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When the words slipped out of him, so sharply, it was a surprise even to himself: “Is your daughter not considered a big enough thing in need of care?” His heart jumped in his chest.
Darcy staggered back, his face struck as though it had been slapped. He glanced at the door, then stared at Bron again. At first he looked almost elated, like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He stepped forward, climbed the stairs, and reached out for him. “You know? But how?” he asked. Bron remained silent. There was no time to answer. As soon as the question had left Darcy’s mouth, his face hardened. “Giovanni?”
“You could’ve told me. Why all the lies? You left Giovanni for his sister, and thought not to tell me. Fine. Whatever. But Ada—she deserves to know the truth, to hear it from you,” he said. He reached out to touch Darcy, a gravitational pull, but whatever it was that drew him forward repelled Darcy away, his jaw flexed, tendons extending his chin sideways. “You are her father, after all.”
“I beg you now to stop clutching at things that do not concern you.” Darcy pulled open the door, and Bron heard the rain before he saw it, the pelting loud in his ears.
A lightning strike lit Darcy’s outline, and Bron slammed the door shut. He could taste blood in his mouth from biting the insides of his cheeks. He rushed back to his room, bounded onto the bed, and clamped a pillow to his chest. Then there was scratching at his door, Captain wanting to be let in. When he was, the dog leaped straight onto his bed and circled his tail before settling himself in the middle of the mattress.
Stupid dog.He couldn’t climb back into bed. He stared him down, noticing the silver marks that flecked his coat, the two white patches that spotted above his eyes and into his head like eyebrows. Bron sat in his chair, resting his head in his arms and knocking himself against the desk until he’d calmed his breathing. He knew what needed to be done, and before it could be done to him. Before he was left alone.I need to leave, get out of here. I won’t let this happen again.But who would put him up?Where do I go? I can’t leave Ada.Would they ask him to stay if he tried to leave? Ada would, but would Darcy? People left, moved on—it’s what they did. Why couldn’t he? He’d asked Harry to stay—begged him to—and Harry, what had he done? He’d left him, ignored him for years.
The dog barked, a little sound that made him turn his head. Bleary eyed, he looked at Captain, who stood on his legs and stared at him quizzically. He rose to touch the dog, to scratch his head. Captain sniffed into his open palm and nuzzled his head against his stomach. He kissed his head, an affection he’d nevershown an animal before, and rubbed his floppy ears, which made Captain’s tongue stick out like the nub of an eraser. “Good boy,” he said and scratched some more, the collar rattling against his thin neck as he did. He held it to stop the noise, brushed a finger over the silver tag, a burnished swirl that read “CAPTAIN.”
He opened his drawer and took out a bundle of letters, the ones he’d stashed at the bottom, beneath a collection of things, and untied the string that secured them. He brushed a light finger over one of the postcards, a picture of white-capped mountains and a Swiss stamp in the corner. Harry’s messy scrawl. This had been the last one he’d received, before three of his letters had gone unanswered. And then all the texts. It read:
Greetings from the Alps!
Having so much fun up here in the mountains. It’s always great when Mom and Dad find the time to go skiing. They’re still incredibly busy. Dad’s phone is always going off—he’s practically working through the trip—and Mom’s planning all that charity work (which I’m totally bored with hearing about), so I get the log cabin pretty much to myself. Nothing’s changed though—they still argue all the time, and I have to pretend I haven’t heard. They’ve even dropped the D word a couple of times recently, which, to be quite honest with you, might do us all some good.
(That’s divorce, you sicko!)
I’m sorry to hear that things are hard. But hang in there, Bron. You’ll be out of there in no time. I’m sure of it.
Hazz
And that was the last of them. Bron had imagined all sorts of reasons behind the unanswered letters. First, he’d blamed the weather, which had been incredibly windy and overcast those last few months—there were probably tornadoes and hurricaneshappening in America—and then the Royal Mail, who could’ve changed their prices without his knowing it. For his last letter he glued a few extra stamps, just in case. He blamed his schoolteachers, who were conspiring against him, hijacking the letters that would have surely arrived. Or perhaps Harry’s parents did get a divorce, and the separation had taken its toll on him. Was he okay? Was it time he needed? Yes, that was it. Time. And so he’d given him time. Of course Harry couldn’t write to his friend overseas when there was so much going on right there on his doorstep.
