In a nightclub they found in one of the back alleys in Prague, with a sword stuck in the stone floor of the lowest level, Elliot tried to kiss her.
She leaned away and laughed. “I thought you were gay.”
Something about her easy casual laugh made Elliot laugh too. “And what gave you that idea?”
“Well, the way you were looking at the half-naked guy juggling fire upstairs was one clue.”
Prague did have quality entertainment.
“I’m bisexual,” Elliot told her, and leaned in again slightly: not touching her, but silently asking her permission to do so.
“Well, the thing is . . .,” said Pinelopi, and Elliot’s heart sank as he saw her searching for words, waiting for something like ‘“ don’t think I could ever really trust a guy who” or “too weird for me, thanks” and felt his heart sink because more than hoping for anything else, he’d liked her. “I have a boyfriend,” Pinelopi finished.
“Oh,” said Elliot. “You never said.”
Pinelopi shook her head. “No. This trip for me is about deciding a lot of things—whether I want to go or stay somewhere, who I want to be. I didn’t want to close any doors on myself. But I—love him, and more than anything else, I don’t want to close the door on that.”
“Oh,” said Elliot, in a different tone, and smiled. “Understood.”
They walked out to see the sights, the next day: the spun-glass frosted fairytale that was the old city in Prague, as if you could cross the fragile arch of a bridge and enter into a world that was all fretwork and ice. From then on, they usually went out together during the day, and met up with the others in the evening and for train rides. There was the stop in Luxembourg and its shimmering gray caves, and the restaurant where nobody could read the menu. There was Florence and the Duomo, a shell-pink building that rose unexpectedly before them out of the night and a shower of summer rain, as if it had risen from the sea.
Elliot went out on his own in Paris, though. He bought gingerbread ice-cream in the early morning and ate it standing on one of the many bridges spanning the Seine. He went from one side to the other, looked at the wiry spike of the Eiffel Tower and the gold-inscribed dome lurking behind it, then from the other side the closer gilt-and-glass bulk of the Louvre. Paris as the morning light washed over it, in glowing pearl and gray.
This was a whole world, the world he’d been born into, and there was so much of it he had not seen. Instead he was going to see seas with mermaids, harpies in the trees, trolls in the mountains. In five years or even ten, when the wars came, he would be there. He could have done something in this world, and he was not going to do it. He was going to do something else, and in choosing one path, another was lost. He spared a moment to feel something almost like grief.
He thought of Pinelopi, and what she had said about not wanting to close the door on love. He thought: as his mother had, as his father had, in their different ways.
If he’d really meant to stay, he would have told Luke and Serene. He would have worked out a way to say good-bye properly. He would have made and kept promises to return another time.
Elliot had thought about staying, but he’d never meant to. And he wasn’t going to.
Elliot threw what remained of his cone off the bridge and walked away. The dark rippling river flowed on, without him watching.
When Tom and Susan got off in London, Elliot kissed Pinelopi good-bye and went too. They took the train down together, and early onset nostalgia made Tom and Susan share all their pictures with Elliot and urge him to come by in a couple of days.
“Keep in touch this time, right, mate,” said Tom, punching him in the shoulder.
“Light blows as a male substitute for physical affection is a remnant from a brutal warrior culture, trust me on this,” Elliot told him, and left the platform.
Gemma was in the kitchen, making dinner before she went home. The house was otherwise gray and still, utterly unchanged. Elliot sat at the kitchen counter and talked to her lightly about his summer, showed her a picture of Pinelopi and a picture of the castle complex in Prague.
“I expect you’ll be back to school soon,” said Gemma.
“I expect I will.”
She hesitated, wiping her hands off on her apron. “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you get back. This place is a little—it’s a little much for me.”
She didn’t have to tell him how it was. He had lived here for years, in a house that wanted to be silent until the silence was broken by a certain step and a certain voice, in a house holding its breath for someone’s return. If anyone held their breath long enough, they were dead.
“Who says I’m coming back?” asked Elliot.
He helped her get some glasses down from the top shelf: he was tall enough to reach it, now.
Then he had dinner with his father. It was quiet as usual, but not quiet like usual: this was a watchful quiet. Elliot waited, throughout the whole meal, and watched his father for even a glimmer of desire to speak.
He was not terribly surprised when it did not come.
He followed his father into the other room, and waited again in the quiet, in their last silence, broken only by the clink of his father pouring himself his first drink of the evening.
Then his father sat down, and Elliot spoke.
“You know what day it is. You know what’s coming.”
“I know that you’re going,” said his father, his voice tired, as if Elliot had been annoying him for years, as if he was incredibly difficult to bear with.
Elliot stood at the window with the light coming in and tried not to let the heaviness of that look weigh him down.
“Do you know something else? If you’d loved me, I would’ve stayed,” said Elliot. “If you loved me, I would never have gone.”
“What do you want me to say?” his father asked. “I never felt it. I don’t have it in me.”
“I don’t want you to say anything. Not anymore. I wanted to say something.”
Elliot got up and opened the door, stepped outside the room and looked back, at his father waiting in his chair, drink in his hand, even the light coming in the windows full of dust. Even if his mother came back, Elliot thought, his father wouldn’t know what to do or how to feel. What is not used becomes atrophied. He didn’t have it in him. And if she returned, Elliot would not be here.
“Your loss,” Elliot said to both of them, and shut the door.
That was love: Elliot couldn’t command it, couldn’t demand it. He could only leave the chill echoing place where it was not.
There was one more thing that Elliot had to do before he left. Carving his name onto a wall that most people would not see, symbolically leaving his name behind, was not really his style. So he bought some spray paint and a ladder.
All over the gray fa?ade of his father’s house in scarlet letters he wrote: ELLIOT SCHAFER. He almost added: “was here” but did not, partly because it was a little too clichéd vandal for him, and partly because it did not encompass all he wanted to say: was here, is no longer here, is somewhere almost unimaginably different, is all right.