"The Whole World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Winslow Emily)

CHAPTER 2

I could still taste my vomit and smell Nick’s shampoo. My body was electric with everything he’d stirred up in me. I’d run the whole way from the Sedgwick. I only wanted to get into my room and close the door. And brush my teeth. I desperately wanted to brush my teeth.

She stood in front of my building, framed between two columns. She fit there, in front of the blue door. I’ve always known she grew up here, but that was a long time ago. I hadn’t noticed before that she actually looked English.

“Darling!” she called.

I didn’t move.

“Polly!” She advanced. “Which window is yours? That one?” She pointed to one with a little stained glass suncatcher. “That one?” She pointed to one with a teddy bear looking out. The rest were anonymous from here.

I willed myself not to look at mine, behind its iron juliet balcony. I didn’t want her to know.

“Polly,” she said, the way all mothers say their kids’ names. Exasperated. Proprietary.

The quivering started in my stomach and radiated outward. I didn’t figure it for anger until she tried to hug me and I shoved her away, hard.

She wobbled, and backed up into sitting on the low wall along the drive. She looked up at me, some kind of puppy look, and I said, “I can’t, Mom. I can’t deal with you right now.”

“I’m sorry. I needed to see if you’re all right.”

“I’m all right,” I lied.

“Polly-darling-please…”

What did she mean by that? That I wasn’t all right? That I’d just pushed away a good thing, and didn’t have any control over my feelings or my body? That I was a freak and a coward and broken, and stupid for not realizing it until I had a good guy practically on top of me? Is that what she meant?

“I’m all right,” I repeated. “You could have called-”

“It’s about your father-”

“No!” I shouted. “No, absolutely not.” I started breathing way too hard.

She got smart right then. I think that even a year ago all this would have been a cue to hold me and rock me, or try to anyway. But there’s a difference between a hysterical little kid and a hysterical adult. I stood up straighter, hugging myself across my chest. I said one more “No.”

“All right,” she said, rising, smoothing her skirt. “Not now.”

She held a business card from a Cambridge hotel up to my face. I saw the name, which is what she wanted. She left.

My hands shook. It took me a while to get my key out of my pocket.

I got upstairs to the bathroom and scrubbed minty toothpaste all over the inside of my mouth. I spit.

I wanted to rinse my hands under warm water but the old sinks come with two taps, one very hot and one frigid. I let them both run and rubbed my hands quickly between them, attempting the effect of tepid, but all I got were two simultaneous extremes.

The recognition hit me hard. I numbly sat down on the closed toilet. I bent over in that position they show you on airplanes, the one where you get your head between your knees.

I wanted him so much. He was warm and gentle and the nicest person I’d met in Cambridge. He was a little older than me, which made me feel older. There was this wriggly feeling inside me of things unfinished.

But the cold water rushed just as hard. I had to stop him. I had to. I couldn’t do it again.

The two extremes didn’t cancel each other out. They didn’t add up to indifference. They just kept rushing, burning and frigid, right next to each other.

I got up from the closed toilet seat and turned off the taps.

In my room I meant to undress, but pushing my top shirt button through its little slit reminded me of him, of his hands, pushing that same button. And the next.

I wanted to try again. I wanted to tell him I was sorry and I’d do better next time. I’d mentally prepare myself. It was the surprise of it all that had done me in.

I took off just my shoes and got under the covers fully dressed. I undid my fly and slipped my hand in, rubbing around. It was a good feeling, right? It was good. I kept going, thinking of his hand on my buttons, and his mouth on my neck. The feelings kept rolling over me. His blond hair tickled my cheek.

Then his face lifted, and it was Jeremy. I screamed a little scream, I screamed and then I strangled it. I sat upright and retracted my hand. The rolling feelings had stopped.

This is why I have sleeping pills.

The winter dark here comes as early as four o’clock. I didn’t realize Cambridge was so much farther north than I was used to, but it is.

The next day, Wednesday, I made myself take a shower and attend a lecture. I used to feel silly that Liv and Nick, and even Gretchen, were all at Magdalene, and me at Peterhouse, odd one out. Now I was relieved. I made it through the whole day without running into anyone with expectations. I only had to breathe and smile and listen. I only had to be polite. The girls in my building who were my friends just believed me when I said I had stuff to do. Erika wanted my cello to join her clarinet and Claudia’s piano to make a trio, but she stopped asking when I told her that I really, really couldn’t.

My mother stayed away from me. I felt calmed by this because I wasn’t thinking.

Since I wouldn’t talk to her, she, I discovered, went after my lecturers and friends. On Thursday, Dr. Birch said something nice to me about meeting her. I smiled politely and made excuses to get away. I was so distracted imagining that Mom was stalking everyone around me that I didn’t think about what time it was. Liv had a class getting out, right by St. Peter’s Terrace. I almost walked right into her. The spokes of our open umbrellas jabbed at each other.

“Oh my gosh-what’s up with your mother? She cornered me coming out of the library yesterday,” Liv said. Tuesday was when I’d been sick; it was now Thursday. Nick was gone, but we didn’t know it yet. “She totally must have followed me. It was so weird…”

I must have looked appalled, because she reined herself in.

