Girl A(59)

Gabriel was in institution pyjamas, propped in the chair at the window. ‘I thought that you would be back,’ he said. And to the nurse: ‘It’s OK. I know her.’

‘There could be meetings,’ I said. ‘Drop-in sessions. Whatever – whatever you think might have helped.’

‘I’d like that,’ he said. His fingers and thumbs shaped a plaque in the air. ‘Funded by Gabriel Gracie,’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

‘And will I be able to take part, do you think? I could speak there – if that would help.’

‘Maybe. When you’re better, and you’re out of here, you can do whatever you want.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know it.’

‘Whatever you did,’ Gabriel said, ‘it worked.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘He didn’t come by,’ Gabriel said. ‘After you left. He passed a message to one of the nurses, instead – just to say goodbye. He did love me, Lex. In his own way.’

Perhaps, I thought. In his own way.

Gabriel stood to navigate the little room, touching the furniture as he went, as if we were in the dark. He took the papers from his bedside table and handed them to me, and I saw that they were already signed.

‘Out there this afternoon,’ he said. ‘You reminded me of Delilah.’

‘I’m not nearly that fierce, Gabe.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing exciting. The law, mostly.’

‘Delilah uses books in her way,’ Gabriel said. ‘And I guess you use them in yours.’





5


Noah (Boy D)


LATE IN THE EVENING, waiting for Devlin to call, I opened my favourite bookmark and checked the weekend’s results. On Sunday, the Cragforth Under 17s Junior Cricket Team had been all-out for ninety-seven, and defeated. Not such a good week.

I hovered at the tab beside Results, which was How to Find Us.

‘Come on,’ I said, to myself, and wandered down to the kitchen. With a kind of mundane magic, the lights in the corridor flicked on ahead of me. It was three thirty a.m. I assembled a bowl of cereal and black coffee, and returned to my desk. Devlin hadn’t called. The cursor still rested on How to Find Us.

I had only heard of Cragforth once, many years before. I was twenty, and had just secured my place at university. My parents and I had been for dinner, and Mum was upstairs, getting ready for bed. Dad and I sat at either end of the sofa, our legs touching in the middle, reading different sections of the newspaper. He balanced a glass of whisky on his chest.

My reading was a sham. In my head, I drafted and rephrased a question I had contemplated for some time. I had plotted various routes to it, discounting some and awaiting the right weather for others. This, I decided, was the day of the attempt.

‘I wonder if the others will go to university,’ I said, not looking up from the paper. ‘Besides Ethan, I mean.’

‘I don’t know,’ Dad said. ‘You’d hope so. But take you – it’s not as if it was easy. You had a lot of catching up to do.’

I turned the page. ‘That would be true for Delilah, too, I suppose,’ I said. ‘But the others were younger. Do you think Noah will, Dad?’

‘Noah’s different. He isn’t expected to remember anything at all. And he had an easier time than the rest of you. As things went – in that house – he was lucky.’

‘Where is he?’ I asked, and Dad stopped reading and stared at me.

‘Lex. You know—’

‘I’d just like to be able to think of him. That’s all.’

A toilet flushed upstairs, and I knew that Mum would soon be on the way down, coming to say goodnight and another congratulations. She was fiercely professional – she protected patients’ confidentiality like state secrets – and she wouldn’t entertain this line of questioning.

‘I don’t know much about it,’ Dad said, ‘other than that he’s well. The family who adopted him were in a little town – Cragforth, I think it was.’

I returned to the paper. He was strangely still, and no longer reading.

‘What?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘Nothing.’

In the weeks that followed, it was clear that Dad deeply regretted this disclosure. The morning after, he arrived in my room in his dressing gown, bearing a teacake. ‘This feels like a bribe,’ I said, and propped myself up in bed.

‘I had trouble sleeping last night,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have told you that, Lex. You need to promise me that you won’t use that information for anything at all.’

He was unable to say Noah’s name. He handed me the plate and sat at the end of my bed.

‘If you were anybody else,’ he said, ‘I would hope that you might just forget it.’

‘I won’t do anything,’ I said. ‘Really. I just wanted to know where he’d ended up.’

‘No emails or messages?’

To my dad, both the Internet and my intellect were all-powerful. I could be on a video call with Noah that afternoon.

‘No.’

He was beginning to smile. ‘And no carrier pigeons, either.’