What Now?

by Low, Shari

  Three months later, they travelled with us to New York for my wedding to Mark and Sarah fell madly in love for the second time in a year, this time with the bustling, heady atmosphere of the Big Apple.

  ‘I never want to leave here,’ she’d announced, on the last day of the trip.

  ‘Then don’t,’ I’d told her, pumped up on the roaring success of my mission. I’d taken a chance, I’d gone after what I wanted, and I’d reconnected with Mark, the boy I’d met at fourteen and dated on and off my whole life. The right one was there all along. I just had to take a risk to find him. ‘You could stay here if you want to,’ I went on, enthusiasm building. ‘Why wouldn’t you? Nick could open a bar here, you could teach, and the kids could have a great life.’ The picture I painted was so vivid, my friend had bought the print.

  Back in Scotland, Nick had franchised out his bar in St Andrews, then, over the next few years, he set about creating a chain of identical outlets across the UK and the east coast of America. He was able to get a US visa because he was investing in a business and bringing capital into the country. They went to court to get official permission to take Hannah and Ryan to live in the US and their biological father didn’t fight it. He’d already moved on to his next family and had little interest in the one that had left him. The feeling was mutual.

  New York was everything they hoped and they adored it unconditionally.

  They created a life that was exactly as I’d drawn it. Nick’s bar in New York, a cool, cosmopolitan speakeasy in SoHo, was a great success and Sarah landed a fabulous teaching role at the international school. We visited at least once a year, sometimes twice, determined to raise our children as one big extended family. Nick and Sarah Russo were set to live happily ever after.

  Until they weren’t.

  In 2017, on a warm Sunday afternoon, my mobile phone rang.

  ‘Girls, it’s Sarah! She’s on FaceTime,’ I yelled to Kate, Carol and Jess, who immediately grabbed their drinks and came to join me at the table in my garden, leaving the rest of our broods to carry on cooking, chatting and, in the case of the kids, fighting a volleyball tournament to the death, using a large net curtain slung over my washing line.

  ‘Happy birthday, Cooper!’ she bellowed as soon as I answered the call.

  ‘Thank you! God, I’m old. Ancient. We all are.’

  ‘Except me,’ Carol chirped. ‘I’m frozen in time.’

  ‘Only because you’ve had too much Botox,’ Jess shot her down. Harsh but true.

  ‘I wish you were here,’ I wailed. ‘It’s been waaaay too long.

  ‘It has. Tell that husband of yours to get his act together. He’s wrecking our social lives.’ Sarah adored my husband, but she definitely disapproved of his workaholic habits. We’d planned to visit her twice that year already, and had to cancel both times because Mark couldn’t get away from work. I hadn’t seen her in person since they’d been over at Christmas and we missed them beyond words. ‘Speaking of which, where is he?’ she asked.

  ‘Working,’ I admitted, with a rueful grimace.

  Sarah gasped. ‘On a Sunday? When his wife’s having a birthday party.’

  ‘Don’t get us started,’ Kate cut in. ‘We already plan to remind our darling Mark what his priorities should be. Although Jess seems to think she requires electric probes for his dangly bits to get the message across effectively.’

  ‘Ouch,’ Sarah squirmed. ‘Although, if the end justifies the means…’

  I went for a quick change of subject. ‘Anyway, where’s your other half?’

  ‘He’s still in bed. It’s 8 a.m. here. We’re having a lazy morning and then we’re going to meet the kids for lunch.’ She still called them kids, although Hannah was twenty-four and working in a real estate company and Ryan was twenty-three and in his final year at college.

  ‘Did you decide what you’re going to do for Nick’s birthday yet?’

  Mr Russo’s big day was the week after mine. Over the years, we’d had many joint celebrations, and if it wasn’t for Mark’s errant priorities, we’d be over there right now, preparing for another one. This one was special – Nick was a few years older than us, so he was about to turn fifty.

  ‘Uh, I’ve got nothing,’ Sarah groaned. ‘I want it to be something special, something he’ll always remember.’

