The Square Root of Summer(70)

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 stuff 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.

“Grü? 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?”