The Whole World (7 page)

We couldn’t fit on the sidewalk with two umbrellas, so she ducked under mine. She was headed for town and we walked together. “I know this is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But, until last week, I didn’t know Nick’s family was in Cambridge.” I immediately regretted it. What a rude thing to say. “I mean, he talked about you. You especially. I know you play cello. I play cello. I just … I didn’t know you were here.”

We stepped over the great gutter called Hobson’s Conduit and slipped through a break in traffic to cross the road. When we got to the other side, we continued up the street and she said, “When Nick started boarding at King’s, my family relocated. I was born a year later. Before that, Mum and Dad and Nick lived in London.”

“Do you like it here?” I asked, stupidly, as if she’d been dragged here instead of born here. “I mean, do you ever wish your family had stayed in London?”

She shrugged. “I’ll go to uni in London if I want,” she said simply. “I didn’t know about you either.”

Okay, touché. Nick hadn’t mentioned me to his family.

“I read about you in the newspaper …” she said.

Of course she had, and in light of the latest it made me cringe. “Yes, well … Nick is my good friend. One of my best friends. I don’t think he was my boyfriend. It’s all gotten a little out of hand.” I didn’t want to talk about this. “Did your parents name you after the Romanovs?”

She rolled her eyes. “You have no idea how many people ask me that.”

How Cambridge. I doubt many people back home would have noticed.

“Mum’s brother who died was Nicholas,” she explained. “Dad’s dad was Alexander. It just worked out that way.”

Wait, what?
“Your mother’s brother died?”

She looked right at me. “He drowned when Mum was my age. He was ten. Now her second Nicholas is gone.”

She looked so sad.

“I know he’ll come back,” I said.

“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 …”

“No!” I said. “Not now, I have an appointment.” Lie, lie. “With Dr. Keene. We were just …”

“I’m Richard Keene,” he introduced himself, shaking her hand. “Mrs….? You must be Polly’s mother?”

“Yes, I am,” she said possessively. “It’s good to meet you, Richard.” She called him Richard! That really made me mad. Who does she think she is, that she can call these people she’s only just met by their first names?

I sucked in a deep breath. “Mom, I know you want a fresh start too. I get it. But Cambridge is mine. It’s mine, okay?” I tried to reason with her.

“You’re not all right, Polly,” she whispered. “You’re still …”

“What? What?” I deliberately raised my voice against her purposely delicate tones.

“You’re still very fragile,” she said. “And it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

I hate psychology. “I like it here and I’m good at it,” I defended myself.

“Nick—” she started to say, and I exploded.

“First, you didn’t want me to have sex. Now you think I’m ‘fragile’ because I don’t want to have sex. Pick one or the other, Mom—they can’t both be evidence of pathology.”

This was wearing on her. I’d said “sex” in front of a teacher.

“Polly, you’re a good girl.” This didn’t mean she approved of my behavior. It was just mother-speak for general affection.

“I spoke to Nick,” she went on. “He wasn’t angry at you. He just didn’t understand why you’d reacted the way you—”

“You told him?” I was incredulous. This was outrageous. “You told him?”

“It’s all right, darling, he understood.” She smiled instead of steeling herself against a blow. How little she herself understood.

It’s like she’d brought it with her in her suitcase and set it free. It was sniffing me now, nipping at me. It was dripping its spit on my feet. It was curling around me with a loyalty I would never be able to escape. I’d left it behind on purpose, to starve without care, and she’d dragged it across the ocean.

“You had no right to tell anyone!” I screeched. “You had no right!” I pounded at her chest while she tried to pull me into an embrace. We were locked a few inches apart, too close to punch as hard as I wanted to, too far to stop me from trying. “You had no right!” Keene’s arm slipped between us.

A porter emerged and commanded us to stop. Richard inserted his other arm and firmly parted us. I took one step back.

Mom spun out against the wall as if he’d tossed her. She covered her face and cowered there. Passersby stood in the rain to stare. I panicked for a moment that, in the midst of everything else, someone with a cellphone would call the police.

So it seemed perfectly reasonable that, suddenly, a policeman was there. “Hi, Morris,” I said, still catching my breath.

“Hello, Polly.” He nodded at me with formality. Then he turned toward my mother.

“My mom and I were just having an argument. It’s not a big deal,” I explained.

“Polly, step aside, please,” he said. Then he repeated that I should step aside, so I did.

“Miranda Bailey, I’d like you to come with us,” he began.

Mom brushed her hair with her hands. She wiped under her eyes.

“You don’t need to do that,” I said to him, as if he were taking Mom away for harassing me.

“Polly, get back,” he said sharply.

Dr. Keene tried to intervene. “Is this really necessary?” he hissed at the policeman.

For a moment everyone held still. I pressed back against the message board on the wall.

Morris squared his shoulders to Dr. Keene.

“It’s all right, Polly,” Mom said firmly. “The Inspector knows I’m happy to answer any additional questions he may have.”

Morris kept looking at Dr. Keene, waiting for him to back down, but he didn’t. “Mrs. Bailey,” Dr. Keene said to my mom, but looking directly back at Morris, “would you like me to come with you?”

“No!” I said. “No, she doesn’t have to go….”

“Polly,” Mom said firmly. “I’m happy to help.” She took Morris’s arm like they were going to the theater. He passed her off to a uniformed officer. She said to Dr. Keene, “Thank you, but I’ll be all right.”

“Sorry, Polly,” Morris said quietly.

Dr. Keene grabbed Morris’s arm. I couldn’t believe it. I think it’s really important not to touch a policeman. I pulled on Keene to make him stop. I wanted to protect him. I hadn’t jumped up for my mother, but here I was jumping for him.

“I can take it from here, Dr. Keene,” Morris said, shaking him off. “Take a step back, Richard.” I thought, How did he know his name?

“Did you really need to do it this way, Morris? In front of her daughter?”

Morris wagged his head back and forth, then laughed, which was horrid.

“You do your job, Richard, and I’ll do mine. Come along,” he said to the officer. They had a car parked nearby.