And then, sloping towards me through the sunshine: Thomas.
He’s carrying two ice-cream cones, one a simple soft-serve, the other a toppling rainbow tower of scoops and sauces and nuts and wafers. Without speaking, he leans down and hands me the vanilla. I wordlessly accept. I’m more mixed up than his ice cream, which is practically an ice-cream sundae (barely) balanced on a cone. My heart is the cherry on top, and he bites it.
I gaze up at him as he contemplates me, blocking the sun.
“I bumped into Sof,” he finally explains, swallowing. “She thrust these at me, pointed you out, then grabbed Meg, and they both booked it. Almost like they planned this. The ice cream was melting all over my hands, and I couldn’t find a garbage can, so…”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“It’s ice cream. I don’t forgive you.”
“Oh.”
Despite saying this, he sits down next to me. My skin runs hot and cold with confusion, sunshine and shade. He doesn’t forgive me; I’m not sure I’ve done anything that needs forgiving. But he knows without asking that the vanilla scoop in a waffle cone is mine. I nibble at it, stealing glances at him and wondering what we’ll say. How we’ll get our friendship back. I think that might be all I want, for now.
“Meg and Sof planned this?” I ask eventually.
Thomas shifts, guiltily. “I stayed at Sof’s the first couple of nights. Weird, right? I’m at Niall’s now, on the sofa. Oh—and I entered the cake competition.” He tugs his cardigan aside, showing me the rosette on his T-shirt. “First prize. Ban’s over.”
“Mein gott, Thomas—that’s amazing.” My voice sounds false, clangs too loudly. I’m annoyed and pleased and confused, all at once.
“Yeah, well. You know I worked in a bakery back in Toronto? Every Saturday since I was fourteen, and summers.” He holds up his hand, counting off barely visible burn scars on his fingers. How have we spent a whole summer talking and this never came up? “Brownie. Mille-feuille. Tray bake. I’m not bad. I had some money saved up from that job. My dad kept telling me it was for college. I don’t know what it was for—maybe to go traveling after high school. I’d like to see a shark. Or catering college. Move to Vienna and learn how to make strudel.”
“What are you going to do with it?” I ask nervously.
“Well, it turned out I saved less money than I thought—cardigans don’t come cheap. Not enough for a shark. Or Vienna. Once I sold my car, it about covered a one-way ticket to England. This mad thirty-eight-hour round trip via Zurich and Madrid, the soonest flight that I could afford after term ended. Left a note for my mom that I’d be living with you till she came over. She and my dad had pretty much decided I’d be staying with him in Canada. That’s why she calls so much. It’s Mr. Tuttle, ten-fold. I’m in trouble.”
Ice cream. Brain freeze. Whoa.
I had no idea where his story was going, I was just happy to have him babbling at me again, but this is huge—Hadron Collider huge. Thomas cashed in his cannoli money to see me. And why?
Before I can ask, he glances at me and says, “I probably should have told you that before.”
“Er, yes. Probably,” I squeak, and try to refill my lungs, which seem to have collapsed. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because it’s nuttier than this ice cream?” He shrugs. “The moment never seemed right to confess. You might have noticed, I’m not the best at telling you stuff. And because … I knew I was using your email as an excuse. The idea of leaving Toronto and choosing to live with my mom—I’d been thinking about it for a while. If I did it, without giving them the choice, they’d have to stop arguing about it. And I didn’t tell you about Manchester, and I didn’t tell you I was half here to annoy my dad—”
Thomas is bat-grabbing again, sending drips of sticky ice cream flying through the air, and the gesture topples me like a domino. Every emotion falling into another—love and fondness and familiarity and want, an aching want for us to be okay. Whether that’s friendship or something else.
“—or about any of it, because you seemed happy see me again, and I liked you.”
He glances at me, checking for my reaction. Which is mostly just trying to keep up. I have at least a hundred questions, but I nibble on my cone and swallow them.
“I don’t want you to think I was running away. I want you to think I was running towards. Making a grand gesture.”
