The Whole World

CHAPTER 10

Nick became a calendar.

Wednesday December second became: The Day Before Nick Was Gone.

I carried around his gloves most of the day; I finally got a chance to hand them over to him at Gretchen’s house. Then Gretchen and I had a fight, and he stayed to fix it. He was gallant. I had to go, and he was doing something else later. It was all, “See you tomorrow!”

Then, tomorrow, Nick was gone. That was Thursday, which became Day One, but we didn’t know that yet.

It was the choir dinner. I knew he’d be there. It was black tie, not academic gowns. I had secondhand dresses I’d gotten cheap from the charity shops on Burleigh Street. Old May Ball dresses from last year. That’s where I shopped with Polly when we were friends. Then we’d eat at the café of the public library, outside on the high-up deck: cheap baked potatoes, cups of tap water, and the tower cranes building the Grand Arcade swinging not too far overhead. We’d read our borrowed books. It had been enough. Someone’s old clothes, borrowed books, and cheap potatoes. It was very La Bohème, a starving-student sort of thing. It was fun. I didn’t mind.

But there’s a boutique on Magdalene Street, just by the entrance to college. They have shoes and purses, and dresses. Not Cinderella-type fuss, just real modern, feminine dresses, in my face, every day.

There were two other customers in the shop: a tiny elderly lady indulging in a really great pair of shoes, and another Magdalene student whom I’d seen around. I knew she had money. She was buying three dresses and a purse. I could tell from the conversation that she knew the sales clerk.

I waited for her to leave. Then I asked the clerk, who had beautiful straight blond hair, if she had the dress in the window to fit me. She took a long time to consider, and all I could think was: She’d fit into the bitty one in the window. Finally she went in the back and there was one in a normal, human size for me. I tried it on behind a curtain. The dress was knee-length and white, with a splash of red poppies clustered at the hem. The top was ruched around my chest, with smaller flowers scattered there. A skinny red ribbon traced the waist. I’d never had on anything so pretty.

I had to get shoes as well.

I keep my cards in a little zipper thing that fits in my pocket: credit card, ATM, public library, student I.D. The zipper thing is only just a little bigger than the cards themselves, and it kind of holds on to them when I try to pull one out. The bag and I had a little fight about the credit card. In the end I snapped the zipper pull and now it doesn’t close anymore.

I might have stopped myself. I could have stopped somewhere between the dressing room and punching in my PIN on the little machine. I needed to make it through to Christmas, when my dad would pay tuition and top up my living expenses again. But when my own purse tried to stop me I just got defensive. I’m not going to let a stupid bag tell me what to do.

The price came in just three pounds under my limit.

I wouldn’t be able to return the shoes; they would show scuffs. But I’d return the dress. So long as I was careful with it, I could return the dress, saying I hadn’t used it, and get the money back.

After all that, Nick didn’t come to the dinner.

It was held at Magdalene, with the usual formality. All the men looked alike, and the women looked different: different hems, different colors, different hairstyles. Except for the girl I’d seen in the shop, who was wearing the same dress that I was. Poppies on white.

I was angry. Nick was supposed to be there. Instead-what? I didn’t even think of him being with Polly. I assumed him to be at some sort of family event, something to do with his sister, or maybe something with the Chanders. Some performance or presentation at their school. Because he’d spent his whole life going to dinners like this. They weren’t special to him, so he had no respect that they were special to some people.

I was so angry I couldn’t eat. I didn’t want to risk dropping anything on the dress anyway. Dinner was roast beef. Even one drip would force me to keep the dress. I was careful with the wine, careful with the water even. I was between someone named Mark and another guy. Mark asked me if I’d ever sung Scarlatti’s “Stabat Mater,” which I hadn’t. He said it had more than thirty-part harmony. I told him he was full of shit. The girl on his other side said it does have that many parts, and what was my problem? I was really mad from Nick being so cavalier about where he bothers to show up, so I told her to fuck off. And she said, “How very American of you.” Five or six people laughed at that. The girl who said it wasn’t even English; she was Canadian. I wanted to leave but everyone would have looked at me walk out.

I picked up my wineglass, which was still full because I’d been avoiding it. Mark reached for his water at the same time, and our arms knocked lightly. If my glass hadn’t been full, it wouldn’t have been any big deal. But the wine was close to the top and sloshed over the side. Just one plop of it, but it hit my plate with momentum enough to send a drop sliding up over the edge. It hit my lap, on the linen napkin there, which I grabbed up quickly, to keep the purple from soaking through onto the dress. That’s when Mark’s water spilled onto the dress instead. Clear water, but any wet at all would ruin the fabric. It could be dry-cleaned away maybe, but not enough to make it look like it had never been worn. Two hundred and eighty-nine pounds. I gasped. Mark apologized, but the girl on his other side covered a laugh.

I was too angry to move, and if I swore again that would just set off the Canadian girl. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” I thought, It’s Nick who should be apologizing. And, It’s Polly who would be laughing, isn’t it.

There was nothing Mark could do; it’s not like he could dab at my crotch with his table napkin. He stopped saying sorry eventually. Now I really couldn’t get up; it would have looked like I peed myself. The guy on my other side finally said something to me. He said, “These things go on forever.” What did he mean? Did he kindly mean my skirt would dry into a wrinkled mess before I’d have to get up? Did he obnoxiously mean that he hated being stuck next to me and my problems?

None of it even mattered. The hard rains had come. When I stepped outside, the dress got soaked.

We found out that Nick was gone on Day Two, which suddenly made sense of him missing the dinner. I heard it from the porter. I was worried, but in a light way, thinking he’d gotten a flat tire on his bicycle or had lost track of time in the library stacks. I went to tell Polly, who already knew.

Polly had been interviewed by the police.

I had to call them myself to tell them I was Nick’s friend too. This was Saturday, Day Three. The man said he was glad I’d called and that I was on his list, which was bullshit. He just said that to cover up that he didn’t think I was much of anything to Nick. I made an appointment to go down to the Parkside police station, to tell them everything that had happened and let them decide who the girlfriend was.

“Hi,” said the policewoman. Polly had talked to a man. “Thanks for coming in. You’re at Magdalene?” I nodded. “The porters tell me there was a little party Tuesday evening.”

“Oh, totally,” I agreed. “I saw Nick collecting his mail and invited him over. He needed a break.”

“Was there any alcohol at this party?”

“Just some beer. I think he only had one.” He wasn’t drunk, if that’s what she was implying. He didn’t need to be drunk to do what we did.

“When did he leave?”

“He stayed in my room for a while.” I smiled.

“How long is a while?”

“I guess half an hour.” Long enough, is what I meant. “He had to see his supervisor.” It was important to explain why he hadn’t stayed over.

“Richard Keene? No, he didn’t.”

“What?”

“We’ve spoken with Dr. Keene. They had no interaction on Tuesday night.”

I know that Nick saw him. He went around to O building and didn’t come out.

“Why would Dr. Keene lie?” I asked.

She leaned back. “Why do you think Dr. Keene would lie?”

I held on to the seat of my chair with both hands.

“I guess he wasn’t in. But Nick went to see him.” And didn’t come out from around the front of the building for at least forty minutes. After forty minutes I went to bed.

“We’ll investigate the discrepancy,” she said. “Did Nick go to a lot of parties?”

“I don’t know.” Maybe he did. Maybe this was a normal thing for him. Maybe lots of girls put their faces there.

“What did you and he do for half an hour?”

She was asking everything backward. She was supposed to have asked that before she told me that Nick hadn’t really gone to see Dr. Keene.

“Like, we talked and stuff. About… school.” I shook my head. That was stupid. Why would we talk about school? But she believed me. She didn’t even try to get it out of me that we hadn’t talked at all.

“Do you know Polly Bailey? Was she at this party?”

“No!” I said.

I let them take my fingerprints, like they were doing with everyone who knew him well. “For elimination purposes,” this policewoman said. That’s right; someone had trashed his room.

My prints wouldn’t be there. I’d never been in his room. Whenever I went over to the Chanders’ house, we’d sat in the kitchen. I’d never even been upstairs.

By the time I learned about Polly being sick in Nick’s office-and when-it wasn’t really a surprise at all.

Since he’d lied about needing to see Dr. Keene, and lied about liking me, and lied about whether I’d done it right and if it felt good and if I mattered, maybe he’d lied about everything. Maybe he hadn’t tried to smooth anything over with Gretchen. Maybe, instead of calming down her freak-out over the handwriting thing, he’d urged her on, picking apart my index line by line…

Never mind. I had to try. I had to get it done. I had to get paid.

She wasn’t even in. And Harry was away for a bird competition, which was actually kind of perfect. I have my own key for just this kind of situation, and I thought, Great, no distractions. But Gretchen had moved the photos. The whole box had been put away somewhere. Maybe she’d taken them someplace to get scanned or preserved, but I thought it was really rude to not have told me.

I’d set aside two hours to be there. I turned on the computer. What else was I supposed to do? It’s not like she’d left me the ability to do my stupid job. I looked at some sites that I like and just felt really frustrated. Then I flipped through her bookmarks a little. Why not?

Polly thinks it’s wrong that I looked at what was on Gretchen’s computer sometimes, but I didn’t even do it on purpose. It talked to me and that’s literal. The first time it happened I freaked out. But then I got used to it, and it was like having a conversation. I’d press buttons and it would say stuff. It was funny.

One time when Gretchen had been using the computer, and I waited my turn out in the hall, I’d heard her. I wasn’t really paying attention, but I noticed it spell out “brussels1958.” I thought that was funny. I realized it was her password. It recited a series of numbers too. It was the password to her bank account. It’s just funny to pay attention to stuff like that. One time I watched a friend of mine dial her locker combination and freaked her out for weeks after by putting stuff in there. Nothing mean, just funny, like stupid toys from the dollar store. It just makes sense to pay attention in life.

So, when I was alone in Gretchen’s house, with absolutely nothing to do-which wasn’t my fault-I logged in. I just wanted to see how much she had. The checking account was normal; the investment account was enormous. Big to me anyway. Not like what had been kicking around Silicon Valley when I was a teenager, but still, it was a lot.

The thing is, I needed money for things, stupid things. Shampoo and food, stuff that I would have charged if I hadn’t hit my limit. It’s not like I could make it to Christmas. I was supposed to get a check today, and even then it would take time to clear. Now I’d have to wait even longer.

Since they had so much, it didn’t seem any big deal to take a little from the cash in the top drawer. Just three twenties. Queen Elizabeth looked at me all judgmental until I crinkled her into my pocket.

Polly’s mother was arrested on Day Seven. I was back at Gretchen’s house one last time, trying to not have a fight with her. “What do you mean you told Nick to ‘dispose’ of them? What does that even mean?” I’d come one last time to try to finish with the photos, and they were gone. Just gone. She’d gotten rid of them.

“I’m suspending the project. You may return the house key. I’ll get you your check. Harry!”

He was in the kitchen. His hands were covered with flour.

“What did Nick do with them?” I demanded. “You can’t just-”

That’s when the doorbell rang. Polly was hysterical, which isn’t really surprising. We knew by then how she’d reacted to Nick touching her. Who knew how she’d cope with anything else?

Everyone forgot about my check. Only Polly mattered.

