The Legacy (46 page)

“But why? You said his head wasn’t hit that hard?”

“It wasn’t. It was the time he spent not breathing. The time before Dad got to him and got air back into his lungs.” Dinny sounds so tired now, leaden. There’s a sparkle of pity, at the core of me, but I can’t let it fill me yet. Too many other things to feel.

I’ve finished my coffee before I speak again. I hadn’t noticed the silence. Dinny is watching me, tapping his ankle with one agitated thumb, waiting. Waiting for my reaction, I suppose. A defensive gleam in his eye.

“It didn’t blow over, you know. Not for his parents. Not for our family . . .”

“Do you think it blew over for me? For
my
family? I’ve had to see him nearly every day since then, wondering if it would have been different if I’d tried to revive him myself, that bit sooner . . . If we
had
taken him to hospital.”

“But you’ve never told. You’ve kept him—”

“Not
kept
him. Looked after him . . .”

“You’ve kept him and let his family—let his
parents
think he was dead! You’ve let Beth and I think he was dead.”

“No, I had no idea what you and Beth were thinking! How would I know? You
ran
, remember? You ran and washed your hands of it! You never even came to ask me about it! You left him with me and I . . . we . . . did what we thought was best.”

This I cannot dispute.

“I was eight years old!”

“Well, I was twelve—still just a kid, and I had to let my parents think I’d nearly killed another boy. That I’d
brain-damaged
another boy. At least, that’s what I thought I had to do. That’s what I thought was right. By the time I realized you two were never coming back, it was too late to change anything. How much fun do you think that was?”

I feel the blood run out of my face when he says this.
I had to let them think
. . . A memory fights its way through the clash in my head. Henry bending down, surveying the ground, gathering four, five stones. Water in my eyes and in one ear, which boomed and wobbled, mangling their voices; Henry, taunting, throwing names at Dinny; Beth’s shrill commands:
Stop it! Go away! Henry, don’t!
Henry said,
Pikey! Filth! Dirty gyppo! Thieving dog! Tramp!
With each word he threw a stone, whipping it from the shoulder with that throw boys are taught at school, but girls never are. A throw that would have sent a cricket ball back from the boundary, and a good aim. I remember Dinny crying out as one hit him, grabbing his shoulder, wincing.
I remember what happened
. And I picture Beth, in the doorway just now; her shout following us, and the terror on her face.
No!

“I have to go,” I whisper, stumbling to my feet.

“Erica, wait—”

“No! I have to go!”

I feel sick. There’s too much inside me, something has to come out. I rush back to the house, tripping over my feet. In the cold downstairs toilet, where the frigid toilet seat makes your thighs ache, I collapse, throw up. But with my throat burning and the stink of it all around me, I somehow feel better. I feel justly punished. I feel as if some kind of retribution is beginning. Now I know what has tortured Beth all these years. Now I know why she has punished herself so, why she has sought such retribution. Splashing my face in the basin, I gasp for breath, try to find the strength to rise. I am cold with fear—I think I know what retribution she might seek from herself.

“Beth!” I call, coughing at the ragged feeling in my throat. “Beth, where are you—I have to tell you something!” On trembling legs, I run in and out of all the downstairs rooms, my heart skittering, making me dizzy.
“Beth!”
My voice is rising, almost a scream. I pound up the stairs, run to the bathroom first then along the corridor to Beth’s room. The door is shut and I throw myself against it. Inside, the curtains are closed, the room in darkness. And what I fear the most, what I dreaded to see is there in front of me. It fills my vision, hollows me out.
“No!”
I rush into the shadowed room. My sister, curled on the floor, her face turned away from me. Long-bladed scissors gripped in her fragile hand, and a dark pool around her. “Beth, no,” I whisper, with no more air in my lungs, no blood in my veins. I fall to my knees, gather her up; she is so light, insubstantial. For a second I am struck dumb by the pain, and then she turns her face to me, and her eyes are open, focused on mine, and I laugh out loud with relief.

