Found

by Erin Kinsley

If only we could all sleep soundly at night, knowing we were safe from wicked people.

Of all the people who were here, she had borne their company most easily, those world-weary men and women who handled pressure with laughter, uncovering rubies of dark humour in the rubble of once-ordinary lives.

‘See you later, Mum,’ he said, and pulled the door shut behind him, leaving her life.

And Matt, promise me you’ll tell that boy how his grandma and grandpa missed him. Tell him his grandma’s baking a cake, and we can hardly wait to see him.’

Evan’s holding Dora’s hand, and as he watches the screen, he begins to smile, a cautious, hesitant smile, as if he’s trying on something that used to be a comfortable fit, as if he’s rediscovered something precious but isn’t sure it’s meant for him.

‘Probably he fed her some line about embezzlement,’ suggests Hagen. ‘People see that as a nice, respectable crime.’

What is it they ask in hospitals? The pain scale, one to ten. Today she’d give an eight or nine. The grief while he was gone, in the low twenties.

Isn’t that what Dora used to say, never the same view twice? And it’s true: the light, the colours, the sky mean that though there are constants in the land and its features – the walls, the valleys, the track-ways – everything else is always changing, an eternal dance of infinite variety.

He’s been remembering too his first Christmas with Dora, when he bought her an engagement ring that cost him a month’s wages. In later years, that ring looked as cheap as it was, a tiny chip of a solitaire she needed a magnifying glass to see. As time went by, he bought her better jewellery, but the first ring he bought her never left her finger.

He’s making the best of the terrible, awful hand life dealt him, and I think we can all learn from that.’