy, escaped from rehab. But not all of them; only one. As it turns out, it’s Gabriel. It’s the sad-eyed ones you have to watch out for—another piece of advice that could usefully have been given to Rebecca, but which she would probably have ignored.

You can see where this is going, right? With the red coats and the blond hair? There are no surprises for you here.

From a distance of ten yards Gabriel sees only Tori’s back, and he is so blinded by his belief that it’s Rebecca—the woman who wrote a letter to his long-suffering wife—that he doesn’t notice the other form crouched down next to her. If he did, he might think it is a bundled coat or a child on a sled; his focus is that intense, the world outside it merely peripheral.

The day-care attendant puts away her cell phone, wonders who all these adults are, then sees him pull out a gun and fire.

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