"How I Live Now," Vocabulary from Part 2: Chapters 1-6

My willingness to eat confused and annoyed the staff, confounding their efforts to understand what I was doing there.

Eventually they were forced to release me, still unable to diagnose the obvious.

I was not interested in starving, killing, slashing, depriving, maiming or punishing myself.

Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.

But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past.

By then I was back in New York City, not because I wanted to be, but because I was half dragged and half deported and the final half was blackmail, and after all the rest of the things I managed to resist, I didn’t have the strength left for that particular fight.

The worst part about those years wasn’t the hospital, or the solitude, or the war, or even being away from Edmond.

It was silent in there, cavernous and empty.

Our right to be in England had to be double and triple confirmed, with sheaves of paperwork and fingerprinted identification cards in addition to the new kind of passports we’d been issued.

Their owners had hacked a space in the dense scrub that now covered everything, but the clearings looked temporary.

I’m coming, I said silently to everything I’d left behind, and headed for the single, ragged bus that would take me home.

The tabloids waxed nostalgic for the good old days of WWII, when the enemy all spoke a foreign language and the army went somewhere else to fight.

Where Isaac was lean and graceful, he just looked gaunt.

I turned and looked at the garden, meticulously tended, by whom, I wondered.

I thought of the ghost of that long-dead child, watching us, its desiccated bones sunk deep into the ground below.

They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers.

I turned back and met his eyes, hard and angry and unyielding.

I couldn’t reconcile it with this scene.

The air was suffocating, charged, the hungry plants sucking at the earth with their ferocious appetites.

I felt claustrophobic, choked, desperately thinking bright thoughts so Edmond couldn’t get inside my head and know how terrified and furious and guilty I felt.

“Talk to him,” he said with no preface.

In the end, the warmth and the scent and the heavy slow buzz of bees seduced me, worked on my brain like opium, so the tightly clenched core of fear and fury that had sustained me all these years began to unfurl.

And so I tried to explain about our journey and the day Piper and I were at the house looking for him as usual and the phone ringing and my father’s voice at the other end and how for all those years I wished I hadn’t picked up the phone that day but I did and by the time I realized what his plan was for me there was nothing I could do because he knew where I was and he had International Connections and despite all my journeys and triumphs over adversity I was still just a fifteen-year-old kid.

We sat there as day turned to twilight and twilight to evening and the moon rose and the constellations moved across the sky and I talked and he listened and it took almost all night to tell him everything but I didn’t stop until there was nothing left to tell.

According to Piper, after The Occupation finished most of the young men were drafted into the army and a good proportion of the urban population began to redistribute itself toward the countryside where it was supposed to be safer.

As outsiders, we both saw our role somewhere in the quadrant of Privileged Caretakers.

But he knew it would take an immense leap of faith for anyone to act.

"He weeded and pruned and dug up old bulbs and put them away for the winter, and collected seed and labeled it, and when spring came he started to plant things and not just for food, for—for something else.”

We watched a honeybee lurch from one fat flower to the next, drunk and staggering under the weight of all that botanical destiny.

And suddenly I knew something with terrifying clarity.

I knew Edmond had witnessed the massacre.

He could help them, which makes pain bearable.

Saved from the ravages of war by stubbornness and ignorance and an insatiable hunger for love.