When Finn is naked you take both his hands in yours. You can feel him shaking, a deep shudder as you draw him down to the next step and the water rises to his thighs, and then to the next, and it rises to his waist and he moans.
The hot night air presses down and the pool – the pond, you remind yourself – is deliciously cool, and you long to sink into it and find Toby. Alone, you’d let your body go limp and drop into it, but you have to bring Finn with you, step by step, you have to introduce him to this world and let him know it’s safe. You can’t let go of him or he’ll fall into horror.
‘I’ve felt him here,’ you whisper, stepping onto the bottom of the pool and gently pulling him with you. You can feel the unaccustomed brush of trailing plants, the scatter of leaves under your feet. Finn twitches and startles at every touch and you bring him close so your skins are touching.
‘I came out every night and swam with him,’ you whisper. ‘But the pumps and the chemicals were destroying him. So I got rid of them and made a place where he could be.’
You can see Finn’s face in the light coming up from the pool and you know he’s thinking you have finally lost your grip. He’s afraid of you, but you’re so sick of being alone now. You don’t want to lose him again.
‘Come under,’ you whisper.
You both inhale deeply, you lock gazes with him, pull his hand down and let yourself drop below the surface.
The water closes over your head and you open your eyes. Toby? You send the thought out. I’m here!
Finn is on the other end of your hand, big and warm and alive even in the cool water; perhaps that’s why you can’t feel Toby. Finn goes up for air but you wait until your lungs start to burn before you surface. You still can’t feel him.
‘I’m letting you go, just for a minute,’ you whisper. ‘I’ll find him. You’ll be OK.’
You start to see pity on his face and you inhale and lower yourself before the hint of it can solidify, and you propel your body, reaching out with both hands, stretching for him.
Toby?
All around you the pool throbs with life. You can sense the fish darting and gliding around the stems of the plants. You can sense the slow, soft scrape of the snails. The water smells of leaves and fish and frogs instead of chlorine.
But no Toby.
You surface, breathe, dive again. Propel yourself to the deep end of the pool, twisting between the plants, sending the fish into a scatter. Nothing.
Your head breaks the surface again.
‘Bridget,’ Finn says softly, from the shallow end.
‘He was here!’ you cry. ‘He was!’
He glides through the water towards you and reaches to slide a hand down your body, leaving it on your haunch. You can see on his face what it’s cost him to swim just that far in this water.
You twist away from him, submerge, breaststroke your way back towards the steps, reaching, reaching. You heard Toby’s laugh here. You didn’t dream it. Where is he? The whole pool is alive now, just for him.
And he is dead.
You know it, suddenly, deep in your cells. Like you have never known it since the day he drowned.
Finn comes beside you, standing neck-deep in the water, reaches his arms out and wraps them around you, lifting you so you wrap your arms and legs around him, and you wail into his ear, a wail that should terrify any human being, but he’s not terrified. His arms tighten as if he would squeeze you into him.
‘He’s gone.’
‘I know,’ Finn murmurs, his voice deep and alive.
The pond is not your healing, you realise, as Finn rocks you in the water and the ripples lap at your neck. It’s the beginning of your grief breaking upon you. You thought you were ready to climb from the hole, but you haven’t even been into the hole yet. Not until today, not until you allowed Finn to be not guilty.
‘I’m with you,’ he whispers. ‘As long as it takes. We just have to forgive ourselves.’
‘Never,’ you say.
‘One day. One day you will.’
You don’t believe him. You can’t lose something as wondrous as Toby and go on. You must live with being unforgiven as long as you have breath in your body.
‘I forgive us,’ Finn says.
He gathers you up all over again, as if there were any more of you to gather, and in that living, breathing water that Toby has left forever, melded to Finn, you begin to weep, and of all the weeping this is the first that’s reached down into the pain of it, and the first time you’ve let him come with you. You can feel in his body that he’s not afraid, not of this, that he’s speaking the truth and he will stay, and in the midst of it you remember Chen, remember the night you put your hand on his chest, and knowing that you took your hand away again makes this somehow more bearable.
You can leave here, you realise.
Finn’s body is stirring under yours, your legs are already gripped around his waist and it’s simply another wave washing into you when he slides inside and you open yourself and take him in.