A Season, or Half a Year

The color drained from Frederick's face—Frederick, who never lost his composure. Elliot stared straight at him, expressionless.

I'm grateful you're worried for me, but even hypocrisy ought to know its limits. You know perfectly well that smooth words require a certain right to speak them.

He rose, bracing a hand on his knee, and spared a single glance for his friend, gone rigid as a wax doll.

"I'll be going. Tell your parents I'm sorry I left without saying goodbye."

His footsteps struck the marble in a steady rhythm. But before he could open the door and step out, a voice caught him by the ankle.

"I'm saying it because I know, you idiot."

Elliot said nothing.

"Because I know what war is. A place like that isn't somewhere a man like you can endure."

Frederick still had his head bowed low. Elliot, who had paused, crossed the threshold without looking back.

A corridor flooded with sunlight, and a gallery lined with art so lavish it turned the stomach. That was the last of the Dickens house he remembered.

After that day the two of them met from time to time, whenever Elliot was granted leave and came down to Castleleigh. Frederick behaved as though he had forgotten it entirely, and Elliot—busy adapting to a new world, and drunk on the luck of stacking up achievements without a hitch—had no room left to recall it. Frederick would offer him polished little remarks. I saw the article about you. You seem to be doing well; I'm glad.

But as the war intensified, leave grew ever more remote, and his meetings with Frederick dwindled with it.

On the rare, lucky occasions he made it down to Castleleigh, Frederick still appeared as a tidy young gentleman in finely tailored clothes. By then Elliot no longer took any pride in his specialty, and he felt something close to revulsion at the hero's image the higher-ups had so plausibly draped over the facts. Every time he saw an article invoke his mother's epithet and call him the Blue Meteor, he felt as if he were sinking into a mire.

Frederick, sharp by nature, stopped bringing up the battlefield. He filled their talk with trivial things—how the university was, how the professors were—and at the end he would only pull him into an embrace and whisper:

"If it gets to be too much, say so. You think there isn't a way to get just you out?"

And Elliot would answer:

"How am I supposed to get out alone?"

Frederick's face, hearing that, was always a subtle thing. It was the look of a man watching a dull younger brother, and at the same time the look of someone keenly aware of his own responsibility.

"Think only of yourself. This isn't a situation easy enough that you can look after other people too."

"What can I do? I was born this way."

"......True enough. That would be like you."

From then on, instead of trying to persuade him, Frederick took to adding a see-you-again to his goodbyes. Elliot always heard it as survive, and come see me next time too. Never quite saying what he meant was an old habit of Frederick's.

Around the time the war worsened and the pressure crushing him grew heavier by the day, Elliot, in a distant foreign land, often found himself thinking of Frederick. More precisely, of the Frederick he had met just before enlisting.

Why didn't you stop me harder, back then?

Absurd as it was, he thought it. In the end the one who had chosen was himself, and knowing full well he would not have listened even if he had been stopped, he went looking for someone to turn the arrow of blame upon. He knew Frederick was innocent in the matter—at least in this. If he did not blame someone, he could not sleep at night.

He had simply been that exhausted. It was nothing especially unusual. The sort of torment other people suffered all the time.

Elliot sat on a great rock and stared out at the far horizon. A past he had no wish to revisit stirred every wrong feeling in him. Regret. Guilt. Resentment. Self-loathing.

He tried to turn the arrow aside—it was all last night's nightmare, all the nightmare's remnants he had stumbled on in the newspaper—but he knew the effort was meaningless. Just as when he had carelessly condemned the blameless Frederick, he knew that in the end every arrow would come back to him.

Yes. In the end it was all his fault. The wrong choice, and the wounds he had dealt the people who cherished him. The sleepless days that followed might well have been part of the penance he was obliged to pay.

"Elliot, I'm sorry. Mother is so sorry......"

Why, as a child, had he failed to understand his mother's heart as she held him and wept? If she ever learned that her foolish son had walked, to the very end, the same road she had walked, what would she say?

Elliot cut short the thoughts that threatened to lengthen without end and rose. The envelope at his feet was fairly heavy, packed with every sort of sweet—chocolate cake, candy, and the rest. Anna would like them. Picturing her face bright with a smile, he swallowed the bitterness that would not leave him.

The clouded horizon was dark. The weather was poor, and boats heading in early were beginning to show themselves, scattered across the water. Climbing the hill with the sea at his back, Elliot turned at the faint, distant sound of a horn.

The blast that had filled his ears became, before he knew it, the drone of an aircraft engine. Meeting a wind that rose like a hallucination, he remembered a single plane from long ago, vanishing beyond that horizon.

