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.