The Sight of You

by Holly Miller

  “Well, let’s see. There’s Iris—she’s eighty-five. And Mary’s getting on for ninety. And I tell you, if I were fifty years older—”

  Still laughing, I put up a hand. “I know I started it, but now I wish I hadn’t.”

  A waiter approaches to show us to our table.

  “Sorry.” Joel smiles. “I’ll dial down the borderline humor now.”

  “No, don’t,” I plead. “Borderline humor’s my favorite.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I’m feeling it, I think, as we’re seated at a cozy corner table. Joel makes me warm with pleasure as ever . . . but then again, he can be hard to read. I’m not sure if it’s mixed signals exactly, but I just don’t know if he sees me as anything more than a friend. Occasionally when I meet his eye, and feel that magnet-clamp deep in my chest, I think perhaps he does—but then it’s as if something shifts in his brain, and he folds up all his feelings and shoves them away, out of reach.

  Besides, I’m still unclear on quite what the deal is with him and Melissa. He’s said they’re friends with benefits, but that could mean any one of a thousand things. I want to ask, but I’m not sure if I will. Sometimes I sense a certain guardedness about him, and the last thing I want to do is cause offense.

  “I love drinking wine from these,” I say, as our waiter sets down a carafe of red wine and two tumblers. “They make me feel like I’m at a pavement café somewhere in the Med.”

  Joel smiles as he pours, hands me a glass.

  “By the way, I wanted to thank you,” I say. “For talking to Steve.”

  Joel met him at the weekend, explained the Murphy situation, squared the whole thing up so I didn’t have to worry about being caught out.

  “You already thanked me.”

  Yes, I did, when he told me—but only in stammered sentences as my tear ducts geared up. “Well, this is my official thank-you.”

  He raises his glass to mine, eyes twinkling. “No, this is your official congratulations.”

  “It feels a bit premature,” I confess. “I still have to get the job, and it doesn’t help that I’m terrible at interviews.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “Oh, it’s true. I shake, sweat—everything. All they’ll need to say is, Why do you want to work in nature conservation, Miss Cooper? and I’ll probably start weeping.”

  I feel his gaze resting on me. “Well, if you do,” he says, “it’ll only go to show them how passionate you are.”

  Though it’s icy outside, it’s cozy in the restaurant, and Joel’s removed his jumper. He looks lovely bare-armed across the table from me, warm and calm. After some deliberation, I decided to go smart-casual tonight—my nicest jeans, and the silk blouse strewn with stars that Grace convinced me I should buy, only weeks before she died.

  I take a sip of wine. “What did you say in your interview—when they asked why you wanted to be a vet?”

  “They didn’t, really. Not for my job, anyway.” His face is part-obscured by his glass. “That was more about specialities and equipment and certificates.”

  “But they must have done for your course at uni.” I nudge his knee with mine. “Please tell me. I need all the help I can get.”

  “Okay. But remember, I’m not even a vet anymore. What do I know, really?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Well, I grew up around animals. Dad wasn’t a fan, but he did anything to make Mum happy. And she loved them. We had rabbits, guinea pigs, ducks, chickens. I’d volunteer at the local animal rescue too, cleaning out cages. That’s where we got our dog, Scamp. He was my best friend. We did everything together—explored the woods, spent hours down by the river. He was always with me. We were inseparable.

  “And Scamp loved to run. I never tried to stop him because he could never be parted from me for long. Anyway, one evening, we were out on a forest track and he bolted after a rabbit. Which was pretty normal for him—except this time, he didn’t come back. So I started calling him and calling him, but . . . nothing.” The pitch of Joel’s voice dips a little. “I stayed out until dark looking for him, then went home to get Mum.” He pauses. “Eventually we found him. He’d tried to run through a barbed-wire fence, but impaled himself halfway. The blood loss was . . . Well, he didn’t stand a chance. But it was as though he’d been waiting for us to find him. He was struggling for breath, and he looked up at me like he wanted to say sorry for running off. A few seconds later, he died in my arms.”

