Then hands grab me, under my arms, pulling me further out until my knees are grounded. One more pull and I am out, water streaming from my clothes and hair and mouth. I cough and start to cry, so happy to be out, hurting so much.
“What the fucking hell are you doing?” It’s Dinny. His voice echoes oddly in my ears and I can’t look up at him yet, can’t move my heavy head on my wooden neck. “Are you trying to kill yourself, for fuck’s sake?” He is rough, furious.
“I’m… not sure,” I croak, and concentrate on coughing again. Behind his head the stars judder and wheel.
“Get up!” he commands. He sounds so angry, and the last of my will leaves me. I give up. Lying down on the ground, I turn my head away from him. I can’t feel my body, can’t feel my heart.
“Just leave me alone,” I say. I think I say. I’m not sure if I have formed words, or just exhaled. He turns me over, stands behind my head and pulls me up by my armpits.
“Come on. You need to warm up before you can lie down and have a rest.”
“I am warm. I’m boiling hot,” I say, but tremors are starting to come, from my feet to my fingertips, convulsing every muscle. My head pounds.
“Come on, walk now. It’s not far.”
A short time later I become aware of myself, of the peeled feeling of my skin, the ache in my ribs and arms and skull. My fingers and toes are throbbing, agonizing. I am sitting in wet underwear in Dinny’s van. Wrapped in a blanket. There’s hot tea beside me. Dinny pours in sugar by the heaped spoonful, instructs me to drink it. I sip it, burn my tongue. I’m shaking still, but less now. The inside of the ambulance is warmer than I’d imagined. The embers in the stove light our faces. Narrow bunks along one side, cupboards and shelves and a counter along the other. A space for billycans. A kettle on the stove top, pans hanging on hooks.
“How come you were at the dew pond?” I ask. My voice has an unhealthy rattle to it.
“I wasn’t. I was going home when I heard the bloody great splash you made. You’re just lucky the wind’s blowing in from the east or I wouldn’t have heard it. I wouldn’t have come. Do you know what could have happened if I hadn’t? Even if you’d managed to get out and then lain on the bank for half an hour… do you understand?”
“Yes.” I am contrite, embarrassed. There is no trace of the whisky in me now. My swim has washed it all away.
“So what were you doing?” He sits opposite me on a folding stool, rests one ankle on the opposite knee, crosses his arms. All barriers. I shrug.
“I was trying to remember. That day. The day Henry died.” Died, I say. Not disappeared. I wait to see if Dinny will correct me. He doesn’t.
“Why would you want to remember?”
“Because I don’t, Dinny. I don’t remember it. And I have to. I need to.” He doesn’t answer for a long time. He sits and he considers me with hooded eyes.
“Why? Why do you have to? If you really don’t remember, then-”
“Don’t tell me I’m better off! That’s what Beth says and it’s not true! I am not better off. There’s a bit missing… I can’t stop thinking about it…”
“Try.”
“I know he’s dead. I know we killed him.” As I speak I shudder again, scattering drops of tea onto my legs.
“We killed him?” Dinny glares at me suddenly, his eyes alight. “No. We didn’t kill him.”
“What does that mean? What happened, Dinny? Where did he go?”
The question hangs between us for a long moment. I think he will tell me. I think he will. The silence stretches.
“These are not my secrets to tell,” Dinny says, his face troubled.
“I just want things to be as they were,” I say quietly. “Not things-people. I want Beth to grow up the way she should have grown up, if it hadn’t happened. It all starts there, I know it does. And I want for us to be friends, like we were…”
“We could have been, perhaps.” His voice is flat. I look up for an explanation. “You just stopped coming!” he exclaims, eyes widening. “How do you think that felt, after everything I-”
“After everything you what?”
“After all the time we’d spent, all the growing up… You just stopped coming.”
“We were kids! Our parents stopped bringing us… there wasn’t much we could do about it…”
“They brought you here the summer after. And the one after that. I saw you, even if you didn’t see me. But you never came down to the camp. My family were turned inside out by the police, looking for that boy. Everybody treated us like criminals! I bet they didn’t turn the manor upside down, did they? I bet they didn’t keep looking in the herb garden for a grave.” I stare at him. I can’t think what to say. I try to remember the police searching the house, but I can’t. “At first I thought you’d been forbidden to come down here. But you’d always been forbidden before and that had never stopped you. Then I thought perhaps you were scared, perhaps you didn’t want to talk about what had happened. Then I finally hit on it. You just didn’t care.”
“That’s not true! We were just children, Dinny! What happened was… too big. We didn’t know what to do with it-”
“You were just a child, Erica. Beth and I were twelve. That’s old enough. Old enough to know where your loyalties lie. Would it have killed you to come? Just once? To write down your address, to write a letter?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what happened. I… watched Beth for all my cues. Even now I can’t tell if I knew what we’d done, what had happened. I don’t know when it went out of my head. I can hardly remember anything I thought or did in those summers afterwards. And then we stopped coming.”
“Well, no wonder. If you were both acting so vacant, your mother must have thought it was damaging you.”
“It was damaging us, Dinny.”
“Well, there you go. What happened, happened. There’s no changing it now, even if you want to.”
“I do want to,” I murmur. “I want Beth back. I want you back.”
“You’re lonely, Erica. I was too, for a long time. Nobody to talk to about it all. I guess we have to take what’s due to us.”
“Whose secrets are they, Dinny, if they’re not yours or mine?”
“I never said they weren’t yours.”
“Mine and Beth’s?” He stares at me, says nothing. I can feel tears in my eyes, feel them start to run, impossibly hot.
“But I don’t know!” I say quietly.
“Yes. You do.” Dinny leans toward me. In the low light I can see every dark eyelash, outlined by the orange glow from the stove. “It’s time you went home to bed, I think,” he says.
“I don’t want to go.” But he is on his feet. I wipe my face, notice that my hands are red and angry, mud under the nails.
“You can keep the blanket for now. Give it back to me whenever.” He rolls my wet clothes into a bundle, hands them to me. “I’ll walk you back.”
“Dinny!” I stand up, stagger slightly. In the small space we are inches apart, but that is too far. He stops, turns to face me. I can’t think of any words to say. I clasp the blanket close to me and lean toward him, tilt my head so my forehead can touch his cheek. I take one step closer, shut my eyes, put one hand on his shoulder, curling my thumb into the hard jut of his collarbone. I stay that way for three heartbeats, until I feel his arms circle me. I lift my chin, feel his lips brush mine, and I lean into his kiss, clumsy with desire. His arms tighten around me, chase my breath away. I would halt the world, if I could; stop it spinning, make it so I could stay here for ever, in this dark space with Dinny’s mouth against mine.