Emily Winslow - The Whole World

I haven’t seen Dad except at the trial. He sent me a present for my last birthday, a beautiful copy of a sixteenth-century planetary model, a pre-Copernican Earth-centered universe, to go with my intended studies. It spins beautifully, representing the best effort of an early scientist, all of whose hard work hinged on an error. I think Dad was admitting that he’d been wrong about a lot of things, fundamentally wrong.

The card was in Dad’s writing, and the model was the kind of detailed, physical, well-engineered item he liked to share. But I think my brother helped him get it-I assume it was he who bought it and wrapped it. He probably helped Dad figure out to choose it in the first place. Why would Will do that? Why would he want to help Dad?

I didn’t try to see Jeremy’s family or attend the funeral. I think they would have flipped. I know that if you pressed them they wouldn’t say they held me responsible, but of course they did. I actually didn’t know his family that well. Jeremy and I had mostly seen each other at school.

The media was kind to me. I was never mentioned except sympathetically. They didn’t draw Dad right, though. They just assumed conservatism was involved. Dad’s actually agnostic and liberal. Who the hell knows what happened in his head?

I was made to go see a counselor; that was part of getting such a sweet deal with school attendance. I actually got a great one. Her name was Laurel Bell. Two nouns, just like that.

She said I didn’t have to say anything, but I did have to stay for the full hour each week, to give myself the chance to say something.

For most of the sessions I just played my cello.

For the last month before I left, I swear to God, we played poker. No kidding. She was awesome. We actually laughed.

When I told all this to Gretchen, she’d said, “What about your mother? How did she deal with all of it?”

And the answer was, I didn’t know. I didn’t think about her.

This is what I think happened here in Cambridge: I think Mom talked with Nick and found out what had passed between us. I think she saw another Jeremy. And I think she was another Dad.

It’s probably not rational to think that. Mom hadn’t been in the car with Dad and Jeremy. She hadn’t freaked about the condoms. But I’m sure there is this orbit around me, this moon-path, that Mom follows as much as Dad ever did. She takes too much of an interest in me. She’s too attached. I keep trying to cut her loose, but my gravity hauls her even across oceans. Some people think that Dad must have been antifeminist or Saint Paul obsessed, but they don’t understand that it wasn’t philosophy steering that car. It was an attachment to me. It’s me.

I walked back to St. Peter’s Terrace in the dark. The dark was nice. I feel safe when no one can see me.

My mother had been recorded on closed-circuit TV talking with Nick at New Square, at ten o’clock on the Wednesday night. That was the night before he was gone. The camera recorded her catching up with him and having a conversation that looked serious and, at the end, confrontational. When they parted, he went on toward the Grafton, chased by her a few minutes later. Mr. Tisch told me that the police actually don’t care about Jeremy. Isn’t that bizarre? They would have arrested her even without the taint of his death.

It also came out that Nick’s room at the Chanders’ had been burgled that night. It’s unclear exactly what’s missing, but the room was a mess and his laptop was nowhere to be found. Mrs. Chander has admitted that they sometimes leave the front windows partly open, because of the uneven winter heating of the town house.

To make it all worse, Nick’s friend Peter, who’d been with Nick that evening, says that Mom had been looking for Nick. Like how she did with Liv.

I’d never even met Peter. Apparently, he’s Nick’s best friend. Which is why it’s incredibly stupid that anyone thinks I was Nick’s girlfriend. I didn’t even know his best friend. Peter’s a grad student too. Liv says he always has a different girlfriend. Even Liv knew him. I know she’s been here a year longer than me, but that’s not the point. Liv knew him.

Nick’s wallet was found in a skip on Trumpington Street. A student says he saw it just lying on the top of the trash. Mom wasn’t anywhere near that part of town yesterday morning, but I guess she could have dropped it anywhere and someone else picked it up. I mean, that’s what the police think.

I’m not sure what I think.

I haven’t asked Mom what happened because I don’t visit jails. I made that decision three years ago and I’ve stuck to it.

Gretchen got pretty mad at me, actually, when I told her I didn’t want to help my mother. She didn’t seem to understand that this isn’t my problem. She took it far too personally. I know she worships her mother and all, but not all of us do.

While she lectured me about my “duty,” she accidentally knocked over a small unlit candle. It split from its brass dish and rolled off the coffee table. Before that moment, I’d never seen her scramble for anything. She thrust herself after it, missing again and again. For the first time she really seemed blind to me.

I tried to avoid the river on the day they dredged it, but little brooklets all over the city lowered with the Cam. The assumption of Nick’s death was everywhere.

An urge to memorialize him blew through the University. The choristers at King’s dedicated a service to him, tactfully aimed toward praying for God’s care for him, whatever his current condition. The voices of those little boys flew up to the ceiling, that elaborate ceiling eighty feet up. I’d not heard boy sopranos before. Their voices lack the weight and ringing of the grown female versions; they have a hollow, airy sound that floats and fills instead of aiming for a target. The effect is truly corporate, rendering the individual voices anonymous. It was difficult to imagine Nick once so small, a skinny little thing inside a cloud of white surplice.

It was difficult to imagine Nick at all, actually. And he’d been gone barely a week.

The envelopes were snatched out of my pigeonhole just as I reached for them.

“What the hell?” I demanded.

“Ooh, love letters?” Liv held them behind her back with both hands. Stretching her arms behind her like that stuck out her chest. Her shirt was tight. Then she turned her back to me, bringing the mail around to her front, and rifled through the stack: a journal, a bank statement, a mobile phone bill.

“No,” I said, not laughing, not cracking a smile. Not bloody love letters. Polly had run out of my office at Earth Sciences like I was a monster. I still smarted from it.

“Bor-ing,” Liv sing-songed. She put the mail back into its slot and tugged on my shirt.

“What are you doing?” I asked, brushing her hand off. She rolled her eyes toward the porters and waved that I should follow her outside.

Out on the cobbles of First Court she whispered: “There’s a party. Come on.” She pulled my hand. I resisted at first. I leaned back to counter her weight. “Come on!” she said again, giggling, adding her other hand and pulling harder.

Polly. She’d pushed me away, with her hands and then with her elbow.

It was nice to be pulled.

“All right, let’s go,” I said. My sudden compliance with Liv’s drag almost toppled her backward.

“Okay!” she said, slipping, righting herself, holding on. “Wow, okay.”