“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.