  I feel my eyes dampen with tears.

  “Anyway, I told him I loved him. And then I just held him until the warmth had left his body. That was the day I knew I wanted to care for animals. At my interview, I wasn’t supposed to be soppy and say I loved animals. I was supposed to talk about my work experience and future plans, what skills I would bring to the job. But for me, there was no other word to convey how I felt. Anything else would have fallen way short. It was love.” He exhales, then looks up at me.

  I’m smiling softly, though my heart is peeling apart. “Sounds like you’re still a vet to me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Over piles of pasta and ciabatta, Joel casts a glance around the restaurant. “You know, I imagine Italy to be . . . not at all like these charming faux frescos.”

  I laugh. They’ve made a good stab at it, but the stenciled temples and pretend piazzas won’t be giving Michelangelo a run for his money any-time soon.

  “You should add Rome to your list,” he says, breaking off a hunk of bread, dipping it in oil. “One of Europe’s greenest cities, apparently.”

  “Actually, I’ve been once. And it is—it’s beautiful.”

  “Family holiday?” he asks lightly. I sense he’s offering up the wrong answer in the hope of exchanging it for the right one.

  “No, I went with my ex. Piers.”

  Joel sips his wine, doesn’t comment.

  I try to work out what to say, how best to describe a holiday that was wonderful and torturous all at once. “I just . . . spent a lot of time exploring by myself, in the parks and the ruins, walking along the river. I found this incredible rose garden . . .” I relive that blue-sky day, how the air swelled with scent. “Anyway, Piers barely left the hotel. He spent most of the time by the pool. We were the opposite of each other, really. He was a bit of a playboy, super-flash. Rome was actually our third date. His idea, not mine.”

  Joel smiles. “Flash indeed.”

  “He attracted drama—you know? Got into fights, debt. He’d disappear from time to time. Was always falling out with people, lurching from crisis to crisis. I thought at the beginning maybe I should go for someone who was totally not my type . . .” I trail off. “That was a mistake. Turns out we have types for a reason.”

  Joel winds spaghetti around his fork, face clouded with thought. “Better to play it safe, you mean?”

  For a moment I’m not quite sure how to answer. “Or avoid drama at least, I suppose. Yeah.”

  Something passes over his face then that I can’t quite identify, but it’s gone as quickly as it appeared.

  22.

  Joel

  When we got back from the restaurant last night, I toyed with the idea of inviting Callie in for a coffee. For a few seconds, I had the words ready to go.

  But at the last moment, I stopped myself.

  Callie told me she’s not interested in drama: another red-flag reminder of why this can’t go any further. All my life, my days and moods have tracked my dreams, played out in ups and downs. As Vicky once pointed out, I’m the exact opposite of stable, the antithesis to steady.

  So I let the words dissolve, sweet but only fleeting, like sherbet on my tongue.

  I made an excruciating mess of saying good night, obviously. I deliberated awkwardly, then went in for a double air kiss neither she nor I was prepared for. Toppe
d it off by mumbling something inexplicable about the Continent as our noses collided.

  I’ve been keeping my head down ever since.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’ve dropped in at my dad’s in the hope of uncovering the truth about my dream. Luckily, he spends each Friday across town, immersed in his woodworking hobby. Comes home covered with sawdust and shavings, the scent of split timber.

  I dreamed he sawed off a fingertip once, bemused him with a gift shortly afterward of some cut-resistant gloves. It worked out all right in the end, because Dad’s reached that age where he rotates between gloves. Leather for driving, latex for the petrol station. Rubber for washing up, and a pair with longer cuffs for scrubbing down the loo.

  He keeps boxes of Mum’s stuff in Tamsin’s old room. I’ve rarely looked at them since they came into being, and now I remember why.

