Carla froze. She was unprepared for how it took her, the feeling of a child’s body against hers for the first time in so long; she could scarcely breathe, could hardly bear to look down at his small head, at the rich chestnut of his hair, at the nape of his neck, on which she noticed two bruises. Around the size of a finger and a thumb, as though someone had grabbed him there, and pinched hard. When Carla looked up, she caught her sister watching them.
“He gets into fights at school all the time,” she said, turning away. Carla heard her clumping down the stairs, her tread strangely heavy for one so light.
Carla let the child hold her for a little longer, and then, gently, she removed his arms from around her waist and crouched down so that her eyes were level with his. “Is that true, Daniel?” she asked him. “Have you been fighting?”
He wouldn’t look at her for a moment. When he did, his expression was grave. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “sometimes people don’t . . . they don’t . . .” He blew out hard through puffed cheeks. “Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter, Dan. It does.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said, shaking his head gently, “because, I’m going away. I’m going to a new school. I’m going to live there, not here anymore.” He hugged her again, his arms around her neck this time. She could hear his breathing, quick and light, like cornered prey.
Angela confirmed it; he was going to boarding school. “His father’s paying. It’s the same one he went to, somewhere in Oxfordshire. It’s quite good, apparently.”
“Somewhere in Oxfordshire? Ang, are you sure about this?”
“You’ve no idea how difficult things are, Carla.” She lowered her voice. “How difficult he is.” Her voice had that hard edge again. “Don’t. Don’t look at me like that. You don’t see it, you don’t . . . you’re here once a fucking week, you don’t see how he behaves when it’s just me and him, you don’t . . . He was traumatized. Severely traumatized by what happened to him.”
Carla gave a swift shake of the head and Angela said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but it’s true.” She reached for her cigarettes, fumbled one out of the pack. Angela’s hands shook all the time now. Before, she’d been a little shaky the morning after the night before, but now it was constant, a tremor in hands that were always moving, always reaching for something to occupy them—a glass, a book, a lighter.
“Yes, of course he’s traumatized.”
“The psychologist says,” Angela said, lighting her cigarette, taking a drag, “that now he’s telling her that he saw . . . you know, that he saw him fall, that he saw Ben fall. He’s saying that it wasn’t just that he found him, but that he actually saw it.” She closed her eyes. “He’s saying that he screamed and screamed, that no one came, he’s saying—”
Carla held up her hand—Angela was right, she didn’t want to hear this. “Please,” she said. She took a moment to allow her breath to steady. “But surely they can’t think—you can’t think—that the answer to his trauma is to separate him from his mother?”
“His mother is the whole problem,” Angela said, crushing her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. “He blames me, Carla, for what happened.” She looked up at Carla, wiping tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “He told his psychologist that what happened was my fault.”
It was your fault, Carla thought. Of course it was your fault.
ELEVEN
Could you open your mouth a bit wider please, sir? There was a young woman, brisk and uniformed, bending toward him, inserting a plastic stick into his mouth, and while the experience ought to have been intrusive and unpleasant, Theo was disappointed to admit to himself that he found it stirring. He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse. He tried not to look at her while she was taking his fingerprints, but when finally he met the young woman’s eye he could tell that she sensed something, something that made her uncomfortable, and he felt like a total shit. He wanted to say to her, I’m sorry, I really am. I’m not like that. I’m not one of those. I’m a one-woman man.
Theo had only ever loved Carla. There were women before and there had been the occasional one since, but Carla was without question the one. The one and the many, he supposed, because there was this Carla and there was the previous Carla; it seemed as though over the course of his life, he’d known multiple Carlas and loved them all, would continue to love them in whatever incarnation they appeared.