“I only mean-it was strange that she found me there, not someplace obvious like after a class or even at the museum. It’s not like she would have known when I would be at the library.”

Had she trailed Liv through town, waiting for the perfect, private moment? Mom would consider that courtesy. God.

“Anyway, she just asked me how you were doing, and she said she was glad you had me for a friend. I told her that you’re fine-you like England, you know lots of people. Nothing in particular.”

I’d saved up to buy all new clothes to bring. I hadn’t wanted anything from home to come with me. Not one thing. God. Couldn’t she stay back where she belonged? I felt faint. This was ridiculous.

“I’m supposed to meet my supervisor; do you want to walk with me?” she offered.

“Okay,” I said, though I didn’t want to. I felt floaty, and didn’t have it in me to resist.

Liv did all the talking, about random stuff. She had lots of Anglophilic facts to share. I didn’t have to say anything. “Did you know that Cambridge was founded by Oxford scholars fleeing the aftermath of a murder?” She said this like she was talking about people we knew.

I stopped walking. This was news.

“Really?” I asked.

“One of the students killed a townsperson in an archery accident. But the locals called it murder. There were riots, and the University shut down. Some of the students didn’t want to wait it out, so they came here. Not really that interesting. Nothing salacious or gory.” She laughed to be unserious about it.

“Of course they had to leave,” I said.

“Well, I guess.”

“Of course they had to leave,” I repeated. I felt like I was walking backward.

“Hey!” she said, and the sound of it stretched out in the middle, like it was thinned and elongated by a rolling pin. I think I was swaying. It was hard to tell. It might have been the world. The world did spin, didn’t it? Perhaps I was just perceiving it for the first time. Perhaps everyone else was in denial.

The doctor shone a flashlight in one of my eyes, then the other. He took my blood pressure. My body did everything right. He pronounced me physically well and advised me to relax. Liv called a taxi to take us back to my room. She stayed with me and wouldn’t go, even when I demanded it. She made me lie still and brought me water to help me down some paracetamol.

“Have you seen Nick?” she asked. This was the first time someone asked that. Later it would be asked over and over again.

“No,” I said, meaning not today or yesterday. I didn’t want to talk about when I had seen him last.

“He’ll want to help me pamper you. I’ll send him over to sit with you while I’m at supervision.” College tutors meet their assigned undergrads every week to monitor progress. Liv grabbed my phone off the nightstand.

“No!” I protested in a sharp bark.

“Look, no one’s accusing you of being a baby, we’re just looking out for you like friends do. Stop being so stubborn.”

I knew I had to get it together. I couldn’t keep making a big deal out of things. So a man kissed me. So I had a mother. So what? These things happen; the world turns. You can’t dwell on it or you’ll just get dizzy. Liv left Nick a silly message in a Cockney accent, just to make me smile. It finally got a laugh out of me and Liv looked satisfied.

“Okay,” I said to myself, having no idea what I would say to him when he came. I knew he would come, to be kind, but I didn’t know what he would want from me anymore. Liv left me with a bottle of water and an energy bar. I propped myself up and read.

Nick didn’t come. Maybe his cellphone was off. Maybe he was in a lecture. I wasn’t worried; actually I was relieved to be alone. I slept. By the time I woke up on Friday, he was officially considered gone.

A policeman came to Peterhouse.

I was with my supervisor, Allison. I’d already been told that Nick was missing. Allison said we could reschedule, but I didn’t want to. I needed to hold on to whatever hadn’t disappeared.

We were talking about evolution, which is just a charged word for change. Things change. I know some people back home who don’t believe in it, but I hope every day that it’s really true.

A man knocked and entered without waiting for the invitation. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, Miss Bailey.”

This was different. See? Find what’s changed. The accent was different. It helped to be in another country. This was not the same. It was not happening again.

He asked Allison to wait outside and took her place across the table from me. I gathered up the papers that were spread there, and reached to close an open book. He splayed his whole hand across both pages. He read the chapter title upside down. It was “Mating Systems.” As soon as he backed off to get out a small notebook I slammed the textbook shut.

“Do you know Nicholas Frey?” he asked.

“Yes.” He wrote that down, just the one word.

“And what is the nature of your relationship?”

“We’re friends.” The policeman nodded and wrote Friends. He put a dot after it, like it was a whole sentence, and looked back up at me.

“We’ve been alerted that he failed to appear for a meeting yesterday morning, then missed an appointment with his supervisor. He hasn’t been to the house where he rents a room since Wednesday. When was the last time you saw him?”

“Uh-three days ago. Four? It was Tuesday. Today’s Friday. I saw him Tuesday.”

He wrote that down. He wasn’t hiding his notes from me. I was clearly meant to see my own words transcribed. “I see,” he said. “May I ask what you were doing, what was his mood, and so on?”

“I-we-went to the Sedgwick. That’s the geology museum. He seemed normal.”

“Normal?”

“Just Nick.”

“Ah. Did he have any plans?”

My face heated up, but the policeman was still talking. “Was he going out with friends, heading out of town?”

“It’s nearly the end of term. He wouldn’t go out of town now.”

