“Sherringford? What a horrid school,” Alistair was saying. “Yes, it’s been something of a disappointment, but we had no doubt that Charlotte acquitted herself well, despite the circumstances.”
Charlotte’s smile was small and cold.
“I’m sorry to be so quiet, James,” her mother said to me in a low voice. “I’ve been having a rough go of it recently. In and out of hospital. I hope you’re enjoying your dinner.”
“It’s great, thanks. I’m sorry you’re not feeling well.”
At that, Holmes’s attention snapped back to me. “Mother,” she said, scraping her fork against her plate. “You really could ask Jamie some of the standard questions. It’s not a difficult script to remember. How does he like school. Does he have any sisters. Et cetera.”
Her mother flushed. “Of course. Did you have a nice stay in London? Lottie loves it there.”
“We had a lot of fun,” I told her, giving her daughter a dirty look. Her mother seemed to be doing her best. I felt bad for her, all dressed up in this ridiculous room when she clearly wished she was back in bed. “Walked along the Thames. Saw a lot of bookshops. Nothing too demanding.”
“I always think it’s nice to take a break after a difficult semester. From what I’ve heard, yours was especially so.”
I laughed. “An understatement, actually.”
Her mother nodded, eyes half-focused. “And remind me. Why was it, again, that you and my daughter were immediately suspected for that boy’s murder? I understand that he attacked her. But why on earth were you involved?”
“I didn’t volunteer to be a suspect, if that’s what you’re asking.” I tried to keep my tone light.
“Well, the reason I’d been given was that you’d been nursing some ridiculous crush on my daughter, but I still don’t understand how that demanded your involvement.”
It was as if I’d been hit across the face. “What? I—”
Charlotte continued rearranging her food. Her expression hadn’t changed.
“It’s a simple question,” her mother said in that quiet voice. “A more complicated one would be, why are you still shadowing her if those circumstances have resolved themselves? I don’t see why she has any use of you now.”
“I’m fairly sure she likes me.” I enunciated my words. Not out of spite—I was terrified that I would stutter. “We’re friends, spending time together over the winter holiday. It’s not a new concept.”
“Ah.” There was a wealth of meaning in that syllable: doubt, derision, a healthy dose of scorn. “And yet she doesn’t have friends. It hardly hurts that you’re handsome, or that you’re from reduced circumstances. I imagine you’d follow her anywhere. That combination must be catnip for a girl like our Lottie. A ready-made acolyte. But what could possibly be in it for you?”
Had we been anywhere else, with anyone else, Holmes would have barreled into this conversation like an armored tank. I knew how to defend myself, but I was so used to her quick, fearless wit that, in its absence, I found myself speechless.
And it was absent. Holmes herself was absent. Her eyes had gone dark and faraway, her fork still tracing patterns on her plate. How long had this been broiling under Emma Holmes’s skin? Or was it something concocted on the spot, a punishment for Charlotte mouthing off to her mother?
Emma Holmes turned her lantern eyes to me. “If you’re planning something. If you’re in someone’s employ. If you demand things from her that she cannot give—”
“You don’t have to—” Finally, her daughter spoke. Only to be cut right off.
“If you hurt her, I will ruin you. That’s all.” Emma Holmes raised her voice to the rest of the table. “And on that subject, Walter, why don’t you tell us about the exhibit you’re working on? I thought I heard the name Picasso tossed around.”
It wasn’t meant as punishment. It was love for her daughter, and it was terrifying.
I watched as a shudder ground through Charlotte’s shoulders. No wonder she never had an appetite, if mealtimes had always been as tumultuous as this.
Down the table, the curator was dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “Picasso, yes. Alistair was just telling me about your private collection. You house it in London? I’d love to see it. Picasso was quite prolific, as you know, and gave away so many sketches as gifts that new pieces are always coming to light.”
Holmes’s mother waved a hand. I recognized the gesture from her daughter. “Call my secretary,” she said. “I’m sure she can arrange a tour of our holdings.”
