The Sight of You

by Holly Miller

  His living room reminds me of Callie’s when I first met her. It’s packed out with stuff, bursting with color. There are houseplants, wall hangings, pictures of waves. Three surfboards propped up against a cabinet. A throw on his sofa that looks as if it’s fresh out of a souk. An old-school stereo beside a pile of CDs. A bona fide lava lamp.

  “Here, take a seat. Tea?”

  Though I manage a nod, he hovers.

  “This happen often?”

  “Turning up on the doorstep of strange men? I try not to make it routine.”

  “No, I meant the color of your skin. You’ve gone a bit . . . chalky.”

  “A shot of brandy in that tea might sort it.” I put my head right down between my knees, like I’m praying for something. Perhaps I am.

  He claps me on the shoulder. Lets his hand linger there for a moment or two. “Coming right up.”

  * * *

  • • •

  His name’s Warren Goode, he told me on the phone. That’s all I know. I dialed the number inside my mum’s thriller as soon as I got back from my appointment. We had a short conversation, then I got into my car and drove to Newquay in one hit and fifth gear. Callie was on loop in my mind the whole way.

  It all slotted into place during my meeting with Diana, and I just couldn’t wait any longer. Time isn’t on my side, after all.

  He brings me a mug of tea laced with brandy, and a glass of the neat stuff for himself. Uncertainly, he sits in the armchair opposite me.

  I sip the tea. Let the room fall silent, so my next sentence can get the airtime it needs. “I think . . . I think you might be my father.”

  A full moon of a stare, lambent with a lifetime’s wondering. Then, eventually, “You’re right. I am.”

  I feel my pulse quicken. My blood’s rushing with sentiment.

  He clears his throat. “You said on the phone . . . you found my number last Christmas.”

  There follows a pause, long enough for me to wonder if I’ve made a mistake in coming here. Clearly he’s expecting me to say something. But what? Is he annoyed I’ve left it so long? What does he think—that I should have jumped in my car and floored it all the way along the M4 on Boxing Day?

  “Yeah. So . . . why was it written in that book? The one Mum was reading in hospital.” (I’d mentioned it only briefly on the phone, figuring I’d prefer to hear the details face-to-face.)

  Warren shakes his head, like he’s trying to nudge his thoughts into order. “I went to visit her, Joel. Just before she died.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to see her, one last time. She told me about you that day. I thought she might want to pass my number on.”

  “You didn’t already know about me?”

  Another headshake.

  “What were you—an affair?”

  “No, we were together just before she met . . . well, Tom.”

  Tom. So Warren knew my dad once, too. “Did you love her?”

  “Yes, I did. Very much.”

  “So why—”

  “Fancy getting some fresh air? Blowing the cobwebs away?”

  * * *

  • • •

  “How did you know Mum was ill? You’re not in touch with my . . . Tom, are you?”

  “Nope. Heard through a friend of a friend.”

  There’s a fresh onshore breeze tonight, straight in off the Atlantic. A few surfers are braving the lines of white water, but most people are sticking to solid ground. Walking dogs, strolling along the headland. The September sky is saturated pastel, purple and pink like sentimental notepaper.

  “So what were you doing when you met Mum?”

  “I was about to go off round the world in my camper-van,” Warren says. “I’m a surfer, you see. Or was.”

  A globe-trotter. So we’re different in that way at least. “What do you do now?”

  He makes the same face I do when people ask me about work. “Teach kids to surf, earn pocket change from photos here and there. I was trying to bring out my own line of boards, but . . .” He looks away from me, out to sea. “Money dried up.”

  We emerge from the beach and pick up the incline toward the headland, past the Victorian hotel on the clifftop. It’s grand and palatial, epically romantic.

  Romance. The idea seems almost obscure to me now. Like a beloved patch of landscape viewed through a misty window.

  “So why’d you break up?”

  “The surf was calling. I thought I was going to be the next world champion.” His laugh is wistful. “I left your mum behind, Joel. I always was a selfish bugger. And soon afterward she met Tom. Your dad.”

  His honesty, at least, impresses me. “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much,” he says, but like he wishes it weren’t.

  “Would you have stayed if you’d known she was pregnant?”

  He skirts the question. “I always told Olivia I didn’t want kids. I told her that life wasn’t for me. Maybe that’s why she decided not to tell me.”

  Olivia. Olivia. A name I never hear. The sound of it travels back to me like music.

  “You know, being with Tom really was the best outcome for your mum—and for you. What life could I have given you, living out of a camper-van, obsessed with chasing the perfect wave? I had no money, no possessions, no job . . . not a thing to my name.”

  I think of my dad, those regimented office hours. His lifelong dedication to order and hard graft. Like a soldier reporting for duty, every day of his life.

  “Was Mum pregnant with me when she met my dad?”

  “Yes. She got a job at his firm, as I remember it. But they didn’t start dating straightaway.”

  I stare up toward the headland. At the acrobatic herring gulls taking on the breeze. Dad’s lifelong hostility toward me is explained now, at least. I wasn’t an accounting anomaly, a miscalculation he could quickly fix. It was more like Warren had graffitied his name all over our house, forcing Dad to look at it every day of his life.

