“Come and see me again,” she said.
“I certainly will, Mrs. Tait,” I replied.
“It’s Lizzie,” she said, her eyes sparkling.
“I certainly will, Lizzie,” I repeated, and I felt as though I had been bestowed with a special honor. Even Penny and Tomas didn’t know her first name.
* * *
I wasn’t the kind of girl to change my outfit seven times before a date, because I had already decided—possibly within seconds of Tomas asking me out—what I would wear. My only nice dress. It was knee length, black, sleeveless, gathered at the waist with a diamanté star. I lived my life in jeans and T-shirts, and this was the one thing I had that made me look like a woman, rather than an asexual teenage slacker. I had no idea what to do with makeup, but Vana at the beauty salon had indeed “found” my eyebrows and tinted my lashes as well. I studied my face as I brushed my hair in the mirror, and decided this was the closest I’d ever been to pretty.
I was, however, ready far too early and perched on my couch for a very long twenty minutes, waiting for Tomas to arrive. My flat was a long way back from the street, so I strained to hear his car’s engine or the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel at the side of the house. Poised like a cat. Anxious, running over scenarios in my head, each of them ending in disaster and mortification. In the end, my warning that he was nearby was the ting-ting of a text message. Out front talking to Mrs. T.
I grabbed my handbag and smoothed my dress down, then headed out of the flat.
Mrs. Tait—Lizzie—was watering her front garden, deep in conversation with Tomas. He wore a dark gray sports jacket over a blue shirt and jeans. He had that wonderful Scandinavian coloring: golden hair, olive skin, blue eyes. But it was more than his looks that had attracted me. There was a kindness about him, a softness around his mouth.
“Hello,” I called as I approached.
Lizzie turned and gave me a broad smile. “I hear Tomas is taking you on a date.”
I could feel my cheeks grow warm. “Yes, well . . .”
“Good on you both. What glorious children you’d have. Tall and fair-haired and kind-eyed.” Then she was laughing at our shuffling discomfort, and I couldn’t help but feel fond of her for having such a wicked sense of humor.
“Shall we?” Tomas asked, indicating his car.
“Bye, Lizzie,” I said, kissing her powdery cheek.
“Lovely eyebrows,” she whispered, before releasing me.
As Tomas and I drove into the long dusk of summer we were quiet a few moments, then he said, “How come you get to call her Lizzie?”
“I spent some time over there yesterday, listening to her tell stories about her mother.”
“She must like you.”
“I hope so; I like her. There’s something about her, isn’t there?”
“Yes, as though age hasn’t mellowed her at all.”
“I think she’s quite lonely. She told me her children are all overseas. She’s proud of them but misses them, too.” I watched the landscape drift by. “I think I’ll try to spend more time with her. It’s not like I have that much to do.”
More quiet. I shifted in my car seat, turned my hands over in front of me, studying them.
“You look nice,” he said.
I glanced his way. His eyes were straight ahead on the road, but he was smiling.
“Thanks,” I replied. Then, “So do you.” My heart was in my mouth. I was so inexperienced at this. “Where are we off to?”
“I have reservations at L’Espalier.”
“Wow. That’s fancy. French food, right?”
“Yes. I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course.” It wasn’t all right. I had a delicate stomach. Rich things didn’t agree with me. My French was hopeless, so I wouldn’t have a clue what I was ordering. My anxiety wound up a notch.
We pulled into a car park a few minutes later and walked up the hill to the restaurant. I was having trouble in my wedge heels, trying not to stomp. Concentrate. Breathe. The main street of Evergreen Falls was quiet and dark except for the occasional burst of laughter and light from the eateries that lined the way. I looked longingly at Vintage Star, an unpretentious eatery in the front of an antique shop where I knew I could read the menu and order a good ungarnished steak. But we walked past it and were soon finding our table at L’Espalier.
“Wine?” the waiter asked as he laid my napkin across my lap.
“I’m driving, so I won’t drink,” Tomas said.
“Yes,” I blurted, almost desperately. “Wine, please.”
The waiter brandished the wine list and I scanned it, trying to hide my horror at the prices. Was Tomas paying?
“A glass of that one,” I said, stabbing at the cheapest white.
“We don’t sell that one by the glass.”
“We’ll have the bottle,” Tomas said smoothly. “I might have half a glass with you.” He smiled at me across the table, his skin smooth in the candlelight. I smiled back, but it may have been a grimace. I heard my phone ring in my handbag and knew it was Mum, and realized I had forgotten to tell her I wouldn’t be home to take her regular call. Well, not forgotten so much as avoided telling her, because she would ask questions and I would either have to lie or tell her I was going on a date with a man, which would prompt her to lecture me again about the dangers of men.
“You’re miles away,” Tomas said to me.
“Not in a good way, I’m afraid,” I said. The phone started to ring again.
“Do you need to answer that?”
“I . . . It’s my mother.”
“You know that for certain?”
“This is when she always calls me.”
“Every Friday?”
Every day. I wasn’t going to tell him that. I wasn’t going to tell him she also called at least twice—random times—throughout the day.