  He divided who she was into categories. Perhaps he had to. People talk about grieving as a process, and he processed the hell out of this. CLOTHES. BOOKS. SHOES. MISC. PAPERWORK.

  I set down my coffee cup, pull out the MISC box. I need to work quickly: like me, Dad’s fairly reliable in his habits and routines but, ever the would-be copper, he does a good sideline in catching people out.

  The box is full of photographs bundled up with rubber bands, old articles she’d ripped from newspapers and magazines. Ticket stubs and trinkets, like the handblown glass ring dish Dad gave her for Christmas one year. Boxes of jewelry, even a couple of bottles of perfume. (I don’t dare touch them, let alone lift them up. I’m too afraid to be reunited with her scent, to feel the warmth of her arms around me again. During chemo her skin became too sensitive for perfume, and she kept saying she didn’t feel herself without it. For a long time after she died, the house didn’t feel like itself either. Not when the kiss of her fragrance had been permanently extinguished.)

  I flick through the photographs. They’re mostly family ones that didn’t make it into the albums downstairs. None offer any clues. So I turn to the box marked PAPERWORK. I guess I’m imagining a birth certificate or a stash of letters. Some other paper-based link to my past, maybe. But there’s nothing. Just reams of financial and insurance correspondence, a fat wodge of hospital letters. It’s strange to see the first one, the letter to Mum’s GP from her consultant, confirming the results of the biopsy.

  A few words on a page, and all our lives were changed forever.

  I look down at my notebook again, at what Dad said to me in my dream. The sadness curls and boils inside me, made even more potent by the memories I’ve just been sifting through.

  Then, downstairs, a door bangs.

  “Joel?”

  My sister. I relax. “Hey,” I call out.

  “Saw your car.”

  “Hold on.” I cram the stuff back into the boxes, leave them where they are on the carpet. Jog downstairs to greet her. I feel a shoring-up inside as we hug, remembering the news she’ll be sharing next spring. It helps, a bit, thinking of new life when I’m once again knee-deep in loss. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

  “On my lunch break.” She lifts a carrier bag. The sleeves of her fuchsia shirt are rolled up to the elbows. “Just putting some bits and pieces in the fridge.”

  “Like what?”

  “Stuff he can heat up.”

  I stare at her. “How long have you been doing that?”

  “It’s no big deal.” She turns away from me, heads into the kitchen. Opening the fridge, she starts stacking it with plastic boxes.

  “Since you left home?”

  A shrug. “Oh, maybe. It started back then, I suppose, and I just . . . never wanted to stop. It seemed mean, somehow.”

  I’ve seen those boxes in there so many times. I always just assumed Dad to be mildly neurotic about his personal nutrition. Had never even thought to ask.

  It’s something children do, take care of their parents as they get older. Did I never think to ask because on some level I sensed something wasn’t quite right?

  A flash flood of sadness. I feel it physically now, whenever I look at Tamsin. We might only be half siblings: is that why we’re so different in appearance? Tamsin and Doug with their rust-red hair and eyes the color of summer sky, versus me, dark like their shadow. I’d get the occasional comment from classmates when I was younger, but Mum reassured me she looked nothing like her sister, either. To me that was explanation enough. So I just accepted it, made it my stock response if anyone ribbed me. Thought nothing more about it.

  I try to calm my mind with cheerier thoughts. Like Amber’s stellar upcoming performance in the nativity play. And the bike she’ll get for Christmas, unbeknown yet to even Tamsin and Neil.

  As Tamsin finishes organizing the contents of the fridge, I attempt to refocus. “Hey, Tam. Do you know if anything weird ever went on between Dad and Mum?”

  “Weird how?” She straightens up.

  Her frown flags my thoughtlessness. I can’t let her think I’ve uncovered evidence of an affair or something. Not before I have proof, anyway. “Never mind. Forget it. Shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “You know,” she muses, her thoughts clearly drifting, “I do sometimes wonder if we should get Dad dating.”