The promise with Luke, which he had forgotten completely, popped out of Thomas's mouth without warning.

"Come to think of it—you said you were going to join the kids' gathering?"

"What?"

"Luke was bragging that you and Anna were coming to the village kids' meetup."

Thock. Thomas brought a large kitchen knife down through a hunk of meat.

"She's nineteen already. Aren't you coddling her a bit much?"

Thomas muttered it, turning his gaze away for no particular reason. Elliot gave a weak laugh.

"You think I'm doing this because I enjoy it?"

"Hmm. Well. Anna's a sickly child."

"And we haven't even decided to go."

"What?"

"I don't remember giving Luke a definite answer."

Elliot said it dryly, staring blankly at the sky beyond the window. Thomas asked, looking a little startled.

"You're not going?"

"I don't know."

Thomas set the knife down without another word. He wiped his hands on his apron, hesitated a long while, and then, faltering, spoke.

"Elliot. Children don't grow just because you wrap them up and keep them safe. They grow a little at a time—making friends, bumping into the world for themselves. Of course you'll handle it well enough, but......"

Elliot only listened in silence to the words Thomas mumbled into his chest. Thomas, who did not know the circumstances, could speak that easily. From where Elliot stood, it was not a comfortable thing to keep sending Anna out into the world. What Frederick had asked of him was Anna's safety, not her care.

Still, one sentence among the words he had been letting pass lodged especially deep.

"Anna will be an adult soon. You can't look after her forever."

How long, really, can I?

Elliot groped back over the past two months, which had slipped by in idleness. The season that had been a chilly early spring when he left Castleleigh had blossomed into a bright spring and was already nearing summer's threshold.

A season, if it's short. Half a year at the longest.

So when summer comes, perhaps you and I—

Elliot closed his eyes, opened them, and turned to Thomas.

"Those friends of Luke's. What are they like?"

"What do you mean, what are they like?"

"Are they trustworthy?"

At the rather sharp question, Thomas's face went plainly flustered, and he stammered out an answer. Elliot listened carefully.

Frederick would surely call it a foolish thing if he knew. Even so, Elliot wanted to show Anna as much as he could—good people and bad, a bright world and a dark one. The child was too pitiful, thirsting for love and seeking affection from someone of merely this degree. And so he hoped, cautiously, that someday they might part with a smile.

"This Thursday! You'll really come, won't you? You will?"

When he asked, offhand, when the gathering was, Luke was beside himself with joy. He said he had been terribly confused all this time, wondering whether Elliot had been unable to refuse him to his face and had only put him off. Elliot, who had in fact been thinking exactly that, could only smile and say nothing.

When he told Anna about the promise with Luke, she—oddly—showed no particular reaction. She only fidgeted with the page of the book she was reading, then asked quietly:

"You're going too, aren't you, Elliot?"

When he nodded, Anna fixed her eyes on the book again, indifferent. Elliot, who had thought she would be pleased, felt awkwardly at a loss. It would be nice if she made a few new friends while she was at it.

A few peaceful days passed, and Thursday came on swiftly. The moment he opened his eyes at dawn, Elliot drew the curtains and looked outside, relieved by the clear weather. The unpaved dirt track up the hill turned to mud the instant it rained. He remembered the white shoes Anna had quietly set out the night before.

The appointment was for lunch. They ate a simple breakfast of bread and butter, then spent a short while reading, each with a cup—coffee for him, tea for her. Anna peered at the black water Elliot sometimes drank under the name of coffee, took a single sip, and immediately retreated with a puckered face. Anna liked sweet things. Into bitter tea she always put milk, or jam.

The clock hands, which had been running without rest, had already passed eleven. They put away the newspaper and the book and went to their rooms to change. Anna, who had been looking forward to the day while pretending otherwise, simply would not come out.

At the table, now bare of anything to read, Elliot waited for her in a daze. Through the low window in the kitchen, the warm sunlight of late spring was pouring in. In the drowsiness that crept over him little by little, the sharp crack of gunfire and the silence of a high sky existed side by side.

He rose unsteadily. His eyes closed of their own accord. One cup of coffee had not been enough, it seemed.

While he boiled water in the kettle and brewed the coffee, Anna's door stayed quiet. A glance at the clock showed the hands already racing toward half past eleven. He knew he ought to hurry her, and yet he only turned the teaspoon, sluggish. His gaze seemed to be drawn down into the swirling black water.

At the click of the latch he lifted the cup and turned. In that instant it slipped from his hand.

Crash.