“Well,” my father had said, “if you insist on going to stay with them, I’m sure you’ll have a very . . . nice time. The house is lovely.” He’d paused, clearly searching for something else to say. “And Holmes’s parents are . . . ah. Well. You know, I heard they had six bathrooms in that house. Six!”
This was foreboding. “Leander will be there,” I’d said, a bit desperate for something to look forward to. Holmes’s uncle was my father’s former flatmate and longtime best friend.
“Yes! Leander. Very good. Leander will surely act as a buffer between you and . . . anything you need a buffer for. Excellent.” Then he’d trotted out something about my stepmother needing him in the kitchen and hung up, leaving me with a whole new host of doubts about Christmas.
As soon as Holmes had brought up the idea of us spending the break together, I’d begun imagining us somewhere like my mother’s apartment in London. Sweaters, and cocoa, maybe watching a Doctor Who special by the fire. Holmes in some bobbly knit hat, dismembering a chocolate orange. We were, in fact, already sprawled out on my living room couch when Holmes told me to stop avoiding the subject and just ask my mother if I could go down to Sussex. I’d been actively avoiding that conversation. “Be diplomatic,” Holmes had said, then paused. “By that I mean, plan out what you want to say, and then don’t say it.”
It was no use. Holmes and my father had predicted her reaction more or less exactly. When I told her our plans, she began shouting so loudly about Lucien Moriarty that the usually unflappable Holmes backed herself bodily into a corner.
“You almost died,” my mother concluded. “The Moriartys almost killed you. And you want to spend Christmas in their enemy’s stronghold?”
“Their stronghold? What do you think this is, Batman?” I started laughing. Across the room, Holmes buried her head in her hands. “Mum. I’ll be fine. I’m almost an adult, I can decide what to do with my holiday. You know, I told Dad not to tell you about that whole near-death thing. I said that you’d overreact, and I was right.”
There was a long pause, and then the shouting got somewhat louder.
When she capitulated—which she finally did, with extreme prejudice—it came with a price. Our last few days in London were miserable. My mother sniped at me for everything from the cleanliness of the living room to the way my English accent had returned, with a vengeance, on my return to London. It’s like that girl even took away your voice, she told me. Maybe I had pushed my mother a little too far to begin with; she certainly wasn’t happy I’d brought Holmes to visit in the first place. I think it would’ve been a relief to both of them had she stayed behind, but I had a point I wanted to make—I was tired of my mother’s disdain for someone she’d never met. Someone who was important to me. For my sake, my mother should be able to accept my best friend for the brilliant, thrilling girl she was.
That worked out about as well as you’d expect.
Holmes and I spent a lot of time out of the house.
I took her to my favorite bookstore, where I loaded her up with Ian Rankin novels and she bullied me into buying a book on European snails. I took her to the chip shop on the corner, where she distracted me by giving a detailed-and-probably-bullshit account of her brother’s sex life (drones, cameras, his rooftop pool) while she ate all my fried fish and left her own plate untouched. I took her for a walk along the Thames, where I showed her how to skip a stone and she nearly punctured a hole in a passing pontoon boat. We went to my favorite curry place. Twice. In one day. She’d gotten this look on her face when she took her first bite of their pakora, this blissful, lids-lowered look, and two hours later I decided I needed to see it again. It was so good to see her happy that it made up for the embarrassment I felt that night, when I found her instructing my sister, Shelby, on the best way to bleach out bloodstains, using the curry dribble on my shirt as a test case.
In short, it was both the best three days I’d ever had, my mother notwithstanding, and a fairly standard week with Charlotte Holmes. My sister, unused to this phenomenon, was completely overcome. Shelby had taken to trailing Holmes like a shadow, dressing in all black and straightening her hair, dragging her away to show off things in her room. I didn’t know exactly what things were, but from the lilting, earnest music coming from under the door, I had a feeling that their soundtrack was L.A.D., Shelby’s boy band du jour. My guess was that Shelby was showing off her paintings. My mother had told me that my sister had taken up art with a passion while I’d been away, but that so far, she’d been too shy to show anyone what she’d made.
Not that I would have known what to say to her about it. I didn’t know a whole lot about art. I knew what I liked, what made me feel something—portraits, usually. I liked things that felt secret. Scenes set in a dark room. Mysterious books and bottles, or a girl with her face turned away. When asked, I trotted out Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson as my favorite work of art, though to be honest, I’d lost the ability to call it up clearly in my head. I tended to spend too much time with my favorite things, loved them too hard until I wore them down. After a while, they became more like a shorthand for who I was and less like things I actually enjoyed.
“Shelby wanted my advice, and I know enough to give her my opinion,” Holmes was saying. I’d asked if she’d been talking to my sister about her art. It was our last night in London; we were leaving for Sussex the next afternoon. My mother had turned my bedroom into a study, so we were where we’d been all week—on a pair of hideaway mattresses in the living room, our bags stacked behind us like a barricade. The sky outside was beginning to lighten. One tradeoff of being friends with Holmes was sleep. As in, you never did again.
“Enough?” I asked.
“My father thought it was an important part of my education. I can go on endlessly about color and composition, thanks to him and”—she scowled—“my old tutor, Professor Demarchelier.”
I propped myself up on one arm. “Do you . . . make art?” It struck me, then, how little I knew about her, how all the facts of her life before this September had come to me either secondhand or in bits and reluctant pieces. She’d had a cat named Mouse. Her mother was a chemist. But I had no idea what her first bought book had been, or if she’d ever wanted to be a marine biologist, or even what she was like when she wasn’t wanted for murder. She played the violin, of course, and so I imagine she’d tried out other kinds of art as well. I tried to imagine what a Holmes painting would look like. A girl in a dark room, I thought, with her face turned away, but as I watched her, she tilted her face toward me.
“I don’t have the skill, and I don’t invest my time in things I’m rubbish at. But I am a fair critic. Your sister is quite good. A nice sense of composition, an interesting use of color. See? There you go. Art talk. Her range is limited, though. I saw about thirty paintings of your neighbor’s dog.”
“Woof is usually sleeping in their backyard.” I smiled at her. “Makes him an easy subject.”
“We could take her to the Tate Modern. Tomorrow morning, before we go. If you wanted.” She stretched her arms out above her head. In the darkness, her skin looked like cream in a pitcher. I jerked my eyes back up to her face. It was late, and when it was late, I had these kinds of slippages.