  “Your mum was the easiest woman in the world to love,” Warren says now. “Everybody did. Not that she had any idea, of course.”

  I think of Callie, and my heart fills.

  “So, Doug and Tamsin . . . they’re only my half siblings?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  Heat spreads through my chest as I picture Tamsin, what her face would do if she knew. We’ve always been so close.

  “And Dad’s parents . . . aren’t my grandparents at all.” All those half-term trips to Lincolnshire, where the welcome was always so warm. Did they know? Did a small part of them never suspect, when this dark-haired urchin turned up on their doorstep?

  “I’m sorry,” Warren says quietly. “My parents—your biological grandparents—died years ago.”

  We walk on, strides matching exactly. The Atlantic has become a furnace, the setting sun its red-hot core.

  “What did Mum say to you when you turned up at the hospital?”

  “She was happy to see me. We talked, and she asked for my number. It was sort of a funny moment, in the end.”

  “I guess she forgot to give it to me,” I say, recalling how the palliative chemo had attacked her memory.

  “I guess so,” he says, voice gruff.

  I look at him. Feel the first fronds of anger take hold. “So why didn’t you ever try to get in touch? Mum died twenty-three years ago.”

  He frowns, works his jaw. For a moment I think he’s trying to come up with an excuse. “Oh, wow. This is hard.”

  My anger intensifies. “You’re telling me.”

  “I did, Joel. I did try. More than once.”

  My heart derails. “What?”

  “The first time was a couple of years later. As soon as I’d got everything straight in my head, I contacted Tom. You were only fifteen then.”

 
Gusts of wind gallop by.

  “He told me you were too young. Said to try again when you turned eighteen. So I did, but he insisted you were busy with exams, and after that, university. He always claimed it wasn’t the right time. Once you’d graduated I tried again, but he told me the two of you had sat down and talked. That you’d said you weren’t interested. That you never wanted to see me.”

  I gape. “And you took his word for it?”

  “He made me afraid I’d ruin your life, Joel. He told me you were sensitive, that I’d unsettle you, cause big problems. I’m sorry—I guess he was just trying to protect you.” Warren swallows. “But, look, a few years later, I . . . had a dream. About today.”

  “What sort of dream?”

  We stop still and face each other. Warren says nothing, just eyeballs me until I know for sure.

  I feel a strange, animalistic urge to howl. With what—relief? Joy? Frustration? “You have it too. You have it too.”

  He takes my arm. “It’s okay.”

  “You’ve been waiting for me? You knew I was coming today?”

  His skin flares amber in the sunset. “Yes.”

  It’s hereditary.

  I turn away from him, hold my face against the wind. The salt invades my nostrils, stiffens my hair as I try to take everything in.

  It’s a few moments before I feel steady enough to walk on. “How long?” I’m unable to digest yet what he’s told me about Dad.

  “Since I was a kid.”

  “And you haven’t found a cure.”

  Warren hesitates before relating his own dispiriting journey. Drugs and heavy drinking in his youth, then a slightly more orthodox approach than mine—multiple GPs and counselors. Hypnotherapy, acupuncture, medication. But we both came up against the same brick wall in the end.

  He has his own sodding notebook too. Black and hard-backed, just like mine.

  “Do you sleep?” I ask.

  “Rarely.”

  “Have you got a girlfriend? A wife?”

  “Too complicated.” He bolts me a look. “And you?”

  I laugh, loosely. “Why do you think I’m here?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a lifelong bachelor too.”

  I think of Callie and my dream. And then my heart cleaves in two all over again. “I tried to be. I wasn’t strong enough. I caved.”

  Because he has only half the story, he treats this as good news. “You have no idea how happy that makes me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Later, he offers me a bed for the night. But it feels too soon. I need space to shelter from the blizzard of thoughts in my mind, so he rings round for vacancies at local B-and-Bs.

  While he’s on the phone, I notice a framed photograph hanging in his hallway. A surfer, wet-haired in a rash vest with a Hawaiian lei around his neck. He’s being lifted above the heads of a crowd. At first I think it’s Warren, then peer a little closer. It’s been signed in gold pen. I can just make out the name. Joel Jeffries.

  So maybe Mum named me after Warren’s favorite surfer. A way to remember him, perhaps.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’m pretty tired the next morning after less than four hours’ sleep. And I don’t envisage the net-curtained confines of the B-and-B’s dining room doing much to pick me up. So instead I go back to Warren’s, with strong coffee and egg rolls from a local café.

  We eat outside, in Warren’s garden (which is really just a patch of yellowed, wasteland-style grass and a headstrong Cornish palm tree angled against a fence). The air’s briny from the beach, a cardigan of cloud across the early-autumn sky.

  Warren unwraps his food. “This has been a long time coming.”

  “Hungry?”

  He laughs. “No, I meant this moment. I dreamed about it. Well, this and when you turned up last night.”

  I stare at him. “You dreamed about . . . what we’re doing right now?” Weird. I’ve never stopped to think about how it would feel to be the subject of a dream.

