The Whole World

Epilogue

“I thought you were in jail.”

Nick flinched. He was in a hospital bed, one of four in the room, under a white sheet.

“That’s why I didn’t come sooner,” Polly explained from the doorway. “I didn’t realize you were here.”

Nick had to lean forward to see the whole of her, to see past the balloon bouquet tied to the metal arm of his bed, and through an absurdly colored eruption of carnations.

“Some of us thought…” She took a breath, revised. “Peter heard that you’d… run over Gretchen, and that police had been called. And before that,” she said, squeezing her hands into a tight ball in front of her stomach, “before that, we all thought you were dead.”

Behind a curtain, another patient coughed.

“I know,” Nick said. “I’m sorry.”

The apology sucked Polly into the room. She got close, right next to the bed. Her fingertips grazed the sheet. “I’m so glad you’re-”

And, at the same moment, “Your mum told me what your dad-” he said.

Polly covered her ears and stepped back. “I know,” she said. “I know.” Then, immediately, she replaced the subject: “I know about you and Liv.”

He shook his head. He held up one finger, to ask her to stop. “There was no ‘me and Liv.’ It… I regret what happened with her,” he said. “I regret-I shouldn’t have pushed you like I did.”

“No, no, it was good. I shouldn’t have stopped you. Us, I mean. Stopped us. It was dumb.”

“It wasn’t stupid. We should have talked more before…”

“I wouldn’t have told you,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about it.”

She moved closer again. She pushed a balloon aside, and it bounced back against her head.

“Did you really slip on a plate?” she asked. “In some old dowager’s mansion?”

Nick’s pause was filled with the creaking and heaving of someone else, someone very heavy, rolling over. The privacy curtain between him and Nick wafted.

“Yes,” Nick finally said. “It was an old friend’s house. She wasn’t in residence. I was stranded.”

“It must have been awful!”

He nodded, bouncing his chin against his neck.

“My mom’s gone home,” Polly said. “I asked her to. She hugged me good-bye this morning. She’s divorcing my dad, did she tell you that too? Did she tell you that?”

“She only told me about what your father did.”

Polly looked up at the ceiling. A machine beeped.

“Well, it turns out that isn’t everything. She came here to tell me something else, something added on. She kept trying to tell me, but I wouldn’t let her get it out, until the day we went shopping for a coat. And then so much else happened… I didn’t think about it enough. I didn’t think about it.

“The day that Dad did it, did the terrible thing, he was really stressed, because he’d confronted his boss about a safety problem at the mill. A forklift had run into a load-bearing column, and it wasn’t being reported. They’d had an ugly argument and Dad thought he’d lose his job. I knew that already. He told the police, as if it mattered. As if it was some kind of reason. But Mom came here to tell me that it going public really shamed the company. They examined the column, and it turned out that a collapse was imminent. They kept it quiet that Dad was right, but they fixed it. Mom only found that out recently, from a friend of Dad’s who still worked there. Five guys work in that area and they probably would have died. Because of Dad they didn’t.”

“That’s a good thing,” Nick said.

“I know. I know it’s good. But it’s not enough. It’s important to stay mad, you know? It’s not like five guys make up for one guy. You can’t average the people a person saves and the people a person hurts. They’re people. You can’t do that. Jeremy’s dead. That’s never going to be okay…”

“No,” he agreed.

“Liv’s in jail now.” She rubbed her sleeve against her cheek. A nurse pushed a wheeled cart past the door, toward another room. It rattled like it contained small medical instruments, or food accessorized with metal utensils.

“Last night I had this dream,” Polly said, “about Liv, that she was at Oxford instead of Cambridge. That she met different people, made different friends. That it was almost the same as here, but not quite, and so none of the horrible stuff happened.”

“Polly…”

“Do you think she had it just in her, the bad stuff, and that something awful would have come out of her no matter where she went? Or do you think it was just this one set of circumstances that worked together to push her in that direction? What do you think?”

“I think… I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Is it true that she hurt the policeman too? Were you there? People are saying that she stabbed him.”

“No, she cut him. She didn’t stab him.” Nick mimed the difference. “He’s in intensive care.”

“No, he isn’t. At least, not anymore. He’s here. On this ward.” Polly waved her hand toward the door. “In the first room…”

Nick grunted, started to slide his legs off the side of the bed.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve got to talk to him.” Nick grabbed the crutches propped near his bed.

“Wait-why?”

“I need to thank him. For Alexandra. If he hadn’t been there…”

“Is she all right?”

“She is. Because of him. She… she’s upset, and angry, but she’s all right.”

“Angry?” Polly’s tone had changed. She wasn’t curious; she was indignant. “Why is she angry?”

Nick balanced on his crutches, stared at Polly. She squeezed her eyes shut. She accused him:

“She’s like you with Cambridge architecture. You breeze past King’s College Chapel. You trudge over Garret Hostel Bridge. Alexandra doesn’t notice the safety of her life. She takes it for granted. I gawk and point at it. I’d put it on a mug. I’d wear it on a T-shirt if I could!”