“No,” the policeman agreed. He wrote down: End of term. Then asked, “Is there any reason you can suggest why he might have chosen to leave so suddenly?”

“You think he left on purpose?” Surely Nick was too stable to run away over a mere embarrassment. For all he knew I’d had stomach flu and it was nothing personal. This wasn’t my fault.

He leaned in, fascinated. “You don’t? What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you don’t think he left willingly.”

“He wouldn’t do that.” He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t let anyone down; he wouldn’t make anyone worry. The policeman folded his notepad and put it back into his pocket.

“You’ve been described to us as his girlfriend…”

“By whom?” I was indignant. I was on the offensive now.

“Various sources. It isn’t true?”

“No,” I said.

“Maybe he wanted it to be true?”

“No.” It was a lie, but it didn’t feel like a lie.

“Anything on his mind lately? Troubles with his work…?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

“All right,” he said, punctuating his words by clicking his pen closed.

“Are you worried about him?” he asked, as if it were a personal question.

I swallowed. “Yes.” If the police were involved, I was pretty sure we all needed to worry.

He waited, but I didn’t say anything else.

“All right,” he finished at last. “Thank you for your time, Miss Bailey. May I give you my card? I’d like you to ring me if you think of anything else. I’ll come by again.”

I’d hidden my hands inside my sleeves. Two fingers peeped out to take the card.

“He’s not really missing,” I called out to the policeman’s back. He turned around and stared hard at me. I realized what I’d said was ridiculous. “I mean,” I added in a whisper, “that this isn’t happening. Okay?”

The policeman nodded slowly. Allison stepped in. I think she’d listened through the door. “We have a lot of work to do,” she announced.

She watched out the window to see the policeman leave. She waited for him to pass the Porters’ Lodge before turning back to me. “Polly, you look awful,” she said, surprised. Then, to make everything better: “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

I burst out laughing. Now I know where my mother got it from. It’s not a personal tic, it’s just English.

“The police came to talk to me,” I told Liv. We faced each other cross-legged on my bed, in my room at the top of St. Peter’s Terrace. The ceiling was all jagged from the slant of the roof and the protruding window. “Well,” I amended. “One policeman. Singular.”

“What? About Nick?”

“Yes. Did someone talk to you too?”

She picked at the clasp of her bracelet. “No. Not yet. Why did they want to talk to you?”

“Somebody said I was Nick’s girlfriend.”

“What?”

“I know.”

“You’re not his girlfriend.”

“I said I know.”

“Why would somebody say that?”

“Because they’re stupid? Why does anybody say anything?”

“What did you tell him?”

“He wanted to know if Nick had problems. I told him that Nick was the last person in the world to be in trouble.” Nick had started life as a coddled baby, become a much-flattered boy soprano, and finished his childhood at fancy boarding schools. He easily attained an undergraduate “first,” the highest grade, at Magdalene, and currently pursued his doctorate there, much doted on by the faculty. He did what he did because he loved it, and had absolutely nothing to prove. I’d never met anyone with such a lack of unfinished business. “Nick is, like, the nicest person I’ve ever known. He’s just… he’s a sweet, gentle person, and I just-”

“You sound like a girlfriend,” she accused me.

“I’m not anybody’s girlfriend, okay? I’m not. And I know you like him. But I can’t make him like you back. Okay? He’s not even here anymore. What is it that you want me to do?”

She sprang across the duvet and hugged me. She did this crying thing that made her head bounce on my shoulder.

Then she showed me a card she’d made for Nick’s family. She’d folded a piece of parchment paper and sketched one of the arches of Pepys Library on the front. “They put those flower baskets up in the spring,” she explained. I felt like a little kid, needing to be told. I’d only been here two months, months too cold for flower baskets. Liv had seen them hanging from the arches last year.

I was surprised by the envelope. “His family is in Cambridge?”

“Sure. They moved here when he was a kid, when he became a chorister at King’s.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Liv sat up straight and smiled. “That’s okay,” she comforted me. “I mean, you’re not his girlfriend, right?”

“He told me about his sister. I just didn’t know she lived here.”

“It’s okay, Polly. You don’t need to get competitive.”

“I’m not!”

But she knew his family address. She knew his parents’ first names. She knew that flowers are hung from the arches of Pepys Library in the spring. She knew everything that I didn’t.

A group of undergraduates made the “Have you seen…?” posters that went up all over town. One of them wanted me to tell them Nick’s eye color, which is when I blathered about his hands.

The poster had two photos on it, recent enough, but both before his last haircut: a formal picture in a tie, and a candid shot of him punting on the river, on one of those thin, flat boats. It wasn’t the time he’d taken me and Liv.

Of course he’d taken many people punting in his life, of course he had… He had a whole other life, a history. Of course. I wondered who’d taken the photo, who’d been sitting in the boat, looking up at him standing at the end, driving the pole into the water. I was jealous, which was stupid. The posters were everywhere, wet through from that week’s unusual, near-constant rain. Because it had become December, the posters shared space with holly and fir branches, tinsel and little twinkling lights.

The policeman came back to me like he said he would. His name was Morris. I don’t know if that was his first or last name, but he said I should call him that. I’d lost his card.