  “Dreamed you got the coffee black too.”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  Warren peels back the lid of his cup. “Chip off the old block.” He smiles. “Can only drink it neat.”

  Between sips of black coffee and bites of egg roll, I tell Warren about Diana. But I deliberately steer clear of my dream about Callie. Maybe because I can already see he has high hopes for my love life.

  “Diana’s right, you know,” he says, when I’m done.

  I look at him, take in the folds of his skin. The creases at the corners of his eyes. He has the kind of weather-worn complexion that always carries a tan. Even in the middle of winter, when the sun hasn’t shone for about six weeks. “About what?”

  “Well, maybe she could stop the dreams. Maybe. After a few years of you as her lab rat. But she can’t change the future.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “We have this affliction, Joel. But we also have each other now. Ever since I dreamed about this weekend, I’ve been trying to get myself sorted. Make the house a bit nicer, go surfing more often. Stop being quite so much of a hermit.” He pats his belly. “Lose a few pounds.”

  It’s a heart-warping thought, strangely sweet: Warren beavering away all this time, preparing for my arrival.

  “I want to help, if I can. Don’t make the same mistakes I did—mess up your relationships and career and—”

  “Ship’s already sailed on that front.” I tell him the story of how I became the world’s worst vet. Then Warren reciprocates with the tale of his own promising surfing career. How he screwed the whole thing up with booze, recreational drugs.

  “But we can get you back on track,” he says. “It’s not too late.”

  My thoughts drift to Dad, to everything he denied me by turning Warren away. Warren could have been my confidant all this time, seen me through some of the toughest periods of my life. “I’m not sure I can ever forgive my dad,” I tell Warren now.

  “Don’t be too hard on him. He was probably afraid of losing you, after Olivia died. I guess he saw it differently from me—he’d done all the hard work, then I turned up uninvited expecting to muscle in.”

  I frown, sip my coffee.

  “So what now?” Warren asks.

  “All I’ve ever wanted is for the dreams to stop,” I say eventually. “I’ve been fixated on that for so long, but . . .”

  “Now it comes down to it, you don’t think you can handle not knowing what’s to come?”

  I exhale. Consider it. “Maybe. How messed-up is that?”

  “Well, you’ve lived with this for so long, it’s understandable you might struggle to live without it. Like those old folks who spend their whole life waiting for retirement, then haven’t got a clue what to do when they get there.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “Forget science, forget cures. Just go out and live—you and Callie. Make the best of your lives.”

  “I have no idea how to do that,” I say. Because the dark cloud of my dream overshadows us now, the threat of devastation just a heartbeat away.

  63.

  Callie

  I’m with Dad in his garden, picking vegetables for Sunday lunch, a throwback to days gone by. Mum’s left us to it, as she tends to do—I like to think, as she’s watching us from the window, she’s remembering all those days I’d totter about after him in my little splash suit, clutching a plastic bucket and trowel, bullied and buffeted by the wind and rain.

  Maybe it’s the sentiment that stems from childhood memories, but I suddenly wonder if I’m being selfish by electing oblivion. Whether I should prepare my parents, forewarn all the people who love me. Perhaps I could even consider one of those living funerals, where everyone gathers and says nice— Oh, no. How morbid. No one should have to experience their own
funeral. No one.

  “So where’s he gone, then?” Dad’s quizzing me about Joel’s impromptu trip.

  “Cornwall.”

  “And that’s all right with you, is it?”

  “Of course, Dad. We’re not—”

  “Joined at the hip? Oh, I know. You kids do things differently these days.”

  I smile. I guess, in my dad’s eyes, I’ll always be his little girl.

  Joel and I FaceTimed yesterday, then again this morning. He confirmed what he’d already suspected—that Tom’s not his real dad—and said he was staying until Tuesday night to try to figure everything out. Overwhelmed on his behalf, I told him I love him, to stay as long as he needs to get his head straight.

  “Dad, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think your patients”—I swallow—“do you think they were grateful for having time to prepare before they died?”

  “Sometimes,” he says simply, uprooting a carrot. “Sometimes they were glad to have that time. Sometimes they weren’t.”

  “What were their reasons for not wanting it?”

  “Well, they varied. People are different. A drawn-out death isn’t everyone’s ideal way to go. People often think they’d rather have time to prepare, but of course they end up spending their last months and weeks paralyzed by sadness, and fear. It’s not always how it seems in the magazine articles.”

  “You mean, it’s not all bungee-jumping and touring the States in a Winnebago.”

  Dad smiles sadly. “Hardly, sweetheart. Not everyone feels emotionally able to tackle last-chance to-do lists, even if they’re physically capable. I’m sure I wouldn’t.”

  We carry on picking for a few moments. The faint churn of farm machinery floats over from nearby fields, as at the garden’s far boundary a quiver of swifts skims the hedge. It’s always so peaceful here—free from shunting traffic and fired horns, the stereophonic rumble of urban living.

  “So what would you prefer?” I ask him. “To go quickly, or . . .”

  He looks over at me, a smear of mud on his left cheek that Mum’s bound to tut about later. “Callie, this conversation’s starting to worry me . . .”