Chapter 5: Rain on His Shoulders
He looked at his son first. I want him to have that.
Then he looked at me.
Then he looked at Serena.
And his face did not change.
Not at the child on the floor. Not at the girl in the torn uniform. Not at the woman he was marrying in six weeks.
I have seen men lose their tempers and none of it has ever frightened me the way that frightened me.
Rage tells you where you are. Rage is information.
He gave us nothing at all.
Then he said, to the man on his right, in an ordinary voice, “Get Marco up here.”
The man went back down the corridor. His footsteps did not hurry either.
Victor came the four metres and went down on one knee beside us.
He did that carefully. The knee came down slowly, the way a heavy man kneels on stone.
He did not touch the arm. I have thought about that since and I do not know whether it was instinct or luck.
He said, “How long has he been like that?”
Not who did it. Not what happened. How long.
I said, “Four minutes.”
It was four minutes. I had been counting since the box came down, because I had nothing else to do with my head.
He said, “Which arm.”
“Left. He’s holding it himself. He hasn’t used it since.”
He nodded once. Then he put his hands out for his son.
Ethan screamed.
Not the hurt scream. A different one, with the whole body in it, a rigid backward arch, both legs going straight.
He twisted round into my chest and got a fistful of my collar with his right hand and pulled.
Victor’s hands stopped in the air about ten centimetres from him.
I want to be careful about this because it became important, and because it was cruel, and because nobody meant it.
That child would not go to his father.
He had never refused him before. He waited at a window forty minutes a night for him.
But something had happened on a floor, and afterwards there was exactly one pair of hands in the world he would accept.
They were mine and they were the cheapest pair of hands in the house.
Victor knelt there for perhaps three seconds with his arms out and nothing in them.
Then he took his hands back and put one of them flat on the marble and stood up.
I do not think anybody else in that room noticed. I noticed because I was at knee height.
Serena began to speak.
She spoke well. I am going to write down what she said as exactly as I can, because it matters that it was good.
“He pulled a box off the table. Four hundred cards. Lily was slow getting to him and he went down on the marble.”
“I lifted him out of it. She came at me and took him out of my hands and we both went over.”
“I don’t know how the arm happened. I think it happened when she pulled him.”
Every sentence in that was made of a true thing.
He did pull a box off the table. I was slow. I did take him out of her hands. We did both end up on the floor.
That is what she was, and it took me a very long time to understand it.
She did not lie the way liars lie. She took the facts and moved two of them.
Victor did not answer her. He did not look at her while she was talking.
He said, “Call Moreno.”
I said, “My phone is in the nursery.”
He took his own out of his coat and held it out to me, and I could not take it, because I had a fourteen-month-old on my chest with one hand in my collar.
There was a moment where we both looked at that problem.
Then he crouched again and put the phone on the marble beside my knee, screen up, and stood up again.
I keyed the number from memory. I had keyed it enough times.
It rang four times and went to the service, and I left a message with the date and the time and the words distal forearm, will not use, guarding, and I said we were going to the hospital.
I did not say who had been in the room. I had not decided anything about that yet. I am not sure I had decided anything at all.
Behind me the second man had gone out and I could hear a car being brought round on the granite.
That sound, at last. That was the first car anybody heard all evening.
Serena said, “Victor.”
He said, “Get her coat.”
Nobody moved, because nobody was sure which her he meant, and he did not clarify.
Then he straightened up fully and turned and looked at the corner of the ceiling above the inner door.
That is where the foyer camera is. A black dome about the size of a grapefruit.
He looked at it for a long time. Long enough that I turned my head to see what he was looking at.