“It’s a Remington rimfire, bolt-action Model Five. Perfect for partridge and rabbits.”

Spence sights down the barrel. Then he hands the rifle to Kitty.

“It’s a .22,” he adds.

She wrestles the butt up to her shoulder.

“What’s ‘twenty-two’ mean?” she asks.

“It’s the caliber.”

“What’s that?”

“The measure of the inside diameter of the barrel. A .22 caliber rifle has a bore of 22/100 inches.”

“Bang!” says Kitty, aiming at a shiny tin can sitting on the fence. “Bang!” she says again.

“Shall we load ’er up?” says Spence. Kitty reluctantly gives up the rifle and watches carefully as her big brother pulls the bolt back and opens the breech, places a single gold-and-silver shell inside, then closes it again. He smiles as he hands her the rifle, but he doesn’t let go of it. He kneels beside her, helps her tuck the butt comfortably into her shoulder, gently pulls back a strand of jet-black hair from across her eye, and tucks it behind her ear.

“Keep tight,” he says, patting her on the shoulder. “There isn’t all that much recoil from this thing, but still . . .”

“Recoil?”

“Kick,” he says, and makes the rifle rear up in her hand to show her what he means.

Then he moves her right hand farther along the stock and shows her how to tilt her head just so to line up the front sight in the notch of the back sight.

She can’t wait to pull the trigger, but he stays her hand.

“It’s about breathing,” he says. “Slowly breathe in and out, then breathe in again and hold it. This will keep you and your rifle still, right?”

“Right,” she says. “Got it.”

Then he shows her how to pull the bolt back to full cock.

She breathes in and out and holds it.

BANG!

And to her amazement, the first tin can goes flying.

“Whoa!” says Spence.

“Did I do that?” says Kitty.

He nods. “Rabbits, take cover!” he says.

Caution gets off the Dundas streetcar at Roncesvalles. It’s night and cold — the day old all of a sudden and tired. She digs her fists deep into her jacket pockets, turtles her head down inside her collar. She’s way across town from the apartment on Carlaw, but you can never tell with a magic man how far is far enough. She heads south, zipping along, half out of fear and half out of trying to keep warm, dodging traffic, zigzagging through the bustle and lights.

She does know one good someone in this city, and she knows where he lives, though she has never once contacted him. She walked by his place a couple of times last winter when she was desperate — even saw him once in his window but couldn’t bring herself to ring his bell. He hates her. Still, she figures, someone from back home who hates you is better than nothing.

Oh, please be here, she thinks.

It’s a rooming house, tall as a nightmare. The outside door isn’t locked. The inside door isn’t locked, either. It’s like saying to a potential thief that there is nothing in here you want. Caution is glad she doesn’t have to ring, but the unlocked doors don’t comfort her. She climbs the stairs to the first landing, climbs the stairs to the next. Listens at number seven. At first she hears nothing, but when she steps back, she can see light seeping out from under the door into the dimness of the landing. She listens again and smiles nervously: someone is playing a guitar.

She sniffs, gathers up her courage, and knocks three times.

The music stops; heavy footsteps approach the door. Caution pulls back and back farther, until her hand is on the newel post, ready to launch herself downstairs if she has to.

Then the door opens.

Wayne-Ray has gotten large. Overweight. It surprises her how much he looks like Auntie Lanie now. He has his mother’s deep brown eyes, her swarthy complexion, thick eyebrows, her heft.

“Kitty?”

It’s taken him a long time to recognize her. She nods hesitantly. It’s been a long time since she answered to that name.

He raises his hands to his head. “Jesus!” he says.

Caution glances behind her furtively, as if maybe a savior snuck up the stairs behind her. No such luck.

“Is it really you?”

She nods, a little uncertainly. She’s waiting for him to come to his senses — to remember what she did. He may have identified her, but he seems to be having a whole lot of trouble figuring out who she is.

But as large as he has gotten, he is 100 percent Cousin Wayne Raymond, right down to the XXXL Toronto Maple Leafs hockey sweater, the green sweats, the moccasins.

“Hey,” she says.

It isn’t exactly “abracadabra,” so maybe it’s the sound of her voice that breaks through his confusion, takes him to the next stage.

“Ah, heck,” he says, “come in here, you.” He steps back into his apartment, holding out his hand. She hurries past him, and he closes the door. Next thing she knows, she is bawling her eyes out all over his big blue maple leaf.

The first thing Wayne-Ray does once she stops crying is to find his phone. “I can’t wait to tell Mom,” he says. “She can phone your mom.”

“No,” Caution says, shaking her head. “You don’t understand.”

“Ah, Kitty, come on. For God’s sake. Everybody’s been worried sick,” he says. “I just want to let them know you’re okay.”

“I’m not okay.”

That stops him for a moment. He puts down the phone. She looks around, finds a chair, and plunks herself down in it.

