He squeezed them tighter, shook her.’ You do know, don’t you? All about me?’
‘Let me go. Please let me go. Oh, Hip, you don’t know what you’re doing!’
He flung her back on the bed. She drew up her legs, turned on her side, propped up on one elbow and, through tears, incredible tears, tears which didn’t belong to any Janie he had yet seen, she looked up at him. She held her bruised forearm, flexed her free hand. ‘You don’t know,’ she choked, ‘what you’re…’ And then she was quiet, panting, sending, through those impossible tears, some great, tortured, thwarted message which he could not read.
Slowly he knelt beside the bed. ‘Ah, Janie. Janie.’
Her lips twitched. It could hardly have been a smile but it wanted to be. She touched his hair. ‘It’s all right,’ she breathed.
She let her head fall to the pillow and closed her eyes. He curled his legs under him, sat on the floor, put his arms on the bed and rested his cheek on them.
She said, with her eyes closed, ‘I understand, Hip; I do understand. I want to help, I want to go on helping.’
‘No you don’t,’ he said, not bitterly, but from the depths of an emotion something like grief.
He could tell—perhaps it was her breath—that he had started the tears again. He said, ‘ You know about me. You know everything I’m looking for.’ It sounded like an accusation and he was sorry. He meant it only to express his reasoning. But there wasn’t any other way to say it. ‘Don’t you?’
Still keeping her eyes closed, she nodded.