“Polly, what are you talking about?”

“Alexandra doesn’t know how lucky she is!” Polly hissed. “The difference between someone you care about being gone and coming back, and someone you care about being dead, is a whole world.”

Nick needed both of his hands to hold tight for him to stay upright. But he nudged her arm gently with his elbow. Her breathing calmed.

“Do you know what I love about being here, in this country?” she said quietly. “I love the sinks and their faucets for hot and cold. Not one tap, like I’m used to at home, where hot and cold mix together to make something nice to wash your hands in. Here, most of the sinks have this one tap for cold and this one for hot. You can mix them in the sink if you want, but hot comes out hot and cold comes out cold. Side by side. There’s something really true about that. Because I know I feel like that. I hate what Dad did to Jeremy, and I’m happy that those men at the factory didn’t get hurt. I feel both of those things, not mixed into merely warm, but just as they are: something really terrible and something really good. It’s like what I felt with you, in the Sedgwick, terrified and happy. I was terrified and I was happy. They didn’t add up to indifferent. They were both just themselves.”

His shoulders were hunched up because of the crutches. She leaned her head against one of them. He tilted his cheek against her hair.

Morris’s abdominal injury was healing well, but his right hand was a wreck. He couldn’t hold anything. He couldn’t even hold a book.

“Are you bored? Is there anything I can do?” Nick asked.

Morris said no.

Nick hovered there. His left leg, still fragile, was bent at the knee and swinging just over the floor.

“I’m so grateful,” Nick finally said. “We all are. I know what you did for Alexandra.”

Morris’s voice was flat. “Really? What did I do?”

Nick beamed. “Alexandra had the fireplace urn. You pulled Liv around, away from her. That’s how you got hurt. I’m so sorry you got hurt. But we’re so grateful. Alexandra doesn’t understand. She thought you did it to protect Liv. She’s angry to have been stopped. She’s just a kid. I had to explain it to her.”

“Why don’t you explain it to me,” he said, all in one tone.

“You protected Alexandra, not just Liv. Killing someone, even in self-defense or defending someone else… that’s something a person has to carry around. It would have changed her. It would have… it would have been a burden for all of her life. You protected her. Thank you. Thank you for that.”

Morris breathed deep through his nose. He didn’t blink.

“Hi, Daddy!” A teenager bounded in, fresh from class. She was around the same age as Alexandra, but in the clothing of a different school. She dumped her backpack and kissed Morris’s cheek, then promised to come right back. She headed for the toilets.

“You know what’s the worst thing about being a dad?” Morris leaned forward. He wrapped his good hand around Nick’s crutch, and pulled himself up close to Nick’s face. “The kid is this thing you have to protect. She’s so much more important than anything else. Even if you have to die, to keep her safe, you do it. You just do it, because if it comes down to you or her, it’s her. That’s it. It’s just her. But here’s the thing: Between me and the rest of the world, it’s me. It’s me, for her sake, because I’m her father. She needs me. She needs to not lose her dad to some nutter with a knife. What was I thinking? What the hell had I been thinking?”

He let go of the crutch. Nick rocked back.

Peter was sitting on Nick’s hospital bed, arms crossed. “I thought you couldn’t walk,” he accused. “I was told you’d never walk again and it would make you even more pathetic and everyone would point and laugh at you for as long as you lived.”

“I hobble,” Nick said. He forced a smile. Peter didn’t. “It’s good to see you,” Nick said, trying to haul the conversation back to a proper start.

Peter resisted. “Do the nurses usually let you wander? Is that wise?”

“I can balance all right,” Nick answered, as if the question had to do with his leg and not with his recent running away to Dovecote. “I was visiting the Inspector. I had to talk to him. Did you know that he’s Richard’s brother? I could hardly believe it when my mother told me that. He’s the one who caught Liv. He-”

“We all got to know him, Nick. We were all questioned by him. About you.”

“Yes, of course.” Nick still waited in the doorway, on one foot.

Peter stood up and to the side, to give him back his bed. Nick sat on it, legs over the side and back straight, rather than lying back down.

“Did you know that they dredged the Cam for you?” Peter demanded.

Nick nodded.

“That Richard considered postponing the wedding? Did you know that Polly’s mother was arrested?”

“What?”

“Because of you.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“A lot happened while you were off.”

“Is she all right?”

“She was only in a few days.”

“Days? My God. Polly didn’t say.”

Peter lifted his head. “She was here?”

“Half an hour ago.”

Peter sucked in a breath, then whooshed it out. “I’ve got to ask you this. But… you’ve got to tell me the truth.”

“About what?” There was so much he had to tell everyone, over and over again. Why he left, where he went, what he’d hoped to find and what he did find…

Peter leaned in close and spoke barely above a whisper. “Liv said you raped her.”

“What?” Nick gaped. “What?”

