“It was all my fault, and you’d have all been better off if it had been me. It should have been me.”
“You’re not to say that ever again,” he whispered fiercely. “My God, Belle, why have you kept that all shut away?”
“Because if I didn’t think about it then it didn’t happen. It was a bad dream and I’d wake up and she’d still be here, but I couldn’t sleep and I wanted to because then I could wake up,” I stuttered over the words, fisting the tears out of my eyes. “Dad, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry that she left you.”
“Thank you for staying with her so she wasn’t alone,” he said so softly I had to strain my ears to catch the words. “She didn’t like being by herself.”
“She was always bugging me to do stuff with her when you weren’t here, and it used to really get on my nerves that she’d never give me any space, but now . . .” I started crying again, hopelessly, helplessly, because suddenly it hit me every bit as hard as that final slam into the back of the lorry that she was gone.
He didn’t say anything; just let me cry until my head felt like it had been packed in cotton wool and then when my throat was too sore to cry any longer, he put a finger to my lips. “If anything had happened to you tonight . . .” he began, then smiled wryly. “Anything worse than this . . . I wouldn’t have been able to live with losing both of you. Even when I’ve been so very angry with you, with the way you’ve acted as if her loss was this minor inconvenience, I love you too much, Belle, even when I don’t like you.”
“You want to send me away to some school where they’re going to make me pray all the time.” I sounded a bit like my old self. “I saw the brochures. I saw them!”
He met my accusatory stare without flinching. “I’ll admit, I’ve given it serious consideration. You didn’t seem to want to be here, and I can’t endure this situation any longer, Belle.”
“I don’t want to go, I want to stay here with you and Felix, but everything is so messed and I don’t know how to fix it. Not just Mum, everything, and I’m so unhappy,” I finished on this desperate wail, and I was gushing out saltwater again and had my good arm around his neck in this complete stranglehold.
He took it in very good humor, snagging a tissue from the box on the side table and telling me to blow my nose in a stern voice that shocked a giggle out of me.
“I will not lose you, Isabel,” he said gravely. “Not to car accidents or your self-destructive behavior. We’ll sort things out, but I will not have a repeat of these last few months, do I make myself clear?”
I nodded. “I am sorry, Dad. I know it was my fault . . .”
“It wasn’t,” he insisted bleakly, choking on the words. “I needed . . . wanted to blame someone because if I hadn’t gone away, if I’d been here . . . and I’ve been trying to hold everything together, make us a family again, but I feel like I lost you as well as her.”
“No! You’re not to say that!” Now I was comforting him, planting millions of tiny kisses across his cheeks. “I did get lost but I wanted someone to find me, you know that, right?”
“I’m beginning to.” I reached out my hand so I could trace the lines etched around his eyes that never used to be there. He turned his head so he could kiss my fingers. “I think you’re responsible for some of those wrinkles and at least 75 percent of my gray hairs.”
“They make you look distinguished.” I frowned. “Kind of.”
“I love you very much, Isabel, even when you make me utterly furious,” he said.
I could feel my eyelids drooping and I yawned hard enough to dislocate my jaw. “Right back at you, Dad.”
“Bed,” he said firmly, helping me stand up, his arm around me for support as I staggered to the door. “You must be exhausted.”
“I passed exhausted a few hours ago,” I said, yawning again and then I looked around. “Hey, where did Smith go?”
Dad coughed delicately. “He very diplomatically excused himself from the room when you started crying. He seems . . . nice enough for someone who’s been leading you astray.”
“It was more like the other way around,” I said, and there he was sitting on the stairs with Felix as they both tucked into bowls of cereal.
They both looked up, and then Smith got to his feet, clutching his cornflakes and looking like it was his turn to burst into tears.
“It’s quite all right, Atticus,” my father demurred. “I don’t happen to have my shotgun at hand.”
The flush started at Smith’s hairline and if he hadn’t been wearing his Jack Purcells, I bet even his little toes would have been blushing. “Yeah . . . um . . . look, I’m sorry . . . I didn’t . . .” he stammered while Dad smiled faintly. He could be one scary fucker sometimes. “I’ll go, if that’s okay with you, sir?”
“Are you all right to drive? It’s very late and you’ve had rather a stressful night.”
I don’t think Smith could have got out of our house fast enough. “No, it’s cool. I might walk, clear my head.”
“Thanks for everything,” I said, and it seemed so lame after he’d been all rocklike in the face of everything I’d thrown at him. “Sorry for being . . . well, sorry for everything.”
And even though I was leaning against Dad, Smith walked away from the door so he could find the one unmarked spot on my face and press his lips to it. “Don’t mention it.” He smiled. “Remember not to get your cast wet.”
“I think we have it covered,” Dad said silkily, putting his hand on Smith’s shoulder and flexing his fingers ever so slightly. “And you should stop for tea when you come around to collect your car.”
“There might be cake,” Felix chimed in hopefully.
Smith edged toward the door with one wary eye on Dad, like he expected him to break out the horsewhip and/or shotgun. Then he was giving me a halfhearted little wave and a lopsided smile before Dad shut the door behind him.
“He’s been really good to me,” I offered, but he shook his head.
“It can all wait until you’ve had some sleep.”
“So should I go to bed or shall I just stay up because cartoons will be on soon?” Felix asked as we shuffled up the stairs.
“We’re all going to bed,” Dad said firmly. “And we’re going to sleep until at least lunchtime.”