They forgot about my key too.

“It’s one thing to use a girl because you’re just so in the moment overwhelmed by her. It’s something else to make her finish someone else’s job. After that, he was gone. And good, you know? Why would I want him to come back?” I told Dr. Keene everything, not about money but about Nick, to shock him.

He winced, then looked over my shoulder, as if the “Building Stones of Britain” were really, really interesting. We were in the basement gathering area under the Sedgwick Museum. My art stuff was spread out over utilitarian tables. The walls were covered with rock samples, every one a slightly different color. They were apparently a lot more interesting than me.

I’d volunteered to make models for a special exhibit at the Sedgwick: “Creatures of the Burgess Shale.” Apparently the Cambrian period, which was way before dinosaurs, had far weirder creatures than most people know. The students who’d studied these fossils in the seventies had given them hilarious names, like hallucigenia. I love the seventies. I would have looked awesome with Farrah Fawcett hair. I have this friend who’s fat who spends all her weekends at Renaissance Faires because the dresses look good on her. I think if I could be an original Charlie’s Angel on weekends, I’d do it.

It felt good to be making art again, not just talking about it. I was making these outsized abstractions of these creatures that were wacky in the first place. No one knows what color any of these things were, so I was free to really go for it. They needed to be paper pop-outs so kids could make their own spiky hallucigenia, or marrella, which is like a shrimp wearing elaborate headgear, or wiwaxia, which looks like Mercury’s winged helmet. With glue and pom-poms and feathers too. Anything to make the kids like science.

I’ve thought about majoring in science. Not stopping making art, but coming at it from knowing more about life. Because experience is the foundation for art, right? So I’m tempted, and then I think, What’s the point of this school thing at all? Why not be like Gauguin and have an adventure?

That’s the kind of thing I said to Dr. Keene, just to see if I could set him off. It was Day Ten, the rains had stopped, and the police were dredging the Cam. He’d come to take a look at my models, probably just to have something else to think about, and we ended up talking. But he didn’t rise up in defense of formal education and good grades. He just nodded absently. So I told him everything about Nick and me.

He did that thing of freezing his face to not show any reaction. A person only does that if their real reaction is something they’d be embarrassed by, right? He’s known Nick for longer than I have, so maybe it’s happened before. Maybe he knows Nick is a dog. Isn’t that the point of his religion? Knowing we’re messed up, and just accepting that as inevitable? So he acted weary about it, but not surprised. What he said, though, was “I don’t think you should be telling me this.”

“Why?” I said. I said it sharply, because that kind of prissiness about life is just what I’m trying to get away from. “Why not tell you about this? You mean it’s okay for Nick to be this way, just not okay to talk about it? Or it would have been okay, except Nick is gone and his victimhood trumps mine?” We were all imagining Nick bloated and gray from drowning.

“Or do you mean…” I was attacking him at this point, hurling words. “Do you mean that I shouldn’t tell you this because you’re a man and I’m a woman and we shouldn’t talk about S-E-X? Even about other people? Because I didn’t think a biologist would be all squeamish about that; isn’t that what you study all day long?” Which is absolutely true: the drive for sex, and the likelihood of sex and the success of sex, is the whole process of natural selection.

“So, like, isn’t this exactly the point? My traits won’t be carried on to the next generation because it’s not like someone’s going to fuck me. So, like, my belligerence and insecurity are going to die out. And that’s good, right? And good manners and restraint are going to be passed on by people like Polly, and people like you.” I knew he was getting married. To a doctor, a medical doctor.

You have to specify “medical doctor” here because Cambridge is stuffed with the other kind. Yelling “Is there a doctor in the house?” would get you Ph.D. computer scientists and engineers and geomorphologists and historians. It wouldn’t get you anyone practical. It wouldn’t get you anyone who knows how to apply a fucking Band-Aid.

I cried but I didn’t stop working, because I had said I would make the models. I do what I say I’ll do.

“I think it’s a wonder,” he said, sighing, “that any of us get past age twenty at all.”

I stabbed little spiny bits all over hallucigenia. I’d painted them purple.

“Why?” I challenged him. “What happened to you at twenty?” If he was going to be all I-know-what-you’re-going-through, I wanted to make him spell it out.

“That’s the year my brother decided he hates me.”

“Poor you.” Stab, stab, stab. “Was it over some girl?”

“Oh, no. He came to hate me over a woman a few years later. But the first time he hated me was when he joined the University. I was already here. We were in different colleges, different departments. We were completely different-nothing to have rivalry over.”

“So, what?” I pushed.

He shook his head. “That’s just it. There was no event, nothing to blame. He just realized he hates me. I’ve never been able to fix that.”

His forlorn gravity was overwhelming. It wasn’t fair. Everyone felt sorry for Polly, and for Nick, and now I was supposed to pity Dr. Keene for a bad brother. No matter how bad I felt, it was never bad enough to rate. It’s like everyone just says, “No big deal. It could be worse. Wake me when it’s worse.” I never measure up, even in failure.

“Well, I wish my brother hated me. He liked me way too much. He raped me when I was thirteen.” I don’t even have a brother, but I spewed an eruption of tears. “He said I was beautiful. I was so pretty he couldn’t not do it, he said. It went on for, like, a year. Then my father found out and threw Will out. He still writes me letters. If my dad found out, he’d kill Will.” Then I remembered that Will is Polly’s brother. But I couldn’t change it once I’d said it.

I wasn’t really in the floral gallery when the vases broke, like I told Polly. I hadn’t been in the museum at all when it happened. But it had been important to make her understand that moment. I told it to her in a way that would make her understand. I had to make Dr. Keene understand, and if he needed a lie to get it, I’d give it to him.

The whole point of cubism is to capture more than one side or one moment. Cubists tried to get a deeper accuracy than photographic representation by including many moments and many sides at once. It doesn’t look literally, physically real. But it is real. It’s the real that includes more than one moment, more than one viewpoint, more than just the physical. It’s a truer real.

What I say may seem a mess, like a cubist painting, but that’s only because it’s even truer. It’s how I really feel. It’s what what’s happened has done to me. That’s truer than just what literally happened.

I finally got the look. I got it. His mouth opened and his eyes didn’t blink. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He said it with full attention. I feel like there hasn’t been full attention from anyone in Cambridge, even from Nick when I was on my knees.

I leaned forward. I filled his field of vision. I had to keep myself bigger in perspective to him than the fucking rainbow of British building stones.

“I know I shouldn’t let him write to me. I don’t write back. But I do read the letters. He’s my brother, y’know?”

“Perhaps you ought to tell the authorities in your home state-”

“Oh, no, no, it’s not like that. He’s not writing things like that. It’s over. He wants me to know how sorry he is. He writes to say that he’s sorry. He has a girlfriend too. He saw a therapist and he’s got a girlfriend. Everything’s cool.”

“Have you talked to anyone professional?” he asked.

“I talk it out with my friends. That’s good enough for me. Like talking it out with you right now. It’s good. Thanks.” I smiled. He was hooked. I leaned back in my chair. I looked down shyly. Then he ruined it.

“Can I call someone?” he asked. “You’re friends with Polly, I could see if she can come around…”

I shook my head back and forth. “No. No, Polly and I aren’t really friends right now. You know,” I said, bringing it back to Nick.

He nodded, and looked away. Everything flowed back into place again, inexorable: This was the day they were dredging the Cam. Only Nick mattered today. And Polly, with both parents in jail. It had been years since my brother had raped me, right? It had been more than a week since Nick treated me like a whore. God, like ten whole days.

“Let me tidy this up,” Keene offered, about my art supplies. Isn’t that just his whole drive in life.

“And me do what? Go back to my room and feel sorry for myself? Or join a volleyball game on Parker’s Piece and pretend it’s all good? It’s not.” I bounced my giant paper hallucigenia from hand to hand.

Dr. Keene looked past me. Then Peter strode in, Nick’s friend. “Richard,” he boomed out. “Richard, it’s done. They didn’t find him.”

Dr. Keene closed his eyes and it was like his body melted a little. All the tension that had been holding him up slipped away. He and Peter clasped hands. The testosterone in the gesture made me laugh. Keene looked at me strangely.

Peter said to me, “He’s not drowned. He’s not drowned.” He didn’t say “He’s not dead,” because by that time we couldn’t be sure he wasn’t, some way or other. But, at least, there would be no body today.

Isn’t that a kick when that’s the best you can say about a day? That there isn’t a corpse in it, at least as far as you know? There’s no certain corpse. It’s like… Schrödinger’s corpse. Until we see it, it isn’t really dead. I laughed again.

“Peter…” Keene started, and in his pause I could tell he wondered about the wisdom of fobbing me off on a man with Peter’s reputation, what with me in such a vulnerable state. But he wanted to get rid of me. That was obvious. Teacher-student, etc. There was potential for a fabricated harassment accusation if things got too personal and he had to be stern.

“I’m all right,” I said, standing up. “I’m all right.” I said it without making eye contact, so he knew to keep worrying. “I’m going to go down to the river,” I said. “Now we can enjoy it again, right?”

I can only assume Keene gave some kind of nod or signal to Peter to follow me. It’s not like he would bother with me otherwise.

“How are you holding up?” he said, keeping pace beside me, awkwardly matching his longer stride to mine. The three tower cranes building the Grand Arcade at the end of the road dominated the view. Each was a huge, latticed capital T. One swung around at the command of a little man in the driver’s seat underneath. It wound up a cord to pull a massive load up over the tops of all the aged college buildings. It was making shops.

“They’re beautiful,” I said. It had been pouring since Nick left, but today the sun was out, shining on the cranes. “I’ll miss them when they’re done.” I would, really. They’re so tall, so aggressively enormous, and perfectly balanced. The completed Grand Arcade won’t be able to live up to them when they go.

“What, the cranes?” He sounded like I was crazy.

“Whatever,” I said, turning the opposite direction, to walk toward Trumpington Street instead.

“No, wait,” he said, and that’s how I was sure this was Keene ’s idea. Peter has better things to do than chase me.

“Look, you may not want to believe this,” I said, “Nick being your best friend and all. But he raped me. Just before he disappeared. I didn’t have anything to do with him going, but I do know that I wouldn’t care if he were in the Cam, because he’d deserve it. You can ask around at Magdalene. We were at a staircase party together, after Polly left his office. I guess he wasn’t finished, you know? He asked if he could crash in my room, you know, from drinking too much. He acted like he needed to crash. But when we got there, he wasn’t tired at all, I guess. He was plenty able to do what he wanted to do. That’s what I think of your best friend.”

I’m not sure why I went with that. It was completely different from what I’d told Keene, but it’s not like Keene would compare notes with Peter. It’s not like anyone even listens, right?

Peter put his hand through his hair. He scanned whatever was behind me, same as Keene. “Nick?” He put his hands on his hips and puffed out the word, as if winded from a long jog. He was so ridiculous I almost lost it and started laughing. “Jesus, Liv-”

“Yes: Nick. I haven’t told anyone because it would just make the police think I had something to do with him being gone. Which I don’t. It may have been karma that got him for it, but not me.”

“Jesus,” he said again. “Nick?”

Everyone acts so surprised that Nick would do anything wrong. Is what I was saying that much different from what he really did do?