“After they dredged the Cam she was upset. We all were. All day we’d prepared for the worst news. It didn’t come, thank God it didn’t, but all that coiled energy had nowhere to spring. Then she told me, and I was angry, and I didn’t believe her. But it stuck in my head. It stuck there.”

“You didn’t believe her,” Nick repeated, insistent.

“Not at first. No. Then maybe… The idea was absurd, but everything was already absurd. There was no reason for you to have run away, no reason for anyone to have hurt you. There was no ransom demand, no body… And I remembered the last time I saw you. You were upset about Liv and Polly. It came across like something on the scale of a pregnancy scare. But this was you, Nick, so at the time I thought you’d ‘led Liv on’ as far as a kiss, or maybe not even that. Maybe just words had been taken the wrong way. I hadn’t thought anything significant of it.

“Then Liv told me you’d raped her. Having done that would make you run away. Or make Liv want to hurt you. It could even have made you hurt yourself. It was unthinkable that you would do it in the first place, but, if you had done it, that would make sense of everything else. Not just of you being gone, but now. What Liv did. Not why it was aimed at Gretchen and Harry, but why she felt she had to hit back at somebody…”

“No!”

“No what, Nick?”

“No to everything! No, I didn’t rape her!”

“That’s the truth?”

A leaf hanging from one of the carnation stems suddenly dropped. It sawed back and forth through the air on its slow fall, finally brushing gently against the cold floor. The slight sound of that soft friction magnified and elongated to fill the gap between asking the question and hearing the answer.

“I wouldn’t do a thing like that,” Nick said.

Peter goggled.

“You wouldn’t? Really? We all said that. ‘Nick wouldn’t do that.’ Nick wouldn’t just leave. That’s what we told the police, over and over again. But that’s exactly what you did do, so how the hell do I know what you would or wouldn’t do anymore?”

Peter avoided the bus. He wanted to keep moving.

He believed Nick. He was relieved. But he was still rattled by having had to ask him.

Nick was home, but home had changed while he was gone. Home had changed partly because he’d been gone. His absence had been a hole they all kept falling into. Now that he was back, he didn’t quite fit that space anymore. Now the people who cared for him most were poked by his sharp edges, and poked back with their own.

The south end of Cambridge, around the hospital, isn’t the Cambridge that Polly and Liv swooned over. It’s just ordinary brick houses, and then, after a good distance, Hills Road erupts with practical, un-decorative shops and businesses. Only much farther beyond do the colleges and parks and expensive stores by which Americans mean “ Cambridge ” cluster.

It used to be a fashionable prank for students to scale the University’s towers. There’s a famous leap from a student bedroom onto the Senate House roof, which has been forbidden for years. Peter had never been tempted. He’d never felt the urge to climb.

Until now.

He turned into Downing Street. He’d be caught, surely. But the question was, how far could he get before that happened?

Someone had had the bright idea to string the tower cranes building the Grand Arcade with Christmas lights; that’s how much a fixture the cranes had become. They shone.

That’s one of the last things Liv said to Peter: that she loved the cranes. That they were more beautiful, in their immensity, symmetry, and balance, than whatever they could build.

There’s nothing so tall as they in Cambridge. Yes, there’s the view from Great St. Mary’s bell tower, but it has a cage around the top to prevent jumping. You can press your face up against the cross-hatching to give your eye an unjailed look. You can see down onto the college lawns, and notice the plaids and stripes made by the mowers. But the cranes…

It was all too small, suddenly. Too tight. The history, the traditions, the glut of buildings.

Peter wanted height. He wanted to look at how big the world really is.

Cambridge is a transitional place. Some people stay. But most pass through on their way to somewhere else. They get their degrees. The cranes sum it up nicely-they’ll come down when their job’s done.

That’s why it was urgent that Peter do this immediately.

The building site was fenced and locked. Peter knew there would be cameras. He tried to not look too interested. He wanted to shock whoever was watching. He wanted to give himself the most time he could.

Just scale the fence, jump down. The cranes were there. Just scramble up the base of one and grab on to the beginning of the latticed neck. He could manage that. Would alarms go off? How far could he get? Would whoever swooped in to get him down treat him like a criminal, or gently, like a potential suicide?

He just wanted to get up high. The air didn’t feel breathable down among the buildings anymore.

There’s a famous Hubble image of deep space, full of distant galaxies and stars like a bag of sweets spilled across a blackboard. Hubble gets those kinds of pictures because it’s above the atmosphere. It sees without fog.

That’s what Peter wanted to do.

He wanted to try. He wanted to reach. He wanted to stand there just for a moment, and fling out his arms, and look down from a great height.

I’ll come down without a fight, he promised himself. I’ll take what punishment comes. But I’ll have that view in my head. That’ll make it worthwhile.

He grabbed the link fence and hauled himself up. He climbed, and rolled over the top, landing on his feet. The cranes were right there. He scrambled up a base, and gripped the bottom lattice in his hand.

The universe expands.