“So he smashed his head on something,” Meredith said. “After how much he drank, are you really surprised?”
“God, Richard,” Wren said again, but seething now, wiping angrily at her eyes. “Richard, you idiot—”
“Hey! Stop that.” Alexander yanked her up off her knees. “Don’t cry over him, it’s his own fucking fault—”
“Are you all insane?” James demanded, looking wildly from one of them to each of the others. He’d stopped straining against my grip, as if he’d forgotten I was holding him. “We have to help him!”
“Do we?” Alexander asked, whirling around, taking one impulsive step toward him. “I mean, do we really?”
“Alexander, he’s still alive—”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“What?” I said, but neither of them seemed to hear me.
“We can’t just stand around arguing about how it happened, we have to do something—” James started, but Alexander cut him off.
“Look, I know you have a pathological need to play the hero, but right now you need to stop and ask yourself if that’s really what’s best for everyone.”
I stared at him, appalled.
“What are you saying?” James asked, faintly, as if he already knew the answer.
Alexander stood with his long arms braced at his sides, twitching with a kind of crazed potential energy. He glanced over his shoulder at the water. Richard’s last convulsion had subsided and he lay unnervingly motionless, as if he were playing dead. The water was smooth and dark as velvet now except for the weak flutter of his exhalations that gave him away. If it be now, I thought, ’tis not to come.
“All I’m saying is, let’s not do anything before we’ve thought it through,” Alexander said, sweat gleaming on his temples despite the raw November chill. “I mean, do you not remember what he’s been like the last few weeks? Clobbering us onstage, we’re covered in bruises, he nearly drowned you on Halloween, and last night?” He looked at me. “You and Meredith?” There was a sharp, stabbing pain in my chest. “Richard completely lost his mind. You didn’t hear him ranting about what he’d do when he got his hands on you. If he wasn’t in the water right now, you probably would be.”
“We had to stop him breaking in,” Filippa said. I’d forgotten how close she was standing beside me, one hand on my back, until she spoke and I felt the vibration of her voice. “He almost put Alexander through the wall.”
“Never mind me, what about Wren?” Alexander said, but he was appealing to James, not her. “You were there, you saw it.”
“What did he do?” Meredith said, when James didn’t answer. Wren squeezed her eyes shut. “What did he do to her?”
“She tried to stop him storming off,” Filippa said, talking quietly, whispering, like Richard might hear. Like she was afraid to wake him. “He threw her across the yard. He could have broken every bone in her body.”
“You think all that’s going to stop?” Alexander asked, with a throb of fear in his voice. “You think we’ll pull him out of the water and he’ll be fine and we’ll all be friends again?”
A thin silence answered him. If it be not to come, it will be now.
Alexander forced one nervous hand into his pocket and found the stub end of a cigarette. His lighter flared and he cupped his fingers around the flame as if it were something unspeakably precious. At the first breath in he shivered, and when he exhaled again his voice was lower, if not quite steady. “Don’t say it out loud if you don’t want to. But five minutes ago when we thought he was dead, what did you feel?”
Filippa’s face was ashen but unreadable. Silver tear tracks glistened on Wren’s cheeks. Beside her, Meredith was upright and immovable as a statue. James stood suspended between her and me, mouth open in abject, childlike horror. Around us the trees’ bristling black silhouettes stood eerily straight and motionless, and thin clouds strung across the milky sky like smoke. The world was no longer dark; a cold light had broken and crouched low on the horizon, prowling the no-man’s-land between night and day. I forced myself to look down at Richard. If he was breathing I couldn’t hear it, but even in that silence he was snarling, teeth bared and seamed with blood. I felt it on the tip of my tongue, the compulsion to confess that in that perilous instant when I thought he was dead, all I’d really felt was relief.
“So,” Meredith said—and it seemed, somehow, that she was speaking for all of us. Her warm vivacity was gone, and there was something about how coldly sober and steady she looked that sent pins and needles prickling down my spine. “What do you suggest we do?”
Alexander shrugged, and there was something terribly momentous in that simple, meaningless gesture. “Nothing.”
For a long time, nobody spoke. Nobody protested. I was stunned by their reticence until I realized—I hadn’t spoken either.
James’s voice finally stirred in the dead air. “We have to help him. We have to.”
“Why, James?” Meredith said, quietly, reproachfully, as if he had somehow betrayed her. “You of all people should understand … We don’t owe him anything.”