  I force a smile. “Can’t imagine Dad letting his guard down enough.”

  She smiles back. “I know someone else like that.”

  I shift the weight to my other leg.

  “I want you to find someone.” She sidles up to me, squeezes my arm. “You’re so lovely.”

  “And you’re so biased. Anyway, I’m happily unattached.” The more I say it, the more I might start to believe it.

  “I want you to find true love.” Tamsin seems more determined about this than ideally I’d like.

  “I’m not interested in true love. Really.”

  “Well, you must want to meet a girl at least. Doug says you’re virtually celibate.”

  I have met a girl, Tam. And she’s charming, and beguiling, beautiful as a butterfly. But there are too many reasons it can’t work.

  “Doug says a lot of things.”

  “So it’s not true?”

  I don’t exactly fancy going into the finer details of me and Melissa with my little sister. “Okay, just so you know? We’re not having this conversation.”

  “It’s been a long time since Vicky.”

  Even picturing Vicky’s face reminds me how unfair it would be to drag Callie into my little vortex of dysfunction. “Vicky’s better off without me.”

  Tamsin persists. “Have I ever told you about Beth? I work with her and she’s completely lovely. I could introduce you—”

  As Tamsin continues to talk Beth up, my phone buzzes. A light-hearted message from Callie, something about a package she’s taken in for me. There are emojis. I’m relieved to have confirmation that last night’s double-kiss fiasco hasn’t put her off knowing me for good.

  I peck my sister on the cheek. “Love you, Tam.” Exiting the kitchen, I start climbing the stairs.

  “What exactly are you doing here again?” she calls.

  “Research,” I mumble, safe in the knowledge that she probably can’t hear me.

  23.

  Callie

  Over a week has passed since my meal out with Joel, since he moved me to tears with his story about Scamp. I held that moment in my mind during my interview at Waterfen yesterday, kept close what he said about passion.

  I’m out shopping in town when I receive the call, and have a conversation that makes me altitudinous with joy.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’d planned to nip back to my flat and at least run a brush through my hair, but when I get home the urge to hammer on Joel’s door is just too strong.

  He’s dripping wet when he opens it, with only a towel around his waist. Water droplets are scatt
ered like dew across his soap-smooth skin.

  I flounder, trying to focus on what it was I came here to tell him.

  “Sorry,” he says, before I can speak. “Wanted to answer the door before you—”

  “Joel, I got it.”

  “You got what?”

  “Fiona just called. I got the job at Waterfen—a one-year contract.”

  “Callie, that’s incredible. Congratulations.”

  As our eyes meet—just for a moment, before he softly half laughs and turns his gaze to the floor—I realize how much I like him, enough not to care if this is the right thing to do.

  He lifts his head as I step forward. We hesitate for a moment, faces so close our noses are almost touching. My blood is abuzz. I could measure my heartbeat in kilowatts. And now I’m reaching up on tiptoe to kiss him, and he’s kissing me back—gently at first, like a question, but then fuller and stronger as our mouths lock together. I feel the heat of his hand in my hair, and now we’re drawing even closer, his body warm and firm against me, wet from the shower. I feel him shiver with pleasure and for spoonfuls of seconds I can think of nothing but the taste of him, the wet press of his lips against mine, the sweet corkscrew of his shower-gel scent.

  Eventually I pull away and draw breath.

  “Sorry,” he murmurs, glancing down at my T-shirt, damp now from his soaked skin.

  Outside, it’s started raining, a comforting percussive rhythm against car roofs and paving slabs, the bare bones of the trees.

  I smile and bite my lip. “That’s okay.”

  “Callie, I—” He opens the door a little wider to let me in. “Can you give me, like, five minutes? Should probably throw some clothes on.”

  Suddenly, I feel shy. My heart is racing, piston-fast. “I need to let Murph out anyway. I’ll just go and do that.”

  He nods. “I’ll leave the door on the latch.”

  24.

  Joel