by Flynn Berry
Martin Hold is behind the counter, and at first his face is blank and open. Then something slides over it. He recognizes me. It is as obvious as the moment when the friend you are meeting first sees you.
He is younger than I expected. Not far past thirty. He wears a gray sweater with holes at the hem. He has red in his hair. There is a deep wrinkle across his forehead. He has a short beard, and his hair is grown out. He looks like anyone, but just underneath it is the adolescent, when his skin was worse and his hairline shaved back. He is so familiar, like one of the boys we grew up with.
I don’t remember starting to cry but my face is wet.
“Hello,” I say, in the voice I used to have. I can tell that my face is contorting.
He stares at me without saying anything. I lift the pistol from my bag and point it at him.
“Roll your sleeves up.”
His eyes are wide. He lowers his head and slowly pushes up one sleeve.
Both of his arms are covered in red marks. One of the scars forms a neat half circle around his forearm. The dog’s jaw. My body is shuddering now. I want him dead. It’s what Rachel would want me to do, I know that now.
“Did it take a long time?” I ask.
He continues to watch me, and I don’t think he will answer.
“No,” he says.
I lower the gun and walk outside. The road is quiet under a gray sky. I can hear the sirens. At first I think I am imagining them, a disruption somewhere in the distance, but the sound grows steadily louder, and I start to move away from it.
• • •
Both of us went cliff jumping in Dorset. The water was so clear that after Rachel jumped I could see her on the other side, plunging down through the center of what looked like a cascading, clear swell.
68
MARTHA IS WAITING FOR me at a pub in Battersea. It’s warm enough now that people sit outside cafés on the King’s Road.
I turn down an alley. A man appears at the far end, walking toward me, and I consider turning back. As we pass, he nods at me, and then I am out the other side, and rushing across the bright road.
• • •
I know I’m going to be all right. And I know I will never stop missing her.
What’s your favorite thing about Cornwall? I asked her. But it wasn’t what I meant. I meant, what’s your favorite thing about being alive?
And she said, Well.
She said, To start—
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank: Michael Adams, my first reader; Emily Forland, my agent; and Lindsey Schwoeri, my editor.
The three of you are ferociously intelligent, wry, and kind. You have each made this thrilling in different ways, and I am enormously grateful.
All at the Michener Center for Writers and Yaddo.
Everyone at Penguin.
My friends, and especially Nick Cherneff, Kate DeOssie, Donna Erlich, Jackie Friedman, Allison Kantor, Suchi Mathur, Justine McGowan, Madelyn Morris, Althea Webber, and Marisa Woocher.
My aunts, Kassia Dellabough, Marlitt Dellabough, and Liana Rödegård, who have been the best possible source for research.
All of my family, and especially my parents, Jon Berry and Robin Dellabough.
And Jeff Bruemmer.
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