The Sight of You

by Holly Miller

  And that’s how I spend Boxing Day night—introducing Joel and his family to nature’s subtle majesty. I couldn’t have asked for more.

  44.

  Joel

  It was scarily straightforward in the end, to open the door on an entirely different life. I could easily have missed it: that quick glint in the darkness of Dad’s loft, where I’d been sent to fetch two extra chairs before our Boxing Day lunch.

  It was the dust bag for Mum’s one concession to indulgence, a large leather shopper the color of marzipan. That holdall accompanied her everywhere. Quick trips to the shop, bus journeys into town. Long drives to see our grandparents in Lincolnshire. And, eventually, her final trip to hospital.

  I noticed the dust bag’s crest. It was identical to the gold-embossed one I knew so well from the shopper. Lifting the thing up, it felt heavier than it should have. So I opened the dust bag, and then the holdall inside.

  A heart-puncturing onrush of scent. Decades-old leather, memories mildewed over. In the bag were the things she’d taken with her for her last-ever stay in hospital. He’d never unpacked them.

  Her cotton-soft nightdress with the candy-pink floral print. I held it up to the loft’s strobing strip light, remembered how my chin had rested against its neckline the very last time I hugged her. A toothbrush with the bristles splayed (very Mum, so fastidious about hygiene she’d make her gums bleed). And her glasses. I turned them over in my hands. They used to nestle in the contours of her face so perfectly, seemed to magnify her kindness somehow.

  And the book she was reading too. It was a thriller by an author whose name I’d never registered, though I do remember she’d been trying and failing to get through it for months. One of the pages was turned down, about two-thirds of the way in. It must have been the place she’d reached when she died.

  I flicked fruitlessly through it, then landed on the inside front cover. And there it was.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later, I drive us home. Callie’s feet are on the dashboard, Santa socks on full display (cheers, Dad).

  The traffic’s heavy tonight, but I don’t mind. I’d like to stay in this car with Callie forever, going nowhere fast. A slow burn of good feelings, always.

  It’s been a decent day. The chaos of Christmas and hyperactive kids meant I could at least take a break from worrying about the situation with Dad. Plus I’m buoyed by the thought that, after dreaming last night, I’ll likely be dream-free for the next few days. The feeling’s as close as I ever come to relaxation.

  “Want to know a secret about Doug?”

  “Always,” Callie says.

  “He’s got a phobia of trees.”

  She laughs, which is what most people do when this comes to light.

  “He’s afraid of branches falling on his head. Works from home in high winds. An official dendrophobe, apparently.” I look across at her. “So all that ribbing about you running the other way while you’re chainsawing was just machismo. Bluster.”

  She smiles sleepily, rests her cheek against the rain-mottled window. “I thought as much. He’s quite alpha male, your brother, isn’t he?”

  I nod, then frown. “It doesn’t work like that anyway, does it—you cut and run? Is that where the expression comes from?”

  “No, isn’t that to do with boats? Anyway, if you’ve made your cut right, you should know exactly where a tree is going to fall.”

  “Good,” I say, a bit too emphatically.

  Up ahead, the road becomes a river of red neon.

  Callie puts a hand on my leg as I brake for the traffic. “Joel, do you ever think . . .” Her voice is languid now in the warmth of the car. “I mean, have you ever thought of your dreams as being . . . you know . . . a gift?”

  “A gift?”

  “Yeah, I mean . . . being able to see the future is pretty powerful.” Her fingers play against my thigh. “That night with the water main, in town, really made me think.”

  “What did you think?”

  I feel her look across at me. “That in some ways your dreams put you in a position of privilege. Knowing things that no one else does.”

  “No.” My voice is stiff. “I’ve never really thought of them like that.”

  “Sorry,” she says, after a couple of moments. “I didn’t mean to diminish what they do to you.”

  The traffic moves. “No, it’s . . . I know what you’re saying.” As always my mind’s muddled with conflicting feelings. “Anyway . . . thank you for today. Meeting someone’s family for the first time is kind of intense.”

  “I made you meet mine. And I had a great day—your family is lovely.”

  “You were a total hit with the kids. Sorry about Buddy.” He refused to be parted from Callie (not me) as we were leaving. We could still hear him screaming as we got into the car.

  “Don’t be. He’s adorable. So are Amber and Bella. I’ve always loved kids. It was a real toss-up between going into child care or nature conservation when I left school.” She laughs. “Funny how I ended up doing neither in the end.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re doing it now.”

  “True.” She sighs happily. “So what was it you said you found earlier, in the loft?”

  I feel the heat of stolen treasure in the pocket of my coat. “A book, in my mum’s hospital bag. With a phone number and an initial inside.”

  “What’s the initial?”

  “W.”

  “Anyone you know?”

  “Don’t think so. I looked up the area code—it’s Newquay. I’ve never been. None of us have, I don’t think.”

  “Maybe she got it from a charity shop. Or borrowed it from a friend.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  I turn past the surgery. Glance at it quickly, as if to check that it’s still standing. We’re almost home.

