AT LUNCHTIME ON Monday I have my meeting with Adam Winters.
I’m late because it’s such a struggle to find a place to park. It’s a raw, hollow day, with an echoey calling of rooks, and the air is thick and gentle with moisture. As I walk across the campus, I can feel the wet on my hair. I tell myself this won’t take long. I’ll say what I’ve come to say and thank him, and then it will all be over, and at least I’ll have some clarity, at least I’ll know where I stand.
He’s waiting for me outside the campus cafeteria. A hot smell of chip grease hangs about its doors.
“Are you sure this is okay?” he says. “Perhaps we could find somewhere quieter . . .”
“No, really, it’s fine,” I tell him. “I won’t be able to stay all that long. I have to get back to the shop.”
“Yes, of course,” he says.
He pushes open the doors. A wave of sound crashes over us, and I think that perhaps he was right, that we should have found somewhere more peaceful. The place is milling with students, all laughing and flirting together, so shiny and certain and careless. I envy them, as I always do.
We buy tuna baguettes and coffee, and he takes me to a table by the window. It looks out over a courtyard that has a struggling fountain in a shallow concrete pool. There are coffee rings on the table, and the sauce dispenser has a dark, dried crust of ketchup down its side.
His glance is thoughtful, concerned.
“You look exhausted, Grace,” he says. “Is everything okay?”
I explain how Sylvie woke in the night. I don’t tell him about the words she said and how strange that made me feel. I tell myself I was probably overwrought anyway.
He murmurs something sympathetic. I wish he wouldn’t be nice like this. It makes it harder to say what I’ve come here to say.
I clear my throat.
“The thing is—I thought I should see you—to tell you why we couldn’t carry on. It seemed only fair to come and see you.”
The words are lumpy, solid things.
But he smiles at me politely.
“That’s really good of you,” he says.
I start to unwrap my baguette. The squeak of cellophane sets my teeth on edge. My body feels loose and clumsy, like it’s a wooden marionette that I don’t know how to control. I wish I wasn’t here at all.
“I’m worried it’s wrong for Sylvie. That it’s the wrong direction to go in. That it’s wrong to be concentrating like this on all the strange things that she says.”
“I understand,” he tells me. “I can see why you might have doubts about it.”
We’re leaning together across the table to hear each other above the noise. His face is a little too close to mine. I can see all the detail in it—the stippling of stubble on his jawline, the smudges of dark in the thin skin under his eyes. The coffee has a burnt taste, but it’s strong and I drink gratefully.
“She was upset after the session,” I say. I’m forcing myself to be honest, even though it feels so difficult. I feel I owe him that. “I felt you pushed her too hard.”
He sips his coffee, his eyes on mine.
“You don’t like her being asked things directly, do you? Not the really big questions,” he says. “I’ve noticed that. And you hate it when I press her . . .”
“But if you ask her directly, she mostly can’t tell you,” I say. My voice a little shrill. Protesting, justifying myself.
“Yes,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to tell you. She’s only a little kid—it’s a struggle for her to express it. She’s trying to talk about things she has no words for.”
“I don’t know. Maybe,” I say.
He puts his cup down in the saucer—carefully, as though it could easily break.
“It’s almost as though you don’t quite trust her,” he tells me. “Perhaps you need to trust her to decide what’s safe to say.”
His voice is gentle, but I still don’t like him saying this. For a moment I don’t say anything.
“I’m always so frightened of hurting her, of making everything worse,” I tell him.
“Grace. She’s hurt already.”
There’s nothing I can say to that.
We sit for a while in silence. Then Adam leans toward me across the table. He has his eager, urgent look.
“Look, I know it seems weird, what I do,” he says. “I can understand your misgivings. When I first got into the paranormal, my colleagues were appalled. Well, I’m sure you can imagine—”
“Simon, you mean?” I think of the man in the blazer, of the skeptical tone in his voice. Adam can be very . . . enthusiastic. Don’t you find that?
“Yes. Among others.” He makes a little gesture, as though to push something away. “Simon thinks that reality is what we see and hear. No more than that. That the study of the paranormal is a debasement of science. That people’s sense of the unseen is just a delusion,” he says.
“He did say something about you being very left field,” I tell him.
Adam takes up the paper napkin that came with his baguette, starts ripping little strips off it.
“To be honest, I think he’d like me out of his department,” he says.
“But what about having an open mind?” I ask. “You know—that thing you said. ‘A scientist should never say that anything is impossible . . .’”
“Simon has this favorite line that he always comes out with,” he says. “As though it answers everything. ‘If you’re too open-minded your brains drop out.’”
Something changes in me when he says that. I see his life quite differently. It’s always looked so enviable—his prestigious job, his admiring students. I hadn’t imagined that he might know some kind of loneliness too.