“I don’t want to ruin things for his family,” I explained nobly. “He has a sister. I don’t want to ruin him for her, at least, not unless he comes home. But if they have to grieve I’m going to let them have it nicely. When my dad died, everyone said only nice things about him. I appreciated that.”

“I don’t really know what to do with this…” he said, holding his palms up.

“There isn’t anything to do.” I shrugged. “These things happen.”

“Maybe you should talk to Polly.”

I pushed him in the chest. “What the fuck does Polly have to do with this? Why does everyone think of Polly?”

“I’m just saying she’s been through a lot herself, maybe she would understand-”

“What the fuck has she been through? As far as I see it, she’s been treated like a princess ever since she revealed her traumatic, scandalous past. Jeez, I gotta get me some of that, right? Because everyone’s tiptoeing around her, all solicitous, all whatever-you-say, whatever-you-need. And anything she wants to be is okay, all of a sudden okay. If she wants to work, she’s being strong. If she wants to hide away, she’s ‘taking care of herself.’ And if she wants to act like a jackass and joke around like nothing’s wrong, then she needs her space, because we all have to breathe, right? And it’s all okay. If she turned around and went with some guy we’d all be proud of her for ‘healing,’ right, instead of thinking, ‘That’s awfully quick…’-which is what it would deserve. And if she never goes with a guy again, it’s not because she’s a coward, or stuck, or just stupid, but something profound. Something that has nothing to do with her choices, but all to do with life whipping her around. And that’s bullshit. We make like her dad made her in that moment, made in her the right to anger, and the right to grief, and the right to fear and frigidity. But I’ll tell you-all that stuff is already in everybody. Maybe her dad kicked it up a notch, okay, but it’s not like what he did invented anything inside her. But when she acts fucked-up it makes people want to protect her, and when I act fucked-up it scares people away.” He had stepped back. We were still on the street, just down from the pedestrian crossing. Periodic clusters of people waiting for the green light had heard parts of what I said, making Peter’s eyes shift from side to side, embarrassed.

One of the people waiting to cross the street was Polly.

Tears cut streaks down her face. “Liv?” she said, incredulous, before taking off back toward Trumpington Street.

“Shit, Liv,” said Peter. Acting out my entire point, he left me and ran after her.

I hadn’t told Dr. Keene or Peter-or anyone-about the letter from my dad.

After the divorce, Dad married someone else and had a baby. I’d told him not to do that. I don’t care who he’s married to but I told him not to have a baby. I remember this one time that I had a friend over, this was when Dad and Mom were still married, I had a friend over, and he said: “Excuse me, sweetheart…” as he passed by her to get to the patio. My head had snapped up. Because he always called me “sweetheart.” That was what he called me. But he used it for this stranger to him, just because she was a girl. I learned a lot about my dad. I learned that what I thought was a special name was just really the way he talks to girls. It’s just that I was usually the only one around, so I’d thought it was mine. I learned a lot about my dad. So I knew what would happen if he had another baby.

It was a girl too.

They named her Viola, to go with my name. From Twelfth Night. I got here for college before they could make me do any babysitting. The baby was all right, I guess. But then Dad wrote me this letter.

Viola wasn’t talking when I left, which was normal. She was a baby. But I guess she never got very good. So now he says she needs a speech therapist, and also to attend a special preschool, for “special” kids. Which is fine. She’ll do fine. But then he said that for him to pay for it, I’d have to come back to California, into the state system. And live with Mom.

That letter had come yesterday, the day before they dredged the Cam, so excuse me if Nick wasn’t the first thing on my mind.

There is nothing wrong with UC Berkeley or wherever but there is a lot wrong with living at home. And a lot wrong with having your college money go to a toddler’s preschool. There’s no way I was going to go with Mom to family therapy, and spend my life shopping at strip malls and stuck in endless traffic. There’s nothing aesthetic or bearable about any of it.

You’ll notice he hadn’t asked me to live with him. I wouldn’t, but he was supposed to ask.

I’d first started painting because I liked being in charge of something, some small thing: this square of canvas. I liked being able to make it whatever I think it ought to be. And beautiful-I could make something beautiful. It could hang in a world of chain restaurants and giant parking lots and roads as wide as the Mississippi and clogged to a standstill, but be, itself, beautiful. I did it out of desperation.

Now, across the ocean, I’m feeling for the first time like I’m not gasping for beauty anymore. It’s here. I’ve found my inspiration here, and, instead of rebelling against my surroundings, I’m being fed by them.

He wanted to take that away from me.

Do you know that the British students pay hardly any tuition? Same for the Europeans. But everyone else really has to cough it up.

And do you know how Polly manages being a foreigner here, with her dad in prison? Her whole town has taken up a collection for her tuition and living expenses.

Do you see the difference? I can’t get money out of my dad, and she gets money out of everyone she’s ever known. People like to take care of her. It’s that weak thing she has going on. I’m too strong. I come off that way. People think I don’t need, and when I reveal that I do, like with Nick, when I make myself vulnerable, it freaks people out. It doesn’t fit with what they’ve thought about me.

People want consistency over depth, which is bullshit.

My first plan didn’t have any stealing in it at all. I wasn’t going to be able to continue at Cambridge, that was clear, but I didn’t have to go home. I had already set up with Therese, another Art History major, to spend the Christmas holiday with her family in Switzerland. The colleges rent our rooms to conferences outside of term, so I’d had to find somewhere to go. And I did. It was going to be amazing.

And I thought, Okay, I’ll look for some kind of under-the-table au pair job while I’m there. I’ll set up a real life. I’ll paint. It’ll be even better than Cambridge.

There was time in that plan to make a change, like turning a slow barge.

So that proves that I’m adaptable. I’d already come up with that plan and the letter had only arrived that morning.

Then, after Peter ran after Polly outside of the Sedgwick, and I’d jaywalked across Pembroke Street, I saw Therese turn the corner out of Free School Lane. She was with someone who had to be her older sister. They looked just alike except the sister was a little taller. They had bags from the haremlike custom perfume shop.

“Oh, Liv!” Therese called. We fell into step together toward Emmanuel College. She introduced her sister Annick, and I said something about looking forward to the holidays.

“Yes, I know, but there’s a little problem,” Therese said in her precise, pretty accent. “You see, our cousins have invited us to meet them in the Pyrenees. To ski. I’ve missed them so much since leaving home that I really can’t say no. It wouldn’t be home at Christmas without them.”

“That sounds wonderful!” I said. “Wow!”

I’d never gone skiing before. But I knew it was this amazing rush. It would be like all the good part of falling-the whoosh, the freedom-without a crash at the bottom or the jarring restraint of a bungee. You could, if the mountain was high enough, and you made wide enough S curves, fall for a very, very long time. The only maybe-problem would be equipment rental fees. Were we staying at a lodge or at someone’s house? Would everyone bring their own skis and could I borrow? I had to hammer all this out.

They stopped short of Emmanuel and veered into The Rat and Parrot. I followed them into the pub, because I had to. Details needed sorting. I didn’t have any cash on me, but I figured it was okay to sit with them so long as they ordered something. They each got a glass of white wine; I asked for water. Therese and Annick talked family stories while we waited at the bar for our drinks. I tried to memorize the names they used-Henri, Luc, Paul. All their cousins were boys. Maybe if I flirted the right way they’d pay for my meals. “One pound sixty,” the man behind the bar said, pushing my glass toward me. He’d poured my water from a bottle, not from out of the tap. He’d put a lemon slice in it.

Therese and Annick clinked money onto the bar and took their drinks toward a table. I had exactly one pound in my pocket, just that one thick coin.

Everything froze. Everything in the arrangement of figures in this scene drew the eye to my glass.

I laid my coin on top of theirs. They’d overpaid with a round number, either to tip or just because they didn’t want to waste time getting change.

He gave me 10p change from the whole transaction. I wrapped my fist around the skinny silver disc and held it tight.

“Do your cousins bring their own skis? Will I need a special outfit?” I asked, joining them at the table. I had to get practical. I had to figure out what to borrow. My friend Gina skis…

“No, you don’t understand,” Therese said. Expensive water sloshed over the side of my glass when I lifted it for a sip. “It’s my cousins’ invitation. It’s not my place to extend…”

“I know that,” I said, like they were slow.

They looked at each other.

“I don’t even ski,” I clarified.

She and her sister smiled. “Then you won’t be sad!”

I stayed to finish my water. I had, after all, paid for it. I listened to their stories and brainstormed about Christmas presents.

They walked off with linked arms. That’s a European girl thing. Sometimes you see French girls hold hands. Their small posh shopping bags bounced off their thighs as they walked.

I had to be out of my room in a week.

I wanted to be like Gauguin. I wanted to have an adventure and paint it, paint from some wonderful life. I didn’t need to study for that; I just needed to live it. I couldn’t be satisfied with painting in defiance of banality anymore. I needed to be surrounded by beauty-not luxury, but beauty.

It would be possible to make one great gesture and get away with it. It would be possible to take enough to get somewhere good.

I had to try. What kind of a person would I be if I didn’t try?

I think about Gauguin a lot. He wasn’t nice to his family, but he was important to the world. I think about that for obvious reasons. And when he ran away, it wasn’t cowardly. He was running to something, not just away. That’s a beacon to me.

When we still had the money-we really had had all that money once-we spent a weekend in San Francisco, me and Mom. Dad was working. We ate at crowded restaurants, and stayed in a boutique hotel. We went to an exhibition at the MOMA about the effect of photography on Impressionism. There were examples of how photography became part of how some painters worked, like if they used a live model or a picture of one, and how they came to see discrete moments within action, like the breakdown of the motion of a galloping horse. But the best part, to me, was how they photographed each other, and how they experimented with that. These painters playing with their new toy had a grand time. They created. And they horsed around.

The photo I most remember was of Gauguin, in someone’s house or studio. The label called it “Gauguin playing the harmonium.” And so he was. But the label neglected to note the hilarious: Gauguin wasn’t wearing any pants. I mean that in the American way, not the British way. He had boxer shorts on, but no trousers, and yet he was fully, formally dressed on top. It was hilarious. It was a moment between friends, nothing sexual but simply casual. Maybe he didn’t want his trousers to get wrinkled. Maybe they were itchy. The museum label was disorienting; was I the only one who noticed? Was everyone else, including the curator, thinking, That’s just Gauguin. He’s so often unclothed while playing the harmonium that I don’t even notice anymore. I swear I was the only one who laughed out loud the whole time we were in that gallery. I felt isolated, but superior too; was no one else actually looking?

That’s what it was like, living where I did. I was too often the only one who noticed something, or wanted something, or thought something was special or beautiful or funny.

There was this house in our town that was burgled. The thieves left a Picasso. It was hanging on the wall, right there, and they carried out the television and the computer, walking past it, back and forth. It was an original, signed Picasso litho worth $40,000. But in suburban California, only sappy, ostentatious Kinkades get treated like art. Picasso can’t even get himself stolen. That’s what it’s like back home. If you recognize a Picasso, if you notice Gauguin isn’t wearing pants, you’re the foreigner. It doesn’t matter that I was born there. I’m a foreigner.

