NINETEEN
“I am home,” I said. “Look,” and I sat back on my bed next to Novo, grabbed a handful of my sheets, felt the breeze from the window above us on my face, heard the gulls. My room, clean and spacious and sunlit at the top of the house. “I’m so here,” I said.
“No,” Henry told me. “You think you’re here but you’re not. You’re with him. In between things. Outside them. You know this, don’t you? He told you this is how it works?”
“Obviously he has,” I said, but of course, I knew I didn’t fully understand it.
I reached for Novo’s hand. “And what if I want to be outside things?” I said. “What if I’m not ready to leave?”
Novo said, “If,” and he stretched and smiled and held on to my hips with his hands. “Of course you’re not ready,” and he looked at me, the happiest I’d ever seen him. Our last moment of pure joy maybe, the peak of the climb before downhill began, and then a little light went out in his eyes. Only small, but I saw it flicker. We both witnessed it, that peak, and we moved on, because you can’t go back even if you want to. Not even Novo could go back.
“Your mother needs you,” Henry said.
“My mother? Why? What’s up? What’s happened?”
Henry looked at Novo, not at me. “Did you burn through it?” he said. “Did you use the time up already?”
“What time?” I said. “What does that mean?”
Henry looked hard at Novo when he said, “It’s time for answers.”
“We’re coming,” Novo said. “Go back downstairs. Two minutes. I promise. We’ll be there.”
When Henry shut the door behind him, I said, “What’s going on?” and Novo kissed me, hungry and fierce. He hid his face in my neck and he stroked my side, almost lazily, with the tips of his fingers, stroked my stomach and thighs. I felt him breathe in and steady himself, about to speak.
“On the beach,” he said. “When you met me, I gave you a choice. Remember?”
“I do. You did.”
“And you said yes.”
“And I would again.”
His mouth moved against my skin, warm and soft, so I felt the words he spoke as well as heard them.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
We stayed there, quietly breathing, and then he got up and moved away, as decisively, as definitively as the cliff drop, and I reached after him and said, “No, not yet. Come back,” but he shook his head and wouldn’t look at me then.
“I can’t,” he said. “I really can’t,” and he turned away. I watched the muscles of his shoulders flex and open as he pulled on a shirt. “We’ve got to go.”
“Tell me what Henry’s talking about. What’s going to happen when we get down there?”
Novo sighed. “Some things don’t live very long. A mayfly has one day. A bubble breaks in seconds. The Now I kept you in lasted as long as it lasted.”
“The Now?” I said. “And what? Downstairs time has carried on without me?”
He nodded, and he didn’t stop watching me.
“It wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “I didn’t think it would. That’s what Henry meant when he said something snapped. This changes things.”
“Changes them how? I’m so confused.”
He walked across the room toward me and we stood close, our fingers touching. I heard Henry’s voice again, two floors below. I heard Mum. There was something in their voices, something coiled and tense, and I pictured it, that drama, waiting for us on the other side of the door like a primed cat, about to pounce.
“This doesn’t feel right,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Novo said. “We will fix it. And I’ll be here.”
“You promise?”
“On my life,” Novo said. “On my life, I swear to you. I’m not going anywhere.”
TWENTY
We came down the steps from the attic quietly, barefoot and half-dressed. Our tread on the stairs was light as anything, almost soundless. We were hardly there. Henry’s windows were wide open, curtains flailing in the wind, and Charlie Parker was all panic-panic, hell-for-leather, in a high, far corner of the room. I heard voices again downstairs, fraught and urgent, and in my head something started ticking, a chattering feeling, like crickets, a percussive, nervous pulse. I stopped at the top of the next flight.
“I’m not liking this,” I said. “I don’t want to go down there at all.”
Novo took my hand and pulled at me gently. “It’s all right,” he said. “We have to. Come on.”
We got closer and I heard a chair scrape and then Mum said something in a strangled, underwater voice that wasn’t hers, and I said, “Is she crying? Is that even her?”
My mum doesn’t cry. She sulks and quits eating and chain-smokes in the garden and breaks cups. But she’s not a crier. This had to be something bad. Something big. And knowing that threw me. It really did.
We stopped outside the kitchen. “What friend?” Mum was saying to Henry in her saltwater voice. “Jude hasn’t got any friends, Henry. We just got here.”
I put my eye to the crack in the door. Mum was wiping her face with both hands, bleary-eyed and frantic with distress.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she said, and even though Henry made all the right noises of dissent, she put her hands on her heart. “Something terrible has happened to my child. I can feel it in here. Jude’s gone. I just know it.”
“Mum,” I said. “I’m right here!” and I pushed on the door, ready to reassure her. But the door didn’t move, and Mum didn’t hear me.
I looked at Novo. “What’s going on? What’s happened to me?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, Jude. Look. You’re here.”
“But Mum thinks I’m not there,” I told him. “What happened? Why can’t she hear me?”
Henry put a fried egg on toast in front of Mum, and passed her a cup of tea. For a second, she looked down at it like she had no idea what it was. She scratched at a mark on the tabletop. The egg sweated. She pulled at the film of the yolk with her fork. It stretched out like wet elastic, and I felt the bile rise in my throat, felt it closing up small. My mum hates eggs.
“I called the police,” she said. “Jude doesn’t do this. It’s out of character. I told them already. It’s all wrong.”