But time was not his friend. Harry continued to play on his mind. All smiling and happy and never thinking of him. Bron couldn’t name the feeling that constantly seized his chest. Betrayal? For leaving him? For never coming back? No, it was more than that. It was the feeling of years, a culmination of time, seeing not words with every book he read, but only Harry’s name, and then hearing only Harry’s voice in every character’s dialogue, and seeing only his body lingering in the shadows at his bedside. It was the feeling of living every day knowing that at any moment the thought could spark:Where is he? Why has he left me? I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked up.Appearing like a ghost guised in flesh if Bron would let it, the years of practice to silence these thoughts unraveling now, a mechanism breaking.
He thought of his name—Harry, Harry, Harry—and applied the tourniquet, cutting off the phantom before it appeared in the dark. Harry—Harry—Har—Ha—white blurs swirling behind his tight eyelids, and nothing but the sharpness of his jaw as he bit down, down, his teeth grinding and the heaviness of his watering eyes to remind him that he was ever there. Still it seeped through, bled into more thoughts, into reasons why Harry had done what he’d done:You’re a loser. You’re not good enough. What is wrong with you? He was just being a good person. It was all pretend. He felt it was his duty to look after you, to be your friend.And these letters were further proof of his being let go.What were you thinking? You’ll always be left behind. Always. Always.
And he could see it happening again here with Darcy. Darcy, who ebbed like a wave, coming and going, disapproving of him too. Criticizing everything and everyone, always keeping his distance from his family and now, again, from him. He’d been tricked into believing that Darcy was some romantic hero, someone he could rely on, but instead he’d been keeping secrets from him—from everyone—the entire time. What had he to hide now? What could be more important than his family at this time? There was something much darker happening in the house, and Bron would not be blind to it. Harry had already taken over his life. He would not let the same happen again with Darcy. He needed to know the truth before leaving.
He pulled together the true facts he had, starting with what Ada had told him: that Darcy had been, according to her witness, the last person to leave the library.“He was so angry,”she’d said. Whatwasit that had caused him to react this way?The photo album …Ada said he’d walked away with the photo album.
Suddenly, there it was. The step he’d force himself to take. He needed to see the evidence for himself. Tangible evidence: a material record or relic that would reveal the truth and shatter his fantasies of who he thought Darcy to be. No more flights of fancy, no more tendency to make things up in his head or pretend that people needed him when they didn’t. That they wanted him. What he wanted to see was proof, actual proof of Darcy’s marriage. Of the wrong he had done Giovanni and to his own daughter. The answers were there in the photo album. And he was determined to see them for himself.
16
BRON TWIDDLED HIS THUMBSand scratched his head, to-ed and fro-ed from bed to door, occasionally glancing back at the clock to see only a minute had passed—now five am—though it’d felt like an hour. He’d convinced himself he needed to do this now, and so he got up and did.
He peered through the keyhole to ensure Ada was still asleep, and passed through the gallery without turning on any of the lights. He could navigate parts of the house blindfolded. How might it seem to be caught in Darcy’s bedroom? His nerves, always visible on his face, would give him away. He could spin something to satisfy Ada’s interrogations if she were to catch him, tell her that he was sleepwalking and found himself there. It was Clarence, always walking about the house, and popping up in unexpected places, who’d be more trouble to him.
He pulled on the door handle at the end of the way and caught his breath. It was heavier than he’d expected—locked. But there was a key left in the hole, which unlocked with an easy twist. He wedged open the door and closed it softly behind him.