Now thinking of that Gauguin photo just puts Nick in my mind: Nick half-undressed. Nick only half-rumpled, Nick holding back. He’s ruined that for me. It’s not funny anymore.

It’s important for me to make it clear that Nick’s not all that. He’s not. He’s just some guy with an accent and floppy hair; God knows there are enough of them in this town. God knows, half the men in this town wear knee-length wool coats and winter scarves striped with their school colors. Everyone talks like he does. But I was vulnerable to that. Americans are. We feel superior to the traditions that sort people into classes, but we envy them too. They’re romantic. I let myself get all romantic about the whole English thing, and he was a piece of it. I wasn’t in love with him. I was desperate for him. Those are two entirely different things.

Because Polly was so prissy about me reading Gretchen’s emails, I didn’t tell her the interesting part. The other biographer had offered money for the photos.

I immediately thought about selling some to her, of course I did. It was the same as someone looking down at the ground from a height. You think about what a jump would feel like, and the fall, and the splat. It doesn’t mean you’re considering it, it’s just a mental journey. You see it and think what it would be like.

After I got the letter from Dad, I thought about it a different way.

It would have been so easy to scan a few. I could even just take pictures of them. The biographer wouldn’t be picky about the source. She wanted them, right? So she wasn’t going to get all righteous and say no.

Except for Gretchen having gone all nuts. Just like that, everything done. Not just for now, but done in a final way. Even the portrait photograph of the two sisters together, which used to hang in Gretchen’s bedroom, was gone. She’d told Nick to actually get rid of everything. That’s crazy!

Maybe he’d thought so too…

I stood up straighter. Maybe he’d recognized that it was ridiculous. Maybe he’d tried to save Gretchen from herself. Maybe he’d saved those photos somewhere before he disappeared…

Maybe he’d saved me.

It was easy to get to Nick’s house: Just go all the way up Madingley Road. For all the web of curvy, crossed lanes downtown, the roads out of town are long, straight spokes. Madingley Road heads for, well, Madingley village. People take this road to get to Churchill College, and the Observatory, and the four thousand white crosses of the World War II cemetery of American soldiers. I took it to Nick’s house, which is right across from the vet school horses.

The house is modest in that it’s not some huge edifice. It’s an aesthetic stack of all-white boxes with windows in a swath all the way across. It was really built in the thirties, not an homage to the thirties, and you can tell the difference. It’s kind of cramped, a little shabby with age, but full of strong shapes and interesting light. The whole thing is topped by a tangle of branches reaching over from the wood behind it.

I rang the bell. A girl answered. This had to be Nick’s sister, Alexandra.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m a friend of Nick’s. He’d borrowed something of mine. I’m really, really sorry to bother you. I didn’t want to do this, but I really need to have it back.”

She squinted at me. “What was it?” She didn’t open the door any farther, only kept it open enough to stick her face through.

“Some photographs. They were in a big box.” I gestured with my hands to indicate the size. “And some papers and stuff, but mostly photos. Do you know if he left them here?”

“Nick doesn’t really keep anything here.”

“I know. I know, but it isn’t at the Chanders’ house or in his office and so I thought…” The contents of those two places had been discussed in the press.

“Were they some really old photos?”

Yes! “Yes,” I said. “Really old. They were mine, and I’d like them back.”

She lifted her shoulders, then dropped them in tandem with an enormous sigh. “Somebody dumped some old photos in the pond. I thought it was our neighbor. Why would Nick do that?”

I told her something about Nick trying to protect me from some old memories that he thought weighed too heavily on my mind. She squinted at me. Good girl for being suspicious; that had sounded stilted even to me. So I tried it a little different and beseeching: “Oh, please, can you tell me where the pond is?”

She squeezed her arm out without opening the door any farther and pointed.

I thanked her and ran around the house. I didn’t see any photos; just nature. The ground near the water was unmaintained, a wild mess of roots, leaves, and weeds.

It was nearing dark already. Winter afternoons don’t last long here. I swept at leaves with a stick, to see what was under them. Nothing but bugs and dirt until, halfway around, a white corner stuck out. I picked it up and turned it over. It was of Gretchen and her friends, at some high school event. It was useless to me itself, but it was like a big fat X in the dirt: The Linda Paul pictures were here. And they’d been discarded; I could collect and sell them legitimately. I could sell them all, not just a discreet few. How could Gretchen complain, when she’d thrown them away?

I got down on my knees to push the leaves around with my hands. Then a stick plunged down in the dirt, right next to me. It nearly impaled my wrist. I fell back and shielded myself. The person with the stick shined a flashlight on me.

“You’re trespassing,” she said. “I demand you leave immediately.”

“I’m a friend of the Frey family…” I said, but my excuse counted for nothing.

“Then you would do well to return to them before I phone for the police.”

I backed up like a crab, and she followed me, poking the flashlight at my face so I never felt comfortable rocking forward to stand up.

“Look,” I said, “I just made a mistake, okay? I didn’t mean to cross into your yard…”

Then she saw the picture in my hand. She snatched it up and scampered backward, out of my reach in case I planned to wrestle her for it.

She turned her back to me and trained the light onto the picture. Now, with the light facing away from me, my eyes readjusted.

Every one of those big trees had photos nailed to it. At first they were all just rectangles to me, but as my eyes coped with the fading light I made out the shapes of familiar scenes. There didn’t seem to be any order to it-black-and-whites and color ones were grouped haphazardly; baby Gretchen and teen Gretchen and young Linda Paul. The neighbor lady put her flashlight on the ground and I couldn’t see much anymore. But I heard her-thud, thud, thud. She must have been nailing up the picture she’d taken out of my hand.

I stood up and rubbed my arms. There! Hanging primly from its wire, the way you’d hang it in a drawing room, was the framed photo of Linda and Ginny. I remembered it. It was formal and beautiful and surely the biographer would pay something for that. Wilting flowers had been intertwined through the elaborate frame. The glass front was cracked. She was distracted. I stepped toward it.

The crazy lady was quick. She called out, “Yaaaaaaaah!” and ran at me. Maybe she had the hammer still in her hand; I couldn’t see. I just turned and ran. There was a large wooden fence between her land and Nick’s, so I had to head back toward the pond for an opening to his family’s well-kept grass. She stopped pursuing as soon as I crossed over, but I kept running until I got to the driveway. I stood there, hands on my knees, breathing hard.

Alexandra opened the front door, just the same amount as before: about eight inches. “I told you I thought they belonged to the neighbor.”

I got on my bike and across the road to the campus of science labs. I was shaking. I rode just to clear my head. The streets and buildings here are named after Cambridge greats: Thomson, Maxwell, Bragg. Thomson discovered electrons and his street always makes me think of Seurat and pointillism: Aren’t we all just made of little dots?

The reason Seurat painted like that, by the way, was to give viewers the ingredients of a color-say, yellow and blue, in tiny bits close together-to be mixed fresh in their eyes each time they look. Instead of some stale old green cooked up ages ago. Isn’t that generous?

That’s the exact conversation I had with Juergen once. He studies explosives in the Bragg Building. He’s nice and kind of geeky. He tried to kiss me once and I avoided it. We haven’t really hung out since then but we say hi. And I thought, Why not see if he wants to do something? Just hang out and maybe bullshit about art and science and all that undergraduate stay-up-all-night kind of talk. Because I really didn’t feel like running into Therese or Polly or anyone else.

I found a bench that had less dried goose shit on it than the others and sat by the pond. I know he cycles by the pond to the bike path to get back to his place. He shares a flat on Fitzwilliam Street. Next to Darwin ’s old flat, no joke. He tells me stuff about Darwin and other scientists, and I tell him stuff about art.

That’s what I love about Cambridge. The smartest people don’t think someone is stupid just because they don’t know some fact or really specific thing. Specialists understand from experience that you can be deeply brilliant at one kind of thing and completely ignorant of something else. Because you’ve focused. Really smart people focus. Nick didn’t mind explaining things to me. Juergen didn’t mind explaining things to me. Rocket science, actual rocket science. And he didn’t think I was stupid for not knowing already-he thought I was smart for being interested and able to follow his explanations. He thought we were equals.

Back home everyone always acted like I was so smart. They meant it nicely, but it was isolating, you know? They said I was special. But “special” means “by yourself.” That’s what it means; “better” than everyone else means “not the same” as everyone else. I love Cambridge, because being smart means fitting in.

Those thoughts and others filled two hours. Juergen never came by on the path lit by knee-high bollards. It was Saturday; what was I thinking? Full term was just ended. There was no guarantee he’d be here. He might have been out with friends. He might be flying home. He might be here, but working all night.

The big, boxy, quickly constructed warehouse-type buildings populating the West Cambridge site had the benefit of dozens of window offices. In the dark, the ones that were lit looked suspended. I knew Juergen worked in the Bragg Building; I didn’t know which window was his.

I walked around Bragg, rolling my bike along beside me. Unattended bikes disappear quickly. Four window offices were lit. I saw Juergen at his desk.

I threw a pebble at his window. I felt like such a geek. He looked down and I waved at him. He met me at the entrance. It has scripture quoted above it. That’s the way it is when a country still has a monarch whose role is head of the Church.

“Hi,” I said. “Look, I feel really stupid, but I’ve just had a run-in with a crazy person and I’ve had a fight with this girl in my college and I just don’t feel like being there right now. Do you want to go out to a pub or something?” I must have expected Juergen to be eager for an invitation. I was surprised when he hesitated.

“Uh, look, I’ve got to finish this up. But, uh, you can hang out if you want…” I locked my bike up outside. He waited at the door and then led me upstairs. We passed a model of the double helix. Watson and Crick had been Cambridge boys. Their favorite pub had a plaque on it about them. The ceiling of it is covered by graffiti from World War II airmen.

The biggest tourist attraction near my hometown is a massive house so poorly designed by the crazy rich lady who built it that it’s marketed as a “mystery.”

I had books in my backpack, so there was stuff to read. There was a beanbag chair, so I wasn’t uncomfortable. Juergen was doing something at the computer, something involving models and scenarios. He was into it, so I didn’t talk. We passed the whole evening like that. I think he stayed up all night. I eventually fell asleep.

Do you know how I think people become sluts? It’s like, pay attention to me. He wasn’t even looking at me. There was no conversation. No sharing something from a vending machine, or talking sticky problems through aloud. There was nothing.

The Centre for Mathematics, which is new, is very “wow” on the outside. But I’ve heard from someone who works there that it’s disconnected inside. No feeling of being part of the whole; your office is just this isolated little cave. I told that to someone else, and Nick, overhearing, had said, “Isn’t that what a researcher needs at work?” He said it like, Of course we want to be unconnected. Of course. And this with Juergen was like that. It was like I wasn’t even there. I think that’s what makes someone into a slut. Because I don’t even like Juergen that way, but I fell asleep thinking, Pay attention to me, asshole. I thought, All right, I’ll do it, whatever. Just notice that I’m here.

CHAPTER 11

It was Sunday, Day Eleven: The Day After the Dredging. The morning after I’d slept on a beanbag chair in Juergen’s office.

Term was just done. Dr. Keene was getting married. Nick wasn’t dead in the Cam, but was still gone. The bells in Great St. Mary’s played a quarter-peal at nine. Churches filled up, after which shops opened, which I hear is new. Everything, I’m told, used to be closed on Sundays not so long ago.

