“Something happened when I was seventeen. They…let me down and I never saw them again.”
“Something?”
“Yes, something.”
“What?”
“Can you remember more about the fall?”
Oh. River got the message. Newt didn’t want to talk about it.
“Remember not wanting…to climb.” He hadn’t remembered that for a long while and still questioned whether itwas a memory or an assumption. River hated heights, so maybe he’d turned that fear into a memory.
“You had a stunt double.”
“Barney. He was sick.” River had learned much later, once his understanding came back, that Barney had a stomach upset.
“Did anyone check that he really was sick?”
“Max said M…Malik did.”
“Barney must have felt guilty that you fell and not him.”
Now the idea that Barney might not have been sick was in his head, River began to wonder.
“Why didn’t Malik climb?”
“Didn’t look right. Small. Wrong…build. Barney tall, thin…blond like me.”
“You must have been so scared when you woke to find yourself in hospital.”
He’d been freaked out every time he woke. And every time he did, his first thought had beenSo I’m not dead yet then.“Scared. Confused. Pain.”
“It’s almost the worst-case scenario. The worst being dead. But being hurt and not being able to understand why, what had happened, what was going to happen, that would be frightening.”
“It was. Better off dead. Wished I was.”
Newt glanced at him. “I’m not surprised you thought that. I’m glad that feeling went away.”
It had taken a while. Getting his understanding back had been a turning point.
“Did you ever read thatDiving Bell and the Butterflybook?”
“Saw film.”
“The French guy had a massive stroke that left him onlyable to blink his left eye. It must have been absolutely terrifying.”
“I thought…if I…if can’t talk, can’t read, can’t understand… No life.”
“And no way to kill yourself.”
River nodded. “How you…?”
“How did I know that’s what you were thinking?”
“Yes.”
“Because I’d feel like that too. But youcanunderstand, you can speak and you’re learning to read again. You’re getting your life back.”
