‘Morning,’ he said.
Neil nodded, smiling with his eyes.
Trey approached the tent as they were struggling into their clothes. In a hard, unfamiliar tone, he said, ‘He wants me to get the police. I mean, what the fuck, you guys? I don’t know about England, but in California you’re looking at two years in San Quentin. Jesus, this is the last thing…’
‘Is this what they teach you at Cambridge?’ the English woman said, as Trey stomped away. What? Adam thought. To her husband she said, loudly, ‘We thought they were such nice boys.’ The Yorkshireman tutted. I am a nice boy, Adam thought. I am.
The female hippy covered her eyes with a hand. The gay couple were staring, mouths open, intermittently shaking their heads. After a few, long minutes Neil said, ‘Look, I’m just stretching my legs, okay? Just over there, okay?’ Nobody stopped him. The athletic American crossed his arms imposingly on his chest but stood aside.
Adam found him leaning against a skinny tree. They were wearing their lookalike boots. Neil said, ‘Suppose I should have known.’
‘How should you?’
‘I don’t know. I just should have, to be honest. You know — her knickers.’
‘What’s wrong with her knickers?’
‘Nothing, they were just… I should have known.’
‘You know, I tried to…’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
They were quiet for a moment. It was getting properly light. Adam scratched his leg.
‘You used something, right?’
Neil didn’t answer. He broke a twig from a low branch and bent it in his fist; it was too supple to snap and he threw it aside.
After a minute Adam said, ‘I guess the skiing’s off.’
‘Ad, don’t. Didn’t you hear what he said? About San wherever it was.’ Adam said nothing. ‘Who am I going to call?’
‘What?’
‘You get one call, don’t you? Or is that only on television?’
‘I don’t know,’ Adam said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
Neil pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and in a different voice, quieter but firmer, as if he had been rehearsing in his head, said, ‘It was what you wanted, wasn’t it? I mean, you wanted it too. You started it.’
Adam knew what he meant. The harmless competition, the innocent collusion, the rapt exclusion of other people’s feelings from their thoughts: all the ordinary elements of friendship that had brought them here. The words he had spoken about the girl, as well as the crucial ones he hadn’t. ‘What are you talking about?’ he replied.
They trudged back together. Flight would have been impractical, but, in any case, the idea never occurred to them — some ingrained deference to the law, and the paralysing numbness of their predicament. They stood in silence, anticipating the police, the handcuffs, Neil’s right to remain silent, Adam privately wondering whether he might be fingered as an accessory. Those two years in San Quentin.
Presently they heard raised voices at the edge of the campsite. They saw Eric gesturing at the two of them with a thumb. They saw Trey pat him on the shoulder and Eric brush off his hand. Trey walked over to them in what seemed like slow motion.
‘There’s a shuttle you can catch,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way, he tells me to hold it, now they… Just take the shuttle, there’s a bus to the city.’
‘But…’ Neil began.
‘He’s changed his mind. She must have persuaded him, how the hell should I know? Could be she told him nothing happened. Or he doesn’t want to put her through it. But he wants you out of here.’
‘Thanks,’ Adam said. ‘Really.’
Trey spat in the dirt. ‘Just get the fuck out of here, will you?’
Neil ducked into the tent to pack up his kit. Adam jogged over to the extinguished campfire, where Trey had half-arranged the breakfast things, to get some water for the journey. Three of the previous evening’s beer bottles sprawled in the ashes. He was dizzy with relief: no police, nothing to be an accessory to, the surreal peril lifting, nightmare-like, as suddenly as it had struck.
As he turned from the water cooler, Eric intercepted him. Adam looked over the broad shoulder for Neil, or for anyone. He shuffled sideways, but Eric blocked him off. ‘You,’ he said, ‘you little… It’s not for your sake, believe me… What kind of people are you?’
Not knowing what to say, Adam offered a tense smile.
‘You think this is funny?’ Eric said. ‘Big joke for you guys, isn’t it? My little girl… What did you do, make a bet or something?’
‘He said he was sorry,’ Adam managed. ‘We’re both very sorry.’
‘I want you to remember this,’ Eric said. ‘One day, you’ll have your own… You do your best, you think you’re doing right. I hope for your sake you never know how this feels.’
Eric half-turned to go, and Adam thought it was over, but he reconsidered and turned back. Briefly Adam feared Eric might punch or throttle him. ‘You know what,’ he said instead, ‘scratch that. I hope you find out exactly how this feels. I told you, you asshole. I fucking told you. I should never have let her stay up… I hope you do, and when that day comes you better remember me.’
At last he walked off, which at the time felt to Adam like a mercy, Eric’s one day being too remote and hypothetical to seem troubling.
Adam stuffed his kit into his rucksack, silently and fast, and they were almost out. At the very end, as they were heaving their bags onto their backs, Rose marched up to Neil, holding out a torn piece of paper on which she had scribbled her name and her parents’ address and phone number. She had changed into a T-shirt with a Charlie Brown motif; she inclined her face for him to kiss, her eyes red but no longer crying, chest heaving despite her visible efforts to pacify it.
Eric watched, now squatting on a tree trunk with his palms on his temples. He seemed somehow shrunken, like a terracotta statue of himself. He balled his hands into fists and let them hang beside his calves. Much later, Adam wondered whether, along with all the other emotions he must have experienced, Eric might have been proud of his daughter at that moment, as she strode across the campsite. Adam saw him avert his eyes as Neil raised a finger to Rose’s chin, gently tilted her face forward and kissed the crown of her head, like a blessing.
She controlled herself until he and Adam hurried away. As they left the campsite they heard a single sob, deeper and longer than her rollercoaster squeals at the lake. Turning back, inadvisably, as they went, Adam saw Rose sitting on her father’s knee, her face buried in his chest, his in her hair.
The odd thing was, or so it came to seem, that for all the blame they were to apportion, all the secrecy and forgiveness and revenge, they didn’t feel so very much at the time. Or perhaps it wasn’t odd, given how remorse can sometimes accumulate, the intimate sort especially; how events can take on a different complexion or valency the further they recede, or the more they seem to have happened to someone else; the more entangled they become, as Rose would, with other memories and resentments. They talked about the drama as they took that shuttle, they talked about her on the bus to San Francisco, Neil briefly studying her note in his lap, but scarcely at all as they delivered the pick-up to Portland (a long straight drive with no detours), where the grateful recipient, the man from San Diego’s older and calmer brother, took them out for a burger to thank them. This glossing-over was partly tact, and involved at least some shame, but also, that summer, a giddy, distracted sense of scale. They didn’t register the pivot in their lives, as you might notice a scratch without anticipating the infection.
They were both due to fly home from Los Angeles, and both with the same airline, but on different dates, so Neil called and changed his ticket. On the Greyhound to LA they made unwisely loud jokes about the consequences they might suffer if they ventured into the badlands at the rear of the bus. On the plane Neil fell asleep in the aisle seat with his head on Adam’s shoulder. Adam leaned across, reached into the luggage compartment for a blanket, and draped it over him.