“We’ve been out looking for you the whole time. If we’d known—” I stopped myself, but the implication hung in the air.
“That’s what Mom said. Because you were looking for me, Peter died.” She raised her chin a fraction, but blinked back tears.
“It’s not your fault.”
Lola nodded rapidly. “But if I’d been here—”
“It’s not your fault.” I pulled her against me, and she kept her arms folded across her chest, but let her head drop onto my shoulder.
“He really died?” she whispered.
“Seriously, Lola. That wasn’t the worst of it.”
Joni seemed to have disappeared, leaving the yurt in a pile of string and fabric, as if a parachute had descended in the middle of our camp. The kids were busy scaling its peak. I gave Lola a we-have-not-finished look and followed the path into the forest. It took a few minutes to find Joni. She sat against a tree, her head slumped forward to rest on her bent knees. I sat in the leaves next to her.
“Thank God Lola’s safe.”
Joni didn’t say anything, and I realized that she wasn’t resting her head on her knees: she was looking down between them at her phone, which she cradled in her hands. She was flicking through photographs.
“You all right there, Joni?”
She pressed the switch and the phone went blank. She slipped it down her top inside her bra.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “Everybody you care about is either here or dead.”
“Well, that’s one way to look at it.”
She shifted her hips so she could look up the long trunk of the tree to the canopy and the blue sky beyond. I watched scudding clouds until she spoke again.
“I can’t stop looking at this damn phone. I keep thinking it might ring. David might call. I’ve been keeping it charged in the car just in case. Even though I know it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid—”
“And there’s all these photos of home. I don’t know if it makes me feel better or worse. It’s not so bad at night. If I can see the stars, then I convince myself I’m home.”
“Let’s go home then, if that’s all it is. We’ll go back to your place, regroup, and work out what to do next.”
She snorted. “I don’t give a fuck about that shitty house. You think I like that dump? The rattling windows and the shitty cars outside and the fricking warped doors that won’t even close. Why do you think I didn’t fix it up, huh?”
“Cos you were busy with more important things?”
She guffawed into the treetops. “How generous of you. You thought I was a slob. But it was my little rebellion against this shitty country. Fucked if I’d put my energy into that hole. David promised we’d come to England for two years, tops. It’s been a decade. And now he’s home and I’m stuck here? That piece of shit.”
“I always thought you were settled here.”
“Well, now I want to go home. To Mom’s place. Pennsylvania.”
“David’s in New York.”
“But he could get there. He could walk if he had to, if it’s that bad. He could just walk for however long it would take. But how can I get there? I’m stuck here. Marooned.” Joni grappled her phone out of her top and scrolled rapidly through to an image, which she held out to me. Corner of a picnic table in the foreground before a long view over mown fields, forest, huge sky. But strangely familiar, bucolic. It could be right here in Shropshire. “We could really live there. Thrive. We did it before, my mom and me, when Lola was born. After my father left and then my brothers, both of them one after the other. And I promised I wouldn’t leave her, but of course I did, soon as I met David. I left and took her only grandchild away.”
“You’ll see her again,” I said. Unless this is all that’s left. I didn’t dare say it out loud. Might come true. I shooed the thought into a corner.
“All her children left her,” Joni said.
“That’s what children do. We know that when we sign up.”
“I’m not ready.”
“You don’t have to be. Lola’s right here. She’s fine.”
Joni shook her head, scrolling through pictures, the images flashing by too fast to take them in. “I thought I could do it all again,” she said. “Raise another child. But I can’t.”
I picked up some sticks and a strip of thin bark. I tore away a long shiny ribbon and fiddled with the sticks until I’d made a wonky sort of cross. Then I made another. One for the boy’s grave and one for Peter’s.
“We need you, Joni. I know it feels like it’s all going wrong, what happened with Peter, but we need you.”
“I’m done.”
“You can’t be done. We’re only just starting.”
She didn’t answer, just sat with bucolic images flashing past her eyes. At least she was up, out of the tent. And now that Lola was back, we could leave. I picked up my crosses and set off to find out where to go next.
Chapter Sixteen
The hermit sat on his porch, wrapping an extensive willow-pattern dinner service in newspaper and loading it into a wheelbarrow. He startled to his feet as Horatio ran up the Lonely Steps, but lowered himself back down and continued his packing when he recognized the dog. He greeted me with a lift of the chin.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
“As I explained in the letter, I’m clearing out. Take my advice and do the same—just friendly advice, mind you, I know how you begrudge interference.” When I didn’t rise to the bait, he carried on talking. “It’s not safe here now those helicopters have spotted us. Well, spotted you.” He looked up into the blue circle of empty sky that split the canopy above the clearing like a child’s drawing of a duck pond. “I thought they would take longer to find us out here. They’re organized, I’ll give them that.”
“Who? Who are you talking about? Why are you so worried about this helicopter? There was only one, and it just flew overheard, doing a recce, perhaps. Granted, I don’t understand why it didn’t pick us up, but it didn’t threaten us, either—”
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. Chatter suggests Johnny English hasn’t been made entirely welcome on the Continent. Treated rather poorly, in fact. The problem is, they were homegrown terrorists, and opinion seems to be that we should keep our homemade virus to ourselves.”
“I know they were homegrown terrorists, but that’s not our fault, is it? Surely the world has a duty to protect us?”
“The world is protecting itself.”
I looked away from him, away from the truth of it. “Well, even so, couldn’t the helicopter have been from the Red Cross?”
“Was it a Red Cross helicopter?”
“No, it was black, but—”
He closed his eyelids for a long second, as though praying for patience with an exceptionally dimwitted child.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “The humanitarian effort must be huge, bigger than anything they’ve ever dealt with before. They could be using whatever they can get their hands on—private helicopters, like the little ships at Dunkirk.”
“No, I rather think we’re on the other side of history this time, the wrong side. The world doesn’t want a plague. They’ll do anything to stop it.”