Page 127 of 56 Days
23 Days Ago
“It was just a normal day. I was walking home from school with this other boy from my class, Shane, and...”
Ciara puts her head down so Oliver can’t see her face, can’t judge her reaction. She holds her body as still as she can, tries not to shake, tries not to cry.
How is she supposed to do this?
How is she supposed to listen to this and not react, not reveal that she knows this already, that he’s describing not only whathedid, but what herown brotherdid, too?
“It was all over somethingsostupid,” he says. “Andwewere stupid. But in just a matter of minutes, everything got completely out of hand.”
She’s encouraged to see that his eyes are filling with tears.
He talks about Paul Kelleher, about how he used to follow them home, and how on this day he did it while throwing stones.
“Most of them miss, but a couple hit our schoolbags and then Shane gets one square in the back of his head. And he like, reels around on Paul, and I think he’s going to roar at him or something, but instead he says, ‘Okay,fine. You can come with us. We’re going down to the water to skim stones.’ And then he gives me this look, like...Follow my lead. And he takes off running. Paul follows him. I do, too.”
She tries to imagine her brother behaving this way, attempts to play the scene out in her head like a film reel. But she was only eight at the time, and her memories from then feel fake and edited, as if contaminated by family photographs and stories she’s heard since. She doesn’t feel at all confident that she could say who Shane really was, what was he like, how he tended to behave.
“The estate was built on the bank of the river,” Oliver says, “that’s where it got its name.”
Iknow.
“The houses kind of sloped down to the water, and then in order to actually get to it, you had to climb through some trees.”
I remember.
“So once the three of us were down there, we were pretty much hidden from view. And that’s when...” He swallows. “That’s when... That’s when Shane just starts, like, pummeling Paul. That’s the only word I could use to describe it. Shane had been kept back a year, he was nearly thirteen by then, and Paul was small for his age... I don’t remember everything but I remember Shane towering over Paul, and Paul looking at up at him”—his voice cracks—“like—like—” He pauses, tries to regain his composure. “At first, I didn’t intervene. I just stood there. But then Shane was like, come on, and Paul was kind of squirming, trying to get away, and he’d started to cry by then, so I went and I”—his voice cracks again here, goes up a pitch—“I didn’t intervene. I joined in. I held him. By the arms. In place. So that Shane could keep... So that Shane could—”
He stops, swallows hard.
Ciara’s heart feels like it’s breaking in two, ripping down an invisible seam, bursting open like stitches. One half is heartsick about what Shane did, about what he was capable of doing...
But the other is filling with warmth, with feeling, withlovemaybe, even, for how much regret Oliver feels about it now, how much it hurts him just to tell the story.
He’s a good man, she thinks. Now. He turned out to be.
Maybe Shane would’ve too, if he’d gotten this far.
They made a terrible,terriblemistake—something that the wordmistakedoesn’t even begin to cover. That’s not in dispute. But they werechildren, ones who’d never done anything like it before, who’d been perfectly average, everyday kids up until this awful afternoon.
And now Oliver wouldn’t evenbreak the travel limit.
Shane might have been all right.
Everythingmight have been.
Ciara desperately wishes he were here to prove that himself. And to show it to their mother, to take away the pain she’d felt for so many years, the blame she’d inflicted on herself, the responsibility she’d taken for his actions.
She’d always blamed herself.
“I was hismother,” she’d used to mutter, its implication lost on nine- orten-year-old Ciara at the time.
Soon after, her mother had stopped talking about it altogether.
“Shane says to Paul, we’re going to wash the blood off in the river. And I justknewwhat was going to happen, what he’d decided to do, but it was like—It was like there was one half of me that felt like, yeah, good idea, that’s what we have to do, whatIhave do now, to help Shane, to protect him, to stop him from getting in trouble. But at the same time, the other half of me was looking at Paul, all covered in blood, saying okay and obediently following Shane down to the water, and that part wanted to scream, ‘What the hell are youdoing?Run. Runaway.’ But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything. Instead, I... I just followed them to the water and I helped Shane push Paul into it and then I helped hold him down. Until... Until he drowned.”
Silence.
