“He didn’t die then,” said Preston. He gave her a flimsy half smile. “He survived, but he hit his head hard on the dashboard, and then on the pavement. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt—he was always reckless like that. It drove my mother mad. The ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital, and by the next morning he was awake and talking. Only the things he said didn’t make any sense.
“My father wasn’t from some well-heeled family, but he was a brilliant man. Self-taught, literary, very thoughtful. He easily held his own at the dinner table alongside my uncles with all their advanced degrees. He had a library in the basement with hundreds of books. What else? He loved animals. We never had any pets, but he would point out every rabbit he saw on the lawn, every cow we passed on the side of the road.”
Preston’s voice became smaller and smaller as he spoke. The grief in it made Effy’s heart wrench.
“I’m sorry,” Effy said again, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
“A traumatic brain injury, the doctors said at first. He might return to his old self eventually, but there was no way to tell. Day after day, and he hardly recognized us, my mother and my brother and me. Sometimes I could see a rare moment of clarity in his eyes, when he remembered someone’s face or name, but it would be gone again in just a blink. His body, externally, was unharmed—he could do all his regular things, supposedly. So the doctors let us bring him home, only it was like living with a stranger.
“He was intractable, combative. He broke glasses and shouted at my mother; he had never done that before. He tore all the books from their shelves. He was nothing like he’d been. Eventually we confined him—or rather, he confined himself—to the upstairs bedroom, where he spent every hour of the day watching television, sleeping. We brought him his meals on trays. I was the one who found him, in the end. Dead right there in the sheets. His eyes were open, and I remember the light of the television still flickering over his face.”
“Preston,” she started, but she couldn’t think of what to say. He gave her a tight nod, as if to indicate that he wasn’t quite done yet.
“When they did the autopsy, they found out that the doctors’ initial diagnosis had been wrong. It wasn’t a traumatic brain injury, or at least not the kind they had been envisioning. That we had been thinking of all along. It was hydrocephalus. Fluid in the skull and spinal cord that can’t be flushed out. The pressure builds and builds. If the doctors had known, they might have been able to put in a shunt, drain it out. But no one knew until the end, until he died. Hydrocephalus. Water on the brain.”
Preston’s voice was nearly inaudible now. Hollow-sounding. Resigned. Effy wanted to reach out and hold him to her chest, but she settled on laying her hand over his instead.
For a moment they both froze; she waited to see if she’d done something wrong, stepped too far over some invisible line. But then Preston turned his hand over and entwined their fingers.
“I wish I remembered,” he said very quietly, “the last time he pointed out a rabbit on the lawn. When I found him that day in the bedroom, all I could think of were the rabbits. That gentle, brilliant person he’d been—that person was dead long before he was. Sometimes I feel guilty even doing what I do, studying the things I study . . . because my father never had the chance. And he won’t even get to see me graduate, or read any of my papers, or . . .”
He trailed off, and Effy squeezed his hand. The wind rattled the car windows, and it was like they were awash in a churning river, clinging to each other so that the water wouldn’t drag them down.
Preston lifted his gaze, eyes meeting hers.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know. For listening, I suppose.”
“You don’t have to thank me for that.”
Preston was silent. After a beat, he said, “And, well, I suppose that’s partly why I don’t have much faith in the notion of permanence. Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn’t guaranteed. You can lose that, too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”
“I understand,” Effy said softly. “I understand what you mean.”
With great gentleness, Preston untwined his fingers from hers and placed both hands back on the steering wheel. “Let’s get back to Hiraeth,” he said. “I think we can still manage it before midnight.”
Somehow, even bereft of her sleeping pills, Effy managed to fall asleep. It was Preston’s presence that soothed her, just like it had the night before, his mere proximity enough to make her feel safe. The next thing she knew, the car had stopped, and her head jerked up from where it had been leaning against the cold window, her lashes fluttering blearily. Through the rain-speckled windshield, in the valley of the headlights, she could see the vague shape of the guesthouse. Her vision was still black at the edges, and her head felt very heavy.
“Hey,” Preston said. “We made it. Eight minutes to midnight.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice thick. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I fell asleep.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. I’m glad you got some rest.”
Effy scrubbed at her face, scraping off some of the salt tracks left on her cheeks. Her eyes were puffy. Preston got out and walked around the car to open her door for her. She stood up unsteadily, and he offered her his arm for support.
She took it, fingers curling into the fabric, feeling the lean, corded muscles through his shirt, pressing against him for warmth. She let him lead her up to the guesthouse. The night was damp and wreathed in mist, and there was no sound save for the crickets and their feet shuffling through the grass.
When they reached the doorway, Preston said, somewhat awkwardly, “You must be relieved to have your sleeping pills again.”
“Yes. I suppose I can’t expect you to lie chastely next to me every night.”
Preston gave a soft laugh and removed his arm from her grasp. “Good night, Effy.”
Effy’s stomach felt hollow with disappointment. But she said back, quietly, “Good night.”
She watched him as he walked back to the car, and watched the car until it had vanished into the darkness, taillights blinkering away. Only then did she go into the guesthouse and lie in the green bed.
If she went back outside, would she see him? The flash of white between the trees, the long, slick black hair? He had appeared to her so clearly, so many times, since that very first night on the bank of the river. Now she knew it was truly just her imagination. A sad little girl’s effort to make sense of a world that was insensibly cruel.
She felt her eyes start to brim again, and she squeezed them shut to stop the flow of tears. There was nothing left to do except try to be good now. To swallow her pills dutifully. To simply look away if she saw the Fairy King in the corner of her room. No more iron, no more mountain ash, no more fanciful girlish tricks.
No more Angharad.
Myrddin was dead now, in more ways than one. It was time to let him rest—or rather, it was time to bury him. They had the letters, the diary, and soon, the photographs. The truth would fall on top of his lifeless body like grave dirt, and maybe then she would be free.
Effy fumbled for the pill jar on the bedside table. When she closed her fingers around it, she felt a searing sense of relief.
Only this time, she didn’t take the sleeping pills to stave off thoughts of the Fairy King, or Master Corbenic, or Myrddin’s letters, or the girl from the photographs. She took them because otherwise, she would have lain awake all night, wondering what might have happened if she had refused to let Preston go.
Even though Ianto had initially encouraged her to leave, and even though they had technically made it back before midnight, the next morning, he was not pleased. He glowered at them over his coffee as water dripped steadily from the ceiling, over the glass chandelier, and pooled on the dining room table.
Seconds ticked by, punctuated by the falling of those large droplets.
“There’s a big storm coming, you know,” Ianto said at last, setting down his cup. “Two days from now. The biggest in a decade, the naturalists are saying. The road down to Saltney will be washed away until Saints know when.”
“I thought winter was meant to be the dry season,” Preston said.