There was not much noise. His hair fluffed upward on top. The eye still stared, she was still pierced by it. She screamed his name. He was no less reachable dead than he had been a moment before. He bent forward as if to show her the ruin which had replaced his hair and the thing that held her broke, and she ran.
Two hours, two whole hours passed before she found Evelyn. One of the hours was simply lost; it was a blackness and a pain. The other was too quiet, a time of wandering about the house followed by a soft little whimpering that she made herself: ‘What?’ she whimpered, ‘what’s that you say?’ trying to understand, asking and asking the quiet house for the second hour.
She found Evelyn by the pool, lying on her back with her eyes wide open. On the side of Evelyn’s head was a puffiness, and in the centre of the puffiness was a hollow into which she could have laid three fingers.
‘Don’t,’ said Evelyn softly when Alicia tried to lift her head. Alicia set it back gently and knelt and took her hands and squeezed them together. ‘Evelyn, oh, what happened?’
‘Father hit me,’ Evelyn said calmly. ‘I’m going to go to sleep.’
Alicia whimpered.
Evelyn said, ‘What is it called when a person needs a… person… when you want to be touched and the… two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?’
Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. ‘Love,’ she said at length. She swallowed. ‘It’s a madness. It’s bad.’
Evelyn’s quiet face was suffused with a kind of wisdom. ‘It isn’t bad,’ she said. ‘I had it.’
‘You have to get back to the house.’