“Perhaps you’d better take it, then,” he said. “I don’t mind.”
I opened my bag, removed my phone, and switched it off. Tonight, I was going to be an adult. “She’ll live,” I said, sounding more flippant than I felt.
The waiter returned with a basket of bread and our wine, which I gulped a little too fast. Tomas didn’t seem to notice. He asked me questions about my mother and my father; I answered him honestly if not thoroughly. Dad was a science illustrator who ran his own business from home, Mum was a retired social worker who had devoted many years to caring for my sick brother, who had died recently.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
“Yes, it’s . . .” I refilled my glass. My head swam a little as I tried to focus on my menu. “I can’t read French.”
“The dishes are translated in English underneath, see?”
Still the waiter didn’t come. The restaurant was busy, noisy, a little hot. We picked at the bread, smiling at each other awkwardly until finally the waiter came for our order. Tomas ordered in perfect French, making me feel even more inadequate.
“How many languages do you speak?” I asked.
“Just English and French.”
“And Danish.”
“Of course. I’m from Denmark.” He shrugged. “I want to hear more about your brother. You must miss him.”
Another gulp of wine. “I do, but . . . you know . . .”
“Go on.”
I took a deep breath. “When I described my family to you just now . . . well, it probably sounded completely normal, if a little sad. But we kind of aren’t normal. Or weren’t. Because of Adam.”
He smiled gently. “You’d better explain.”
Fortified by wine, I tried to get at the nuance of the situation. My brother’s illness had lasted sixteen years. From first signs at nineteen, to a lung transplant at twenty-one, to the endless panicked trips to emergency with colds that ordinary people could recover from in a day but could be a death sentence for him, to the various diagnoses of other horrors that the medications wrought upon his body and the related surgeries, to the sl
ow tortured wait for the transplanted lungs to give out. Some people get a good ten years, they told us. Adam got fourteen. All the while we waited, held together by his awful sentence, afraid to go out in the world lest we bring back a germ that would kill him. My mother’s brain rewired to see certain death for her offspring everywhere. Her caution was not just for Adam; as the surviving child, I was her only consolation, and she couldn’t bear to lose me, too. She kept me in. She begged me to undertake my university degree remotely, and I didn’t bother to finish it because I felt so divorced from the experience. She asked me not to go out to work, but instead she employed me to help her with Adam, and he did need a lot of help, a lot of our time. She kept me as close under her watchful eye as she kept her terminally ill son. The four of us, in that house, held close by illness, all hearing the deafening tick of time’s passing for sixteen years.
Tomas was a wonderful listener. He knew when to ask questions, when to sit back and let me be silent. His watchful eyes occasionally searched for our waiter, and occasionally alighted on my hand as it went for the wine bottle again. But he didn’t stop me and, truly, once I’d started it all came pouring out.
“Wow, I’m really drunk,” I said when I was done and Tomas was gazing back at me with empathy. Immediate regret. Why had I told him everything? I was an idiot. “I shouldn’t have told you all that,” I said.
“I’m glad you did.”
“Where is the waiter? I’m really hungry and my stomach feels kind of . . .”
“I think they’ve forgotten us.”
I glanced around the room. It spun a little.
“You don’t drink often, I take it?” he asked.
“Hardly ever.”
He stood, dropping his napkin on the table. “Come on. I’ll take you to my place and make you a sandwich. We need to get something into your stomach, and I don’t think anything rich is going to sit well with you.”
The waiter dashed after us calling apologies, but Tomas waved dismissively and handed him a fifty-dollar note for the wine.
On the hill down to the car, my body’s ability to balance on the wedge heels failed me completely. Tomas caught me, arm around my waist, and guided me to the car. I was aware dimly that the night was going very badly, that I was a drunken mess after four glasses of wine in less than an hour and I had confessed to him that I had lived my adult life like a character out of Flowers in the Attic. But all his concern seemed focused on getting me in the car and then on the way home.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For embarrassing you.”
“You haven’t embarrassed me.”
“For embarrassing me.”
He pulled the car to the side of the road and turned to me, reaching for my face with a warm hand. “Lauren, there is no need for anybody to be sorry. Now, I’m taking you to my place, all right? For food. Nothing else.”
“Right.” Nothing else? What did that mean?
The car sped off again. The last blush of sunset on the horizon. Everything seemed to whir and blur around me. I pressed my hands to my forehead.
“Nearly there,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re going to have to stop saying that.”
Then we were outside his house and he was helping me out of the car. He got me inside. Things got a little woolly for a while, but it seems I had hot tea and a toasted cheese sandwich, and then Tomas was sitting beside me. “Why do you like me?” I said. “You’re so wonderful and I’m so . . . me.”
“Just drink your tea,” he said gently.
“But . . .”
“I like you because there’s something very real about you, Lauren. Your heart is in your eyes. I don’t know. I’m not good at saying these things.”
I finished my tea and sandwich while he watched. He was so gorgeous. I leaned in to try to kiss him, but he backed away and grasped me gently by the shoulders. “No,” he said. “Not like this.”
He moved to clear away my plate and cup, and I sat alone for a few moments, listening to him in the kitchen.
