Meg Rosoff - How I Live Now

By the time it became official that Aunt Penn wasn’t coming home, Osbert was eighteen, and since no one else was interested in adopting what was left of the family, it fell to him, though as Piper said, nothing much changed. He moved out last year, she told me, to live with his girlfriend but we still see him all the time.

Isaac, apparently, was still Isaac. He spoke more now, but mostly to the animals. He’d spent the last five years building up the flock of tangly-haired sheep again, and he and Piper had goats, a small herd of cows, pigs, two riding horses, a pony, and chickens. The vegetable gardens were huge, with a section left untouched to provide seeds for next year.

They had decided to be self-sufficient; it seemed the safest thing to be now, and the natural way for them to live. In addition to the farm, Piper said people brought Isaac livestock with a variety of physical and mental problems because they knew he could fix them and it was a luxury these days to give up on a sick or dangerous animal. She said people in the country called him the Witch Doctor, but in a nice way.

And then she told me about herself, how she was in love with Jonathan, and how he was training to be a doctor and she wanted to be one too. The universities had opened again but the waiting list to get in was long and Piper thought she might not qualify for entry this year. I could tell by what she said that it wasn’t some temporary teen romance, but what else would you expect of Piper? She told me he loved her. Well of course he did. I told her I couldn’t wait to meet him and it was true.

We walked the last few hundred yards uphill in silence and as we approached the drive I could see the honey-colored stone of the house. My hand tightened around Piper’s and my heart stuttered, contracting so hard on each beat that the blood whooshed in my ears.

Isaac was there to greet us, holding a pretty border collie by the collar.

He smiled as I hugged him close and smelled his familiar smell and saw how he had grown taller than me, and quiet and slender and strong.

“I wanted to come collect you,” he said gravely. “But Piper wouldn’t let me. She’s very possessive you know.” And he smiled at us both.

I think it was the longest sentence I ever heard him speak. It was accompanied by the familiar tilt of the head and a slightly raised eyebrow and I felt the ground rush away from me, so strong was the memory, and the fear.

“Come on,” Piper said, taking hold of my hand once more. “Let’s go see Edmond.”

Six years.

My fantasies were as constant as I was: Edmond and me. Living some sort of life.

That was it. I never bothered filling in the details. The details didn’t matter.

The day was warm and Edmond was outdoors, sitting carefully upright on a lawn chair in the white garden, his eyes half closed. He sat facing away from us and Piper went and knelt in front of him.

“Edmond,” she whispered, her hand resting lightly on his knee. “Edmond, look who’s come.”

He turned his head then and I couldn’t even move toward him or make my face have an expression.

He was thin, much thinner than I am now, his face worn. Where Isaac was lean and graceful, he just looked gaunt.

His eyes narrowed slightly and he turned his head back away from me and closed them again. Closed the subject.

I wasn’t prepared.

Piper pulled a metal folding chair over and pushed me into it and went off to make tea and at first I just looked at him and eventually he looked back with his eyes the color of unsettled weather. His arms were covered in scars—some new, some healing over, some disappearing into thin white lines. I could see the same thin lines etched around his neck and he’d developed a nervous habit of running his fingers along the ridges over and over again.

Edmond…

I didn’t know how to continue.

Not that it mattered. To him I was still thousands of miles away. The borders were still closed.

I sat there, awkward, not knowing what to do. I wanted to touch him but when he opened his eyes again the expression in them was poison.

Piper came back with the tea. Good old reliable English tea. Two world wars ago, battlefield nurses gave cups of tea to the wounded and it leaked through their bullet holes and killed them.

I turned and looked at the garden, meticulously tended, by whom, I wondered. The child angel had been cleared of moss and planted all around with snowdrops and white narcissus that poured out an overpowering scent. I thought of the ghost of that long-dead child, watching us, its desiccated bones sunk deep into the ground below.

On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I’ve never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn’t beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage.

It was Edmond, I thought. I recognized him in the plants.

I turned back and met his eyes, hard and angry and unyielding.

It was such a beautiful day. Warm and full of life. I couldn’t reconcile it with this scene.

Piper looked at me and smiled a small tired smile.

“Give him time,” she said as though he couldn’t hear us at all.

Well what choice did I have?

After that day, I could barely enter the garden without a huge effort of will. The air was suffocating, charged, the hungry plants sucking at the earth with their ferocious appetites. You could almost watch them grow, pressing their fat green tongues up through the black earth. They emerged selfish and starving, gasping for air.

Once inside, I couldn’t breathe. I felt claustrophobic, choked, desperately thinking bright thoughts so Edmond couldn’t get inside my head and know how terrified and furious and guilty I felt. But I don’t think he even tried.

And still he sat there, as still and as cold as the statue of the dead child.

I sat with him for a shorter and shorter time each day as my fear took over and the grasping whiteness of the garden blinded me.

I thought of excuses, involved myself totally in the farm. There was plenty of work to do so I could fool myself that no one noticed the obvious. It was like not eating. Everyone knew.

After a few days I found myself alone in the barn with Isaac. Piper had gone to meet Jonathan, returning from a week at the hospital. Travel was so difficult that it made sense for him to stay for long stretches without coming home.

For once Isaac looked at me directly, the way he looked at the dogs.

“Talk to him,” he said with no preface.

“I can’t.”

“Why else did you come?”

“He won’t listen.”

“He is listening. He can’t help listening. It’s what caused all the trouble for him in the first place.”

I knew any of them would tell me the whole story but I didn’t dare ask. I didn’t dare know.

I looked at Isaac’s eyes with their strange mix of warmth and dispassion. I could see that he suffered for Edmond as much as he could suffer for another human being.

And suddenly the thing inside that had kept me focused all these years rose in my throat like vomit. It was as strong as poison and for once I didn’t fight it down or try to reshape it as something polite.

“IF HE’S LISTENING SO HARD,” I shouted, “WHY CAN’T HE HEAR THAT THE ONLY WAY I’VE MANAGED TO SURVIVE EVERY DAY FOR ALL THESE YEARS IS BECAUSE OF HIM?”