My leg gave out before we reached the top and he swung me up in his arms. “What if I can’t sleep?” I whispered. “What if tomorrow just keeps on sucking?”
He nudged open the door of my room with his foot and placed me gently on the bed. “One day it won’t,” he said, tugging at the laces of my sneakers. “One day you’ll wake up and find that the pain’s still there but it doesn’t hurt quite so much.”
I shrugged out of my borrowed jacket and decided that if I was going to sleep it might as well be fully clothed. “But it doesn’t ever really go away, does it?”
He tucked the quilt around me, nice and tight, and then straightened up. “No,” he said, eyes shadowed. “It doesn’t ever really go away.”
“Good,” I muttered, and I was asleep before he’d even switched off the light.
Let'sGetLost
Epilogue
So, I’m sorry that I haven’t been here for ages.
A lot’s happened but I guess you probably know that. I’m not sure how it works. Like, can you see me all the time? If you can, that’s weird and slightly icky, especially if I’m doing something rude. But, anyway, things were bad for quite a while. Disaster movie bad. I don’t even want to get into it, not because I’m being avoidy but it’s in the past and I’ve moved on.
I got into another car crash a few months ago. I’ve really screwed up my arm so I guess that I’m not going to be a brain surgeon or a concert violinist. I think I needed to be really hurt on the outside so the hurt on the inside would realize that it wasn’t on its own and that it had to come out.
Dad was amazing. I told him everything, and he didn’t get really cold and sarcastic like he does—you remember? He pulled me out of school immediate
ly, wouldn’t take any crap from Mrs. Greenwood or the governors. I’m going to go to college in September and maybe I’ll squeeze my A-levels into one year, maybe I won’t.
I haven’t seen the others. Even Dot. She kept calling, and Dad said I had to be straight with her and tell her why I didn’t want to see her ever again. I miss her sometimes but I don’t want to be that girl any more. I never did. Not deep down.
It’s been really nice to just chill. Grandma’s talking to me again, she taught me how to knit because it’s good therapy for my hand, and I made a cover for my iPod and I made one for Smith, too. I’ll tell you about him later. But mostly this year, I’ve been working with Dad. Or, like, I’ve been working for Dad because, yeah, he’s been amazing but he was really pissed off that I hurt all his books and he wanted compensation. And a new filing system. Payback’s a bitch.
I go to the university with him some days and sit at the back while he lectures and hear his students moan about him. Then I come home and make these really exotic meals. And I taught Felix, who says hi by the way, how to bake so we’ve been having a lot of cake.
What else? I did some volunteering at an old people’s home, but I gave it up because I didn’t like the old people. They smelled funny and most of them were loopy. Oh, come on! I haven’t suddenly sprouted wings. I’m still me.
Dad’s taking the summer off and he’s rented a place in Devon with a swimming pool. He says he’s going to write a book about some dead American novelist, no surprises there, and that Smith can keep me out of trouble. Yup, Smith’s coming, too. As my sort-of-not-boyfriend.
I’m not sure what he is, but we kissed the other night for the first time in ages and maybe I’ve finally wriggled back into his good graces. It’s taken a lot of effort, not just in knitted iPod covers or Victoria sponges. Takes more than that to make someone trust you again. Dad was easy compared with Smith.
All his friends hated me for making him miserable and lying to him. Even when I was at my most forlorn with my plaster cast accessory, they’d walk out of the room when I walked into it. I guess I deserved it, but I think they’re warming to me. Well, Molly is and she might come down to Devon while we’re there. Jane is always going to hate my guts and the feeling’s pretty mutual and Smith . . . he’s like my best friend, and maybe now that we’re getting kissy again, he might be my best friend with, like, benefits.
Should probably stop getting fixated on one kiss. Smith says that we went too far and too fast last time and that we have to slow down—I have to slow down. I think I’ll be eighty before we ever have sex again. And I still love him. I can’t help it. I wish I could sometimes, because it hurts when he won’t say it back. He says that he needs more time. I wonder if he sneaks into my room when I’m asleep and whispers it in my ear while I dream about you.
Yeah, I always dream about you. Good dreams. I wish I didn’t have to wake up. But I always do and the pain’s still there, but I don’t ever want it to go away because then it means that you’ve gone away. But you’re not ever going to leave me, I know that now.
Everyone was right when they said I’d carry a piece of you in my heart and I do. And it burns so bright, the tiny corner of my heart that’s exclusively yours, that it’s turned all the terrible things we said that day into ash and all that’s left is the good stuff.
I see you all around me. I see you in Felix when he’s concentrating on his homework and his tongue pokes out the corner of his mouth. I feel you in the way my hands rub the butter and flour together when I’m baking, like you taught me. I hear you every time Dad calls me “Belle,” like you used to. A million times in a million different ways, you’re there in my heart. Don’t ever stop. Don’t ever leave.
I love you, Mum. Always.
Let'sGetLost
a note from the author
I started Let’s Get Lost about three months after my mum died. I never got a chance to say good-bye to her, so I wrote this book instead. Three years and about ten different drafts later, I finished it and hope that it’s a fitting tribute to an amazing woman who nurtured my love of reading and gave me all the opportunities she never had. Without her, I’d never have become a writer.
There are no words left, so I’ll just point out that Isabel’s badges came from the wonderful mymy.girlswirl.net/ and that “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” is by Broken Social Scene from their very brilliant album You Forgot It in People.
Table of Contents
Let's Get Lost
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