  ‘What about…’ I paused to build up the moment. ‘Flying lessons! Nick would love that.’

  ‘You think?’ she asked, sounding doubtful.

  ‘Absolutely!’ I assured her. ‘He mentioned having a hankering to learn the last time he was over here,’ I enthused. ‘That’s it! It’s the perfect present! And they do those dual lessons, so you could go with him.’

  Sarah spluttered. ‘I’d rather be subjected to Mark’s electric probes.’

  ‘Sarah Moore Russo, where is your sense of adventure?’

  ‘I let it go for a lie-down about five years ago and I haven’t seen it since,’ she joked. ‘You know I hate all that adrenalin-rush stuff. Besides, I’m flipping terrified of heights.’

  That should have been it. I should have let it go. But at that moment I was so carried away with my own brilliant idea, so chuffed that I’d solved her problem, so determined to push her into something I thought she’d love, even if she wasn’t sure herself, that I wouldn’t let it go.

  ‘Book it! It’ll be amazing and I promise you’ll thank me. He’ll be completely blown away and, you never know, you might catch the bug. If so, we demand to be flown anywhere for free until we croak,’ I joked, loving her giggle on the other end.

  At some point that week, on my stupid advice, Sarah booked a joint flying lesson for her and Nick, and another ten for him to do alone.

  The following Sunday, they showed up at the local, provincial airport that was the base for the flying school.

  A terrified, apprehensive Sarah, and a delighted Nick, climbed into a Cessna, with an instructor of twenty years.

  One that had been out playing poker and drinking Jim Beam with his mates until 3 a.m. that morning.

  Forty-seven minutes later, the pilot made a mayday call.

  Thirty seconds later, the plane came down, crashed into an electricity pylon and then finally came to rest when it landed on a nearby lake.

  The investigation would conclude that there was a mechanical issue which almost certainly caused the crash, but the situation was exacerbated by the reduced faculties of the pilot, due to lack of sleep.

  It ruled accident, and fell short of naming who was at fault.

  It didn’t have to because we all knew it was me.

  The truth was, if it weren’t for my crazy ideas, Sarah Moore would never have met Nick Russo.

  If I hadn’t got married in New York, Sarah wouldn’t have visited that city that year.

  If it weren’t for my encouragement to live in the moment and go after what she wanted, she might never have packed up her whole life and moved to New York.

  If I hadn’t given her that idea for an adrenalin rush and badgered her into booking the flying lessons for Nick, she’d never have organised that flight.

  And if they’d never taken that flight, they wouldn’t have died when it crashed to the ground, claiming the lives of everyone on board.

  If it weren’t for me and my stupid, ill-thought out schemes and exploits, Sarah and Nick would still be alive, and Hannah and Ryan would still have their parents. I might not have caused the engine to fail, or poured bourbon down the pilot’s throat, but if I hadn’t coaxed Sarah into going there, she’d never have been in that situation.

  So what right did I have to live my life like nothing had happened? What right did I have to sleep easy at night, to love and to seek love back, when Sarah had lost it all?

  How could I possibly be happy, when my recklessness had taken away two people we loved, and left nothing behind but guilt, sorrow and holes in our lives where Nick and Sarah Russo used to be?

  21

  New York, August, 2019

  Goodbye –
The Spice Girls

  Sarah and Nick were everywhere in their home. They were in the black-framed photographs that lined the hallway, showing unposed images of family moments throughout the years. They were in the duck egg blue of the wall panels – Sarah’s favourite colour. And they were in the plaid of the carpet runner that climbed the stairs, St Andrews tartan, a nod to the town Nick grew up in.

  Sarah was there, right there, in the face of her daughter. It took my breath away to see how much Hannah resembled her mum now. The long dark hair, pulled back in a low, messy ponytail, escaped tendrils framing her face. The smile, too. Wide, open, but hinting at a shyness that lingered just under the surface.

  At the door, we hugged like we were hanging on in a storm, until Carol interrupted the moment. ‘Right, you two, I love you both, but if you don’t let me past, I may pee in the hallway and I’m trying to stop doing that when I go to other people’s homes.’