“A gesture like telling me you spent all your money on a plane ticket for me, when really it was to get away from your dad?” I cock an eyebrow.
“It was still a little bit about you. I wanted to know if you’d chin me again.” He smiles, rubbing his jaw. Somehow, even when we’re out of sync with each other, we still have a rhythm. “It’s pretty funny that you actually did.”
I put my half-finished cone down next to me and wipe my fingers on the grass. And I say to my knees, “It’s pretty funny that you actually did run away again…”
“Yeah, well.” He sighs. That’s all I get—a sigh?
“Look.” I shuffle around so I’m sitting cross-legged opposite him. Meet his eye. “I’m going to explain this once, about me and Jason, and then it’s done. But you can’t just disappear on me again. You promised you wouldn’t. Deal?”
Without checking behind him, he flings the last of his ice cream over his shoulder, and reaches out his hand for me to shake. “Deal.”
“All right. Okay. I’m sorry I lied.”
Thomas nods, still holding my hand, waiting for me to go on.
“No, that’s it. That’s all I have to say—I’m sorry I lied, or let you misunderstand, or whatever. Period. Ned tells me I’m self-absorbed. I’m not sorry Jason and I had sex, or that I was in love with him before you, and I meant what I said in the garden—it’s not your business, and I don’t have to explain it, and you don’t get to judge me on it or be jealous. And if you are, keep it to yourself. It’s not even a thing.”
After my little speech, I nod, firmly. I think Sof would be proud.
“Why did you? Lie, I mean,” he asks. I take my hand back. “Sorry. It’s just, if you’d told me … Okay, I’d still have been totally jealous. But it was like you were making fun of me.”
“I was used to keeping it a secret,” I say. “You know that thing you said—that I was the first kiss that counted? I thought it was a nice idea. You were my first best friend. But I’m not sure it matters anymore—first, second, the order you do things.”
He doesn’t say anything, just sits there quietly in a totally un-Thomas-like way. He’s still. Did I freeze time again? Can he even hear me? Then he blinks.
“So what happens now?” I ask, my voice squeaky. “Are you going to come home? Papa, and Ned, and Umlaut, everybody wants you to. I know you’re leaving in a week anyway, but it’s true.”
“Are you asking me to come back as friends, or as whatever we were?”
“I don’t know.” It’s true, I honestly don’t. “Can’t you just come back, and leave it up to fate?”
“The trouble is,” he says, “I still like you. And after the party, you just gave up! We wouldn’t even be talking right now if I hadn’t come over. And I like you so much, I would probably let you do this.”
“This?”
“Not make a grand gesture in return. You email me, and I come from Canada for you. You ask me to come home, but you’re not coming to me. When I lied about Manchester, I came and found you. Then you go and break my heart, and I’m still the one who goes looking for you.”
There’s a fairy tale Grey used to read to me called Guilt and Gingerbread. The princess’s heart of gold is stolen and replaced by an apple. The apple rots inside the princess, there’s a maggot. She sighs, she dies. That’s me. Rotten. Where my soul should be, is a shriveled little dead thing.
“I’ll make you a grand gesture,” I declare.
“Hmmm.”
“I will! I don’t know what it’ll be yet. Come back first.”
He huffs, a half laugh. “And pack all my s
tuff AGAIN?”
I scoot round so I’m sitting next to him, and we both lean back against the fence. We’re friends. We did promise each other that.
“I don’t remember it being this tiny,” Thomas says eventually, waving out at the fair.
“We’re bigger now. Proportionally, it’s tinier. If you’re three times the mass you were then, and you used to be half a percent of the fair, there’s now less of it in relation to you.”
“Hey, I nearly understood that.” He elbows me, then unfolds himself, brushing the dried grass off his jeans. “So … I’ll see you before I go to Manchester, right? To say goodbye.”
The sun has slipped down the sky, and now, when I gaze up at him, he’s nothing but light.
“Okay,” I say. And then he’s gone, walking off into the afternoon. I sit there for a while, feeling like I missed a really big moment, and I can’t even blame a wormhole.