“Erica?” Her voice is tiny.

“Oh, Beth! What have you done?” I smooth her hair back from her face and then I realize. She has hacked it off, all of it. The dark pool on the floor is the severed length of her hair. Without it she looks like a little girl; so vulnerable. “Your hair!” I cry, and then I laugh again and kiss her face. She has not cut herself, is not bleeding.

“I couldn’t do it. I wanted to but . . . Eddie . . .”

“You
didn’t
want to do it! You
don’t
want to do it! I know you don’t, not really,” I tell her. I pull her further into my arms, rock her gently.

“I did! I did want to!” she weeps angrily, and I think she would pull away from me if she had the strength. “
Why
did you make him tell you?
Why
wouldn’t you
listen
to me?”

“Because it had to happen. It did. But listen to me—Beth, are you listening? This is important.” I glance up, catch my reflection in the dressing table mirror. I look gray, spectral. But I can see it in my own eyes—the truth, waiting to spill out. I take a deep breath. “Beth, Henry’s not dead.
Harry
is Henry! It’s true! Dinny told me the whole story . . . he didn’t die. They took him off to some friend of theirs for first aid and then they moved him around different camps for years and years. That’s why none of the searches ever found him.”

“What?”
she whispers. She watches me like she would a snake, waiting for the next strike.

“Harry—the Harry your son just spent the Christmas holiday playing with—Harry is
our cousin Henry
.” Oh, I want to release her; I want to mend her! In the silence I hear her breathing. The fluttering of air, pushed from her body.

“That’s not true,” she whispers.

“It’s true, Beth. It’s true. I believe it. Dinny wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened, so Mickey thought
Dinny
had done it, and they didn’t want him to be taken away . . .”

“No, no,
no!
None of that is right! I killed him! I
killed
him, Rick.” Her voice rises to a wail, wanes to a sliver. “I killed him.” She says it more calmly now, as if almost relieved to let the words out.

“No, you didn’t,” I insist.

“But . . . I threw that stone . . . it was too big! I should never have thrown it! Even Henry wouldn’t have thrown one that big. But I was so angry! I was
so
angry I just wanted to make him
stop
! It went so high,” she whispers.

I can see it now. Finally, finally. Like it was there all along. Girls aren’t taught to throw properly. She flung her whole body behind it, let go of it too soon, sent it too high. We lost sight of it against the incandescent summer sky. Henry was already laughing at her, laughing at the ineptness of the throw. He was already laughing when it came back down, when it hit his head with a sound that was so wrong. Loud, and wrong. We all knew the wrongness of that sound at once, even though we’d never heard it before. The sound of flesh breaking, of a blow to the bone. It was that sound that made me sick just now. As if I were hearing it again for the first time, and only now rejecting it. And then all that blood, and his glazed look, and my scramble from the water, and our flight. I have it now. At last.

“I didn’t kill him?” Beth whispers at last, eyes boring into my face, mining me for the truth.

I shake my head, smile at her.

“No. You didn’t kill him.”

I see relief seep into her face, slowly, so slowly; like she hardly dares believe it. I hold her tightly, feel her start to cry.

L
ater, I go back to the camp. In the early afternoon, with the sun burning through the mist. As the first glimpses of sky appear—gauzy, dazzling shreds—I feel something in me pouring out, pouring up. I’m left with a neutral feeling that could become anything. It could become joy. Perhaps. I sit next to Harry on the steps of his van. I ask him what he’s doing and although he doesn’t speak, he shows me, opening his hands. A tiny penknife in one hand, a half-cylinder shard of tree bark in the other, and patterns scratched into it, geometric shapes bumping and overlapping. He is miraculous to me now. I try to take his arm but he shuffles, doesn’t want me to. I don’t force it. Miraculous. That Henry could grow into this gentle soul. Was he damaged or, rather, was something knocked out of him by Beth’s blow? The spite? The childish arrogance, the aggression? All the base things, all of Meredith’s legacy, all the hate she taught him. He is a cleanly wiped slate.