At that, I excused myself. I needed to do that clichéd movie thing where I splashed cold water on my face. To my surprise, Eliska dropped her napkin on her chair and followed me down the hall.
“Jamie, yes?” she asked in accented English. When I nodded, she peered over her shoulder to make sure we were alone. “Jamie, this is . . . bullshit.”
“That sounds about right.”
She stalked into the bathroom to check her reflection in the mirror. “My mother, she tells me we go to Britain for a year. Not too long to miss my friends back in Prague. I will make new ones. But everyone is a thousand years old, or stupid, or silent.”
“Not everyone here is like that,” I found myself saying. “I’m not. Charlotte Holmes isn’t. Usually.”
With a finger, Eliska wiped off a bit of stray lipstick. “Maybe somewhere else, she is better. But I go to these family dinners in these big houses and the teenagers are silent. The food is very good. At my home, the food is terrible and the teenagers are much more fun.” She looked at me over her shoulder, considering. “My mother and I go back in one week. She has a new job in the government. If you are in Prague, come see me. I feel—how should I say?—sorry for you.”
“I always appreciate a good pity invite,” I countered, but my heart wasn’t in it. Eliska could tell. She flashed me a smile and left.
When I got back to the table, Emma Holmes had already gone up to bed. Dessert had been served, an architectural piece of cheesecake the size of my thumbnail, and Alistair Holmes was asking his daughter a series of softball questions about Sherringford. What have you learned in your chemistry tutorial? Do you like your instructor? How do you think you’ll apply those skills to your deductive work? Holmes answered in monosyllables.
After a minute, I found I couldn’t listen to the questions anymore. I couldn’t, not when Charlotte Holmes was pulling one of her magic tricks right across from me. She wasn’t pulling a rabbit out of a theoretical hat or transforming herself into a stranger. This time, without moving a single muscle, she was disappearing completely into her high-backed velvet chair.
I DIDN’T RECOGNIZE HER. NOT HERE. NOT IN THIS HOUSE. I didn’t recognize me.
Maybe this is what happened when you built a friendship on a foundation of mutual disaster. It collapsed the second things righted themselves, left you desperate for the next earthquake. I knew, deep down, there was more to it than this. But I wanted an easy solution. It was awful to wish for a murder case to fall at your feet, and I found myself wanting it anyway.
Holmes left dinner without saying anything to me. When I caught up to her, she’d already locked her bedroom door. I knocked for a solid five minutes without any reply. For a long, pointless moment, I stood there in the hall. Upstairs, I heard the edges of a male voice, shouting. They can’t do that to us. They can’t take that from us—and then a door, slamming.
“We can’t have that,” a voice said behind me. I jumped. It was the housekeeper, who’d found me waiting in the hall like some pathetic dog. She showed me to my room. From her kind, impersonal manner, I got the idea that she must have been used to finding strays around.
I spent that night in a giant bed across from a set of giant windows that rattled every time the wind whipped by. “Spent the night” was the right term—it’d be a lie to say I slept there. I couldn’t sleep at all. I knew now that I wasn’t the only one who wished for awful things. Every time I closed my eyes I saw a slump-shouldered Holmes willing her
self into nonexistence across the dinner table. It kept me up because I knew that if she made up her mind, she was determined enough to follow through, to take a handful of pills and lock the world out. I’d seen her do it once already, under my father’s porch. I couldn’t watch it happen again.
Back then, I’d stopped her. I didn’t think I could now. Now, I was the last person she wanted to comfort her, because I was a guy, and her best friend, and maybe I wanted to be more than that, and with every passing hour she added another brick to the wall she was building between us.
At two, I got up and shut the curtains. At three thirty, I opened them again. The moon hung in the sky like a lantern, so bright that I pulled the pillow over my head. I slept, then, and dreamt that I was awake, still staring out across the Sussex countryside.
