There! On that branch. The fluffy white canary I’d cupped in my hands. The last I’d seen, it was on its side, sucking and squeezing air in and out of its little orb of a body. I’d returned its feather. It had flown a long way to get to this tree, in this little wood at the edge of the city. I hadn’t thought it would live at all, and look how far it had come.

“Hi,” I said. All around me people had other conversations. Bystanders urged paramedics. Bloody people explained where it hurt. The bird and I, we had our own thing going on. I’d tried to tell everyone that I hadn’t hurt the birds. No one had listened, but we knew.

It wasn’t afraid of me. It lit onto my stomach. This little poof of white rode up and down, up and down.

Thick hands brushed it away and scooped me up onto a padded mat thing. The bird hopped backward, away from the commotion. “It’s all right,” I croaked. I tried to make it shoo. There were too many feet, heavy and busy, crossing this way and that.

I couldn’t turn my head on the stretcher bed, not far enough. I got slotted into the back of an ambulance. The last I saw for myself was a flash of white, maybe lifting up into the air. Or, that could have been the doors slamming. They shut with a bang and a click.

Epilogue

“I thought you were in jail.”

Nick flinched. He was in a hospital bed, one of four in the room, under a white sheet.

“That’s why I didn’t come sooner,” Polly explained from the doorway. “I didn’t realize you were here.”

Nick had to lean forward to see the whole of her, to see past the balloon bouquet tied to the metal arm of his bed, and through an absurdly colored eruption of carnations.

“Some of us thought…” She took a breath, revised. “Peter heard that you’d… run over Gretchen, and that police had been called. And before that,” she said, squeezing her hands into a tight ball in front of her stomach, “before that, we all thought you were dead.”

Behind a curtain, another patient coughed.

“I know,” Nick said. “I’m sorry.”

The apology sucked Polly into the room. She got close, right next to the bed. Her fingertips grazed the sheet. “I’m so glad you’re-”

And, at the same moment, “Your mum told me what your dad-” he said.

Polly covered her ears and stepped back. “I know,” she said. “I know.” Then, immediately, she replaced the subject: “I know about you and Liv.”

He shook his head. He held up one finger, to ask her to stop. “There was no ‘me and Liv.’ It… I regret what happened with her,” he said. “I regret-I shouldn’t have pushed you like I did.”

“No, no, it was good. I shouldn’t have stopped you. Us, I mean. Stopped us. It was dumb.”

“It wasn’t stupid. We should have talked more before…”

“I wouldn’t have told you,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about it.”

She moved closer again. She pushed a balloon aside, and it bounced back against her head.

“Did you really slip on a plate?” she asked. “In some old dowager’s mansion?”

Nick’s pause was filled with the creaking and heaving of someone else, someone very heavy, rolling over. The privacy curtain between him and Nick wafted.

“Yes,” Nick finally said. “It was an old friend’s house. She wasn’t in residence. I was stranded.”

“It must have been awful!”

He nodded, bouncing his chin against his neck.

“My mom’s gone home,” Polly said. “I asked her to. She hugged me good-bye this morning. She’s divorcing my dad, did she tell you that too? Did she tell you that?”

“She only told me about what your father did.”

Polly looked up at the ceiling. A machine beeped.

“Well, it turns out that isn’t everything. She came here to tell me something else, something added on. She kept trying to tell me, but I wouldn’t let her get it out, until the day we went shopping for a coat. And then so much else happened… I didn’t think about it enough. I didn’t think about it.

“The day that Dad did it, did the terrible thing, he was really stressed, because he’d confronted his boss about a safety problem at the mill. A forklift had run into a load-bearing column, and it wasn’t being reported. They’d had an ugly argument and Dad thought he’d lose his job. I knew that already. He told the police, as if it mattered. As if it was some kind of reason. But Mom came here to tell me that it going public really shamed the company. They examined the column, and it turned out that a collapse was imminent. They kept it quiet that Dad was right, but they fixed it. Mom only found that out recently, from a friend of Dad’s who still worked there. Five guys work in that area and they probably would have died. Because of Dad they didn’t.”

“That’s a good thing,” Nick said.

“I know. I know it’s good. But it’s not enough. It’s important to stay mad, you know? It’s not like five guys make up for one guy. You can’t average the people a person saves and the people a person hurts. They’re people. You can’t do that. Jeremy’s dead. That’s never going to be okay…”

“No,” he agreed.

“Liv’s in jail now.” She rubbed her sleeve against her cheek. A nurse pushed a wheeled cart past the door, toward another room. It rattled like it contained small medical instruments, or food accessorized with metal utensils.

“Last night I had this dream,” Polly said, “about Liv, that she was at Oxford instead of Cambridge. That she met different people, made different friends. That it was almost the same as here, but not quite, and so none of the horrible stuff happened.”

“Polly…”

“Do you think she had it just in her, the bad stuff, and that something awful would have come out of her no matter where she went? Or do you think it was just this one set of circumstances that worked together to push her in that direction? What do you think?”

“I think… I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Is it true that she hurt the policeman too? Were you there? People are saying that she stabbed him.”

“No, she cut him. She didn’t stab him.” Nick mimed the difference. “He’s in intensive care.”

“No, he isn’t. At least, not anymore. He’s here. On this ward.” Polly waved her hand toward the door. “In the first room…”

Nick grunted, started to slide his legs off the side of the bed.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve got to talk to him.” Nick grabbed the crutches propped near his bed.

“Wait-why?”

“I need to thank him. For Alexandra. If he hadn’t been there…”

“Is she all right?”

“She is. Because of him. She… she’s upset, and angry, but she’s all right.”

“Angry?” Polly’s tone had changed. She wasn’t curious; she was indignant. “Why is she angry?”

Nick balanced on his crutches, stared at Polly. She squeezed her eyes shut. She accused him:

“She’s like you with Cambridge architecture. You breeze past King’s College Chapel. You trudge over Garret Hostel Bridge. Alexandra doesn’t notice the safety of her life. She takes it for granted. I gawk and point at it. I’d put it on a mug. I’d wear it on a T-shirt if I could!”

“Polly, what are you talking about?”

“Alexandra doesn’t know how lucky she is!” Polly hissed. “The difference between someone you care about being gone and coming back, and someone you care about being dead, is a whole world.”

Nick needed both of his hands to hold tight for him to stay upright. But he nudged her arm gently with his elbow. Her breathing calmed.

“Do you know what I love about being here, in this country?” she said quietly. “I love the sinks and their faucets for hot and cold. Not one tap, like I’m used to at home, where hot and cold mix together to make something nice to wash your hands in. Here, most of the sinks have this one tap for cold and this one for hot. You can mix them in the sink if you want, but hot comes out hot and cold comes out cold. Side by side. There’s something really true about that. Because I know I feel like that. I hate what Dad did to Jeremy, and I’m happy that those men at the factory didn’t get hurt. I feel both of those things, not mixed into merely warm, but just as they are: something really terrible and something really good. It’s like what I felt with you, in the Sedgwick, terrified and happy. I was terrified and I was happy. They didn’t add up to indifferent. They were both just themselves.”