“Erica?” Her voice is tiny.
“Oh, Beth! What have you done?” I smooth her hair back from her face and then I realize. She has hacked it off, all of it. The dark pool on the floor is the severed length of her hair. Without it she looks like a little girl; so vulnerable. “Your hair!” I cry, and then I laugh again and kiss her face. She has not cut herself, is not bleeding.
“I couldn’t do it. I wanted to but… Eddie…”
“You didn’t want to do it! You don’t want to do it! I know you don’t, not really,” I tell her. I pull her further into my arms, rock her gently.
“I did! I did want to!” she weeps angrily, and I think she would pull away from me if she had the strength. “Why did you make him tell you? Why wouldn’t you listen to me?”
“Because it had to happen. It did. But listen to me-Beth, are you listening? This is important.” I glance up, catch my reflection in the dressing table mirror. I look gray, spectral. But I can see it in my own eyes-the truth, waiting to spill out. I take a deep breath. “Beth, Henry’s not dead. Harry is Henry! It’s true! Dinny told me the whole story… he didn’t die. They took him off to some friend of theirs for first aid and then they moved him around different camps for years and years. That’s why none of the searches ever found him.”
“What?” she whispers. She watches me like she would a snake, waiting for the next strike.
“Harry-the Harry your son just spent the Christmas holiday playing with-Harry is our cousin Henry.” Oh, I want to release her; I want to mend her! In the silence I hear her breathing. The fluttering of air, pushed from her body.
“That’s not true,” she whispers.
“It’s true, Beth. It’s true. I believe it. Dinny wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened, so Mickey thought Dinny had done it, and they didn’t want him to be taken away…”
“No, no, no! None of that is right! I killed him! I killed him, Rick.” Her voice rises to a wail, wanes to a sliver. “I killed him.” She says it more calmly now, as if almost relieved to let the words out.
“No, you didn’t,” I insist.
“But… I threw that stone… it was too big! I should never have thrown it! Even Henry wouldn’t have thrown one that big. But I was so angry! I was so angry I just wanted to make him stop! It went so high,” she whispers.
I can see it now. Finally, finally. Like it was there all along. Girls aren’t taught to throw properly. She flung her whole body behind it, let go of it too soon, sent it too high. We lost sight of it against the incandescent summer sky. Henry was already laughing at her, laughing at the ineptness of the throw. He was already laughing when it came back down, when it hit his head with a sound that was so wrong. Loud, and wrong. We all knew the wrongness of that sound at once, even though we’d never heard it before. The sound of flesh breaking, of a blow to the bone. It was that sound that made me sick just now. As if I were hearing it again for the first time, and only now rejecting it. And then all that blood, and his glazed look, and my scramble from the water, and our flight. I have it now. At last.
“I didn’t kill him?” Beth whispers at last, eyes boring into my face, mining me for the truth.
I shake my head, smile at her.
“No. You didn’t kill him.”
I see relief seep into her face, slowly, so slowly; like she hardly dares believe it. I hold her tightly, feel her start to cry.
Later, I go back to the camp. In the early afternoon, with the sun burning through the mist. As the first glimpses of sky appear-gauzy, dazzling shreds-I feel something in me pouring out, pouring up. I’m left with a neutral feeling that could become anything. It could become joy. Perhaps. I sit next to Harry on the steps of his van. I ask him what he’s doing and although he doesn’t speak, he shows me, opening his hands. A tiny penknife in one hand, a half-cylinder shard of tree bark in the other, and patterns scratched into it, geometric shapes bumping and overlapping. He is miraculous to me now. I try to take his arm but he shuffles, doesn’t want me to. I don’t force it. Miraculous. That Henry could grow into this gentle soul. Was he damaged or, rather, was something knocked out of him by Beth’s blow? The spite? The childish arrogance, the aggression? All the base things, all of Meredith’s legacy, all the hate she taught him. He is a cleanly wiped slate.
I let him keep working, but I tie his dreadlocks into a chaotic knot behind his head so I can see his face. I sit, and he works, and I watch his face. And slowly, familiar things surface. Some of his features settle back into the shapes I knew. Just here and there, just traces. The Calcott nose we all have, narrow at the bridge. The blue-gray shade of his irises. He doesn’t seem to mind me watching. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“He recognized you, I think,” Dinny says quietly, coming to stand in front of us. His arms hang loosely at his sides, hands in fists, as if he’s ready for something. Ready to react. “That first time you saw him in the woods and he stopped you passing by. I think he recognized you, you see.” I look up at Dinny, but I can’t speak to him. Not yet. Tendons standing out on his forearms, ridges under the skin, tense with the clench of his hands. He was right. Everything has changed. Across the clearing, Patrick emerges from his van and gives me a solemn nod.
I go up to fetch Beth as the light is failing. She has been lying down for hours. Assimilating. I tell her who is downstairs and she agrees to see him. All the solemnity and the dread of one going to the gallows. Her bluntly cropped hair lies at odd angles, and her face is immobile, unnaturally still. Some force of will it must be costing her, to keep it that still. In the kitchen the lights are on. Dinny and Henry, sitting opposite each other at the table, playing snap and drinking tea as if the world has not just tensed itself up and thrown off everything our lives were based upon, like a dog shaking off muddy water. Dinny glances up as we come in, but Beth only looks at Henry. She sits down, at a safe distance, and stares. I watch and wait. Henry shuffles the cards clumsily, dropping a few onto the table that he slides back into the deck, one by one.
“Does he know me?” Beth whispers; her voice so thin, so precarious. Something about to break. I sit beside her, put my hands out to catch her.
Dinny shrugs slightly. “There’s really no way of knowing. He seems… comfortable around you. Around both of you. It usually takes him a while to warm up to strangers, so…”
“I thought I’d killed him. All this time, I thought I’d killed him…”
“You did,” Dinny says flatly. Her mouth opens in shock. “You knocked him out and left him face down in the water-”
“Dinny! Don’t-” I try to stop him.
“If I hadn’t pulled him out, he would be dead. So just remember that before you start judging what I’ve done, what my family’s done…”
“Nobody’s judging anybody! We were just kids… we had no idea what to do. And yes, it was lucky you thought so fast, Dinny,” I say.
“I’d hardly call it lucky.”
“Well, whatever you want to call it then.”
Dinny draws in another breath, eyes narrowing at me, but Beth starts to cry. Not soft, self-pitying tears. Ragged, ugly sobs, torn out from the heart of her. Her mouth is a deep red hole. Low wails, rising from a darkness inside that’s almost palpable, horrible to hear. I sit back down, put my arms around her as if I can hold her together. Dinny goes to the window, leans his forehead against the glass as if he wants nothing more than to be gone from this place. I press my cheek against Beth’s back, feeling shudders pass up through her and into me. Henry sorts the cards into their suits in neat piles on the table. I can’t begin to decipher what I feel about Dinny, about this secret he’s been keeping. Henry, squirrelled away in England’s labyrinth of lay-bys and green lanes; in vans and motor homes and caravans and lorries; a simple side-step but a world away from the door-to-door search for him in the neat and tidy villages. It’s too big. I can’t see it clearly.