  My tears turned to gratitude for the perfect distraction. ‘My sister-in-law, ladies and gentlemen,’ I said solemnly, standing back for her to sweep past.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Hannah beckoned. ‘Leave your bags there and we can sort them out later.’

  We followed her into the kitchen. Like Kate, Sarah’s homes had always had a table in the middle of the room, operation central for her family and friends, and we all automatically took the chairs that we’d sat in on the many times we’d visited this house before. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the empty one at the end of the long plank of glossy ebony.

  ‘Coffee or wine?’ Hannah asked.

  Kate and Jess were in sync with, ‘Wine.’

  ‘Coffee,’ I said, at the same time. I didn’t want to say that my choice was influenced by worry that a drink or two would make it impossible to maintain the gargantuan effort it was taking to hold it together.

  Hannah flicked a button on the integrated barista machine on the wall of the gloss cream units behind her. The kitchen had been Nick’s domain. RUSSO, his restaurant in St Andrews, the one we’d tracked him down to all those years before, had turned out to be just the first in a chain of six: two in Scotland, one in Manhattan, two in upstate New York and his newest one, opened just before his death, in New Jersey.

  When he died, Hannah had stepped up from her management role in HR to take over the company, a transition made easier because she’d worked part-time in the restaurants since she was a teenager, so she was familiar with every aspect of the operation. If only Sarah could see how brilliant her daughter had been since her parent died…

  I stopped myself. Hold it together.

  Hannah chatted as she poured the wine. ‘Ryan said to say hi and sorry he couldn’t be here.’

  Ryan was younger than Hannah by a year and a half, so they’d always been close. A sporty kid, Sarah had been thrilled when Ryan had landed a four-year soccer scholarship at a college in Columbia, South Carolina. He’d graduated just a few weeks after the accident and I knew from Hannah’s emails that he’d found it difficult to adjust to his whole life changing in such a short space of time.

  ‘How’s he doing?’ Kate asked, taking the first full glass.

  Hannah hesitated. ‘It was rough at first…’ She didn’t need to elaborate. ‘But he’s getting there. You know he spent the last couple of years drifting in and out of jobs, just trying to find his place, but now that he’s gone back to South Carolina he’s so much better.’ The previous January, Ryan had been offered the role of assistant soccer coach at the college he’d attended for four years.

  Hannah’s relief was palpable as she went on, ‘He’s so happy to be back there and I think it’s helped beyond words that he’s somewhere he feels comfortable and that he belongs. They’re like family and they’re taking care of him.’

  Every one of us at the table understood that concept.

  There was a click of sky-scraper heels as Carol charged back into the room, hair scraped back from her face, already changed into a body-hugging red minidress that clung to her every curve. ‘Okay, my Uber is outside.’ I’d completely forgotten that the initial purpose of this trip was for her to attend some flash launch. ‘I’m off. I’ll be back as soon as they’ve milked me to a dry husk for the sake of corporate profits.’ And she called me dramatic.

  Jess went for the cynical approach. ‘You mean as soon as they’ve plied you with food and champagne, and paid you massive sums of money to have your photograph taken next to some ridiculously expensive, price-inflated piece of technology that was probably built for twenty quid in a factory with the bare minimum of health and safety standards?’

  Carol stopped, and I was pretty sure I almost saw a frown line. It was either a trick of the light or a definite indication that she needed to top up her Botox. ‘Yep,’ she said, as if it was obvious. ‘That’s exactly what I said.’ She blew us a kiss and then her heels clicked right out the door.

  For the next couple of hours, mostly thanks to Jess and Kate keeping everything light and chatty, the conversation flowed. We talked about everything except the people that connected us. It was superficial. Breezy. Like the conversation you would have with a casual friend. Not the difficult, antagonistic conversation that needed to be had between people who were grieving and those who were responsible for that pain. Sure, Hannah was making an effort to be polite tonight, but she couldn’t look me in the eye. This was all surface stuff and I knew she was only behaving this way because Sarah had brought her up well.