There is a pair of shows on the BBC called Spring Watch and Autumn Watch, made of footage of the effects of changing seasons on the natural world: deer mating, swallows nesting, that sort of thing. I think Cambridge should have its own show, Term Watch, where you can see footage of the sudden deflation in the bicycle population whenever students go home for break; the bloom of tourists at Christmas and summer; the after-Easter switch of season in school uniforms, from navy blazers to school-color gingham dresses on girls all over the city. Juggling buskers materialize on the corner by Holy Trinity Church whenever children have days off school. It’s all as cyclical and inevitable as any pattern of mating and migration.

Early December sees Christmas lights and banners advertising garish pantomimes dominate downtown. No snow, but deep, damp cold.

Harry’s told me that this is the time of year for the best canary feathers. Because they finish their molt, I think. He goes to bird shows most weekends this month. I’d know him gone or not by the car.

The only obstacle would be Gretchen. She wouldn’t have lights on to warn me that she’s home, so I had to keep an eye out for other hints. I got there early enough to assume that she’d be in: robe, coffee, whatever she does instead of reading the newspaper. Maybe listening to something on the radio. I wasn’t near the house, of course; I stayed by the end of the street, where it hits Barton Road. There’s a bench there. It isn’t a bus stop, just a gift to tired walkers and cyclists coming from Lammas Land or the Grantchester footpath. That sidewalk is so full of both pedestrians and bikes that it’s been split into lanes.

I fit in, wearing jeans and a sweater from yesterday, and my jacket. I looked all right. I’d had a hairbrush in my bag. I’d cycled straight there from Bragg. I needed to be there early to see her go for sure. If I came too late, and she went out in the morning, I’d never know if she was gone or not.

There were lots of cars passing me, and parked cars blocking me. No one would notice or remember me. On residential and dead-end Millington, sure. But not here on Barton, busy with cars, cyclists, and pedestrians. I looked natural. I was doing a book of Sudoku puzzles. Everyone did those.

Polly’s mother drove straight at me. She was coming up out of Millington as if from Gretchen’s. What was she doing there? Wasn’t she supposed to be in jail?

Suddenly anyone could be anywhere. A policeman could be in the car idling at the light; Nick might be hiding up a tree. Who knows who could be under this bench? I’d assumed Gretchen was home, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe I was waiting for nothing.

Mrs. Bailey turned to join the cars at the light. It greened and everything rolled on.

I don’t think she saw me.

I picked up my pencil.

About fifteen minutes later Harry surprised me by being on foot. He turned toward Newnham Road and downtown. Later a taxi turned down the L of Millington Road, then came back up with Gretchen in it. She went in the opposite direction of Harry, out of town.

I walked my bike down Millington. I parked it around the side of a house for sale; I didn’t want anyone to see it parked at Gretchen’s. I used the key they’d given me for working with the photos.

Inside the house, I walked a wide arc to avoid the Chinese dog statue. Stupid. It wasn’t going to bite me, it wasn’t going to bark. I made myself go back, right up to it, and nudge it with a little kick.

And that’s how I felt about Gretchen.

This whole time I’d acted like she has some kind of power. But she doesn’t. I don’t need to walk a wide arc around her. I can kick her if I want. She’s just a person, like the stupid Chinese dog is just a statue. She’s not anything I need to be afraid of.

I went upstairs. I examined their bill history online. I created a new payee, directed to my bank account, but named it to look in its record like a regular billing account. I transferred ten thousand pounds. It was easy. It would come through by the second business day: Tuesday. I didn’t think they would notice the discrepancy before then. Gretchen had been distracted lately.

Then I’d have to go away. I’d be like Gauguin. I’d find my own Tahiti. I’d-not go home. It was important to not go home.

That meant the world to me. Polly would think it was too small, but it’s not like I chose to be squeezed this tight. It’s not like I asked for it.

The phone rang. I just about jumped. I’d ignored the computer narrating my keystrokes, but the phone was unexpected. At the same time, the front door opened. I could tell by the foot stomps on the doormat that it was Harry. It sounded like he had plastic bags, like from Sainsbury’s. Groceries.

The phone kept ringing. Instead of picking up in the kitchen, he went for the stairs. A machine picked up, a machine in this room. It didn’t seem like he was going to answer, but there was every chance he’d listen to the message. I do that. I screen. It’s normal. He was coming.

I’d already shut down the banking site and the monitor. I slipped out of the den and could only follow the hall away from the main stairs. And the only thing there was the ladder to the bird room. Jesus. There were feathers and sawdust on each step, and the air smelled like balsa with a tinge of refrigerator rot.

The voice came from the den: “You’ve reached Gretchen Paul and Harry Reed. Please leave a message.” Gretchen, Paul, and Harry-they sounded like a folk group. Ha. Then a long, irritating whine for a beep.

Harry had paused outside the den door to listen. I was wearing ballet flats, but even so I didn’t think I would get up to the bird room without obvious creaks. He might even be on his way there anyway. And-Jesus, there was a dead bird on the top step. A dead orange bird…

“Hello, Gretchen. I’m calling again to make sure you know that Miranda Bailey has been released. I thought you’d want to know that her situation has been resolved by a witness. Phone if you have any questions; I’ll be in the office.”

It was the lawyer. So it wasn’t Polly’s mother who did it, whatever had been done. Sometimes I wondered if Nick had pulled a Gauguin of his own.

Harry came closer. I hunched in the corner, behind the ladder stair. I should have just grabbed some papers and said I was working. He didn’t care when I was there. Shit. I closed my eyes. He gasped.

It was the bird. It wasn’t me.

He’d seen it. Poor thing. The feathers were fluffed out, making it almost spherical. The body itself was rubber-chicken limp. He stood on the bottom step and scooped the body gently in both his hands together. Then he gasped again, and thundered up the stairs. He froze with his upper half inside the bird room, standing on the middle step. I looked up at him. There was nowhere to go. I kept still. His head fell forward and he saw me.

“Liv?” He sounded strangled.

“I was just… I was finishing up with the pictures…”

I wasn’t even thinking about the money anymore. I thought for sure he’d blame me for the birds. Indignance blossomed in my chest, blossomed so big it hurt. I defended myself: “I don’t know what the hell happened up there. Jesus.”

He was calmer than I expected. He’s a big man. I thought for sure he’d grab me up by my shirt and throw me into a wall. He had that kind of energy in him all of a sudden. But it wasn’t directed at me. The sound that came out of him was weird and keening, and he pounded the top step with his fist.

I wasn’t sure how he was reading the situation, but I felt like I had to prove it hadn’t been me. I followed him up the ladder. He squatted in the middle of the mess, righting cages. Dead birds flopped inside; living ones flapped and chattered.

I took a broom propped in the corner and pushed sawdust and birdseed together in a pile. Little bits of broccoli too. I swept around the cages. It was really important that he know this wasn’t my doing. Jesus. There are some things I would do but this was horrible.

While I swept, he got all the loose cages piled up. The big cage in the middle was bashed in, one corner completely concave, and the door couldn’t close anymore. Some birds were still in there. A few had escaped. They were perched or lying dead or out the window.

A white one was on a chair seat. It was alive, but it wasn’t sitting right. Like it was hurt. I picked it up, in my two hands together, like he’d done with the dead one on the stairs. It quivered. I switched to cupping it; maybe it was cold. I brought it to him, like, What do I do now? I thought he would open a cage. Harry turned from righting a cage and looked straight at me, this awful look. His eyes slowly lowered to my hands.

He freaked. He wanted me to put his bird down. I didn’t know where to put it down. He stood over me. He’s really tall. He started waving his arms around and there was really nowhere to go.

The bird twitched, making awful noises. He was trying to get me to let it go, but it was crazy. He was crazy, and all the grief and wonder in him about what had happened up here made this wall of crazy that backed me up to the point that I couldn’t do anything.

He grabbed my elbows. I didn’t want to drop it. Did he want me to drop it? The sharp little feet were scrabbling at my palm and he was shaking me. Jesus. He was, like, huge. I screamed at him, “Get the fuck away from me! Get the fuck away!”

“Please,” he said. “Please.” He wanted this one bird. He wanted it. But he had my elbows. I didn’t know what he was going to do. He was crazy about this bird, like my holding it was worse than what had already happened to it.

I charged forward with my shoulder. I pushed him hard. There was this kind of oof, but I kept pushing. My legs churned, sliding on spilled lettuce leaves. He went down the ladder steps.

I put the bird down, finally. Without him looming over me, I was able to pop it into a cage. It was going to die anyway. It wasn’t sitting right; it was broken.

I looked down. Harry had fallen onto the back of his neck. His legs were diagonal up the steps; his head was flat on the carpet. His body looked short and strange to me from up here. It reminded me of Mantegna’s laid-out Dead Christ, which everyone studies. The way he used foreshortening of the legs to position the viewer, anyone looking at the painting is right there, at dead Jesus’ feet, near and kneeling. It’s like I was right there with Harry. It’s like this was real.

I had to walk sideways to get down past him. The phone rang. Four rings, the long beep again, “Gretchen, Paul, and Harry…” Ha. Ha. Ha.

It was Gretchen. I listened. It’s human nature to listen.

She was sorry, she said. It was she who had done it to the birds. She forgave, I don’t know what. She needed to be picked up. Her mother was… something. And the money.

She was suddenly bent on moving the money.

Charity. Immediately. I could hear the disgust in her voice. She was shoving the money away from her, like a plate of bad food. I needed until Tuesday. I needed.

I deleted the message. I took the keys out of Harry’s pocket.

I picked birdseed out from the tread of my shoes before I went downstairs.

The orange Sainsbury’s bags sagged by the front door. I put the milk away, and the hot cross buns, and the coffee beans. It seemed important. My fingerprints wouldn’t matter. They were already all over the place, they were supposed to be. It just seemed important that this not look sudden, not look caught-in-the-act. I pushed the empty bags in with the recycling under the sink. A small, white feather, which must have come off of me, was caught between them.

I picked it out very carefully. It was very important that nothing confuse the simplest explanation of what had happened, an explanation that didn’t include me.

I cupped my hands around the feather, so it wouldn’t waft away, and carried it up the stairs. At the end of the hall I stepped around the mess at the bottom of the ladder and inched my way up. At the top, the little bird, whose heart had beat so fast in my hand, was lying on its side but still visibly breathing.

I laid the feather on it. The little poof of white rode up and down, up and down.

I’ve driven their car before, once to get Gretchen to a lecture when her taxi didn’t arrive, and another time to pick up a package. I’d volunteered as an acolyte and friend. It seemed like a long time ago. I shifted the seat for my shorter legs. I always put it back when I returned, to be ready for Harry.

I turned left onto Barton and stopped at the light at the bottom of Grange Road. Six other cars idled with me. A dozen pedestrians flowed past on both sides of the street.

A pair of women walked up Barton together, from out of Wolfson College. They were dressed up. One wore gold, the other white. Knee-length dresses and feminine coats. Gloves. The one in white had a veil on her head, a short one, grazing her shoulders. Her hair was down. They both carried flowers. They were arm in arm, like European girls. Like Therese and Annick. They were heading toward the river.