The next thing I knew I was waking up in grainy morning light, still wearing my dress and heels, under a light blanket on Tomas’s couch.
The shame. The horrible, crawling shame. Snatches of the previous night came back to me. Drinking too much, talking too much, falling over too much, trying to kiss Tomas and being rebuffed. I looked at my watch: it was just before five. If I crept out now . . .
But my bladder was too full for a quick escape. I climbed slowly to my feet, head pounding, and glanced around the room. Couch, coffee table, television. No rug, no bookshelves, no paintings. Tomas was renting, which perhaps explained the lack of finishing touches on the place. The cottage was silent. I could hear birdsong from outside.
I spied a likely hallway in the hope of finding a bathroom, slipped off my ridiculous shoes, and made my way quietly down it.
Shortly after, I was halfway out the front door, congratulating myself on having got so far without waking Tomas, when I heard his voice.
“Sneaking out?”
I turned. He stood behind the couch, in blue pajamas, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
“I’m sorry—”
“I forbade you from using that word last night, remember?”
I shook my head. “I don’t really remember much.”
“Stay,” he said, smiling. “Let me make you some toast and coffee, at least.”
The idea of coffee caught my attention. “You don’t hate me?”
He shook his head, laughing. “That’s the last thing I feel for you.”
I closed the door on the cool predawn air. “Thank you,” I said. “And thanks for the blanket. And for being . . . you know . . . a gentleman about it all.”
“Follow me,” he said, and I followed him to his kitchen, where he switched on the light and indicated I should sit at the table.
“So, I take it you’re not usually a big drinker?” he said as he fired up his coffee machine.
“Ah, no. Nor a big dater, I’m afraid. I was very anxious.”
“I find it impossible to believe I could make anyone anxious.” His bright blue eyes were twinkling.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“You told me a lot of it last night.”
“I didn’t tell you I’ve never had a boyfriend.” The word boyfriend felt wrong in my mouth, like a word I should have used fifteen years ago, not now.
“Not one?”
I shook my head. He busied himself making coffee, and I sat in my embarrassment until he placed a cup in front of me and joined me at the table.
“Really?” he said, picking up the same conversation. “Not one relationship?”
“I couldn’t. For . . . all those reasons I spoke about last night.”
“But didn’t you want a relationship? Didn’t you want a life?”
“Of course. I longed for it. But . . . Adam’s life seemed to depend on me not doing anything I wanted. Then his impending death made me feel selfish for even wanting something.”
“Did you have dreams? Aspirations?”
“Not really. Beyond maybe getting married one day, having children. When Adam died and I realized I had some freedom, I discovered I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
“So you came up here to find yourself?”
I shook my head sadly. “I came up here because Adam always wanted to. I didn’t have a dream, so I just picked up his.”
Tomas sipped his coffee, wearing that listening expression that had kept me talking so long last night.
“He spent some time up here in the two years before he became ill. He talked a lot about coming back. For a long time, when he was younger, he was quite agitated about it, about not being well enough to travel. As time went by, he stopped talking about it so much. But he had a framed photograph he’d taken on the bush track to the Falls, and he had it enlarged to a meter across and hung on the wall of his room. He spent a lot
of time looking at it, I imagine, when he could do nothing else.” Dammit, no. On top of everything else, my voice shook and I had to blink back tears.
Tomas reached his hand across the table and covered mine with it. “Cry if you need to. It’s okay.”
“I think women are supposed to be more mysterious than I’ve been on this date,” I said.
“I don’t like mysterious. I like you. Maybe all those extra years with your family meant that you didn’t learn how to be hard, or cool, or false. Maybe that’s exactly why I like you, Lauren.”
His kind words made me cry for real, and as I did he sat patiently, stroking my hand with his thumb.
“I need to be honest with you, though,” he said, and an ominous chime rang out in my heart. “Knowing what I know about you now, about your . . . inexperience, I suppose you’d say. I’m due to return to Copenhagen in June, and I won’t be back until January next year. Then, six months after that, I’ll be returning home for good.”
“Home? To Denmark?”
“Yes. So, I can’t . . . I wouldn’t be able to offer you anything . . . you mentioned marriage, children. It’s better that I warn you. I’m not here forever.”
“That’s fine,” I said, probably too quickly. “I don’t mind. I’d really like to keep seeing you. I’m sure our second date will be better than the first. It can’t be worse.”
He tapped my hand gently. “Let’s have our second date now, then.”
“Breakfast date?”
“How about a quick piece of toast, then let’s go back into the west wing, and see if we can find any more about our forbidden lovers.”
“I’m wearing an evening dress and ridiculous shoes,” I said.
“We’ll stop by your place and get some sensible ones, then.”
I grinned at him. “Okay.”
* * *
The faint dawn light fell in cracks through the boarded windows, but Tomas had brought a large torch with a long beam, and I got a much better sense of the faded grandeur of the place.
“Will you try to preserve the original look?” I asked as he shone the torch onto the ornate ceiling. “The pressed-metal designs are magnificent.” I was much more comfortable now in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
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