* * *
When I get home, Papa is in the garden. He’s lying on his back among the dandelion stars, staring up at the evening sky. There’s a glass of red wine half-balanced in his hand, the bottle buried in the grass beside him, and it looks like he’s been crying. It makes me want to run and run, hide inside the horizon, but instead, I sit down next to him. I’m saying yes. I’m running towards.
He smiles up at me, patting my hand.
“Grüß dich,” he says. “How was the fair?”
“I saw Thomas,” I blurt without preamble. “I’m sorry. I tried to get him to come back here, it was my fault he left, and the tap—all of it.”
“Liebling,” he says, smiling, “that can’t possibly be true. Ned attacked it with a wrench.”
“Yes, but—” I flail, tight-throated. I have an ocean of apologies to make and no one will accept them.
Papa sits up and takes a sip of wine, frowning at his empty glass and refilling it.
“‘It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault,’” he parrots. “This was how Thomas got his reputation as, what did you call that? A gremlin? The pair of you were always up to something. And afterwards you would always be racked with guilt. You’d be full of apologies and making amends—I’ll be gut for a week, so gut!—and you were. Naturally, we all assumed everything naughty had been Thomas’s idea.”
“He keeps telling me everything was always my idea,” I complain. “Did you know it was his idea to come over this summer, not his mum’s?”
“Ha-ha,” Papa says, goblin-gleeful. “Not at first—I thought it was you, like the cat.”
“Papa,” I say carefully. “I didn’t bring Umlaut home.”
“Nein? Anyway, after the party, I call Thomas’s mum and she told me that he told her it was your idea.” He hands me his glass. “I’ve missing you.”
I take a sip—sour and vinegary—and say, “I’ve been here.”
“Have you?” His voice isn’t sharp, like the wine—but it stings. If everyone’s telling me I’m only half here, maybe they’re all right.
“I missed you too,” I tell him. Papa draws his knees up, looking out to the tangled garden. “And I miss Grey.” I gulp the wine again, to hide my embarrassment. We’ve never talked about this. We’ve snuck around, avoiding the subject.
“Ich auch.” Me too. “I don’t know—did I get it wrong? Letting you and Ned find your own way? When your mami died, Grey did this for me. Stepped back. Let me discover.” Papa trails off, plucking the wine from my hand. “Liebling. You’ve been reading his diaries. You know now he was ill, the radiation treatment?”
*R
*R
*R
Radiation? The wine and the second shock announcement of the day set me reeling in the twilight. I think of Grey’s thunderstorm moods last summer. His early nights. All the times I’d cycled past the Book Barn and the door had been locked. Getting me a book for my birthday. Thomas’s voice in the kitchen, saying, morphine.
And Grey, leaping over the fire. Shouting for a Viking’s death.
“No. I didn’t know.” All these secrets, shattering.
“Ja, Liebling,” says Papa. He gulps his wine, till there’s just a bit left, then he hands it back to me. “Go slowly. I already have Ned to deal with. Hodgkin lymphoma.” He tests the words on his tongue, unfamiliar. “Cancer. For a while. The stroke was always a possibility. But anyway, even so. There wasn’t much time, and he wanted you not to know. You and Ned had exams. You’d lost your mami. He liked when everything was happy, you know?”
And I thought we had all the time in the world. I’ve held on to a meaningless wish for a year. It stings a little, when I let it go. It had put down roots. Then I pour my wine onto the grass: a ritual. And at last, the guilt dissolves like smoke in the air.
Papa is watching me. “Ich liebe dich mit ganzem Herzen,” he says. I love you with my whole heart.
Ned chooses this touching moment to start pounding AC/DC through his open window.
“Ist your brother?” asks Papa, wincing.
“I’ll get him.” I unfold upright and stomp over to his window, taking out my feelings on the grass. Yellow tulips and wormholes and a wish. It’s haunted me for a year; now it’s gone.
“Ned!” I bang on the window. “We’re getting DRUNK.”
He pops his head out immediately. “What’s the occasion?”