I let him keep working, but I tie his dreadlocks into a chaotic knot behind his head so I can see his face. I sit, and he works, and I watch his face. And slowly, familiar things surface. Some of his features settle back into the shapes I knew. Just here and there, just traces. The Calcott nose we all have, narrow at the bridge. The blue-gray shade of his irises. He doesn’t seem to mind me watching. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“He recognized you, I think,” Dinny says quietly, coming to stand in front of us. His arms hang loosely at his sides, hands in fists, as if he’s ready for something. Ready to react. “That first time you saw him in the woods and he stopped you passing by. I think he recognized you, you see.” I look up at Dinny, but I can’t speak to him. Not yet. Tendons standing out on his forearms, ridges under the skin, tense with the clench of his hands. He was right. Everything has changed. Across the clearing, Patrick emerges from his van and gives me a solemn nod.

I go up to fetch Beth as the light is failing. She has been lying down for hours. Assimilating. I tell her who is downstairs and she agrees to see him. All the solemnity and the dread of one going to the gallows. Her bluntly cropped hair lies at odd angles, and her face is immobile, unnaturally still. Some force of will it must be costing her, to keep it that still. In the kitchen the lights are on. Dinny and Henry, sitting opposite each other at the table, playing snap and drinking tea as if the world has not just tensed itself up and thrown off everything our lives were based upon, like a dog shaking off muddy water. Dinny glances up as we come in, but Beth only looks at Henry. She sits down, at a safe distance, and stares. I watch and wait. Henry shuffles the cards clumsily, dropping a few onto the table that he slides back into the deck, one by one.

“Does he know me?” Beth whispers; her voice so thin, so precarious. Something about to break. I sit beside her, put my hands out to catch her.

Dinny shrugs slightly. “There’s really no way of knowing. He seems . . . comfortable around you. Around both of you. It usually takes him a while to warm up to strangers, so . . .”

“I thought I’d killed him. All this time, I thought I’d killed him . . .”

“You did,” Dinny says flatly. Her mouth opens in shock. “You knocked him out and left him face down in the water—”

“Dinny! Don’t—” I try to stop him.

“If I hadn’t pulled him out, he
would
be dead. So just remember that before you start judging what
I’ve
done, what my family’s done . . .”

“Nobody’s judging anybody! We were just kids . . . we had no idea what to do. And yes, it was lucky you thought so fast, Dinny,” I say.

“I’d hardly call it lucky.”

“Well, whatever you want to call it then.”

Dinny draws in another breath, eyes narrowing at me, but Beth starts to cry. Not soft, self-pitying tears. Ragged, ugly sobs, torn out from the heart of her. Her mouth is a deep red hole. Low wails, rising from a darkness inside that’s almost palpable, horrible to hear. I sit back down, put my arms around her as if I can hold her together. Dinny goes to the window, leans his forehead against the glass as if he wants nothing more than to be gone from this place. I press my cheek against Beth’s back, feeling shudders pass up through her and into me. Henry sorts the cards into their suits in neat piles on the table. I can’t begin to decipher what I feel about Dinny, about this secret he’s been keeping. Henry, squirrelled away in England’s labyrinth of lay-bys and green lanes; in vans and motor homes and caravans and lorries; a simple side-step but a world away from the door-to-door search for him in the neat and tidy villages. It’s too big. I can’t see it clearly.

We part some time later, to deliver our respective charges to bed. Dinny goes into the night with Henry; I walk up the stairs with Beth. She cried for a long time and now she’s quiet. I think her mind is rewriting itself, like mine had to, and that she needs time. I hope that is all she needs. Her face looks raw. Not just red, not just rubbed. Raw like it is new-made, like it has yet to be shaped, yet to be marked by life. A childlike delicacy. I hope I see something wiped from it, some of her caginess, some of the shadow and fear. Too soon to tell. I pull the blankets up to her chin like a mother would, and she smiles a half-mocking smile.