“It sounds crazy.”
“I’ve seen some crazy things,” he says. “The trick is, once you realize you don’t know anything, the crazy is easier to accept. Just tell me. Everything.”
And surprisingly, Holly does. Because she’s exhausted, worn out by grief, by the fear she saw in her children’s faces when she reached for them. Because she’s tired of carrying this story alone. And because, when she looks at Christopher, she sees something in his eyes that tells her he also knows what it’s like when all your choices are terrible ones but you still have to choose.
She keeps her arms folded, her gaze on the water ahead. She starts on that long-ago day when everything changed, the day when she lost it all. The day of the crash. Every other loss since then has merely been fallout.
* * *
She begins in cool, measured language—the road was slick, the treads on the tires worn—but Christopher is good at asking questions. Soon she’s recounting details she’s kept locked away for years. She tells him of being trapped in the front seat, her legs pinned, of hearing the twins screaming. She tells how she could hear Isaac’s breaths grow slower and slower, further and further apart, until at last she couldn’t hear him anymore. Jack was still crying, sobbing, but she couldn’t reach him, and finally he went quiet too. She must have passed out, and when she woke up, it was in the hospital. She knew they were all dead. When they told her Jack had survived, she climbed out of her hospital bed to go to him. Since she couldn’t stand, she tried to crawl. After that they sedated her. When she woke, she tried again and again, until finally they wheeled her bed next to his. She tells Christopher of the agonizingly slow hours that turned into slow days, waiting to see if her son would live, not daring to wonder what type of life he would have if he did.
She doesn’t say Robert’s name once. The sounds he made before he died are what she wakes to on her darkest mornings. Robert is stored so tightly in her heart that if she mentions him, it will split and crack her in half. She’ll never be able to go on.
When her story reaches Peter, she leaves out anything that sounds too insane, like the tinkle of tiny bells, the flickering golden light outside the window, or how Peter got up to that window in the first place. She leaves out any mention of magic. She focuses instead on what he already knows—Peter’s charm, his magnetism.
“I thought he was a hallucination,” she tells Christopher. “A hallucination brought on by despair.”
She glosses over Eden’s childhood, simply says she has a genetic disease that aged her, that Holly hasn’t been able to find a cure. She ends with the other accident, the bookend to the first, where what had been taken from Jack was miraculously returned. She describes how he ran to her when she came home from her hospital vigil.
“The best I’ve been able to discover, Eden’s blood has a protein that promotes healing,” she finishes. “It works like an antibody, binding to damaged cells and repairing them. But it couldn’t heal her. Only other people.” She stares down at her hands. “And there’s one last thing. I’ve seen Eden. Just today—this morning,” she says to forestall the angry comment she can tell he’s about to make. “She wouldn’t come home with me, and I don’t know where she’s staying. But it’s not with Peter. She’s terrified of him.”
“Is she okay?”
Holly starts to speak, stops, waits for the pool of tears that is always just behind her eyes these days to settle into stillness. “I think so,” she says.
“Good,” he says. “That’s good. And it makes it even more important to find Peter before he finds her. Could he have found a way to use this . . . this protein, to create a drug?”
“It’s possible.” She thinks of the euphoria she’s experienced the times she’s tested Eden’s blood on herself, the flush of well-being she sees in Jack each time she administers it to him. “But he must be using it in conjunction with something else. The protein on its own couldn’t hurt anyone.” Holly doesn’t mention that Peter must have another source besides Eden for the protein. She’s sure Christopher has thought of that.
There’s nothing else she can say. They sit in silence for a long time, both of them looking out over the water in the twilight.
At last Christopher kick-starts the bike, wheels it into traffic. Holly doesn’t say a word. She sits erect the whole way back, touching him as little as possible. He drops her at the door.