“Are you, like, knocked up?” he asks. She frowns at him. “Well, you said you were not okay. I just —”

“I’m not pregnant,” she says, cutting him off. Jesus, she hopes she isn’t. “There are things even worse than that,” she says.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. “It’s just . . .”

But he doesn’t finish. Then there is a long silence, which she breaks, because she owes him some kind of explanation.

“I got myself in with some bad people, okay? Really bad people.” She looks down to escape the pity in his eyes. Then she thinks of something she can say. “I’m up to my neck in skunks, Wayne-Ray.”

He smiles, a Charlie Brown smile. His whole face is kind of crooked. He’d broken his nose bad playing baseball when he was a kid, had a scar on his chin the shape of a ground-rule double.

“Up to your neck, eh?”

It was something they used to say, although the skunks they were referring to way back then weren’t vicious, sadistic drug dealers whose stash had been pinched.

“You hungry?” he asks.

“Oh, God, yes.”

He nods. “Okay.” But there’s a question in his eyes, and she braces herself.

“What the hell’d you do to your hair?” he says.

She sits with a bowl of stew at a tiny white table in a spotless kitchen about the size of a changing room. It’s venison stew. He was home a week or so and came back with gallons of the stuff.

The stew is hot, the gravy rich, the meat tender. Auntie Lanie never bothered much with vegetables. Caution has a hold of her spoon like she’s six years old and wants the bowl to never be empty.

After she eats, they sit in his front room. She curls up on his couch with her feet under her bum. He fusses with a space heater, plugging it in so it’s close to her, then switching it up to high. There’s a draft coming from behind her, bringing up goose bumps on her naked neck, but it’s all right. She flips up the collar on her jacket.

“You sure I can’t hang that up for you?” he says.

She shakes her head, smoothing down the fuzzy blue pelt. “It’s my security blanket,” she says. “I kind of empathize with it, you know?”

Wayne-Ray shakes his head. “You always were wired funny.”

He means it nicely, she tries to tell herself. But she’s afraid it’s true. Knowing that she’s capable of unthinkable things.

He sits in an easy chair, a few feet away, with a cup of tea beside him on the wide armrest. She feels the nap of the cushion under her. She knows this worn fabric, knows this couch. It used to be in Auntie Lanie’s parlor. She shakes her head. It’s as if she’s fallen down a rabbit hole. She closes her eyes. The stew and the infrared heat are making her sleepy. She can’t shake the feeling that any minute her cousin is going to remember how much he hates her. It will be so bad because she doesn’t think she has the energy to leave of her own volition, so he will have to drag her to the door and fling her down the stairs. She will understand.

“Have you . . . ?” he starts. “Have you been here all along?”

She shrugs. Shakes her head. “I was in Sudbury for a while, but it was too close. You know?” He nods.

“But you didn’t see your dad?”

She shakes her head. “I got a job up there for a few weeks, and when I had the money, I took off again.”

The only light in the room comes though the windows behind her, from a streetlight. He’d turned on the overhead, but she’d covered her eyes and begged him to turn it off again.

“So, how long since you got to Toronto?”

With her eyes closed, she can almost imagine that the warmth coming up from the heater is from a woodstove. When Spence moved to Toronto to go to school, she’d had to carry in the firewood back home. She was only nine and she’d hated it. Wished they’d had electric baseboards, like people in town. Mostly what she’d hated was Spence being so far away.

“You should’ve called,” says Wayne-Ray. “We’re family.”

She nods. Doesn’t look up.

“Everybody’s been worried sick.”

“You said that.”

“Your mother —”

“Oh, jeez, Wayne-Ray. Lay off, will ya?”

“It’s just that —”

“I’m serious, man. I hear you. And I really appreciate you taking me in. I promise . . .”

Where did that come from? Promise? What could she promise him?

“I promise I’ll get in touch . . . when I can.”

“When’ll that be?”

“When I can.”

He doesn’t say anything, and she wonders if he believes her. Why should he? But if she doesn’t want to talk about family, she has to say something. She props her eyes open, works up a tired smile.

“How’s the . . . what’s it called . . . audio engineering — how’s that going?”

“You mean TMI?” he says.

“Right, The Music Institute.”

He rubs his chin with the back of his hand, looks away. “I kinda dropped out.”

“No way,” she says. “You were so pumped — the whole recording engineer thing.”

He nods. “Yeah, it was very cool. But . . . well, things got rough there for a bit. . . .”

Something in his eye finishes the sentence for him. Dim as the light in the room is, she can see it.

“Was it because of . . . because of what happened?”

He shrugs, won’t look at her. “What do you think?” he says.

And what Caution thinks is that, yet again, she has made a big mistake.