Morris told me that the cleaner for Earth Sciences said Nick’s office was a mess on Tuesday evening. Apparently he’d been sick. Did I know anything about this, since I’d been with him Tuesday?

This was the worst thing he could have asked me. I didn’t lie immediately. I considered whether and how much to lie.

“That was me. I had a bug. When he saw I wasn’t feeling well he brought me up to his office.”

“Oh. All right.” Morris fiddled through his notes. “I understand his office is up several flights of stairs and near the end of a long corridor? How is it that he thought that would be a comfort to an ill friend?”

“I don’t know, Morris, but that’s how it was.” There was something about calling him by his name that felt satisfyingly insubordinate, even though he had asked me to call him that.

“Look, Miss Bailey, I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, but I do think you could shed some light on his state of mind. I really don’t see the motivation behind your brevity. If you’re not attached, and neither was he, there’s no one to protect…”

Morris may have been a shrewd cop but he was a naïve person. There was myself to protect, of course. My sanity. Who else would be more important?

“It’s all right to tell me,” he said. Then he waited. His not-going filled the room more and more until it pressed me near flat.

I sucked in a breath. He cleared his throat. It took that little to crack me.

He swore he didn’t know how it ended up in the news. He wouldn’t share his case notes with the press, he said. Nevertheless, there it was, all I’d told him, leaked by whatever usual gutters ran between the police and the paper. They described it more luridly than I had, but they did capture my vehemence that we were nothing to each other.

It was reported in Monday evening’s edition. On Tuesday, everyone knew.

I was grateful for the rain; it allowed me an umbrella to hide under. I didn’t want to look at anyone, even my friends. Liv would lord it over me. I was broken and she wasn’t.

She was coming out of the big brick library as I headed in. I’d just pulled my umbrella down for the revolving door. We saw each other through the glass, spinning around the same axis. She went all the way around to end up back inside. “You bitch,” she hissed at me.

I wished to be outside, anonymous in the rain. I wished to be upstairs among the books, where she wouldn’t be allowed to talk to me. I wished she would let go of my arm. My closed umbrella pressed against my leg and soaked my jeans through.

People stared. The person behind the desk asked if there was a problem. Liv said in a raised voice that the problem was that I was ungrateful, which was baffling. Did she mean I’d been ungrateful to her for something? But it was Nick. She meant toward Nick. She called me an ungrateful bitch. We were asked to leave.

I pushed through the revolving door as fast as I could. Liv squeezed herself into the next compartment and spilled out onto the front steps right after me. She chased me down them, out into the parking lot. A car pulled out right in front of me. I had to stop. Liv put her hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry, okay?” she said. We were both breathing hard. We were both wet.

Nick had been gone six days by this time. Speculation was drifting more toward death, either by murder or by accident. No one had suggested that he might have killed himself; no one could make his personality fit that. But, however it had happened, it didn’t look like he was coming back. I guess that’s a good reason to get hysterical. All of us were kind of hysterical, just set off by different things.

Liv asked me to go with her to Kettle’s Yard. She held my arm, but loosely, squeezing it gently. I said okay.

We went into a gallery full of life-sized photographs of empty walls where famous works of now-stolen art had once been displayed. It was more stunt than art, but effectively mournful. We sat on the floor with our knees tucked up and our backs against the wall. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay. This has been awful for everyone.”

“Do you think he’s dead?”

I just shook my head because I no longer had it in me to say a confident no.

“Why did you call me ungrateful?” I asked.

She sighed. “Because you didn’t want him. He offered you something good, and you didn’t take it.”

I understood her jealousy, but I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone. She could tell I was bristling.

“Okay, I know,” she soothed. “I’m not saying that I have a right to feel that way, just that I do. Okay? I’m just explaining.”

“I know you liked him.”

“Yeah.” And she smiled, like I didn’t really know, not everything.

“What?” I asked.

“I was out with Gina that afternoon. You know Gina?” I shook my head no. But it didn’t matter. “She’d given me a cute sweater she didn’t want anymore, and a pair of earrings. I felt really pretty. I ran into him later. He seemed kind of down. I tried to cheer him up, you know, I was being silly. I pulled him into this staircase party. It was just what he needed. And we ended up dancing a little, I mean it was too crowded to really dance, but there was music and we were standing near each other. I pretty much threw myself at him. Then the porter broke the party up and we went into my room and went at it.”

“Oh,” I said. My mouth was dry. This was agony. This recitation was a form of revenge.

“We didn’t do it all, okay? It was a kind of President Clinton thing.” She smirked, but her hands were shaking. “I’m a virgin, okay? And I’d never done that before either. And I knew he was yours, but I wanted to try.”

“He wasn’t mine,” I said. She said “yours” like this was borrowing a shirt and getting a stain on it. She said “yours” like when she had taken ten pounds from my bag without asking.

“Whatever,” she said. “When everyone else said that you were the girlfriend, what was I supposed to say? That I was, really? Because I didn’t know that. I was waiting to find that out. I knew that what we’d done wasn’t a sure thing, it wasn’t a ‘progression’ in our ‘relationship.’ It was a thing that maybe would make him see me that way, or maybe it wouldn’t. I was waiting to see what it was to him.”

