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.
My mind raced on, leading me. Onward up Madingley Road. Where was I taking me? There were two of me: myself, here, about to bolt, and myself, ahead, guiding me forward.
The solid me shoved off the policeman. I sprang forward and landed flat on my feet, knees bent, hands still cuffed behind me. I looked like a child bent to imitate a pecking chicken.
The soon-me, the just-ahead-me, kept running. I would make it. All I would have to do is follow.
The destination took me by surprise. Lawn, studded with thousands of short white crosses. The American Cemetery.
Both of us hesitated. Me, and me-about-to-be. How had it happened? How had we ended up there?
Britain had given the U.S. the land for the cemetery in thanks after World War II. It’s American. Even in my mind I’d run, somehow, home again. My fantasy had taken me roundabout, back to where I’d started.
I was still on the flagstones in front of Nick’s house. Horror had frozen my escape. My imagination had betrayed me.
I was trapped. Not by the cuffs, though they hurt, or Nick tackling me to the ground, in a grotesque parody of what I’d once wanted from him, or by the distant sirens blaring toward us from the motorway. I was paused by those things, but I was trapped by realization. I was trapped in my head.
Even in my fantasies I couldn’t get away from home. Nothing would ever be new, ever. I knew that now. No place would ever be foreign enough that I wouldn’t be me anymore.
Nick was on top of me. “Gross! Get off me!” I grunted, pushing. He was disgusting to me now. What had I ever been thinking? He was holding me down.
Alexandra kicked my midriff, just beneath where my shirt had gotten rolled up around my rib cage. She kicked my bare side, hard. I felt something crack. I think it was a rib. It got difficult to make my chest expand.
Her mother pulled to get Alexandra away from me. The girl resisted. “You bitch!” she said, like I had to her, I think mistaking me for everything that had gone wrong. Mistaking me for why Nick had ever been gone. The toe of her shoe plunged in again.
The sirens got louder. Nick’s dad stumbled out the front door, awake at last. He blinked, just coming to, as confused as a newborn. He almost tripped over the cop on his doorstep.
Alexandra abandoned attacking me, to fling herself at him. “Daddy!” she cried out, melding herself to him. She was miniature against his adult height and barrel chest.
I squirmed. Nick must have felt my breathing shrink. He got off and rolled me over onto my back. That helped.
I really had seen him in the car this morning. A living Nick really was back. There had been no true ghosts, none of them. So I knew this was real too:
There! On that branch. The fluffy white canary I’d cupped in my hands. The last I’d seen, it was on its side, sucking and squeezing air in and out of its little orb of a body. I’d returned its feather. It had flown a long way to get to this tree, in this little wood at the edge of the city. I hadn’t thought it would live at all, and look how far it had come.
“Hi,” I said. All around me people had other conversations. Bystanders urged paramedics. Bloody people explained where it hurt. The bird and I, we had our own thing going on. I’d tried to tell everyone that I hadn’t hurt the birds. No one had listened, but we knew.
It wasn’t afraid of me. It lit onto my stomach. This little poof of white rode up and down, up and down.
Thick hands brushed it away and scooped me up onto a padded mat thing. The bird hopped backward, away from the commotion. “It’s all right,” I croaked. I tried to make it shoo. There were too many feet, heavy and busy, crossing this way and that.
I couldn’t turn my head on the stretcher bed, not far enough. I got slotted into the back of an ambulance. The last I saw for myself was a flash of white, maybe lifting up into the air. Or, that could have been the doors slamming. They shut with a bang and a click.
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.”