  “Do you think my dad’s curmudgeonly?” I say.

  “That’s a good word. Curmudgeonly.”

  I smile.

  “No. I think he’s very straight-talking. But he looks at you with love in his eyes.”

  Is that really what Callie sees? My own perspective is so distorted now. “That’s probably the dull glaze of disappointment,” I say. “How many times did he mention I’m no longer a vet?”

  “It’s not disappointment. He just doesn’t understand.”

  “Maybe. Pretty sure he wishes he had two of Doug, though.”

  “How long have you felt like this?” She sounds crushed on my behalf.

  “My entire life. It makes me think . . .”

  “Go on,” she urges, after a beat. “What does it make you think?”

  “That maybe it’s true. That I’m not really his son.”

  45.

  Callie

  A couple of weeks into the new year, I go to Cambridge for a hen do. Alana’s an old colleague of mine from the paint-tin company, though she was one of those transient types with ambition, which explains how she’s now several corporate ladders away from where we started out.

  A financial-services head hunter, she must have forgotten I no longer work at the factory, because twice she presses her business card into my palm and insists she can hook me up. The first time she did it I thought she meant drugs and was almost too nervous to unfold my hand.

  The hen’s one of those events where I can’t work out if everyone secretly despises each other. There are six bridesmaids, but they’re phone-checking more than they’re mingling, and the maid of honor booked cocktail punting—which would have been fine if it wasn’t mid-January and Alana wasn’t terrified of water. So we call it off and find a bar instead, where the maid of honor heads straight to the loos to flip out, forcing the rest of the bridal party into protracted negotiations to appease her.

  I organized Grace’s hen do, off-road buggy driving near Brighton, an attempt to r
e-create—at least in part—her fabled Dubai dune-buggy experience. Afterward there was curry, then pints in a proper pub, the two things Grace said she always missed most when she was traveling. And, to top off the day, it rained—and it was the right sort of rain, British rain. Cold, unforgiving, Four Weddings rain was Grace’s preferred precipitation type.

  She leaned over to me halfway through a pint of John Smith’s. Her mascara was running by then because we’d been laughing so hard. I remember making a mental note to buy her some of the waterproof stuff so she didn’t end up looking like a Halloween bride at her own wedding. “I want you to get married, Cal.”

  “What?”

  “I so want you to get married.”

  “Why?”

  She looked around the pub. “So I can do all this for you.”

  Putting a fingertip to the apple of her cheek, I wiped away some of the black. “When I meet the man I want to marry, you’ll be the first to know.”

  I hadn’t even met Piers back then, not that marriage would ever be in the cards between us. And before that I’d really had only flings, a few dates that had progressed before going invariably nowhere.

  It still makes me sad to think of it now, that Grace never will get to meet the man I want to marry.

  * * *

  • • •

  The hen do goes from bad to worse when everyone starts to bicker about whose idea the punting was, so I sneak outside to call Joel.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Horribly, actually. It’s the most passive-aggressive hen do I’ve ever been on.”

  “That doesn’t bode well for the big day.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m thinking of giving them the slip. Fancy being my co-conspirator?”

  I hear him smile into the phone. “Always. Think they’ll mind?”

  “Alana’s limbering up for a brawl with her maid of honor as we speak, so I doubt it.” I hesitate. “How does a night in a low-end hotel sound to you?”

  I’m booked in at a budget place on the outskirts of the city. The maid of honor chose it, for the discount on the group booking, but Alana turned purple when she saw it. It’s the kind of hotel that could only really pass for decent if both your eyes were closed and you liked all your surfaces to come with a slightly sticky sheen.

  “Low-end, you say?”

  “It’s very poorly rated on TripAdvisor.”

  “Say no more. I’m there.”

  * * *

  • • •

  An hour or so later, he knocks on my hotel-room door.

  “Wow,” he says, when I open it. “You look incredible.”

  Excited for an opportunity to escape my wellies and fleece, tonight I made an effort by way of a black dress and fairly extreme heel, curling my hair, giving my eyeliner a sizable flick. The effect’s diminished now—my shoes are off and my hair’s lost its bounce—so it’s extra nice that Joel still thinks I look lovely.

  “I’m trying to work out if it’s good or bad that the guy on the front desk didn’t bat an eyelid when I bowled straight past him,” Joel says, putting his arms around me.

  I smile and kiss him hello. “I’d say good. Definitely. Thank you for saving my night.”

  “Oh, I’m really just here for the free biscuits.”

  I wince. “Sorry. There was only one shortbread, and I got a bit peckish.”

  “Ah. How was it?”

  I laugh. “Stale.”

  Together we sink onto the mattress. Or, at least, we try to, before it becomes apparent that the bed frame represents something of a death wish to the coccyx.

  Joel grimaces bravely. “Oh, they really don’t want you to lie in here, do they?”

  “I’m sorry. This place is worse than I thought. Barely worth half a star.”

  He tries and fails to indent the mattress with his palm. “No, you’re being too harsh. This, for example, is a very handy feature. Saves setting an alarm for the morning, see?”

