“Is it true?” Lola cut Woody off. My own niece clarifying if I had, in fact, killed a child. I had to drag the air into my lungs so I could draw enough breath to answer.
“There was an accident when I was out looking for Billy. The first night you were away. A boy fell off his bike, and I ran him over.”
Woody started shouting again. His earlier faux-gangster posturing was gone, replaced by genuine apelike arm swings and lunges. I could see him riding the fumes of his anger, avoiding the loss of face that crying in front of his friends would entail.
“Can I call you ‘Woody’?” I asked, when he ran out of steam. Lightning skittered through the clouds; we needed to get under cover soon, but if this scene was going to turn nasty, I’d prefer to be within reach of the car.
“It’s my fucking name.”
“Thought it might be a nickname. Boarding school kids always have nicknames, don’t they? Mine was Bogey Greene for a while, and then Stick. Because I was tall.”
“Woody’s my real name. I guess my parents gave me a stupid name. My stupid dead parents.”
Smooth, Marlene. Smooth.
“Can we talk by ourselves?” I pressed on. “So I can explain what happened to your brother—Lenny, is it?”
“Lennon. Just tell me now.” His face flinched for the blow. I saw then that he still had hope. Woody must have come back looking for his brother, maybe finding blood on the road. But, just as I had when Billy vanished, he refused to believe the worst. I turned my back on the rest of the group so they couldn’t hear me.
“It’s going to be upsetting, Woody. You don’t want to do this in front of everyone.”
His eyes darted between me and his minions, whirling like a slot machine. I waited to see which instinct would hit the jackpot: his innate deference to an adult or his bullyboy’s need to keep up appearances. Or maybe another spinning reel would win out: his simple desire to find out what had happened to his brother.
“Lola?” I said, and she gave a rabbit-like nod. “We need everyone under cover and some food inside them.”
Lola regained the use of the arms that hung by her sides and marionetted away. The kids edged back toward the tunnel, still shooting me under-the-eyelashes looks, leaving Woody and me alone in the clearing.
“Is there somewhere under cover we could go to talk about Lennon?” I asked him. “Somewhere private?” The storm was sweeping black shadows across the land, and the sky spooled through a time-lapse movie of itself. Woody hesitated long enough to show that it was his choice, he was in charge, then he slunk off toward a deep railway tunnel on the other side of the clearing, and I followed, rehearsing in my mind how I might tell someone that his baby brother was dead. And I was the one who had killed him.
He didn’t ask a single question. I inched my way through it—from Billy’s disappearance to the all-night search, my crash and the chase to the accident, and the funeral to Billy’s reappearance. I explained about the vigil and the ashes and how I marked the grave with a small cross. I admitted that I couldn’t face the burial, but it sounded like I felt sorry for myself. Poor, traumatized me. I stopped talking. Outside the tunnel, the wind toyed with a tree branch that it had broken off and was pushing around the yard.
I sat with my back to the wall and waited for Woody to speak. He sat opposite me for a long time, fiddling with his fingers, biting off hangnails. Then one of his index fingers slipped in and out of his mouth in a compulsive way that made me want to tell him to stop, but of course I couldn’t, so I looked away and tried not to hear the sound of his teeth grating over his knuckle bone. He pulled the finger out of his cheek with a soft pop.
“I should’ve—” he began.
There was a flash of lightning outside, and we both counted under our breath until the sullen rumble arrived. Ten miles away. But closer than the last. As I waited for Woody to speak again, I counted the railway sleepers as they merged into the darkness.
“I told my mum I’d look after him,” he whispered.
Woody’s guilt acted like a catalyst for my own, and I had that same desire I’d had before—after Peter died—to grind myself into the earth. The shame crawling out from under my skin. I was supposed to be the adult here, the one most able to take the high ground. But instead I was wallowing at a grieving boy’s feet, awaiting forgiveness. Because, being honest, that’s why I was hunkering in this dank, dark place. No high ground here.
“How old are you, Woody?”
“Fourteen. Lennon was only nine. It was his first term.”
“I used to ask Charlie—he’s my oldest—to look out for the younger ones. In the back garden. Or the playground. But I just meant for him to keep an eye on them. Shout if they were wandering off, that sort of thing.” I leaned forward to catch Woody’s eye. “Your mother didn’t expect you to save Lennon from all this.” I waved outside. “You can’t hold yourself responsible—”
“Nobody’s perfect, yeah? We all make mistakes. Learn from it and move on.” His lip curled as he spoke. “You sound like my mum.”
“She’s right, though.”
“She didn’t know what I’m like.” He was gnawing on his knuckle again.
“Were you mean to your brother? Did you tease him, hurt him sometimes, let the big boys steal his comics?”
He nodded.
“And now you feel guilty?” I said.
He nodded.
“But that’s what people do, Woody. People are just walking bags of impulses. Not just teenagers—all of us. We do shitty things because we think we have time to make amends. But sometimes we run out of time.” A flash of lightning jolted me out of my rant. It lit up Woody’s sharp features, his electric hair and keen eyes. “And just because we survived this virus, I’m afraid it doesn’t mean we’ve been reborn, all perfect. We’re still just shitty humans. We can try to imagine that we’re going to forge a new civilization with better values. But we won’t, will we? Because it’s never happened before.”
“Like the Romans and that.”
“We just live with the guilt. We survive and live with the guilt.”
Woody’s finger went to his mouth, and he gave a soft pop as it slid from his cheek.
“But how come Lennon died? When he was the good one?”
“I’m sorry, Woody, I can’t answer that. And I’m sorry about Lennon. I’m sorry about your parents and all of this. I’m sorry I can’t make you feel better, but I can’t make myself feel better, either. I don’t know how.”
He got to his feet. I did the same.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“We brought pasta. There should be some left.”