‘He’s not,’ I said quickly. ‘He hasn’t. I just know.’
‘Your problem,’ she said, ‘is that you always believe the best in people. It’s like a disease with you.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Not everyone is sweetness and light and floral aprons. Just look at your dog,’ she added. ‘He looks harmless enough and yesterday he tried to chew off my face.’
‘He’s not my dog,’ I said.
But Summer wouldn’t hear that. There was so much she wouldn’t hear, so much that I wasn’t allowed to say. I had stopped trying—my voice wasn’t loud enough. ‘Please let the boy stay,’ I said. ‘Just till he’s better?’
‘Or dies,’ said Summer, and thought for a while. ‘Well, just don’t think I’m helping you dig a grave, because remember the blisters I got when we buried the guinea pig? I couldn’t hang from the monkey bars for ages after that.’
‘Thank you!’ I said. I curled my arms around her neck. Even her neck felt stronger than mine. I didn’t even mind the lie about the guinea pig. The hole we dug was so much bigger than that.
‘Just remember the rules,’ Summer warned. ‘Don’t you even think about mentioning what’s in the bell tower.’
‘I won’t,’ I said. I never break the rules. Or at least I never did.
His name was Edward Ashby, in case you were wondering.
Summer
Do you know—have you ever even thought—how handy a bear actually is to have around? Even a little-ish one, or one that starts off little, makes a great table on a hot summer’s night, when you want to pretend you’re a just-married couple at a resort in Bermuda and you eat dinner down on the sand with a white bit of cloth over the bear’s back and an altar candle on that flat part on top of its head, though this comes with a warning that crabs come out at night, and boy, do they nip.
If you have even the most basic supplies, like the end of a bell tower rope, you can make a bear cub its own cute harness and attach it to a little cart, and it can jog alongside you, right up to the base of Our Mountain, with enough books and apples and thermos tea to last until sunset. You could get through two Harry Potters before you had to wind things up and sit on its back and ride down the mountain, talking deep about whether you’re a Ron or a Hermione or a Harry or a Hedwig the owl.
That delicious summer with the bear ended in a confetti-pop of magic and long days out and about, and silky, salty morning swims before the sand blew up all gritty. Lunches in the meadow, plush with flowers—purple ones, mostly, but not just purple how you’re seeing it in your mind right now, I’m talking so many shades of purple that some are shaking hands with blue and some are sidling up to hot pink and the rest are having a good old time with whites and greys and browny-blacks.
And the smell, well, it was like your mum’s high-end perfume and a Christmas tree (a real one) and a florist’s shop and an ice-cream parlour and a pile of grass clippings dumped next to a swimming pool on a sunny day and the cool stone foyer of a posh hotel; it was all of those things together. The smell—that’s what I remember when I think about those long, lazy days when we were three together: Winter, the bear and me.
I had folded an old altar cloth into a sling and strapped Edward onto Winter’s back, all snug, and as a Surprise, I’d cut off a couple of squares and made us headscarves so we could play out that scene from The Sound of Music where they get those rocking curtain clothes and go all loose and crazy in Vienna, singing about deer. That was Winter’s favourite, and I know sometimes I could be a little, you know, bossy, but shoot me cold if I didn’t try every nanosecond to make her happy—if every titchy thing I made us do wasn’t to keep her true heart beating on just the way it did. And considering we’d had to stop wearing underwear a while back because we were pretty low on the old textiles, I think you’ll probably get what a Sacrifice (capital S) that Von Trapp headscarf really was.
That was the day we taught Edward to roll down the hill, that funny old bear, and to turn in circles looking at the sky until he was fall-down dizzy. We taught him to stand up on his hind legs and hold the end of our skipping rope so that we could skip without having to tie the other end to an organ pipe or the stone font where Pops told us that babies were dunked in water, back when churches were still used for holy things. And even though it took some doing, eventually that bear could arc the rope around with the best of them, so that it flicked white against that blue, blue sky, and swoosh it so it nearly touched the ground but didn’t. Blow me down if it wasn’t nice to have him around, sort of festive, like gelato, or a new nun/ nanny who makes you realise you’ve been living your life answering to a whistle when you could have been wearing curtains and choreographing marionette shows.
And I guess I figured that if we stayed there, playing grown-ups, maybe we could stay kids forever. I’m not talking in a Peter Pan way (because, honestly? I think that guy had Issues). Summer, you are thinking, fourteen is not a kid. Fourteen can hold a machine gun on its shoulder, a baby in its insides. But to me, we were very much Not Yet Adults, in spite of what was going on under our shirts. I guess I just mean I wanted to be wrapped up safe in the way we knew the world, and the way the world knew us.
Winter
When he first got out of bed, I was standing in the doorway.
‘Hey,’ he whispered.
Pete was tucked at my side. I was holding him back with all of my thoughts. Earlier he had snapped at Summer’s Achilles. Gnashed the air so hard he cracked off a tooth.
‘Here, boy,’ Edward croaked, and Pete went.
‘You’re a good guy,’ he said, and Pete sat.
I couldn’t believe it.
The boy said, ‘Fancy a run?’ and Pete wagged his whole self. And to me he said, ‘Come with?’
I said, ‘I don’t know how to run.’ And I didn’t.
‘You don’t know how to walk?’ He smiled. The gloss of his eyes was silver. ‘You don’t know how to breathe? Because that’s all it is: fast walking, deep breathing.’
He wore my father’s old pyjama pants. He ran his hand through his hair.
I said, ‘We never did sports.’
He cupped his palm on Pete’s head, patient and gentle.
Pete rolled over. He waved his paws around.
‘He can foxtrot,’ I said. I don’t know why I told him. I knew Summer would hate it. I swallowed. ‘I’ll come.’
But after three steps, Edward fell down, still fever-weak and shaky. A mauve egg popped up on his forehead.
I had to call Summer to help lift him. I didn’t know if she would.
‘Your skeleton must weigh a lot, because there’s not much else left of you,’ she said from under his arm.
‘It’s my brains,’ said Edward. ‘They’re huge.’
‘You’ll fit in well here, then,’ Summer said back. ‘Sudoku at seven.’
And after that we never spoke about him leaving. Not once.
The days got longer. Edward got stronger.
He caught things. In his hands, in nets. He dug around and pulled things up.
He loved to carve. He loved to fix.