  The bed’s really two singles—the hen party was an odd number, and when the maid of honor asked, I said I didn’t mind not sharing. So I’ve pushed them together, which has only made the setup feel even more shambolic than it did before.

  I survey the room again. “Urgh, easily the most soulless place I’ve ever stayed. Are those curtains . . . plastic?”

  “Now, soulless is a tad unfair.” He leans over to kiss me. “Wait here a moment. Don’t drink all the UHT milk. Be back in two secs.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Fifteen minutes later he returns, sticks his head around the door.

  “Shut your eyes. That UHT had better be where I left it.”

  I laugh and comply, moving my hands to my face so I’m not tempted to peek. My senses sharpen as I feel his footsteps, hear the bite of a lighter and a tap released. Then follows the sound of something tearing, a tinny trickle of music. Finally a click, and behind my eyelids, nightfall.

  “Okay. Open your eyes.”

  There are tea-lights on the desk now, a wonky bunch of flowers in a mug. Music’s playing low on his phone, and in his hand a champagne bottle is ready to pop. He shrugs sweetly. “Turns out the soul’s self-service.”

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “Well, I stole the tea-lights from the dining room. But I bought the champagne, then asked a friendly maintenance man if he’d care to donate his lighter to the good cause of romance. Oh, and I swiped the flowers from the lobby.” He winks. “Because who doesn’t love a nylon carnation? Sorry—they’re a bit dusty.”

  I’m not sure if anyone’s ever made me laugh and cry at the same time, but that’s what I’m doing as I climb off the bed and go over to him, roping his waist with my arms. “You’ve just turned the worst night ever into the best night ever.”

  Our faces are close now. We’re almost-but-not-quite kissing.

  “Want to make it even better?” he whispers.

  “Yes.” The word is molten on my tongue. “I really, really do.”

  He bends to kiss me, and it’s a kiss that’s full of fireworks, of weeks-long anticipation. Now, exhilaratingly, both our bodies are on fast-forward—in an instant our hands are everywhere, grasping at limbs and pulling off clothing and tugging at hair. Fully charged, we undress in what seems like seconds before collapsing in a tangle on our cobbled-together bed. And now he’s peeling back the silk of my underwear before that final dizzying moment—after so many weeks of waiting—that I know we’ve both been anticipating for so long.

  “Callie,” he gasps, his face against mine, “you’re everything to me.”

  “You are to me too,” I breathe back, spun over with ecstasy. I want to tell him I love him—because I do, I’ve known it for weeks—but instead I shut my eyes, feel him start to move inside me, and right here, right now, this is everything I ever wanted.

  46.

  Joel

  Oh, no. Rufus hates Valentine’s too.” Callie laughs as Iris’s dog cocks his leg against a bus shelter. The poster on it is advertising a rom-com film, release date February 14.

  “Why? Who else hates Valentine’s?” I ask.

  “Only everyone I know, fanatically.”

  “Fanatical hate. Sounds reasonable. Why, again?”

  “Oh, you know, because it’s a cynical corporate ploy and commercial schmaltz. A symbol of rank consumerism. Did I tell you Esther holds an anti-Valentine’s party every year?”

  I try not to laugh. “But I thought Esther had her very own library of Hugh Grant DVDs.”

  “She’s not anti-love, just its commercialization.”

  “Because those high-budget films are resolutely not-for-profit.”

  “She would say she chose to buy them—”

  “All thirty of them.”

  “—whereas Valentine’s is thrust upon her. Us. The world.”

&
nbsp; “So what do you do at these parties, then—burn roses? Flush chocolates down the loo?”

  Callie stops to untangle Murphy’s lead from around his front leg. “Not exactly. But they are intense. They’re very . . . immersive.”

  “What—you sit in a circle and chant about how much you hate Valentine’s?”

  She straightens up, face zipped closed. It’s impossible to know where she falls on this one. “Well, you have to hold a view, at least. And there’s always a theme. Last year was zombies.”

  “She having one this year?”

  “Yep. The theme is heavy metal through the ages.”

  “Wow.” I rub my chin, attempt nonchalance. “So who would you go as? If you went to the party, I mean.”

  Her mouth wriggles, like she’s wrestling a smile. “Not sure. I haven’t said if I’ll go yet.”

  * * *

  • • •

  She doesn’t, in the end. Instead she calls dibs on the evening two weeks in advance. Asks me to meet her at the café, eight o’clock on Valentine’s night.

  It’s a first for me. Fully buying into Valentine’s. If you’d asked me in the past, I’d have sided firmly with Esther on swerving the thing altogether. The idea of celebrating love has never been straightforward for me.

  But then I met Callie.

  I arrive fifteen minutes early, with a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers. (I say bunch. It turns out no one wants to look too try-hard on Valentine’s Day; all the normal flowers had sold out by the time I made it to the shop. So I’ve ended up with a bouquet the size of a small planet, containing fifteen different types of flower and sprouting exotic greenery like it has its own microclimate. But I could hardly turn up empty-handed, so there you go.)