It was Alice. Today was Dr. Keene’s wedding. I’d forgotten.

They crossed the road in front of me. The light turned green. I went. What else could I do? There were cars behind me. There was nothing for it but to go forward.

Alice was so beautiful that I cried.

CHAPTER 12

I woke up. It was dark and the clock said four. In winter, a dark four could be a.m. or p.m. and I didn’t know.

I still had all my clothes on under the covers. My jeans felt stiff, like casts on my legs, and pinched my stomach. I tried to swing my legs over the side, but there was friction against the bedclothes.

I was still wearing shoes.

“What the fuck?” I said out loud. I kicked, hard, until the covers ended up on the floor. They sucked one of my shoes with them, and I had to crawl around down there and stick my arm into the tangle of blanket and sheet to get it back out. It was an awful lot of fucking work just to get out of bed.

I got dressed and went outside. The long line of twinkle lights across the shops were on. People bustled. So, four p.m. December shoppers from the villages were wide from the bags they carried. There wasn’t room on the sidewalk for all of us; I got bumped on both sides. I put my hand on my cheek and shivered. How long had I slept?

My jacket wasn’t warm enough. I didn’t need one in California. I shouldn’t need one here either; it’s not like it ever snows. The only snow I got I’d had to make myself, little scraps of paper. The white Christmas reputation that England has is Victorian. You’d know that if you think about it. Those British-people-skating scenes on cards always have long dresses and muffs and sleighs. You don’t get snow here now, except maybe one day a year. It snowed once last year, and it didn’t stick or even slush. It hit the street and melted immediately. You could watch it happen but it didn’t stay and pile up. Which makes it not really snow, not the snow that I dreamed about when I was a kid. Snow is only snow when it’s accumulated. Snow is what happens after it’s hit the ground. The falling is just the way that it gets there.

It’s like a guy who touches you at a party isn’t really a boyfriend. It’s not like you can tell people the next day, He’s my boyfriend. Because he’s not, not until you see what sticks.

Nick looked upset. Not in my head; Nick wasn’t in my head. He was in a car at the intersection.

I was stopped at the corner with the flower shop. I was flanked by a window of bright living things, and the doorway was like this halo over me. Flat brass flowers were embedded in the sidewalk all up and down this road, scattered like they’d grown up through the concrete by accident. Someone had designed them and cast them and pressed them in at random, all the way from here to beyond the river. God, it was beautiful.

I think he saw me. He looked right in my direction, but he didn’t act like he saw me. There were other people around, so maybe he didn’t. He wasn’t driving. Someone else was driving. It was a woman. She drove the car through the intersection and on down Chesterton Road.

I leaned back against the shop door. Nick. He wasn’t gone. None of it had happened.

How much the fuck did I drink last night that I dreamed all that? Right?

I only needed to figure out how far back it all went.

I almost ran. I was so sure of what I’d find, I wanted to run. But I didn’t, because of the narrow sidewalks and all those fancy shopping bags hanging from everyone’s hands. So I kind of skipped and half jumped around, jogging but not really jogging, you know? I almost tripped over a busker’s bucket of coins.

The gates were closed. Of course they would be-Monday. Museums close on Mondays because they’re open on weekends. I didn’t rattle the gates; I didn’t need to. The window I was looking for was farther down the building. There-between the main stairs and the handicapped entrance. Over the giant Henry Moore. There. That window there.

Three Chinese vases, each as big as a toddler. I wrapped my fingers around the iron bars of the fence to hold myself up.

None of it had happened. None.

It was Christmas. It was presents and snowflakes and cards with prints of Victorian skaters. I hadn’t fucked it up with Nick; he wasn’t gone. Maybe I hadn’t even met him yet. If the vases hadn’t been shattered, I hadn’t even met Polly yet. I was still nineteen. I was young. I was happy. I was still a kid.

What a fucked-up dream. What the fuck did I eat last night? I had curry or something or a street vendor sausage with hot sauce. Right? What a fucked-up…

I’d wait till they opened. I had to go in. Maybe I could put my hands on the vases, just like a stroke or a pet, and no one would notice. They wouldn’t have motion detectors, right? It’s not like paintings, right? Because there isn’t a guard on those stairs. And the vases aren’t that old. They’re not even that valuable. Just to me. I just wanted to touch them, like, to say “thank you.” I wanted to draw them. I didn’t have my sketchbook, but the front desk gives out these packets to kids who ask for them. They have paper and colored pencils and even a little sharpener. I needed to draw those vases.

I’ve been waiting, like, my whole teenaged life for this. For something to draw. For something that’s mine. For something that means something to me so much that when I draw it it’s more than a stupid still-life or landscape or portrait that everyone says is amazing just because it’s recognizable. Everything I’ve done up to now has been praised for looking like real life, but what good is it to just draw what everyone can see anyway? The whole point of art is that it shows the looker something that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise. But you can’t make that happen. You can’t make yourself have something to say.

There are pictures that I drew when I was little, in the margins of books. It took forever for the library to get complaints about them, because they looked really good. They looked like stuff that was supposed to be there. Finally the librarian turned into fucking Nancy Drew and figured out that it was me. She just looked at who had checked out all those books. And she arranged a conference with my parents and told them that I’m an artist. I’m a fucking artist. Because my faces look like faces. It’s such a fucking low standard. Are they good faces? Are they interesting faces? Do they tell you anything or make you feel something? Do they do something?

This librarian told my parents that I’m an artist because why? Because I draw hands with five fingers each, and I know the difference between an eye in front view and an eye in profile? Big fucking deal. An artist draws a face that stops you. Fuck, an artist doesn’t even need a face. There’s a Degas in the Fitz that’s just a hand, a sculpture of a hand. How would you feel if you held your hand like that, cocked back with crooked fingers? If you put your hand like that, everything else follows: You’re angry. All he needed was a hand to fully depict anger. That’s what an artist does. He takes something completely inadequate-like a single body part if you’re Degas. And you make-what? You make something that stops people. Something that has more in it than can fit. Art is a fucking clown car. Right? It’s something with more in it than anyone else would be able to fit.

So this librarian called me an artist. And people shouldn’t be allowed to throw words like that around. Because she didn’t know. She didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. She just meant that I don’t suck, that I’d drawn physically recognizable humans. She didn’t have any standard higher than that. People like that shouldn’t be teachers. Because people like me get told things and get the really wrong idea.

Up until this moment, I didn’t really know if I was an artist. I had all these skills, but no vision. And now, right in front of me through that window, I had vision. It was this physical scene, just a stupid still life, right? But it was relief. It was profound fucking relief. And youth. And future. And Christmas. It’s fucking Christmas on that shelf. Shit, I had tears on my face. They landed on the front of my jacket, and melted away in an instant like snow in England. Snow in beautiful fucking England. I was really here, and nothing bad had happened yet.

I didn’t know if I could wait. If I’d had chalk I would have happily drawn on the sidewalk.

When I looked up again, there she was: Polly. What was she doing here? She doesn’t start until next fall. She must be looking at the colleges.

She passed me by, without acknowledgment. I let out my breath. See? She didn’t know me. She didn’t know me yet.

I turned and watched her keep going, toward St. Peter’s Terrace. She must be checking out Peterhouse accommodation. That would make sense for a prospective student. It all made sense.

A poster farther down the fence reared up into view. It was hanging there, but not just hanging: It intruded and don’t ask me how that works. I’m just telling you what was in front of me. It was a kind of panel where they announce new exhibits. I thought, Someone beat me to it. Someone else is excited about these vases besides me, because there they are.

It wasn’t a drawing. It was a photograph. The Fitz was advertising the vases’ restoration.

The image was a close-up, bigger than life-sized. I put my hand on it. I looked as close as I could, and I found them: the cracks. The picture was so real you could even find the cracks.

I think I stood there forever. I don’t think my blood even moved around my body. Everything just stopped. Even Polly must have stopped because when I looked away like a million hours later she was still just half a block from me.

If the vases had been smashed and repaired, if I did know her, if everything had happened just like I’d dreamed it or nightmared it or just plain fucked it up, then who does she think she is that she can walk by me like we don’t know each other? Who does she think she is?

I caught up with her in just a few stretched-out strides because I was mad. Anger makes people bigger, faster, longer-legged. My huge hand and long arm pulled her back by her collar. Her coat had a fur collar on it, fake and feathery. My hand plunged into the tickly mass to get hold of the wool neckline underneath. I pulled hard, to make her back up and choke. The coat was buttoned up around her neck and I pulled.

Then I let go so she could turn around. She looked indignant and I had on this innocent face. Her expression backed down, like she must have been mistaken. Like I hadn’t choked her for a second. Ha ha. It’s like-it’s like, who wouldn’t want to play with that? I wanted to smack her on the face and then say I hadn’t, just to see if she’d take it. Maybe she’d even apologize for the misunderstanding.

“What the hell?” she demanded, rubbing her neck. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with you, walking right past me? I’m here, you know? I’m right here!” I waved my hands in her face. “I didn’t think Gretchen’s blindness was catching…”

The skin around her eyes was dark, like she’d slept in mascara. But she doesn’t usually wear makeup. “Liv, don’t you know? Gretchen’s dead. She’s dead,” she said.

“I know,” I said. I know. I know. I know. I know. The vases are cracked, Polly is here, Gretchen is dead. But what about Nick? If everything’s happened, then why isn’t Nick gone? Why did I see him in a car on Chesterton Road?

“I saw Nick,” I said.

And, just like that, there was this tapping sound behind me. It sounded like Gretchen’s cane, tapping on the steps of the Fitzwilliam. I ignored it.

“Oh my God, what? Where?” Polly said. Her face didn’t know how to look. It waited to hear whether I saw him dead on the road or on the news or buying a cup of coffee or in my own fucking head.

Then Harry brushed past me, his arm pushing mine as he went by. I know sidewalks can be skinny around here, but this one was plenty wide and there was no reason for it. It was like he just wanted to nudge me or something. I turned and watched him keep going. The clothes were different, and he had on this hat which wasn’t like him, but it was obviously him. And I realized that all his niceness and can-I-make-you-tea is just as much bullshit as everyone else’s because when you’re really freaking out he’ll just walk past you, right?

Polly grabbed my elbow. “Did you really see Nick?”

I was, like, What? I made my face all innocent and said, “What are you talking about?” Why didn’t she ask about Harry? Had no word gotten around about Harry, only Gretchen? That isn’t fair. But why would I expect anything to be any better for Harry than it is for me?

She looked hit. I said it again: “What are you talking about?” and she actually started to cry. She looked like a well-trimmed poodle with that coat on. “Nice coat.”

Her fists hammered me in the chest. I was up against the iron fence, and the hitting made my head bounce on the bars. It only lasted a few seconds. “My mother bought me this coat!” she said. Then she let go of me, and I guess I slumped.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll lay off the coat.”

“My mother bought me this coat,” she repeated. She crossed her arms as if I were going to try to take it.

“All yours,” I conceded.

We breathed at each other a little while.

“I just can’t believe that Gretchen’s dead,” she finally said.

“Old people die.” That tapping started again, behind me on the steps.

