‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said.
I lifted the wooden stake over my shoulder. ‘Cover your face,’ I whispered; then the time for quiet was up, and I swung the wood against the bottom corner of the window. It cracked, but it didn’t break; I swung it again, harder, and the pane shattered. Downstairs, Noah screamed. Beneath that, I could hear footsteps underneath our room, and Mother’s voice. Already, somebody was on the stairs. I tried to brush away the glass on the window ledge, but instead a shard lodged into my palm. There was too much of it, and there wasn’t enough time. I hauled one leg onto the ledge, and pulled the other after it, and sat at the window, facing outside. Somebody was at the door; the lock was moving. I had told myself that I wouldn’t look down. I pivoted around, and for a moment I was suspended, half inside the room and my legs in the winter air. ‘We’ll need to lower ourselves,’ I had said to Evie, ‘until we’re hanging, so that we reduce the fall as much as we can.’ The door opened, and I saw a flash of Father. The shape of him in the doorway. I let my body drop, but I was too weak to hang like we had planned it, and as soon as my arms locked, I fell.
The grass was wet, but the earth was frozen beneath it. As I landed, something in my right leg collapsed, the way that a building falls in on itself when the foundations are blown. The crunch ricocheted across the garden. I fell forward, and the impact shot the glass further into my hand. The air was too cold to inhale, and I was crying, I knew. ‘God, get up,’ I whispered. Slowly, I straightened, and pulled my T-shirt down towards my knees, and there, at the kitchen door, was Mother.
I waited for her to run at me, but she didn’t. Her mouth was moving, but I could only hear the blood in my ears. We looked at one another for a long last second, then I turned and ran.
The garden gate was unlocked. I hobbled around the house, holding onto the walls, and then out into the road, following the white markers at its centre. The evening was a cold, dark blue. Here was the neighbourhood I remembered: Moor Woods Road and its quiet houses, each far apart from the next. Windows glowing like shrines in the gloaming. Father would be behind me. I couldn’t expend energy approaching a doorway: he would catch me there, before the residents could answer. I could anticipate the precise weight of his hands on my shoulders. I screamed, trying to summon them from their living rooms, from their sofas, from the evening news. Festive lights hung from trees and over front doors, welcoming their inhabitants, and I thought, stupidly: Christmas.
The road curled downhill and my leg buckled, and I veered into the wall at the side of it, grasping at the wet stones. I steadied myself and kept going, in the shadows now, my feet slapping on frozen leaves and winter-long puddles. Pain was seconds away, like coming out of sleep; I was on the brink of it, and once it hit me I wouldn’t be able to ignore it again.
I could see the end of Moor Woods Road. Beyond it, about to pass by, was a pair of headlights. I ran straight for them, my hands held up in appeasement, and the driver braked just before she hit me. The car bonnet was warm beneath my palms, and I left rusty handprints where I touched it. The driver was climbing out of her seat in silhouette; she moved tentatively towards me, and into the light. She was dressed in a suit and holding a mobile phone, and she seemed so bright, somehow, and clean, like a visitor from a bold new world.
‘My God,’ she said.
‘My name,’ I said, ‘is Alexandra Gracie—’
I couldn’t get the rest of it out. I looked back, up to Moor Woods Road: the street was silent and impassive. I sat down in the road and reached for her, and while she called the police, she let me hold her hand.
I woke once in the night, cold from the air conditioning, and folded the covers across my body. Already it was light outside, but I couldn’t hear any traffic. It was nice to wake like this, with many more hours before morning. I would feel better then.
Just as I was falling asleep, my body started. I had been thinking of the fall from the window, fifteen years before. The impact, half dreamed and half remembered. A spectre of pain brushed my knee. Mother at the kitchen door. I rolled over. I stood in the garden in the dim winter dusk, in my sullied T-shirt and nothing else. My leg twisted behind me, like a ball and chain. It would have been so easy for her to stop me. This time, in the dream, I listened; I could hear her over my heart. ‘Go,’ she said. Further north they were preparing her grave, wielding shovels in the warm, pink dawn so that they could bury her before the sun rose. She said, ‘Go.’
2
Ethan (Boy A)
ETHAN CALLED BACK BEFORE my alarm went off. He sounded like an advertisement for the morning: he had been for a run along the river; he was feeding the dog; he was cracking eggs for breakfast.
‘Tell me everything,’ he said.
I did so. He enjoyed my discovery of the article about his work in Mother’s box of belongings; he asked me to recite it so he would know exactly which of his projects it referred to.
‘Oh, that. That’s a relatively old one.’
‘It’s a good job that she didn’t have access to The Times,’ I said. ‘And “The Problems with Forgiveness”.’
He ignored me. ‘Will you be around for a while?’ he asked. ‘Being executor, and all.’
‘I can work from London this week. I’ll see how things go. We may need to visit the house, I guess.’
I could hear him contemplating it, recalling the windows, the garden, the front door and the doors after that. Each of the rooms. I was ruining his morning.
‘We can find a time for that. Listen. Get a Friday-night train up to Oxford, stay with me and Ana. It’s been ages since you’ve been in the country. And it would be nice to see you before the wedding.’
‘It’s work-dependent. I don’t know how long I can stay.’
‘Well, tell them your mother died. You’ll get some leeway for that.’
The dog was barking. ‘Fuck,’ he said.
‘I can go.’
‘Friday. Call me when you’re on a train.’
At the beginning – and at the end, too – it was just me and Ethan.
First born; last adopted.
It was a few months after we escaped before arrangements were made. I remember very little about that time, and each of the memories seems exaggerated, as if I’ve taken somebody else’s story and imagined myself into the narrative. When they first woke me up, days after the escape and already a few surgeries down, they took me to a bath and washed me. My skin slowly came into view, whiter than I had remembered. It took hours, and each time they stopped I asked them to keep going: there was dirt in my ears, in the creases of my elbows, in the folds between my toes. When they finished, I held to the tub and refused to get out. ‘There might be more,’ I said, never wanting to leave the water and the warmth of it. It felt like the ocean would feel in Greece, where Evie and I planned to live.
Thin, downy hair had grown on my face and shoulders. ‘Your body was keeping you warm,’ one of the nurses said, when I asked her, and she kept her face turned away from me until she could leave the room. My bruises faded to a dull jaundice spread, and some of my bones began to retreat, back beneath fat and flesh.
I couldn’t believe that people didn’t enjoy being in hospital. That people could actually want to leave. I had my own room. I had three meals a day. I had patient doctors, who talked me through my body and why they had to open it. All of the nurses were tender, and sometimes, when they had left, I would cry in the clean, quiet room, the way that you cry when somebody is nice to you in the middle of a terrible day.