She wiped her face on her sleeve and went on. “I knew I was second choice, okay?” she blurted. “But it wasn’t until yesterday that I found out from the freaking newspaper what had really happened that day. I thought he’d gone upstairs with me because I’m maybe more exciting than you are, or prettier, or more enthusiastic, or more obviously into him.” She took a deep breath, glanced at me to see how I was reacting. “He only let me do it because that was the day you got him all high like a kite but then wouldn’t get him off. I was just… finishing the job. But he wasn’t hard for me, you know?”

She was a mess by this time. For a few minutes she couldn’t talk. I stared at a photo of an empty wall. Finally she said, “You’re my best friend and I hate you.”

I got up. I had to get out. Liv followed me. We almost knocked into a sculpture of a woman made out of hard wire knots.

“I have to go. I’m meeting somebody.”

“Who?” she demanded.

I hesitated. This would make her angry too.

“Nick’s sister,” I confessed. “She asked to meet with me.”

She gaped. She shook her head. Liv had sent the card to his family. Liv had sung with Nick in the choir. Liv had put out. But his sister wanted to meet me.

“Sometimes the whole world is just crazy,” I agreed.

We’d wandered into the way of the gallery’s spot lighting. Liv squinted and looked down. I put my hand, flat, above my eyes, like I was looking at something far away.

“You’d better go,” Liv said. “It must be pretty awful, missing a brother.”

That’s all it takes to realize you have no right to be so precious about your feelings, your loss, your trauma. There’s always someone with more rights to it than you.

Liv’s story made sense of the mention in the paper that Nick had been seen at a party at Magdalene in the days before he disappeared. Some person there had noticed that he’d been friendly with a girl, and it had been reported, I guess by someone making assumptions, that that girl had been me.

Alexandra went to Perse Girls, like the Chander daughters. It’s not far from St. Peter’s Terrace, where she offered to meet me after school. She looked nothing like Nick, and much, much younger. She was about fourteen and dressed, as required by her school, entirely in navy and light blues.

We couldn’t fit on the sidewalk with two umbrellas, so she ducked under mine. She was headed for town and we walked together. “I know this is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But, until last week, I didn’t know Nick’s family was in Cambridge.” I immediately regretted it. What a rude thing to say. “I mean, he talked about you. You especially. I know you play cello. I play cello. I just… I didn’t know you were here.”

We stepped over the great gutter called Hobson’s Conduit and slipped through a break in traffic to cross the road. When we got to the other side, we continued up the street and she said, “When Nick started boarding at King’s, my family relocated. I was born a year later. Before that, Mum and Dad and Nick lived in London.”

“Do you like it here?” I asked, stupidly, as if she’d been dragged here instead of born here. “I mean, do you ever wish your family had stayed in London?”

She shrugged. “I’ll go to uni in London if I want,” she said simply. “I didn’t know about you either.”

Okay, touché. Nick hadn’t mentioned me to his family.

“I read about you in the newspaper…” she said.

Of course she had, and in light of the latest it made me cringe. “Yes, well… Nick is my good friend. One of my best friends. I don’t think he was my boyfriend. It’s all gotten a little out of hand.” I didn’t want to talk about this. “Did your parents name you after the Romanovs?”

She rolled her eyes. “You have no idea how many people ask me that.”

How Cambridge. I doubt many people back home would have noticed.

“Mum’s brother who died was Nicholas,” she explained. “Dad’s dad was Alexander. It just worked out that way.”

Wait, what? “Your mother’s brother died?”

She looked right at me. “He drowned when Mum was my age. He was ten. Now her second Nicholas is gone.”

She looked so sad.

“I know he’ll come back,” I said.

“What do you mean? Do you know something?” She stopped walking and got right up in my face all of a sudden, my height, eye to eye.

“No! No, I just…” I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. “He’s got to,” I said. “He’s got to come back.”

She backed down, started fiddling in her bag, digging around. “The last time I saw him I was really angry,” she confessed.

At Nick? I didn’t think he could make anyone mad.

Alexandra looked both ways. She turned off the main avenue onto a side street; I followed.

“He’d hate that I’m doing this,” she said, putting a cigarette in her mouth. “Do you want one?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

Her lighter was made of purple plastic. She lit and sucked in. “He’s such an older brother,” she said, looking just straight ahead, leading the way.

We turned again, onto Tennis Court Road, parallel to Trumpington but much more private.

“What do you mean, ‘older brother’?”

“You know what I mean. He just thinks he knows everything. If he were still here I’d still be angry. But because he’s gone, I don’t get to be angry anymore.” She raised her voice. “I’d be really, really angry. I probably wouldn’t even talk to him.” Tears squirted out of her eyes.

We stopped again. Because we were under one umbrella, her little curls of smoke got caught around my face.

“Why does he live at the Chanders’ house?” I asked, as if this little girl weren’t baring her grief to me. I didn’t want it. I didn’t have room for hers too.

“He’s a grown-up,” she said, incredulous at my ignorance. “Grownups move out.”

Of course. He was twenty-four. He was a “grown-up.” That description was unbearably sweet.

Alexandra threw her cigarette stub onto the ground and stomped hard on it.