Caution: Watch Your Step. She should never have come here. With all that stolen money, she could have stayed at a hotel — stayed right out of this. Wayne-Ray has been so good to her just now. Always was, once he got over her hanging around with him and Spence. Once he knew she wouldn’t go away no matter how much you threatened her or cajoled her. He had become like another brother. He had been good to her, but that didn’t change anything. If she stayed, she’d be waiting for him to suddenly point his finger at her, shout at her. She’d thought maybe she could tiptoe around things by asking him about school. But school ended with Spence’s death. Everything ended with Spence’s death. All this was just a slow dying.

“What are you going to do?” Wayne-Ray says, gentle as can be.

She shrugs. “I’d just like to lie low until all this blows over,” she says.

“All what?”

“This,” she says. “Life.”

She hears him sip his tea, place the cup down on the arm of the chair. He is breathing through his mouth. He’s so big. He was never this big.

The silence closes in. She picks at something caught between her teeth. Looks away.

He had come to the city to get into the recording business, but he’d also come to be near Spence. Spence had always been more like a big brother to Wayne-Ray than a cousin. And Wayne-Ray had flunked out of school once Spence died. Not because he wasn’t good enough but because his best friend in the world had been shot and killed. Kind of hard to do your homework under those conditions. She knew that much herself.

“It’s hard, eh?” he says.

And before she really knows what she’s doing, Caution is on her feet, slipping into her tired shoes, grabbing up her pink backpack from where it lies at her feet.

“What’re you doing?”

“I shouldn’t have come,” she says, pushing past him.

“Yes, you should have,” he says, his voice rising. “You should have come months ago.”

“It’s no use,” she says, shaking his hand off her arm.

“You can’t go, Kitty.”

“Watch me,” she says.

For a big guy, Wayne-Ray is still quick on his feet. He gets to the door before her.

“You don’t want me here,” she says.

“Are you crazy?”

She stamps her foot. “Yes!” she says. “Haven’t you been listening?”

Then she starts beating on him, punching him, trying to heave his massive frame out of the way. He doesn’t even try to fend her off, just lets her go at him with all she’s got, while he bars that exit, like beyond the door was some sacred shrine she planned to desecrate. And all the time he’s saying, “Ah, Kitty. Ah, Kitty. Ah, Kitty.”

Finally, there is nothing left in her — not one precious joule of energy, not one swear word. He guides her back to the couch, his hand cupping her elbow like she’s some old lady he’s helping cross the street. He gets her sitting down, then kneels, laboriously, and slips off her sneakers. When he’s sure she’s not going to bolt, he goes into the bedroom and comes back with a pillow and a blanket. He tries to coax her to lie down, but she won’t. He tries to unzip her jacket, but she slaps his hand away. Puffing from the ordeal, he finally backs off.

He leaves and comes back a moment later with his guitar. He sits in the easy chair and starts playing a ballad she should recognize but doesn’t. She covers her ears until he stops.

“Hate me!” she says.

“What?”

“Hate me, Wayne-Ray. It’s the least you could do.”

“No,” he says.

“I’m not going to ever get over this.”

“I know,” he says.

“It’s never going to go away.”

“I know.”

“And don’t you dare tell me I’ve got to be strong.”

“I won’t.”

Which is when she screams. She screams so loud and so long that somebody downstairs thumps on the ceiling. Then she stops.

“Sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay,” says Wayne-Ray. “Them and I don’t get along, anyway.”

She chuckles. It’s a sad little excuse for laughter. More like a white flag of surrender than anything else.

She doesn’t lie down so much as fall over. She drags the blanket out from behind her and haphazardly flings it over her aching body. When she is next conscious of anything, the apartment is plunged into darkness and she is sore all over, as if someone has been using her as a punching bag.

Some time later, she senses Merlin hovering over her. Without letting him know she’s awake, she makes her face as ugly as she can. She hopes there is enough street light in the room for him to see just how ugly she is. She hopes he finds the spittle drooling from the corner of her mouth truly disgusting. She lets herself sag into the springs of the couch, disguising any shapeliness she may possess. She even manages to snore in a most unappealing manner. Meanwhile, her hand searches under the covers for Anna. She was reading it before bed, wasn’t she? If worse comes to worst and he tries anything, she’ll be ready.

Step one: a Russian classic to the face.

Step two: a couple of handy long-necked beer bottle empties, applied one to either ear, as if she were a cymbal player in the orchestra and Merlin’s head the crash site of the symphony’s climax.

But then she’s not sure if there really are any beer bottles on a coffee table in front of this couch, or whether that was some other couch, some other place. So confusing. So many couches. Such a long day. And Anna is nowhere to be found. So it seems that only her ugliness can save her now. How lucky she is, she thinks, to be so deeply, profoundly ugly.

“‘Everything is finished,’ she said. ‘I have nothing but you. Remember that.’”

The words came to her, but she had no idea why. No idea who “you” might be.