Polly opened her mouth like she wanted to argue about whether or not Gretchen was actually “old” but instead she asked one more time, “Did you really see Nick?” Like she really, really needed to know.

I thought it was sweet that she still thought he might be alive. Speaking of old, I was old now too. Because I’d been through something. I’d woken up thinking all kinds of people could be alive, and it turned out that none of them are.

I shook my head. Because I hadn’t seen him, not the way Polly wanted me to have. I knew that now. I’d seen him the same way I see Harry and Gretchen, and would keep on seeing them, the rest of my life. Why Nick would bother haunting me is anyone’s guess, because it’s not like I had anything to do with whatever stabbed him or pushed him or held him underwater. Maybe he was just haunting Cambridge, and passing me was incidental. That would fit, wouldn’t it? It’s not like I mattered enough for him to even bother.

“Nick’s dead too,” I said. What did she expect? He’s gone, he’s dead. The police had dredged the Cam, because they thought so too. Did she ever really think he was coming back?

It was the smack I’d fantasized. The shock on her face was hilarious. She must have really thought he was coming back. Up until this moment, when I said what’s been obvious for a long time. Of course he’s dead. People like Nick don’t just leave.

“You were going to take him back, weren’t you?” I hurled at her. “Never mind that he gets off with your best friend. You were going to take him back, and get on with being a tease and just holding hands.”

I stared hard, because this was fascinating. Look at her face: Things passed through it, things that could have become words but never got that far, never got that specific or that limited. That’s what art is for, for catching these looks. I wanted to draw her so bad my fingers vibrated.

Then she spoke, and all the variety and vastness resolved and reduced into two bullet points: “You’re not my best friend. And I do wish Nick was back.”

There was a flapping sound behind me, like a dozen birds had suddenly taken off from the museum’s roof. I didn’t have to turn around. They would be Harry’s canaries, round and fluffy and colored like Easter candy. When the beating of their wings died down, I did turn around. Gretchen was gone.

When I turned back, so was Polly.

I checked an ATM. The transaction was going to take “up to” two days, but that could mean today, so I checked. Everything was still the same. I was still in desperate need of money.

There are something like twenty banks in town and I passed, like, half of them. I checked my balance at each one. If I’d been on my bike I wouldn’t have done that, but with everything in slow motion what else was I supposed to do? I was on foot because someone had taken it.

Bikes get stolen all the time in Cambridge, and it’s not an idle thing. It’s not like they get stolen by people who’re going to use them. Then maybe someone who really needed a bike and had to get somewhere might be on mine. I could live with that. Maybe my bike would even be part of something important. But the bike stealing is more organized here. The person who took it is probably just selling it on, just doing business. Things like that make me sick.

I waited in a lot of lines. I pressed a lot of buttons.

Then, just like that: 10,003.45 pounds.

I looked over my shoulder. Did anyone see that?

I looked back. The number was still there. I jumped from foot to foot and shook my hands like they’d fallen asleep. Quick; end the transaction. No-celebrate! Withdraw cash. Buy something. Maybe one of those massively expensive coffees that’s really some kind of mutant sundae with caffeine.

I pressed all the right buttons. But it spat out my card without any money. I tried again; the balance was there, but it wouldn’t let me get at it. I grabbed the sides of the machine and tried to shake it, like when a bag of potato chips is hanging off the spiral in a vending machine. But this thing was, of course, embedded in the wall. There would be no shaking it.

The spiral with my money hanging off it wasn’t in this machine anyway. It would be in a computer somewhere at the bank. The account or transaction might have been flagged, and put on hold. Perhaps they’d been notified of the death by someone incredibly thorough. Maybe everything to do with them was frozen already. Or, no, really, it could just be that things hadn’t finished processing. Maybe there’s this stage where the amount is acknowledged but not releasable yet. Maybe that’s what they meant by two days and tomorrow everything would be fine. Right?

Just past Sainsbury’s there was one more bank.

I waited in line behind a guy with a guitar on his back. He stuck in a card and punched a lot of buttons but nothing much happened, so he opened up his bag and rooted around in it. He got another card and held it in his teeth while he rebuckled the two straps on the front of his bag without taking off his bulky gloves. One side he got but the other one squirmed away from him over and over. He stood there, between me and the machine, wrestling with this stupid bag buckle while I rocked from side to side. The card stuck out of his mouth like a tongue. A mom with a stroller passed between us and rolled a dirty wheel over my shoe.

Finally he stuck the new card in the machine. A ten slid out.

He got out of my way. I pushed my card in the slot and pressed the right buttons. The balance was there.

I tried withdrawal again. Ten had worked out pretty great for the guy in front of me, so I tried it too. Press, press, press, press, whirr… money. Money.

Ten pounds.

I pinched it between my fingers and tugged. It didn’t give right away so I pulled with both hands so hard that I rocked back into the person behind me. “Sorry,” I said, but I didn’t get out of the way. The machine asked if I wanted another transaction. Even with the money free I knew I couldn’t get at the whole of it until tomorrow. A machine wouldn’t be able to give that much; I’d have to wait in line and ask a teller nicely. It was already after five.

I just stared at the small piece of it that was in my hand. It was suddenly weird to me that it wasn’t green. I’d been using this colorful money for over a year now but it was suddenly weird. It didn’t look like money. It looked like a magazine ad. Like a travel agency poster. A poster for Tahiti, my own Tahiti, my own place to get away and grow into something that I knew I could be if people would just stop getting in the way.

I mashed the money into the front pocket of my jeans and whirled around. I thought I’d heard Gretchen’s cane, but it was the person waiting behind me, tapping a pen against their card.

I rubbed my forehead. It was just a pen tapping a card. And the birds at the Fitzwilliam could have been any birds. There are lots of birds in Cambridge. Harry never wore a hat like that at all. I was just getting all “Tell-Tale Heart” about things because of the waiting. Everything could be explained away, except Nick in that car. I’d seen Nick for sure.

Harry came out of the supermarket. I ducked into a doorway. He had those same two orange bags he’d left by the front door yesterday. He had that same hat on he’d had by the Fitzwilliam. No, Harry doesn’t wear hats. What was going on? I had to look at his face.

I chased him toward Magdalene but there were crowds at the bus stops. By the time I got through he was gone.

I leaned against the bridge to breathe. Of course it hadn’t been Harry. He wouldn’t carry groceries up Bridge Street; that’s the opposite of the way to their house. A punt emerged underneath me. In the spring the river will be full of them, rubbing up against each other. But in today’s cold and dark there was just this one. I squinted to see if it was Nick. But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. He was too short. Of course it wasn’t Nick. Why would Nick be punting?

I had to get it together.

If I’d seen a dead Nick, if I was seeing ghosts, then this money wouldn’t get me anywhere. They wouldn’t let me spend it on anything, not without sneaking up behind me or crossing in front of me or filling my ears with chirping and tapping and Gretchen’s horrible thud against the front of Harry’s car.

But if Nick had been real, if he was alive and back, then I’d know for sure that any tapping I heard was just someone busking on the drums, or bouncing a jackhammer into the street, anything, but not that cane.

If he was back, then I could get out of here tomorrow and get on with life. I could leave and not be followed.

He’d be with his family, wouldn’t he. I had to know.

Madingley Road is a busy street and the cars whooshing by made a buzz in my head that blocked out other things. I felt like I was going to float up, which I think was from breathing in so much exhaust instead of oxygen.

Nick’s family’s house is on a corner. To get to the front door, you have to go around most of the place. The back of it is kind of right there, facing the crazy neighbor’s fence.

This fluttering thing hit me in the face. Not a bird, not any kind of bird. It was a piece of… it was a picture. It was a dozen little boys in black top hats. It was the King’s College choristers. Nick was in the middle. That was him, when he was short and his voice was high. I recognized his face. I can always tell his face.

Another one landed on my foot. It was raining Nick. This one was of him as a blond teenager with a dark-haired little girl in front of some big European fountain.

I looked up. That dark-haired girl was grown up and throwing them out of the window. Wind blew them at me, instead of into the neighbor’s yard she was aiming for.

“What are you doing?” I called out.

She flinched, and the top of her head banged into the window frame.

“Hey, are you okay?” I asked. I walked over to underneath her. The house didn’t have high ceilings so upstairs wasn’t that far up.

“If Mrs. Cowley likes photos so much she can have them!” Alexandra kept trying to arc them over the fence, but the wind smeared them around the yard.

I picked up another at random. It was a blurry, blobby baby picture. My mom had pictures like that of me, from back in the day when you had to print a whole roll of film.

“Are you okay?” I repeated.

She looked at me with that kind of tilted head that people do when someone else is stupid.

“Hey!” I said. She retreated and shoved the window shut. I charged around to the front door. “Hey!” I repeated, pushing it open.

This was Nick’s house. There were full bookshelves everywhere. There was a cute bag on a chair, and a girly jacket on the floor. There was a table with two plates holding orange rinds and crumbs. There were two cups and two spoons, and a jagged-edged knife.

Alexandra cantered down the stairs on tottery high heels. She had on tights and a short skirt and a sweater. She hugged her arms around herself. “You’re Nick’s friend, right? What do you want?”

“Where is he?” The house was mostly open-plan. It couldn’t hide anything. Nick wasn’t there, not on this floor anyway.

“I don’t know.” Her mouth hung open in that last “oh” sound. She rubbed her thin sleeves like she was cold.

I darted past her up the steps. She chased me. “What are you doing?” One of the bedroom doors was sort of open. I pushed it the rest of the way.

The bookcase in here held old textbooks, framed certificates, and Nick’s graduation photo: He looked like an Easter bunny in the University’s traditional rabbit-fur cape and white bow around his neck. “What do you want?” she persisted.

A drawer at the bottom of the computer desk had been pulled all the way out. It was full of pictures and negatives sorted into labeled envelopes. There was the window from which she’d dumped her and Nick’s childhood.

The duvet on the single bed hung halfway off and the pillow was indented and askew. I gasped.

Alexandra hung back in the doorway. “Mum must have slept in it,” she said. “She does that sometimes. He’s really not here. I, I really don’t think he’s coming back…”

The balance of the duvet must have reached some tipping point; it suddenly sagged and something round tumbled out. It came to rest at Alexandra’s foot. It was a balled-up sock, a thick white one.

We both fell to hands and knees, like movie people ducking bullets. We stuck our faces under the bed.

There was a crumpled sweatshirt. And, where the duvet had slid off the mattress, a pair of jeans.

Alexandra squeezed the sweatshirt in her hands, but tempered her hope. “Mum might have hugged his sweatshirt in bed…”

I pulled out the jeans to read the label. Inches, not a size. Guys’ jeans. “These are his,” I said. “These are his clothes. Unless,” I added, “you had a boyfriend over last night…”

“I wasn’t even home last night!” she said, indignant, then ecstatic. Realization bloomed. “I wasn’t even home…”

There’s a famous sculpture of St. Teresa in ecstasy. The expression Bernini put into her marble face would have been enough for anybody, but he positioned a hidden window to light it, and then threw in an extravagance of enormous gilt rods behind her, just in case the rays of the real sun didn’t measure up. That’s how Alexandra looked. She looked radiant. She looked lit.

“I saw him today,” I said, reflecting her happiness. “On Chesterton Road. I really saw him!”