At four, I woke but thought I was still dreaming. Holmes was perched at the end of my bed. Actually, she was perched on top of my feet, effectively pinning me in place. It might have been sexy, except she was wearing a giant T-shirt that read CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS, so it was insane, and her face looked like she’d been crying, so it was terrifying.
Completely unbidden, my father’s list of rules for dealing with Holmeses began scrolling through my head. #28: If you’re upset, Holmes is the last person you should ask to make you feel better, unless you want to be chided for having feelings. #29: If Holmes is upset, hide all firearms and install a new lock on your door. I swore and scrabbled to push myself up on my elbows.
“Stop,” she said, in a graveyard tone. “Just shut up, will you, and listen to me for a minute.”
But I was too wound up to do that. “Oh, are we talking now? Because I thought we were just going to let your crazy family eviscerate us at the dinner table and then abandon each other there without saying a word. Or maybe I could try to kiss you again, so that I could get another round of the silent treatment—”
“Watson—”
“Will you just stop with the theatrics? They’re not fun anymore. This is not a game. This isn’t the nineteenth goddamn century. My name is Jamie, and I don’t need you to act like we’re part of some story, I just need you to act like you like me. Do you even like me anymore?” I was embarrassed to hear my voice cracking. “Or am I just some . . . some prop for the life you wish you had? Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re back in real life now. Lucien Moriarty’s in Thailand, Bryony Downs is in a black box somewhere, and our biggest threat is having to eat breakfast with your batshit mother tomorrow morning, so I’d appreciate a little acknowledgment of reality.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Actually, the housekeeper will bring us in a tray.”
“I hate you,” I said, with feeling. “I hate you so much.”
“Are we finished with this little production? Or do you need to rend your clothes first?”
“No. I like these pants.”
“Fine. Fine,” she said again, and took a slow breath. “I want things from you, intellectually, that I don’t want physically. That is to say, I could want you like—like that, but I can’t. I . . . want things I don’t want.” I could feel her shift her weight. “And maybe I just want them because I think that you want them from me, and I’m afraid you’ll up and go if you don’t get them. I have no idea. Either way, if it wasn’t bad enough to know that I’ve lost control over my own reactions, I also know that I’m hurting you. Which, honestly, isn’t my main concern right now, because it can’t be. But I feel badly about that. You’re feeling badly about that. Every time you look at me, you flinch. And I’m fairly sure my mother has interpreted that as you having secret nefarious plans toward me, and then when she tore you apart at dinner, I was happy, because I’m frustrated with you and I’m not allowed to express it. Watson, this is boring, all this wheel-spinning, and there’s no way out I can see unless we turn each other loose. But that isn’t an option for me.”
“It isn’t for me either,” I said.
“I know.” Her mouth twisted. “So I suppose that means we’ll be sharing this prison.”
“I knew we’d end up in one eventually.” The moon hid behind a cloud, and the room was washed dark. I waited for her to say something. I waited a long time, and she watched me watching her. We were each other’s mirrors, always.
But the air between us wasn’t charged the way it had been. It wasn’t suffocating anymore, either.
“So what now?” I asked. “You get a therapist, and I go back to London?”
“I loathe psychology.”
“Well, right now, I think you might need it.”
To my surprise, she flopped down next to me, her dark hair spilling over her eyes. “Watson, how do you feel about an experiment?”
“Not terrific, actually.”
“Stop. It’s not a difficult one,” she said, her face buried in a pillow.
“Fine. Shoot.”
“I need you to touch my head.”
Gingerly, I poked her scalp with my finger.
“No,” she snarled, and grabbed my hand, fitting it against her forehead as though I was taking her temperature. “Like that.”
“Why am I doing this?”
“You’re demonstrating nonsexual touch. It’s akin to how a parent would touch a child. When you were ill last semester, I felt fine climbing into your bed, because I knew that nothing could happen. Look, I’m not recoiling. I don’t want to hit you.” She sounded pleased. “Really, I should be recording my findings.”
