The Apothecary Page 0,91

expected them to be furious, but instead they caught me up in their arms, first my father, then my mother, crying and holding on to me as if they would never let go. I started crying, too, just because they were. They didn’t seem to notice that my clothes smelled of seawater and reindeer fat. My father was so overwhelmed that he couldn’t speak right away, a rarity for him.

“We were sick with worry, Janie,” my mother said, wiping tears from her face. “That ridiculous Mrs Parrish said you were staying with someone named Sarah, but the Sarah we found at your school said you’d gone on a boat trip with someone’s uncle. But whose uncle? What boat? The school knew nothing! How could you just go off like that?”

“Benjamin’s father wants to meet tomorrow,” I said. “So we can tell you everything.”

“I’m going to wring that kid’s neck,” my father said.

“He saved my life,” I said. “You’ll understand when they tell you the whole story.”

“When we went to the police, they said you’d been arrested,” my mother said. “They said you’d been released to a teacher and then vanished, and they threatened us with deportation when we couldn’t tell them where you were. But we were asking them! Janie, we’ve just been sick.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m so tired, I couldn’t begin to tell it all. And I really, really want to take a bath.”

They seemed to be afraid I might disappear again if they denied me anything, so they agreed. I understood, as I filled the tub, how truly luxurious it was to have a private bathroom in the flat. I was careful not to kick the drain lever, and I took my first bath—alone, in hot water, without Benjamin and Pip waiting for me to become invisible—in what seemed like a very long time.

When I was out and dry, my parents kissed me good night and said again how terrible it had been, and extracted promises of the whole story, no omissions, in the morning. Then I climbed into bed. My diary was tucked beneath the mattress where I’d left it, and I brought it up to date, from sneaking Benjamin through my window a million years ago to the flight home. I fell asleep with the little red book still in my hand.

The next day was a Saturday, and I woke to yellow sunlight streaming through my window. I stretched my arms and legs, happy to be in a bed, in London, in my parents’ flat: I almost thought the word home, which I never thought I’d use for any place except Los Angeles. My mother made scrambled eggs for breakfast, and they were the best things I’d ever eaten, hot and salty and delicious.

The telephone rang, and it was Benjamin. “My father and I will be in the newsreel cinema at Victoria Station in an hour,” he said. “Can you and your parents come?” He sounded odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how.

“Are you all right?”

“Just tired,” he said. “We didn’t get much sleep. Listen, you know that diary you keep?”

“Yes.”

“Will you bring it? There are some things I want to check against my notebook.”

I should have been suspicious right then. I should have been more wary all along. But I was so glad he was safe and healthy, and I wanted so much to see him and talk about everything we hadn’t gone over yet, that I would have done anything he asked.

There were early daffodils blooming in window boxes as my parents and I walked to the Underground. The weather was brisk and cold, but it was balmy compared to the Arctic, and it was good to be outside on a beautiful day. My parents were eager to hear the apothecary’s story, and were in surprisingly buoyant moods, as if he had already slipped them a potion that produced a happy complacency. They had even started speculating about what the nature of my absence might have been.

“You joined a traveling circus,” my father guessed.

“You joined a band of wandering troubadours,” my mother said.

“You were an elephant tamer?” my father said. “Or a tightrope walker. I can’t decide.”

“Just wait,” I said. “It’s much stranger than any of that.”

At Victoria, we went into the darkened newsreel theater, and I spotted Benjamin and his father sitting with Pip in a back row, in the flickering light of a news story about fighting in Korea. Pip grinned and waved at me,