Nick is a grown-up. I’d treated him like a junior high boyfriend. Hold hands, kiss kiss. It made sense he’d gone to Liv. I’d taken him for granted. It wasn’t fair that I was being treated like a grieving widow. I hadn’t earned it.

Finally I realized that we’d stopped because we’d arrived at the juice bar where she was meeting her friends. Two girls in school uniforms that matched each other, but not Alexandra’s, waved at her from inside.

Alexandra got to the point. “Did you phone on Wednesday? To our house?”

She sounded so accusatory that I tilted my head in response. “What? No.”

“Oh.” She rubbed the sidewalk with the bottom of her shoe. “I was kind of rude. I just wanted to apologize.”

She was in the shop in an instant. One of her friends hugged her. The other one stretched her neck to get a look at me.

Back at Peterhouse I put my academic robe on over my clothes.

I found its anonymity a comfort. I ate more and more at formal hall in the evenings, for an excuse to wear it.

Nick had been gone only a week when I found out that the police were planning to dredge the Cam. I almost phoned Morris to tell him not to do it. They should keep looking for Nick alive, not scrape the bottom of the river for a body. But telling him that wouldn’t change anything. I’ve dealt with police before. They listen to everything, in case your words might be useful to them, but they never do what you say.

I went to Magdalene to tell Liv, but she wasn’t in. I was just outside the porter’s lodge writing a note for her when Richard Keene, Nick’s thesis supervisor, came out of the chapel. I’d met him once, with Nick. I’d heard he only walked, never drove or cycled or took the bus. He said it kept the pace of life human.

“Good morning, Polly,” he said.

“Hi, Dr. Keene.” He offered that I could call him Richard, which was nice. But he wasn’t even one of my teachers, or someone whose house I go to, like Gretchen. I wanted to call him Dr. Keene. It felt safer to live in an organized world.

“Congratulations,” I said. “Nick told me that you’re getting married.” He was marrying a medical doctor and going off on a honeymoon at the end of term. Was that really the coming Sunday, four days away? “I mean, he told me that before… before he was gone.”

My hands had been shaking since I got there. My handwriting on the note to Liv was all over the place. Now that I spoke, my voice was shaky too. Dr. Keene looked worried about me. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“They’re going to dredge the Cam,” I blurted. I showed him the note I’d written Liv. It said the same thing, in a diagonal line across the paper: “They’re going to dredge the Cam.”

Dr. Keene paled.

“Not today,” I clarified. “They’ll wait for the rain to stop.” To illustrate my point, water suddenly sheeted down, obscuring the view through the arch of Magdalene’s gatehouse.

We waited under the shelter of the entryway.

“You go to church there?” I asked, meaning the college chapel from which he’d just come. I couldn’t discuss Nick anymore. And I was curious. From the creationists I knew back home, I’d just assumed people who worked with evolution stayed away from church.

“My Sunday church is near Lion Yard,” he said, waving his hand toward town. “But I sometimes go to Magdalene’s chapel for a more formal service mid-week.” He looked back into the courtyard, at all the windows lined up just so and the neatly trimmed grass and the designated paved paths. “I find that formality is a comfort in the midst of chaos.”

So he felt the world spinning too. That was good to know.

“Dr. Keene,” I said, “do you really think-”

And then I saw her. My mother. She was on the other side of the road, looking for me.

I grabbed Dr. Keene’s arm, then let it go. I hardly knew him. I shouldn’t be touching people I don’t know. Mom crossed, ignoring the bicycles and the enormous red double-decker buses going both ways. For a moment I couldn’t see her, as one of those buses drove between us. Then she was closer. Then she was there.

Dr. Keene is the same size as my dad. I stepped back to put his shoulder between me and Mom. The wind changed direction; rain from the open courtyard behind us soaked my back.

Mom joined us in the shelter of the gatehouse. She dripped. She looked like a melting candle. She shook herself off and gave a little conspiratorial smile to us, like a stranger commiserating about the weather.

Dr. Keene spread his arms protectively. He didn’t realize who she was. It was refreshing to find someone I knew in Cambridge whom she hadn’t already hunted down.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said from behind him. I meant in England.

“I know. It’s such an expensive city. But I’ve been looking at apartments. The rents are higher here than I’m used to, but-”

“No.”

She looked at me with coolness instead of her usual beggar’s eyes. “I still have British citizenship and I can live where I wish. It’s not up to you.”

I stepped out from behind Dr. Keene. “You can’t leave Will,” I said. My brother.

“Polly,” she said gently. “Will is in college now. You know that.”

Of course he is. But I still pictured him at fifteen. Everything at home is frozen there in my memory.

“I’m divorcing your father,” she said formally, embarrassed to be saying it in public. My refusal to meet with her more conventionally had reduced her.

I’d expected it, but, good God, I didn’t need this now. Later, later, my eyes pleaded. Not now.

“Okay,” I said. Really, what else was she supposed to do?

It’s not like I hadn’t known this was coming. She’d started taking birth control pills again just before I left. We only had one bathroom, and she took one right in front of me, while I was brushing my teeth.