“Wait,” I said. “You wanted to hit me the other night?”
Holmes lifted her head from the pillow. “I want to hit everything all the time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I should join the rugby team,” she said nervously. Stalling. “I, um. I want you to . . . touch my face. Like you would have, the other night, had we kept going.”
I eyed her for a long minute. “I want to help you do—whatever it is we’re doing. But I don’t want to be your guinea pig.”
“I don’t want you to be one. I want you to understand.”
For some reason, it felt dangerous to breathe, and so I didn’t. I held myself as still as I could, except for my hand running down her soft, shining hair to her cheek. Her skin was pale in the dark, but as I traced my thumb along her cheekbone, she flushed the barest pink. I bit my lip, and her mouth opened, and without thinking about it, really, I let one finger brush against her mouth, and then her hands slid up my chest, pulling against my T-shirt and then pulling at the collar, pulling me down toward her until I could feel myself pressing her down into the mattress, and my nose dug into her neck and she laughed, she exhaled and her breath was soft and a little sharp, and I tangled my fingers in her hair, the way I’d wanted to for months now, all of this I’d wanted for so long, and she angled her head as though she was about to kiss me—
Then she dug her elbow into my stomach and heaved me off her.
“Shit,” she said as I gasped for air. She swore again, fluently, and pulled the pillow down over her face.
“That was a terrible idea.” I needed to throw up. I needed a cold shower. Maybe I would take a cold shower and throw up in the tub. That sounded great, actually. I staggered to my feet.
She nodded. I could tell because the pillow was moving up and down. “Come back,” she said.
I dragged my hands through my hair. “God. Why?”
“Just—”
“Holmes—are you okay? Like, really, actually okay?” It was such a dumb question, but I couldn’t think of another way to ask it.
“Don’t you think it’s sort of backward, that you’re the one always asking me that and not my family?”
“Honestly? All the time.”
We stared at each other.
“They think this sort of thing shouldn’t’ve happened to me at all,” she whispered. “Not to someone as . . . capable as me.”
“This isn’t your fault,” I said fiercely. “God. Has no one told you it’s not your fault? Of all the fucked-up families in all the world—”<
br />
“It was never said, as such. It was implied.”
“Like that makes it any better.” I stared at the ground. “I know this isn’t your favorite subject, but have you thought about—”
“Talk therapy isn’t a panacea. Neither are drugs. Neither is wishing it away.” When I glanced up at her, she was wearing a sad little smile. “Watson. Come back.”
“Why? No, give me an actual answer.”
With a groan, she pulled the pillow down against her chest. “Because, contrary to how I just reacted, I don’t actually want you to leave.” She looked at me with baleful eyes. “I also don’t want to . . . do that again. I just want to go to sleep, and if I’m correct, it’ll be much easier for us to continue talking to each other the way we normally do if we don’t have to first go through tomorrow’s formalities.”
Gingerly, I sat down. “I still think that makes little to no sense.”
“I’m fine with that.” She yawned. “It’s dawn, Watson. Go to sleep.”
I eased myself back in under the covers, careful to leave a few inches between the two of us. Leave room for the Holy Spirit, I thought semihysterically. I hadn’t been to church since I was a kid, but maybe the nuns had gotten it right.
“Are you measuring the space between us?”
“No, I—”
“It’s not funny,” she said but it was dawn, and we were exhausted, and I could tell she was trying not to laugh.
“What we need is a good murder,” I said, not caring how horrible I sounded. “Or a kidnapping. Something fun, you know, to keep our minds off all this.”
“All this? Do you mean sex?”
“Whatever.”
“Lena keeps texting me. She wants to fly out from India and take us shopping.”
“That’s not a distraction. That’s a reason to throw myself into the ocean. I need an explosion or something.”
“You’re a sixteen-year-old boy,” she said. “I think we’ll probably need a serial killer.”
The Last of August Page 3