Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(35)

“That’s all right.”

“They told us not to. They said to keep all the children where they were.”

“It’s fine.”

His father laced his fingers on top of Zachary’s head and stroked two thumbs along the lines of his eyebrows. It was something he’d always done, and for a moment Zachary felt that nothing had happened in between times. His mother hadn’t been lost, they’d never crossed the ocean, they’d never been pulled apart.

His father said, “Your old teacher warned me to fetch you home, back in the winter. I should have listened to her.”

“Miss North?’

“She said she was opening up that school again, and they couldn’t stop us bringing you home. But I thought she was trouble. And you know trouble is one thing for her, and another thing for us.”

“I understand.”

“But look at you. Your poor face.”

Zachary shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt. It looks worse.”

“I raised a liar. Are you hurt anywhere else?”

Zachary looked up at him. “When we get back to London can we go to the school, please?”

“I’m not sure it’s the best thing.”

“Please?”

His father sighed. “ ‘Well how can I say no to you now?”

Zachary looked back to the window. He wore the gray knee shorts and the gray duffel coat in which he had been evacuated from London, and he had nothing with him but his gas mask in its box. Two things you could do with the gas mask: you could put it on so your breathing made a nice pop-pop, the valves clicking on the inhale and the exhale so your breathing had an off-beat. Or you could run a stick across the ribbing of the pipe that led from the filter to the mask, and the zip-zip reverberated through the rubber straps and sounded like a washboard.

“What can I do for you?” said his father. “Need more cream on those cuts?”

“I wish it could go back to before.”

His father smiled. “Before what? You start wishing it back, at your age, soon you’re back in diapers.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, but I’m serious too. Where are you going to take it back to? This life hasn’t worked out perfect, maybe I give you that, but it’s got you and me in it. I don’t see what you could change and still have us be. And I don’t see it can be bad so long as we’re here for each other.”

“You won’t let them split us up again?”

“I won’t.”

It was better, from there. Low hills whistled by, woodland verse and field chorus, the rails in rattling tempo. His father fell asleep. London came closer. The other passengers divided their time between staring at the Negroes and pretending they hadn’t been. When they weren’t looking, Zachary licked his fingertips and ate crumbs from the gaps between the seat cushions. The woman in the seat beside him was writing a letter, pressing on the cover of a book to do it. She paused to think, looking out of the window. Finally she fell asleep with the letter loose on her lap, and Zachary ate it. It was one page, written on one and a half sides, and the blue ink tasted of Simone’s note. When the woman woke she looked at her lap and then around the floor of the compartment. Then she looked at him.

“Have you seen a letter I was writing?”

“Why are you asking me?” said Zachary. “Why not ask one of the others?”

His lips and tongue were blue. The woman looked at him thoughtfully, then blinked and began writing all over again. At Reading, where she was alighting, she gave him a Mint Imperial.

At Marylebone the locomotive pulled up and vented steam as if the stuff had been hurting its belly. Zachary and his father stepped down from the carriage. On the station concourse the crowd seethed, harried here and there by its own urgent need. London absorbed them entirely.

Zachary leaned against an iron column. He was weak with hunger, though he wasn’t about to make his father feel worse by admitting it. The blood drained from his head and he had to wait until the color came back into the world and the ringing in his ears stopped. Dying might be like this, an infinite losing of balance, like looking at yourself in the mirror, only with time instead of light.

They left the station to walk home. There were no smoldering craters. He had been evacuated for nine months, and the Germans hadn’t attacked at all. It made no sense to him, but he didn’t even know how to begin asking his father why. It must be obvious. If there weren’t something wrong with him, he would be able to see some particular meaning in London’s undamaged streets and say: “Ah, so that’s why they had to send us away.”

His mind drifted again. If there were bomb craters, you could see whatever was underneath London. You could climb down into the holes and come back up with your pockets full of it. Fossils, gold, instructions.

“You really want to go straight to the school?” said his father. “You don’t want to get cleaned up first?”

“I want to go.”

“But why? Haven’t those people done enough to you?”

He didn’t know how to explain it, how he was so weary of never understanding, so worn down and sad from it, and how a part of him dared to hope that Miss North might know the trick of making him less stupid.

“I just want to see,” he said.