Emily Winslow - The Whole World

“What do you mean? Do you know something?” She stopped walking and got right up in my face all of a sudden, my height, eye to eye.

“No! No, I just…” I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. “He’s got to,” I said. “He’s got to come back.”

She backed down, started fiddling in her bag, digging around. “The last time I saw him I was really angry,” she confessed.

At Nick? I didn’t think he could make anyone mad.

Alexandra looked both ways. She turned off the main avenue onto a side street; I followed.

“He’d hate that I’m doing this,” she said, putting a cigarette in her mouth. “Do you want one?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

Her lighter was made of purple plastic. She lit and sucked in. “He’s such an older brother,” she said, looking just straight ahead, leading the way.

We turned again, onto Tennis Court Road, parallel to Trumpington but much more private.

“What do you mean, ‘older brother’?”

“You know what I mean. He just thinks he knows everything. If he were still here I’d still be angry. But because he’s gone, I don’t get to be angry anymore.” She raised her voice. “I’d be really, really angry. I probably wouldn’t even talk to him.” Tears squirted out of her eyes.

We stopped again. Because we were under one umbrella, her little curls of smoke got caught around my face.

“Why does he live at the Chanders’ house?” I asked, as if this little girl weren’t baring her grief to me. I didn’t want it. I didn’t have room for hers too.

“He’s a grown-up,” she said, incredulous at my ignorance. “Grownups move out.”

Of course. He was twenty-four. He was a “grown-up.” That description was unbearably sweet.

Alexandra threw her cigarette stub onto the ground and stomped hard on it.

Nick is a grown-up. I’d treated him like a junior high boyfriend. Hold hands, kiss kiss. It made sense he’d gone to Liv. I’d taken him for granted. It wasn’t fair that I was being treated like a grieving widow. I hadn’t earned it.

Finally I realized that we’d stopped because we’d arrived at the juice bar where she was meeting her friends. Two girls in school uniforms that matched each other, but not Alexandra’s, waved at her from inside.

Alexandra got to the point. “Did you phone on Wednesday? To our house?”

She sounded so accusatory that I tilted my head in response. “What? No.”

“Oh.” She rubbed the sidewalk with the bottom of her shoe. “I was kind of rude. I just wanted to apologize.”

She was in the shop in an instant. One of her friends hugged her. The other one stretched her neck to get a look at me.

Back at Peterhouse I put my academic robe on over my clothes.

I found its anonymity a comfort. I ate more and more at formal hall in the evenings, for an excuse to wear it.

Nick had been gone only a week when I found out that the police were planning to dredge the Cam. I almost phoned Morris to tell him not to do it. They should keep looking for Nick alive, not scrape the bottom of the river for a body. But telling him that wouldn’t change anything. I’ve dealt with police before. They listen to everything, in case your words might be useful to them, but they never do what you say.

I went to Magdalene to tell Liv, but she wasn’t in. I was just outside the porter’s lodge writing a note for her when Richard Keene, Nick’s thesis supervisor, came out of the chapel. I’d met him once, with Nick. I’d heard he only walked, never drove or cycled or took the bus. He said it kept the pace of life human.

“Good morning, Polly,” he said.

“Hi, Dr. Keene.” He offered that I could call him Richard, which was nice. But he wasn’t even one of my teachers, or someone whose house I go to, like Gretchen. I wanted to call him Dr. Keene. It felt safer to live in an organized world.

“Congratulations,” I said. “Nick told me that you’re getting married.” He was marrying a medical doctor and going off on a honeymoon at the end of term. Was that really the coming Sunday, four days away? “I mean, he told me that before… before he was gone.”

My hands had been shaking since I got there. My handwriting on the note to Liv was all over the place. Now that I spoke, my voice was shaky too. Dr. Keene looked worried about me. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“They’re going to dredge the Cam,” I blurted. I showed him the note I’d written Liv. It said the same thing, in a diagonal line across the paper: “They’re going to dredge the Cam.”

Dr. Keene paled.

“Not today,” I clarified. “They’ll wait for the rain to stop.” To illustrate my point, water suddenly sheeted down, obscuring the view through the arch of Magdalene’s gatehouse.

We waited under the shelter of the entryway.

“You go to church there?” I asked, meaning the college chapel from which he’d just come. I couldn’t discuss Nick anymore. And I was curious. From the creationists I knew back home, I’d just assumed people who worked with evolution stayed away from church.

“My Sunday church is near Lion Yard,” he said, waving his hand toward town. “But I sometimes go to Magdalene’s chapel for a more formal service mid-week.” He looked back into the courtyard, at all the windows lined up just so and the neatly trimmed grass and the designated paved paths. “I find that formality is a comfort in the midst of chaos.”

So he felt the world spinning too. That was good to know.

“Dr. Keene,” I said, “do you really think-”

And then I saw her. My mother. She was on the other side of the road, looking for me.

I grabbed Dr. Keene’s arm, then let it go. I hardly knew him. I shouldn’t be touching people I don’t know. Mom crossed, ignoring the bicycles and the enormous red double-decker buses going both ways. For a moment I couldn’t see her, as one of those buses drove between us. Then she was closer. Then she was there.

Dr. Keene is the same size as my dad. I stepped back to put his shoulder between me and Mom. The wind changed direction; rain from the open courtyard behind us soaked my back.

Mom joined us in the shelter of the gatehouse. She dripped. She looked like a melting candle. She shook herself off and gave a little conspiratorial smile to us, like a stranger commiserating about the weather.

Dr. Keene spread his arms protectively. He didn’t realize who she was. It was refreshing to find someone I knew in Cambridge whom she hadn’t already hunted down.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said from behind him. I meant in England.

“I know. It’s such an expensive city. But I’ve been looking at apartments. The rents are higher here than I’m used to, but-”

“No.”

She looked at me with coolness instead of her usual beggar’s eyes. “I still have British citizenship and I can live where I wish. It’s not up to you.”

I stepped out from behind Dr. Keene. “You can’t leave Will,” I said. My brother.

“Polly,” she said gently. “Will is in college now. You know that.”

Of course he is. But I still pictured him at fifteen. Everything at home is frozen there in my memory.

“I’m divorcing your father,” she said formally, embarrassed to be saying it in public. My refusal to meet with her more conventionally had reduced her.

I’d expected it, but, good God, I didn’t need this now. Later, later, my eyes pleaded. Not now.

“Okay,” I said. Really, what else was she supposed to do?

It’s not like I hadn’t known this was coming. She’d started taking birth control pills again just before I left. We only had one bathroom, and she took one right in front of me, while I was brushing my teeth.

“And there’s something else. Your father…”