“So why do you do it?” I ask him. “Why is it so important to you?”
There’s a brief silence between us.
I try again. “Why does it matter so much to you?”
I don’t really expect that he’ll tell me. I expect him to reply with some impassioned abstraction—how psychologists need to be less defensive and think outside the box, how we shouldn’t be so frightened of the things we have no words for. I don’t think for a moment that he’ll really answer truthfully.
He’s silent for a moment, as though working out what to say.
“There was this thing that happened,” he says.
There’s a new, harsher note in his voice. I’m intrigued.
“What thing?” I ask him.
He isn’t looking at me.
“My brother died,” he tells me.
I stare at him. For a moment I think I misheard.
“Your brother?” I remember the photo on his desk, the boy in oil-stained overalls who looks like Adam but isn’t him. I feel a warning tug of sadness. “Is—was that him in the photo in your office?”
Adam nods. “That’s Jake,” he tells me.
“When did this happen?” I say.
He thinks for a moment, adding up the years.
“Jake was seventeen when he died. He was two years older than me. It’s sixteen years ago now. He died in a car crash,” he says.
I’m a little afraid. I’m not sure I want to hear this.
“But—how? What happened?” I ask him.
“We used to take cars when we were kids,” he tells me.
“Oh.” I feel a jolt of surprise, that he’s not quite who I thought he was. “That’s not at all how I’d imagined your childhood,” I say.
I feel my face go hot. This seems to imply that I’ve thought about him too much.
He’s looking at me curiously.
“How did you imagine it, then?” he says.
“I thought you’d maybe had a rather more privileged background than that.”
He shrugs slightly.
“I grew up on a council estate in Newcastle,” he tells me. “Quite a rough place, really.” His voice changes slightly as he talks. I hear the lilt of his childhood accent in it. “That’s what you did—you took stuff. We were pretty accomplished car thieves, my brother and me.”
I think about where he has come from, and how he must have struggled to achieve the life he has now. I feel a little surge of admiration for him.
He’s looking down into his coffee. In the clear light that comes through the window I can see all the lines in his face.
“I was driving, the night it happened,” he tells me. “We’d stolen this crappy old Astra, and the engine was really rough.”
His voice is very quiet. I lean in closer.
“I was driving too fast. I could hear the police were after us, I could hear the sirens. I lost control. We went off the road, went head-on into a tree.”
“God, Adam.”
“I got knocked out for a moment.” His face is bleak. I see how raw this still is. “When I came to again, there was blood in my mouth, on my face, and I knew it wasn’t my blood. Jake died in my arms before the ambulance came.”
He pauses just for a heartbeat.
“I felt it was my fault. I felt I’d killed him.”
“No,” I say, my voice rather high, protesting. “For God’s sake, Adam. Of course you didn’t kill him. You loved him, you didn’t want him to die. It was an accident . . .”
“That wasn’t how it felt,” he says.
He’s quiet for a moment, and the noise of the cafeteria breaks over us. The sadness in his story presses down on me. I feel all the terrible incompleteness of things. There’s so much that never gets said, so much that’s unfinished and broken.
“Afterward,” he tells me, “some rather weird things happened. One night I woke in the darkness in the bedroom that we’d shared, and I had such a sense of his presence.”
I feel a quick, surprising pang of envy—that nothing like that happened to me after my mother died. That she left behind her only the wrenching sense of her absence.
“What was that like?” I ask him. “Did you see something? Hear something?”
“That first time, I just felt him,” he says. “Like the way you can know that a house isn’t empty even as you enter it. But another time I heard his voice—not in my head, but real. Coming from somewhere outside me. He said my name. It comforted me. But after that, nothing.”
I hear all the bleakness in his voice. His hands are clasped together on the table. The knuckles are white, the veins are like wire through the skin. Instinctively I reach toward him, put my hand on his wrist. He looks up sharply. I see how my touch startles him. I feel a little jag of arousal, which unnerves me—it seems illicit, out of place. I take my hand away.
“So that’s it. That’s what happened. You asked me why this stuff mattered to me, and I wanted to tell you,” he says. “To answer your question honestly. Sorry to be a bit morbid.”
“No, I’m glad you told me . . . Well, not glad exactly. You know what I mean.”
He nods slightly.
I have such a sense of strangeness, suddenly learning about this man who’s about to walk out of my life. Everything feels off-kilter. Every-thing’s happened the wrong way around.
He starts to gather our cups and plates together. Something shifts between us, as though some thread that joined us together has snapped.
“Well, I guess you’ll need to be getting back in a moment,” he says.
“Yes. I suppose I should.”
He walks me to the entrance hall.
“Look—the best of luck with Sylvie.” He has his familiar crooked smile. “I hope it all works out for you both.”
“Thank you.”
I walk out into the raw gray day and leave him there.