“And there’s something else. Your father…”

“No!” I said. “Not now, I have an appointment.” Lie, lie. “With Dr. Keene. We were just…”

“I’m Richard Keene,” he introduced himself, shaking her hand. “Mrs…? You must be Polly’s mother?”

“Yes, I am,” she said possessively. “It’s good to meet you, Richard.” She called him Richard! That really made me mad. Who does she think she is, that she can call these people she’s only just met by their first names?

I sucked in a deep breath. “Mom, I know you want a fresh start too. I get it. But Cambridge is mine. It’s mine, okay?” I tried to reason with her.

“You’re not all right, Polly,” she whispered. “You’re still…”

“What? What?” I deliberately raised my voice against her purposely delicate tones.

“You’re still very fragile,” she said. “And it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

I hate psychology. “I like it here and I’m good at it,” I defended myself.

“Nick-” she started to say, and I exploded.

“First, you didn’t want me to have sex. Now you think I’m ‘fragile’ because I don’t want to have sex. Pick one or the other, Mom-they can’t both be evidence of pathology.”

This was wearing on her. I’d said “sex” in front of a teacher.

“Polly, you’re a good girl.” This didn’t mean she approved of my behavior. It was just mother-speak for general affection.

“I spoke to Nick,” she went on. “He wasn’t angry at you. He just didn’t understand why you’d reacted the way you-”

“You told him?” I was incredulous. This was outrageous. “You told him?”

“It’s all right, darling, he understood.” She smiled instead of steeling herself against a blow. How little she herself understood.

It’s like she’d brought it with her in her suitcase and set it free. It was sniffing me now, nipping at me. It was dripping its spit on my feet. It was curling around me with a loyalty I would never be able to escape. I’d left it behind on purpose, to starve without care, and she’d dragged it across the ocean.

“You had no right to tell anyone!” I screeched. “You had no right!” I pounded at her chest while she tried to pull me into an embrace. We were locked a few inches apart, too close to punch as hard as I wanted to, too far to stop me from trying. “You had no right!” Keene ’s arm slipped between us.

A porter emerged and commanded us to stop. Richard inserted his other arm and firmly parted us. I took one step back.

Mom spun out against the wall as if he’d tossed her. She covered her face and cowered there. Passersby stood in the rain to stare. I panicked for a moment that, in the midst of everything else, someone with a cellphone would call the police.

So it seemed perfectly reasonable that, suddenly, a policeman was there. “Hi, Morris,” I said, still catching my breath.

“Hello, Polly.” He nodded at me with formality. Then he turned toward my mother.

“My mom and I were just having an argument. It’s not a big deal,” I explained.

“Polly, step aside, please,” he said. Then he repeated that I should step aside, so I did.

“Miranda Bailey, I’d like you to come with us,” he began.

Mom brushed her hair with her hands. She wiped under her eyes.

“You don’t need to do that,” I said to him, as if he were taking Mom away for harassing me.

“Polly, get back,” he said sharply.

Dr. Keene tried to intervene. “Is this really necessary?” he hissed at the policeman.

For a moment everyone held still. I pressed back against the message board on the wall.

Morris squared his shoulders to Dr. Keene.

“It’s all right, Polly,” Mom said firmly. “The Inspector knows I’m happy to answer any additional questions he may have.”

Morris kept looking at Dr. Keene, waiting for him to back down, but he didn’t. “Mrs. Bailey,” Dr. Keene said to my mom, but looking directly back at Morris, “would you like me to come with you?”

“No!” I said. “No, she doesn’t have to go…”

“Polly,” Mom said firmly. “I’m happy to help.” She took Morris’s arm like they were going to the theater. He passed her off to a uniformed officer. She said to Dr. Keene, “Thank you, but I’ll be all right.”

“Sorry, Polly,” Morris said quietly.

Dr. Keene grabbed Morris’s arm. I couldn’t believe it. I think it’s really important not to touch a policeman. I pulled on Keene to make him stop. I wanted to protect him. I hadn’t jumped up for my mother, but here I was jumping for him.

“I can take it from here, Dr. Keene,” Morris said, shaking him off. “Take a step back, Richard.” I thought, How did he know his name?

“Did you really need to do it this way, Morris? In front of her daughter?”

Morris wagged his head back and forth, then laughed, which was horrid.

“You do your job, Richard, and I’ll do mine. Come along,” he said to the officer. They had a car parked nearby.

“How could you?” I shouted, and I meant, How could you laugh? How could he have a personal squabble about it?

“I’ll be fine,” Mom mouthed at me. I’d forgotten about her for a moment. I’d made myself forget.

I turned and ran the other direction, into the courtyard. First court, second court, around Pepys Library and into the Fellows’ Garden. Some of the colleges are fussy about their Fellows’ Gardens, but Magdalene’s is open. I followed the path that leads away from the river; there are always too many people near the river. I hid in a private little wood that turned out to be a pet cemetery. I sat on the tombstone of a dog that had died a hundred and fifty years ago and put my face between my knees. Breathe.

I thought my mom had been arrested, tactfully. And I thought to myself, My God, she did it. It happened again.

I ran to Millington Road, panting. I knew Liv was at Gretchen’s.

