All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

“Give it to me, Maeve. Give me the knife.”

In the end, I don’t have a choice. He prises my fingers from around the knife’s handle, and immediately turns it on himself.

“Roe, no!”

But he just stares at me, and falls, backwards, onto the white satin.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THE THINGS I REMEMBER.

Fiona, tying the satin around the wounds. Making, as she called it, a tourniquet. I heard her say the word on the phone to the ambulance. She kept repeating that word through her tears, holding on to it as though it were a magic chant of its own. “I’ve wrapped their wounds,” she kept saying. “They’re bleeding a lot. I made them tourniquets.”

I remember wondering whether it was painful for her, to be so good at this, when the last thing in the world Fiona wants is to look after people. I remember thinking that her mother would be proud of her.

The moon. Everywhere and everything was the moon: everything was white; everything was pearls. Cold, minty light shot through Fiona from all angles as she held her phone to her face while I watched her from the ground. Can she not see it? How is she even keeping her eyes open? I was reduced to a squint. The moon was behind her, huge and booming, like the drunkest person at a party.

The grass. It was wet, and muddy, and I pressed my face into it to protect my eyes from the glare of the moon. It felt good on my face. A balm.

Fiona, before the ambulance came, her arms around me like she was a child holding on to a too-big teddy won at the fairground. She begged me to stop pressing my face in the dirt. “Look at me, Maeve,” she said, my face in her hands.

Roe’s shoe. The underside of his trainer. Caked in mud, and lying lifelessly on his foot. I squeeze my eyes shut. I should have known. He knew what I was up to. He knew from the moment he saw the carving knife. Roe. Roe. Roe.

The river. Soft lapping sounds like a sea tide, getting louder and louder, larger and larger. I laughed to myself and thought about the cogs that had gored my hand open. It was all so obvious, wasn’t it? We said it ourselves: Lily is water.

Lily is Water.

And finally: I remember the moon’s light finally starting to dim, and I remember long hair tickling my face. Drops of water fell on my forehead, drops so warm and iron-rich that I first understood them to be my own blood.

“Oh, Maeve,” Lily said. “What have you done?”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

WHEN I WAKE UP IN THE HOSPITAL, Jo is the only one there. She’s looking at her phone, biting her nails. Her eyes are red-rimmed and raw.

“You look terrible,” I say.

“Oh Jesus. Maeve. You’re awake! Oh my God, let me get Mum and Dad – they’re in the canteen. No, wait, how are you feeling? Are you OK? Do you need help sitting up?”

“I feel … OK,” I say uncertainly. I gaze at my arm. There’s a trail of stitches, nimbly picked out in brown thread. At the top of the trail is a wad of gauze where I had tried to gouge the knife further in. Before Roe took the knife off me, and turned it on himself.

I close my eyes as tears start to spill down my face.

“Hey, don’t start crying on me now,” Jo says. “I’m supposed to be the crier.”

“Why am I in here? How long have I been asleep? What happened?”

“You hit your head hard, Mae. Bashed your head on a rock when you fell.”

“When I…”

“Fiona explained how you were … what? Helping her rehearse? She called the ambulance and came in with you – her mum came to pick her up an hour ago.”

Thank God for Fiona.

“What about Roe?”

“Who?”

“Rory. Rory O’Callaghan.”

“He’s … not doing as well as you, but it seems like he’ll eventually be OK. He had some blood transfusions. His parents don’t know what to make of everything.”

“To make of what?”

“Oh, God, I forgot. You don’t know. Lily. She’s showed up. She staggered home last night when her parents were already at the hospital and collapsed on her front steps. The neighbours had to ring them while they were here.”

I blink, long and slow. I can’t believe this. Roe and I are alive, and Lily is … back? How can that be?

“So where was Lily?” I ask, dazed. “Where was she, this whole time?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t shared that with the likes of us yet. But her skin was almost blue. Hypothermia. Wherever she was must have been freezing.”

“So she’s in the hospital?”

“Yep,” Jo says. And then, after a pause. “This hospital.”

“Me, Roe and Lily are all in the same hospital,” I say disbelievingly. “Alive.”

“Alive,” she confirms.

And I don’t get another word from her, because Mum and Dad crash through the door, and I am covered in love.

They stay for hours, way past when they’re supposed to. Mum treats me like I’m made of glass. I don’t say a lot, and pretend to be much more tired than I am. I wait for clues, to try and make out what Fiona told them. She must be a better actress than even I realized, because the story sounds bizarre, yet Mum and Dad don’t seem to have any doubts about its validity. We were rehearsing Othello with her, apparently: it was all Fiona’s idea. The knife was there for Desdemona’s death scene. Jo, who did Shakespeare as part of her Masters, says nothing. I wonder if she remembers that Desdemona was smothered, and that it was Juliet who stabbed herself.

“I suppose this solves the mystery, then,” she finally says.

“Of what?”

“Of who your boyfriend is.”

“I don’t know if we’re calling it that.”

But a light switches on in me, bright as the North Star. Roe lived. I lived. Lily lived. We can do anything now.

My family leave slowly, reluctantly, with promises that