The money would come out of the bank tomorrow. I would leave a living Nick, and dead Harry and dead Gretchen, behind. I’d only been imagining things. They couldn’t really follow me.

Tap, tap, tap…

All my muscles squeezed together hard.

I shook myself. That was just the noise of Alexandra’s heels on the stairs. She was clattering down them because a car was pulling up.

I checked my hair in the dresser mirror. I wiped my mouth. I followed her down to see Nick one last time.

Tap, tap, tap.

Gretchen had no power over me anymore. I knew the sound for what it was: knocking on a door.

Why would Nick knock on his own door?

The stairs decanted me back into the living space. It was a big room, for everything all at once: for sitting and eating and putting on coats. Only the kitchen had a full-height interior wall, for more cabinet space, I guess. I ducked into that kitchen, behind that wall.

Alexandra opened the door to a man. She said, “Morris!” and hugged him. Morris. That was the name of Polly’s policeman.

“Alexandra,” he said. “I need to see Nick. Is he here?”

“Is he alive? Is he really alive?” She jumped in place: bounce, bounce.

The policeman said yes. There were tears and squeals and stuff out of her, but he made her focus.

“Is Nick not here?”

“I think he and Mum are out looking for me.”

Her clothes were rumpled and stretched in a way that made things pretty obvious. “Did you come home last night?”

“I was at a party. I slept at my friend Hannah’s house. I didn’t tell Mum.”

“Well, we need to call her now, all right? I need to speak to Nick.”

She came into the kitchen to use the phone on the counter, and Morris followed. I edged myself out the kitchen’s other end, onto the living room side of the wall. I bumped into a suitcase. It cracked open and leaked a tie.

“They’re on their way,” Alexandra told him, after talking to her mom. “Dad flew home early, from New York overnight. He’s upstairs asleep.”

“Really?” I blurted. That was a mistake. Before that the policeman hadn’t realized I was there.

“This is Nick’s friend,” Alexandra said, sweetly, gallantly. She was happy. She wanted us all to be best friends. She didn’t even know my name.

But he did. “Liv?” he asked, and it was totally not fair because he hadn’t even bothered to meet me when Nick was gone. He’d fobbed me off on the assistant cop, the sergeant. “No,” I said, denying it all. But he must have seen photos of all Nick’s friends, or maybe spied on us, because he knew. He knew who I was.

“Why don’t you go upstairs and wake your dad?” he suggested to Alexandra, but looking only at me.

I’d slipped the sandwich knife off the table, just in case. But it’s not like I was going to use it.

I moved toward the door. The policeman put himself between me and it.

So it was his fault.

I got hold of Alexandra’s arm. “What are you doing?” she said. The knife jumped out of my pocket and pressed into her neck.

The policeman froze.

“It’s all right, Liv,” he said evenly.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Let her go.”

This is what makes me so angry: I wasn’t even going to do anything.

He made this kind of leap at me, shoving his hand between my hand and Alexandra’s neck. I moved as a reflex, not meaning to hurt him, but I sliced him across his knuckles.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at hands; they’re the hardest of all body parts to draw. This one was big and had blood on it, first just straight across, then also sliding down each finger, like clothes hanging from a laundry line.

He shoved Alexandra away with it, and she fell against the table. Orange peels popped up off plates; the two coffee cups toasted with a clink before wobbling over. There was blood on her shirt now, from him. I scrambled to the door but it opened in. I had to back up to open it all the way. I felt like I lost entire minutes, maybe hours, pulling that door back.

I plunged into the outside headfirst. He grabbed me around the middle with that one good arm. I elbowed him off me, but somehow I was back in the doorway, and he blocked my exit on the stoop.

I held my hands up. One of them still had the knife in it.

Out of nowhere, his good hand yanked me around, right around, like we were square dancing. This opened up his whole torso. His white shirt was this huge field.

It felt weird putting the knife in. His body was too soft and too hard at the same time. I didn’t want it to be like this. It was like touching a guy you don’t really like because you have to or else he’ll yell at you or say things about you. I didn’t push hard or move it around. I just rubbed it across, but the sharpness went in anyway. The knife did that. I was just pushing him away.

When our positions were fully reversed, I saw that Alexandra had a vase over her head, a huge urn from next to the fireplace. She looked like she was carrying water back from a well. She’d been about to smash my skull in, except that the policeman had heaved me away.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Alexandra shouted. She wasn’t angry at me. She was angry at him, for pulling me out of her range and so making himself vulnerable.

She couldn’t balance the weight of it any longer. It shattered on the concrete stoop. We all jumped at the impact.

“What did you do that for?” I echoed, really curious. He sagged to one side, with the good hand kind of on his hip, I think holding him up. His shirt wasn’t white anymore. His cut hand hung down, limp at the end of his arm.

That good hand shot out and pulled my arm hard, twisting it behind me. We both went down, me front first. His weight on my back hurt. My cheek pressed into the concrete. I wiggled and whined. I thought it was a siren at first, but it was me.

His breathing was rough. He told me right in my ear that I didn’t have to say anything, but that if I withheld something that would later be used in my defense, that would be a problem. He told Alexandra that there were handcuffs in his pocket and to get them on me, which she did, fumbling and I think freaking out. One of my hands was under me, and she had to dig it out. The other one was still held behind my back, under the policeman’s chest, and held tight in his good fist. It was slippery from him bleeding on me. The cuffs were cold and she pinched my skin on purpose. “Bitch,” I said.

“Keep still.” That was the cop.

“I didn’t do anything,” I insisted. It was hard to breathe down there.

“We know about Gretchen, Liv. And Harry and the birds. It’s over. Stop struggling.”

“I didn’t-” But I didn’t get the chance to say that I hadn’t hurt the birds. I’d only found them that way, but I didn’t get to make that clear because a car turned the corner. Nick was home.

It was the car I’d seen on Chesterton Road, and the woman driving it must be his mother. He didn’t see us yet. He was looking at her. He’d notice her change in expression any second, but for this moment he was only happy.

When we’d all first become friends together, me and him and Polly, we’d gone to the Fitz a lot. That was always my idea. Once we borrowed one of the kids’ play kits they have: games and puzzles based on various galleries. Nick carried the plastic box, a clear tool-type box. Inside, the first game we picked up had been a kind of birdwatching in the ceramics gallery.

I’d never paid much attention to ceramics before. The whole point of these games is that they make kids pay attention to things they otherwise might not have. It works for adults too. There was a set of binoculars we shared between the three of us, and we prowled that gallery looking at every little piece to find representations of the half-dozen birds listed in the challenge. We horsed around, and made bird calls at each other, and tussled over the binoculars. That day, more than any other, is what I saw in his face in the car. Any moment he would look and see me and his face would get complicated. But for that moment in the car, and that whole afternoon in the Fitz, he’d been plain happy.

There are four Monets in the Fitzwilliam. I like the way the Impressionists would find one good moment and go after it. They wanted to show that for one moment the wind blew, or the sun reflected off the water this one way. They understood that life is mostly a mess and that good moments need capturing. Because light moves on. Wind dies. An expression changes.

Nick looked up. He saw me. His mother was already getting out of the car.

Alexandra called 999 on the policeman’s cellphone. He was still breathing, but wasn’t holding on to me anymore. I could roll him off me. The cuffs had really calmed him down.

I thought: This is my chance. Right? In a moment, Nick would be out of the car, Alexandra would get through to the emergency line, Mrs. Frey would stop freaking out and get it together. But this moment-just before all that would happen-was my chance.

I could run.

Into the jungle behind the house… skirting the edge of the huge pond… through back gardens and over a hedge… between the medieval ridges and furrows of ancient fields… sliding between tightly packed cars in the park-and-ride lot, cars that scream alarms when touched. This is where I went in my mind. This was my plan as my strength coiled.

My mind raced on, leading me. Onward up Madingley Road. Where was I taking me? There were two of me: myself, here, about to bolt, and myself, ahead, guiding me forward.

The solid me shoved off the policeman. I sprang forward and landed flat on my feet, knees bent, hands still cuffed behind me. I looked like a child bent to imitate a pecking chicken.

The soon-me, the just-ahead-me, kept running. I would make it. All I would have to do is follow.

The destination took me by surprise. Lawn, studded with thousands of short white crosses. The American Cemetery.

Both of us hesitated. Me, and me-about-to-be. How had it happened? How had we ended up there?

Britain had given the U.S. the land for the cemetery in thanks after World War II. It’s American. Even in my mind I’d run, somehow, home again. My fantasy had taken me roundabout, back to where I’d started.

I was still on the flagstones in front of Nick’s house. Horror had frozen my escape. My imagination had betrayed me.

I was trapped. Not by the cuffs, though they hurt, or Nick tackling me to the ground, in a grotesque parody of what I’d once wanted from him, or by the distant sirens blaring toward us from the motorway. I was paused by those things, but I was trapped by realization. I was trapped in my head.

Even in my fantasies I couldn’t get away from home. Nothing would ever be new, ever. I knew that now. No place would ever be foreign enough that I wouldn’t be me anymore.

Nick was on top of me. “Gross! Get off me!” I grunted, pushing. He was disgusting to me now. What had I ever been thinking? He was holding me down.

Alexandra kicked my midriff, just beneath where my shirt had gotten rolled up around my rib cage. She kicked my bare side, hard. I felt something crack. I think it was a rib. It got difficult to make my chest expand.

Her mother pulled to get Alexandra away from me. The girl resisted. “You bitch!” she said, like I had to her, I think mistaking me for everything that had gone wrong. Mistaking me for why Nick had ever been gone. The toe of her shoe plunged in again.

The sirens got louder. Nick’s dad stumbled out the front door, awake at last. He blinked, just coming to, as confused as a newborn. He almost tripped over the cop on his doorstep.

Alexandra abandoned attacking me, to fling herself at him. “Daddy!” she cried out, melding herself to him. She was miniature against his adult height and barrel chest.

I squirmed. Nick must have felt my breathing shrink. He got off and rolled me over onto my back. That helped.

I really had seen him in the car this morning. A living Nick really was back. There had been no true ghosts, none of them. So I knew this was real too:

There! On that branch. The fluffy white canary I’d cupped in my hands. The last I’d seen, it was on its side, sucking and squeezing air in and out of its little orb of a body. I’d returned its feather. It had flown a long way to get to this tree, in this little wood at the edge of the city. I hadn’t thought it would live at all, and look how far it had come.

“Hi,” I said. All around me people had other conversations. Bystanders urged paramedics. Bloody people explained where it hurt. The bird and I, we had our own thing going on. I’d tried to tell everyone that I hadn’t hurt the birds. No one had listened, but we knew.

It wasn’t afraid of me. It lit onto my stomach. This little poof of white rode up and down, up and down.

Thick hands brushed it away and scooped me up onto a padded mat thing. The bird hopped backward, away from the commotion. “It’s all right,” I croaked. I tried to make it shoo. There were too many feet, heavy and busy, crossing this way and that.

I couldn’t turn my head on the stretcher bed, not far enough. I got slotted into the back of an ambulance. The last I saw for myself was a flash of white, maybe lifting up into the air. Or, that could have been the doors slamming. They shut with a bang and a click.