Page 68 of A Study in Drowning

That was the truth at the very center of everything, the truth she had tried her whole life to evade: there were no fairies, no magic, and the world was just ordinary and cruel.

She ought to have been embarrassed, with how much she was whimpering and blubbering, her vision blurred with tears. But Preston only looked at her in concern, his brows drawn together. He shrugged out of his jacket and held it out to her.

“Here,” he said. “Sorry I don’t have any tissues.”

It was all so absurd. Effy blew her nose on a sleeve. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She huffed a pitiful laugh. “Because I’ve been awful to you. Pestering you just to pester you, trying to get under your skin, being foolish—”

“You don’t see yourself very clearly, Effy.” Preston shifted in his seat so that they were facing one another. “Challenging me isn’t pestering. I’m not always right. Sometimes I deserve to be challenged. And changing your mind isn’t foolish. It just means you’ve learned something new. Everyone changes their mind sometimes, as they should, or else they’re just, I don’t know, stubborn and ignorant. Moving water is healthy; stagnant water is sickly. Tainted.”

Effy wiped her eyes. She still felt embarrassed, but her heartbeat was returning to its ordinary rhythm. “Which one of your heroes failed you?”

Preston sighed. It was a very weary sigh that could have belonged to someone thrice his age. “I told you before that my father is dead. Well, plenty of people have dead fathers; it’s hardly an uncommon backstory. But the manner of his death—I can’t really imagine anything worse.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.” The sadness in his tone made her feel bad about asking.

“No, it’s all right. My mother is Llyrian, as I’ve said. Her family is from Caer-Isel, quite well-to-do, seven advanced degrees among her immediate family. Scholastically inclined people. My father is from very far north, up the mountains—it’s a bit like the Bottom Hundred, a very rural place, but sustained by mining rather than fishing. It was a torrid story of forbidden love, as far as I can tell. They moved to a suburb of Ker-Is—Caer-Isel—on the Argantian side of the border, close enough that we could visit my mother’s family often. My father could never go—no Llyrian passport. Anyway. He worked as a construction manager, nothing prestigious or glamorous.”

Preston was a good storyteller. He paused in all the right places, and his voice grew grave whenever it was appropriate. Effy tried to stay as silent as she could, hardly even daring to breathe. It was the first time Preston had spoken so openly about himself, and she didn’t want to risk shattering the delicate moment.

“He was working late one night, during a bad storm. It was summer; I was sixteen. The roads were slick and deadly. His car skidded out on a sharp turn.”

“Oh,” Effy said. “Preston, I’m so sorry.”

“He didn’t die then,” said Preston. He gave her a flimsy half smile. “He survived, but he hit his head hard on the dashboard, and then on the pavement. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt—he was always reckless like that. It drove my mother mad. The ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital, and by the next morning he was awake and talking. Only the things he said didn’t make any sense.

“My father wasn’t from some well-heeled family, but he was a brilliant man. Self-taught, literary, very thoughtful. He easily held his own at the dinner table alongside my uncles with all their advanced degrees. He had a library in the basement with hundreds of books. What else? He loved animals. We never had any pets, but he would point out every rabbit he saw on the lawn, every cow we passed on the side of the road.”

Preston’s voice became smaller and smaller as he spoke. The grief in it made Effy’s heart wrench.

“I’m sorry,” Effy said again, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

“A traumatic brain injury, the doctors said at first. He might return to his old self eventually, but there was no way to tell. Day after day, and he hardly recognized us, my mother and my brother and me. Sometimes I could see a rare moment of clarity in his eyes, when he remembered someone’s face or name, but it would be gone again in just a blink. His body, externally, was unharmed—he could do all his regular things, supposedly. So the doctors let us bring him home, only it was like living with a stranger.

“He was intractable, combative. He broke glasses and shouted at my mother; he had never done that before. He tore all the books from their shelves. He was nothing like he’d been. Eventually we confined him—or rather, he confined himself—to the upstairs bedroom, where he spent every hour of the day watching television, sleeping. We brought him his meals on trays. I was the one who found him, in the end. Dead right there in the sheets. His eyes were open, and I remember the light of the television still flickering over his face.”

“Preston,” she started, but she couldn’t think of what to say. He gave her a tight nod, as if to indicate that he wasn’t quite done yet.

“When they did the autopsy, they found out that the doctors’ initial diagnosis had been wrong. It wasn’t a traumatic brain injury, or at least not the kind they had been envisioning. That we had been thinking of all along. It was hydrocephalus. Fluid in the skull and spinal cord that can’t be flushed out. The pressure builds and builds. If the doctors had known, they might have been able to put in a shunt, drain it out. But no one knew until the end, until he died. Hydrocephalus. Water on the brain.”

Preston’s voice was nearly inaudible now. Hollow-sounding. Resigned. Effy wanted to reach out and hold him to her chest, but she settled on laying her hand over his instead.

For a moment they both froze; she waited to see if she’d done something wrong, stepped too far over some invisible line. But then Preston turned his hand over and entwined their fingers.

“I wish I remembered,” he said very quietly, “the last time he pointed out a rabbit on the lawn. When I found him that day in the bedroom, all I could think of were the rabbits. That gentle, brilliant person he’d been—that person was dead long before he was. Sometimes I feel guilty even doing what I do, studying the things I study . . . because my father never had the chance. And he won’t even get to see me graduate, or read any of my papers, or . . .”

He trailed off, and Effy squeezed his hand. The wind rattled the car windows, and it was like they were awash in a churning river, clinging to each other so that the water wouldn’t drag them down.

Preston lifted his gaze, eyes meeting hers.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know. For listening, I suppose.”