different places. None of that matters. I knew her. I lived with her. That wasn’t fake. You’re like Rafe’s father, all that bullshit about the real world-That was the real world. It was a whole lot more real than this.” A fierce jerk of her chin, at the room around us.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I just don’t think she ever wanted to hurt you, any of you. It wasn’t like that.”
After a moment the air went out of her; her spine sagged. “That’s what you said, that day. That you-she-just panicked. Because of the baby.”
“I believed that,” I said. “I still do.”
“Yeah,” said Abby. “Me too. That’s the only reason I let you in.” She shoved something more firmly onto one of the fridge shelves, shut the door.
“Rafe and Justin,” I said. “Would they want to see this stuff?”
Abby balled up the plastic bags and stuffed them into another bag, hanging off the chair. “Rafe’s in London,” she said. “He left as soon as your lot would let us travel. His father found him a job-I don’t know what, exactly; something to do with finance. He’s totally unqualified for it and he’s probably crap at it, but he won’t get fired, not as long as Daddy’s around.”
“Oh, God,” I said, before I could stop myself. “He must be miserable.”
She shrugged and shot me a quick, unfathomable look. “We don’t talk a lot. I’ve phoned him a few times, stuff about the sale-not that he gives a damn, he just tells me to do whatever I want and send him the papers to sign, but I have to check. I rang him in the evenings, and it mostly sounded like he was in some fancy pub, or a nightclub-loud music, people yelling. They call him ‘Raffy.’ He was always about three-quarters drunk, which I doubt comes as any surprise to you, but no, he didn’t sound miserable. If that helps you feel better.”
Rafe in moonlight, smiling, eyes slanted sideways at me; his fingers warm on my cheek. Rafe with Lexie, somewhere-I still wondered about that alcove. “What about Justin?”
“He went back up North. He tried to stick it out at Trinity, but he couldn’t take it-not just the staring and whispering, although that was pretty bad, but… nothing being the same. A couple of times I heard him crying, in his carrel. One day he tried to go into the library and he couldn’t do it; he had a panic attack, right there in the Arts block, in front of everyone. They had to take him away in an ambulance. He didn’t come back.”
She took a coin from a neat stack on the fridge and fed it into the electricity meter, turned the knob. “I’ve talked to him a couple of times. He’s teaching English in a boys’ school, filling in for some woman on maternity leave. He says the kids are spoiled little monsters and they write ‘Mr. Mannering is a faggot’ on the board most mornings, but at least it’s peaceful-it’s out in the countryside-and the other teachers leave him alone. I doubt either he or Rafe would want that stuff.” She flicked her head at the table. “And I’m not going to ask them. You want to talk to them, do your own dirty work. I should warn you, I don’t think they’ll be overjoyed to hear from you.”
“I don’t blame them,” I said. I went to the table, tapped the bundle of paper into shape. Below the window, the back garden was overgrown, strewn with bright crisp packets and empty bottles.
Abby said, behind me, with no inflection in her voice at all, “We’re always going to hate you, you know.”
I didn’t turn around. Whether I liked it or not, in this one small room my face was still a weapon, a bare blade laid between her and me; it was easier for her to talk when she couldn’t see it. “I know,” I said.
“If you’re looking for some kind of absolution, you’re in the wrong place.”
“I’m not,” I said. “This stuff is the only thing I’ve got to offer you, so I figured I had to try. I owe you that.”
After a second, I heard her sigh. “It’s not that we think this was all your fault. We’re not stupid. Even before you came…” A movement: her shifting, pushing back hair, something. “Daniel believed, right up to the end, that we could still fix things; that there was still a way for it to be OK again. I didn’t. Even if Lexie had made it… I think, by the time your mates showed up at our door, it was already too late. Too much had changed.”
“You and Daniel,” I said. “Rafe and Justin.”
Another beat. “I guess it was that obvious. That night, the night Lexie died… we couldn’t have made it through, otherwise. And it shouldn’t have been a big deal. Various stuff had happened before, here and there along the way; everyone was always fine about it. But that night…”
I heard her swallow. “Before that, we had a balance, you know? Everyone knew Justin was in love with Rafe, but it was just there, in the background. I didn’t even realize that I… Call me stupid, but I really didn’t; I just thought Daniel was the best friend I could ever want. I think we could all have gone on like that, maybe forever-or maybe not. But that night was different. The second Daniel said, ‘She’s dead,’ things changed. Everything got clearer, too clear to bear, like some huge light had been switched on and you could never close your eyes again, not even for a second. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
“After that, even if Lexie had come home after all, I don’t know if we…”
Her voice trailed off. I turned round and found her watching me, closer than I’d expected. “You don’t sound like her,” she said. “You don’t even move like her. Are you anything like her at all?”
“We had some things in common,” I said. “Not everything.”
Abby nodded. After a moment she said, “I’d like you to leave now.”
I had my hand on the doorknob when she said, suddenly and almost unwillingly, “You want to hear something strange?”
It was getting dark; her face looked like it was fading away, into the dim room. “One of the times I rang Rafe, he wasn’t in that club or whatever; he was home, on the balcony of his apartment. It was late. We talked for a while. I said something about Lexie-that I still miss her, even though… in spite of everything. Rafe made some flip comment about having too much fun to miss anyone; but before he said it, before he answered, there was this little pause. Baffled. Like it took him a second to figure out who I was talking about. I know Rafe, and I swear to God he almost said, ‘Who?’ ”
Upstairs, half muffled by the ceiling, a phone burst into “Baby Got Back” and someone thumped across the floor to answer it. “He was pretty drunk,” Abby said. “Like I told you. Still, though… I can’t stop wondering. If we’re forgetting each other. If in another year or two we’ll all have been wiped right out of each other’s minds; gone, like we never met. If we could pass on the street, within inches, and not even blink.”
“No pasts,” I said.
“No pasts. Sometimes”-a quick breath-“I can’t see their faces. Rafe and Justin, I can handle it; but Lexie. And Daniel.”
I saw her head turn, her profile against the window: that snub nose, a stray strand of hair. “I loved him, you know,” she said. “I would have loved him as hard as he’d let me, for the rest of my life.”
“I know,” I said. I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack. Instead I got the photocopies back out of my bag and flipped through them-I practically had to hold them against my nose, to see-until I found the streaky color copy of that snapshot: the five of them, smiling, wrapped in falling snow and silence, outside Whitethorn House. “Here,” I said, and held it out to Abby.
Her hand, pale in the near-darkness, reaching out. She went to the window, tilted the page to the last of the light.
“Thanks,” she said, after a moment. “I’ll keep this.” She was still there, looking at it, when I closed the door.
After that I hoped I’d dream about Lexie, just every now and then. She’s fading from the others’ minds, day by day; soon she’ll be gone for good, she’ll be only bluebells and a hawthorn tree, in a ruined cottage where no one goes. I figured I owed her my dreams. But she never came. Whatever it was that she wanted from me, I must have brought it to her, somewhere along the way. The only thing I dream of is the house, empty, open to sun and dust and ivy; scuffles and whispers, always just one corner away; and one of us, her or me, in the mirror, laughing.
This is the one thing I hope: that she never stopped. I hope when her body couldn’t run any farther she left it behind like everything else that tried to hold her down, she floored the pedal and she went like wildfire, streamed