“Grey.”
* * *
“Remember the slugs?” I ask.
“The sluuuuuuugs.” Ned stretches the word from here to the moon as he flops backwards on the grass. We’ve been out here since I banged on his window, the twilight slipping into dark, sharing our favorite Grey anecdotes. Tree laundry. The frozen orange story. Slugs.
They were Grey’s first test on the road to enlightenment. He read all these books, went temporarily vegetarian, started meditating. Fat Little Buddha statues sprang up all over the cottage, and bites sprang up all over Grey’s legs because he wouldn’t even swat a mosquito.
Summer and mosquitoes gave way to autumn and daddy longlegs. Around October, it started to rain. And rain begat slugs, and slugs begat more slugs, and slugs begat Grey slowly, softly, gradually, losing his temper. For a few weeks, he’d painstakingly pluck fat grey apostrophes off the pavement and tip them into the Althorpes’ vegetable patch.
Then one night, we were woken at two in the morning by a bellow of “Bugger enlightenment!” and Grey banging a hoe on the pavement. A massacre.
“Did I ever tell you about him and the bells? He just stood out there”—Papa waves in the direction of the church—“yelling they should shut up.”
There were bells after his funeral, ringing out through the afternoon. Everyone goes quiet. Ned wriggles upright.
“We should do something,” he says, breaking the silence.
“It’s late,” says Papa. “Bedtime. No more parties, no more drinking.”
“I meant”—Ned rolls his eyes—“about Grey. It’s nearly a year. Shouldn’t we ring bells or, okay, maybe not. Fireworks?”
“If you both wanted, we could scatter the ashes,” says Papa. “They’re in the shed.”
“The shed?” Ned hoots. “You can’t keep them in the shed! It’s—it’s—”
“Where else would you keep them, Liebling?” Papa asks, his face rumpled in confusion. “Anyway, Gottie put them there.”
“I what?” I choke on my wine.
“I put them in one of the Buddhas, and you cleared them all away,” he says, standing up, “so that’s where they are.”
“Papa, when you say they’re in one of the Buddhas … Half of them are back out in the house. Do you know which one?”
“I know which one,” he says. It’s clear he’s always known. Is he as vague and absent as I think, or do I just not notice him? “I’ll find it. You all start to think about where we can do this. Maybe here.” He disappears into the dark.
“Here…” I say. “You don’t think he means in the garden?”
Ned snorts, and we’re back to normal. “Bit morbid. I bet near the Book Barn, or in the fields.
What do you think?”
I wait until Papa comes back from the shed, a cardboard box in his hand. He rests it gently on the grass between us. It’s unreasonably tiny.
“Grots?” Ned prompts me. “Where should these go?”
“The sea,” I say, because Grey wanted to die like a Viking.
There’s nowhere else. The sea is the only place big enough, and the box is far too small. How can you hold the universe in the palm of your hand?
Sunday 24 August
[Minus three hundred and fifty-seven]
I wish I knew how the world worked, already. Because I wake up early with a pounding headache and Thomas’s email clutched in my hand. And I can read it.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: 4/7/2015, 17.36
Subject: Trouble times two
The answer’s yes, obviously.
But I think you already know that.
Hasn’t it always been yes when it comes to us?
I want to see the stars with you.
And whatever you tell me, I’ll believe.
Because remember—
Things can get dark, and fairly terrible
But the scar on my palm makes you fucking indelible.
I read it a dozen times, and it still doesn’t make any sense. The stars—that’s obvious, the plastic ones he put on my ceiling. But what is he saying yes to? What have I told him that he believes? And I want to throttle him—this is hardly the clear warning you give if you’re flying across the Atlantic to visit! It is, however, thoroughly Thomas—full of heart and gesture and a little bit loony, with no thought to the consequences.
I think I know why I can read it, too, and it’s got nothing to do with the Weltschmerzian Exception. I’ve finally forgiven myself for Grey’s death. I’m allowed a little bit of love in my life.
The Square Root of Summer Page 21