  She kept up the façade of normality until we’d exhausted all areas of small talk, and a painful silence descended. To my surprise, it was Hannah who broke it first.

  ‘Mum would love that you’re all here,’ she said, leaning over to refill Kate and Jess’s glasses. ‘I’m glad that you called me, Aunt Kate. I really am.’

  Kate reached for her hand. ‘Me too. I can’t tell you how much we’ve missed you.’

  Hannah bustled to her feet, perhaps unable to bear the emotion of the moment.

  ‘Another coffee, Aunt Carly?’ It was the first time she’d actually made eye contact with me.

  I shook my head and Kate glanced at me, checking up on how I was doing.

  Hold it together.

  ‘Anyone fancy a walk?’ I blurted, suddenly feeling a desperate need to get some air into my lungs before my chest exploded.

  Jess didn’t even try to hide her initial reaction of horror. I knew she’d much rather take a cosy kitchen with wine and snacks than outdoor exercise on a warm Manhattan night. ‘You want me to walk? For no purpose? There isn’t a shopping mall or a bar at the end of it?’

  ‘No purpose at all,’ I confirmed. ‘Just a walk.’

  ‘I think that’s a great idea,’ Kate jumped in, sussing that the walls were closing in on me and I just needed some space.

  ‘Me too,’ Hannah agreed, her relief visible.

  The clock on the wall showed eleven o’clock when we passed it on the way out. The temperature had dropped outside, but it was still warm and humid. Without making a plan, we turned right and began to walk, no destination in mind. The pavements were narrow, so Jess and Hannah naturally fell into step in front, with Kate and I behind them.

  ‘How are you holding up, honey?’ she asked me, in hushed tones that couldn’t be heard by the two in front.

  ‘My heart is breaking for her and I can’t stand the thought that me being here must be so painful for her.’ I could have said so much more. That my heart was racing. That the guilt was crushing me. That I’d do anything at all to take back what I’d done.

  Kate’s pace slowed so the gap was a little bigger, making sure our conversation was only between us. ‘You need to talk to her. It’s the only thing that is going to help.’

  ‘I know.’ I did. I just wanted to wait for the right moment. But was there ever a right moment to bring up something as important at this?

  We turned left off 6th Avenue on to Canal Street, the cafés and food outlets still open and busy. I’d walked the streets of New York many times in my
life, absorbing the energy of the city, but tonight, nothing could get past the feelings of sadness. New York would always be Sarah’s city. Without her, it didn’t feel the same.

  We were still wandering with no real purpose, turning corners, crossing roads, when I caught sight of a building so familiar it took my breath away. The blond stone steps of the New York City Marriage Bureau were just in front of us.

  Kate registered my sharp intake of breath, and knew exactly what had caused it.

  ‘Anyone want to sit for a while?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes!’ Jess blurted, before realising where we were and laughing. ‘Oh my God, that was one of the best days ever.’

  Hannah looked confused as she sank down on to the steps next to us. The four of us were in a row, huddled together so we could hear each other clearly.

  ‘Carly and your Uncle Mark got married here. Only it nearly didn’t happen because we all got waylaid in a bar round the corner and we were having much too much fun to interrupt it for the actual ceremony bit.’

  Hannah pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. ‘The bar is a McDonald’s now.’

  Something inside me deflated at that announcement. Sometimes progress sucked.

  Chin on her knees now, Hannah went on, ‘My mum pointed it out to me years ago. She told me that story so many times. It sounded like quite a day.’

  ‘It was perfect.’ I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d said that out loud. ‘The perfect day with the perfect people. I wouldn’t change a thing.’ I definitely vocalised that because I could hear my voice crack as I ended the sentence.

  Hold it together.

  I’ve no idea why that suddenly seemed like the right place to have the conversation I’d been avoiding for so long. Perhaps it was the feeling that this was somewhere I’d felt so loved, so protected. Mark and I had been so completely and spectacularly in love. My girlfriends had been by my side. And life had yet to kick the crap out of my naïve optimism that nothing could touch us, that we were an unbreakable gang who would live the best lives.