He felt the wrongness of his trespassing, like a smog in the air he would choke on. The room itself was large: the entrance was spacious, carpeted, and mostly bare, excluding the great ebony cabinet tucked into the side. On the left was another door, which,when propped open, led to an en-suite bathroom, modern in its glossy white, with a floor-to-ceiling shower in the corner. The sink’s wide basin flecked with the clippings of Darcy’s dark stubble. Water marks stained the silver tap and the mirror that hung above it. He brushed a finger over the shelf that held Darcy’s toothbrush, his moisturizer, the expensive-looking perfume bottle with its brownish liquid and golden cap that took the shape of what looked like a rhinoceros.
He went up a step into the main area of the bedroom, where the carpet cut off to wooden flooring and the wall curved to the fitted window seat; a freestanding bathtub with silver legs was centered beneath the oriel window overlooking the gardens and fields. So silent was the room that, even barefoot, each step sounded like a stomp. To the left, the four-poster bed had one side of its curtains closed. He caught his breath, mistaking the unmade bed and discarded pillows for a body, at first Darcy’s, then a corpse, lying still behind the crimson drapes. On the floor beside the bed, and half tucked behind another wardrobe, was a large portrait, an oil painting of a man who resembled Mr. Edwards but whose face was slimmer, with harsher features and brooding brown eyes. As Bron passed and opened the doors and drawers to things in search of clues, the eyes followed him about, as much a presence as any knowing ghost would be.
He found them quickly on the bookcase: two great leather-bound volumes at the end of a row of orange Penguin Paperback Classics. He plucked them off the shelf and relieved the weight in his hands by dropping them onto the bedspread. He flicked one open to pictures he’d seen before—of Darcy as a baby, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, the photographs of Darcy and Giovanni at the riverside. He leafed to the end, but it was all more of the same: family photographs, holiday, snapshots, Darcy and Giovanni, and then Darcy as a child again. He swapped it for the second volume, skimming through the scenic photographs of mountains and seascapes, a place that looked like Rome. Then, just like that, he stopped skimming.
There was no denying that Toni Vespa made a beautiful bride, standing as she did upon the stone steps leading up to the manor. Her white train ran the length of the stairs that spilled down to the gardens; her neck was erect and tilted, and her manicured hands clasped a bouquet of flowers. She appeared at once camera shy and yet destined to appear before it. Bron couldn’t see any bump; if she was pregnant, it didn’t show. A second photograph had her standing with a straight-necked and much thinner Mr. Edwards, pulling at his collar, lips tipped upward into an almost forced-looking smile as he held her arm in his. Another photograph of bride and father-in-law, and then Mr. Edwards and Darcy. The two men stood beside each other like two polished columns, identical in their choice of formal wear, though where Darcy wore a neckerchief, Mr. Edwards wore a tie; where one had chosen a gray top hat, the other wore it black. Finally, one of the bride and groom: both man and woman beautiful in their own right, a couple who contrasted with and yet complemented each other so well. Anyone who looked at them would immediately recognize the suitability, the inevitability, of their pairing.
But what about Ada? Had she come across this photograph when flicking through these pages? Was she old enough to understand the true meaning of what was being captured? That would mean she knew about Darcy being married, and that he was her father. No, she couldn’t know. He looked at them again. To a less comprehensive eye, Darcy could have been just anyone standing beside this bride. A friend of the family. He felt a prick, then, a tugging at his heart. For bride and groom looked not at each other, but into the lens with lifeless eyes. They stood apart, appearing as though the photograph had captured the in-between moment of the photographer directing the proxemics of his models. Bron examined the slight extension of Darcy’s arm toward the outskirt of the composition, animating the image into life. He couldn’t quite explain it, the way Darcy’s hand reached out for something outside the edge of the frame, his pinkie stuck in an inconspicuous movement. Was it a twinge of the wrist? Or something more?Was he reaching out for someone else? And then, on the next page, the photograph Ada had described to him.
Here was a photograph of a woman propped up by pillows in a hospital gown, hair matted, eyes sunken, a woman who held onto her baby. Toni looked different from the woman she was today, more youthful and glowing. A different nose altogether, much like Ada’s nose. She smiled into the camera.
A&A, newborn, 2:15 pm, 7.6 lbs