Harry let me in. “Polly! What can I do for you?” He wore an apron and smelled of vanilla.

“Please. I need Liv. Can she come out, please?” I had meant to ask to come in, but I couldn’t face it.

“Liv!” he called over his shoulder, keeping me in sight. I had never heard him speak above a polite volume. I must have looked a wreck.

Liv came around the corner. “Polly?” she asked. We hadn’t spoken since the revelations at the gallery.

“Liv…” I said, and then my eyes cracked open to release a torrent of tears.

“Nick?” she asked, of course assuming that the worst had been discovered.

I shook my head, tossing tears to both sides. “No, no. At least, I don’t think so. I-please come with me.”

She told Harry that she had to go and pulled her jacket out of the closet next to the door. Her arm was in one green sleeve when Gretchen came up from behind. “What’s going on? Is there an emergency?” She sounded concerned but also annoyed.

“Please,” I said. Meaning, I just need to speak to my friend. But she took it differently. She insisted I come in and pulled on Liv’s arm.

She dragged us both into the lounge. Harry prepared hot drinks in the kitchen. Gretchen tried to be stern and parental with me, which was exactly the worst thing under the circumstances. I sobbed till I was almost choking. It was minutes before I could speak.

“My mother,” I croaked out. “My mother,” I said again, with a bit more control. I was getting it together.

“Is she hurt?” Liv asked. It was like Twenty Questions. All I could manage were short answers.

“No. No, she’s all right.” They waited for me to elaborate. I could only hiccup.

“Is she still in Cambridge?” Liv is so sensible. I really admire her.

“Yes, she’s here. She wouldn’t leave.”

“Polly.” Gretchen took me by the shoulders. “You’ve got to talk. You must.”

“Okay,” I said. Harry pressed a cup into my hand. It burned my fingers. That kind of got me together. “Okay. My mother’s been arrested. They took her away.”

“Harry,” Gretchen interjected. “Call Jim. He’ll have a recommendation for a solicitor.” Harry jogged upstairs. Gretchen continued: “Drink up. You’re in shock.”

“Thank you,” I said. I sipped. Time passed.

“I’m lost here,” Liv admitted. “What’s she been arrested for?”

Gretchen knew. She’d connected the dots.

“It’s Nicholas, Liv,” said Gretchen. I nodded to thank her, which was thoughtless.

Harry had come back. He put a pink Post-it on the table in front of me. “Grant Tisch. Would you like me to phone him for you?”

“No,” I said, honestly surprised. “No, I think she did it.”

Gretchen sat up straighter. “Harry, phone the man.”

Things happened around me. Liv gaped. I tried to protest the lawyer, but Gretchen was a force.

The room seemed to be growing larger. The cushions on the couch swelled up and pressed on all sides, lifting me up toward the ceiling. Liv and Gretchen lengthened before me. Liv asked, “Are you all right?” and I said, “Yes,” because I had no force of my own. I didn’t have it in me to explain anything to anyone.

The inside of my head had become bigger than the world around me. It was a terrible place.

Gretchen spoke to the solicitor in front of me, to reassure me that my mother was in good hands. She used a tone with him that suggested he should have preemptively prevented my mother from being arrested in the first place.

“Grant Tisch is going to meet your mother at the police station, Polly,” Gretchen said. Harry put food in front of me, which I ate, I think. Liv was doing whatever she was asked, and generally wringing her hands. I missed a lecture on “Order and Disorder in Material Science.”

No one asked me again what I think it was my mother did.

Gretchen put me into the guest room even though it was daytime. Gretchen has this way. It wasn’t physical how she did it, but with force nonetheless. I said, “I think I should go home now,” and she acted like she didn’t hear it.

There was a telephone in there, which I unplugged. I locked the door and considered climbing out the window. If only the world outside the window didn’t have my mother in it.

I opened drawers. There were stationery and pens and stamps. Also an address book. This must be Harry’s writing room when it wasn’t accommodating guests.

I considered writing Nick, but where could I send it and what would I say? I couldn’t apologize, because I’d tried to save him. That I’d failed was not my fault.

I eventually collected myself and wandered back down to the lounge. Liv wasn’t there anymore. Harry wasn’t around either, not even in the sounds of distant puttering. The curtains were pulled. Gretchen sat at the table, running her fingers over a book.

She was startled by my steps. “Polly!” she said. “I urged Liv to attend her lecture. The most important thing was for you to rest.”

“Okay,” I said, still not fully under my own power.

I sat down across from her and she closed the book.

“Polly,” she said, “I think you should tell me what happened.”

I’ve played in chamber groups and I’ve played in orchestras. In a quartet, we follow each other, we follow the music, we follow what we’d agreed together in practice. Orchestras are a whole other thing. In performance, the orchestra itself becomes an instrument, played by the conductor. His hands point and waft, dictating pace and emphases. We absorb the emotions from his face and posture, to return them through our instruments. We’re open receivers. It’s an unequal situation. An orchestra does what it’s told.

“Polly,” she repeated, just that one word, just my name. It was like that moment when the conductor raises his hands. Everybody sits up straight. Elbows out, bows hovering over strings.

“Okay,” I said. And I opened my mouth to tell her.