How to Say Goodbye

by Katy Colins

  ‘I don’t know. All I know is that they’d spoken about getting everything in place before she told you. She was going to leave you the house –’

  ‘How fucking generous of her,’ he snarled quietly.

  ‘– and move away.’

  ‘It wasn’t just a bored wife looking for a cheap thrill with a fucking tormented artist. I had no chance at resolving this! I’d lost her two and a half years ago without even realising it…’ He rubbed his face as this sank in.

  His gaze fixed on the bruised knuckles resting in his lap. Vomit stained his jeans.

  ‘The night she died…’

  ‘She was here, on her way home from seeing him.’

  ‘For so long I believed that I’d killed Abbie, but it wasn’t because of me that she avoided coming home that night…’

  I shook my head vehemently. ‘You did nothing wrong! She didn’t come home after dropping Owen off because she came here to see Daniel.’

  He blinked rapidly, letting the truth sink in.

  ‘He was the last person to see her alive.’

  This fact hung in the air like smoke from a party popper.

  ‘Come on. We should leave.’

  The past few hours had rolled into one long, painful open wound of emotion. He got to his feet, looking exhausted. Even if I was the last person he wanted to be near, he let me gently guide him out of there.

  ‘How did you get in here anyway?’ I asked softly.

  ‘Picked the lock.’ He nodded at the door then, without thinking, half-smiled at my shocked expression. ‘Learnt it from my mum.’

  I turned off the lamp and pulled the door behind us. Our footsteps were loud on the empty pavement. Whenever Daniel next turned up, he would see the state of his studio and know Callum had been there. The insurers would think a burglary had taken place, but he wouldn’t pursue any further action.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Now we go home.’

  Callum kicked a stone, sending it skittering over the cobbles, and nodded. I wondered if he was picturing Abbie here. If he could see the ghost of her reflected in the dark windows. I thought about the trail of destruction she’d unwittingly left, how no secrets were ever truly buried. I thought of Henry. I thought how Callum and I both had a choice to move forward and leaving the ghosts where they belonged. Our feet fell in sync as we walked away from the past.

  Chapter 39

  We’d driven home in convoy. I drove cautiously, slowing down to check Callum was following me, my brake lights lighting his swollen face in my rearview mirror.

  I’d helped his shaking hands fumble with the keys to his front door. From the pleading look he gave me I knew that he didn’t want to be left alone with his thoughts, alone in this huge house. I’d offered to stay. He’d produced two tumblers and a bottle of whisky. For the first time in over five years I joined him in a glass; the burning heat of the amber liquid both smooth and difficult to swallow. We needed this. We both did. He sat on the floor with his back against the sofa, effortlessly draining his glass before pouring another. I was reminded of the last time we’d been sitting up at a similar hour of the morning, in similar positions in my flat. It felt a world away.

  ‘You want a top-up?’

  I shook my head. I was going to nurse the one I had.

  ‘It’s probably a good thing you’re here.’

  I glanced over from the sofa I was sitting on.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, with you here I’m going to be a whole lot more restrained than I normally am with this stuff.’

  ‘Happy to be of help.’

  The silence curled between us once more.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I bit my lip. What a stupid question – but I couldn’t just ignore the elephant in the room.

  ‘I thought I was doing OK…’

  He probably felt like he’d swum from the shipwreck to the shore when, in fact, he was completely lost at sea.

  ‘I dunno. I mean, I thought I’d handled it when she died. I thought I was doing pretty well at the whole grieving thing but, well, after tonight I feel like I’ve been grieving for a complete stranger. I’m furious with Abbie, but where’s this anger for a dead woman going to go? It’s not like I’ll ever hear her side of the story. I still can’t believe it. I mean, as much as we bickered, I can’t honestly believe that Abbie would have done this to me. We’d taken our marriage vows seriously. I’d been a good husband, tried my very best to keep her happy. I’d have known if she had been having an affair for over two bloody years, surely?’ He shook his head in utter disbelief. ‘When I was driving to yours I told myself that Abbie was innocent; my suspicions were false, the evidence I’d found didn’t add up. Another part of my brain was more insistent – of course she didn’t love me. I hadn’t been good enough to keep a woman like Abbie Anderson happy and content. In the last few years she’d become more distant, despite how much I tried to tell myself otherwise. I realised that the clues had been staring me in the face all along.’

  ‘The Brighton thing?’

  ‘And others… phone calls Abbie had never answered, insisting they were sales calls, PPI, and I’d believed her. I mean, Abbie cheating shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. She thrived on male attention. No workman who set foot in our house was safe. Every young waiter who served her got a flash of her trademark flirty smile. She’d never change, though. That was what had pulled me towards her. I was a hypocrite to think that I could tame her. For a year or so into our marriage she played the role of dutiful wife. We’d go to parties, basking in the looks others gave us; the lovebird newlyweds. We’d hold hands in restaurants and kiss by the dishwasher. But then she’d got bored, the shine had faded on matrimonial life around the time when most couples try to keep the spark alive by having a baby. Every time people said “It’ll be your turn next”, whenever the topic of children came up, Abbie would laugh and make some light-hearted comment that we weren’t ready just yet. Once we returned home from this act that we’d perfected, and closed the front door, it was a different story. She would go to the lounge and stick on some awful reality TV show, telling me she needed some alone time, or have a long bath, pointedly locking the door behind her. I started spending more time alone, keeping out of the way of Abbie and her erratic moods.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Callum. I don’t know what else to say.’ Maybe if I repeated it enough times it would sink in.

  He was on a roll, letting it all out to the stillness of the semi-dark room.

  ‘It all happened so gradually. I can’t even pinpoint the exact moment we drifted apart. The time spent doing our own thing outweighing any time we spent as a couple. Before I knew it we were living separate lives under the same roof. Or maybe we both did realise it, but neither us had the energy to stop it. Our marriage was less than perfect, but I still never would have imagined she’d do this to me.’

  ‘I won’t say I know what you’re going through because I don’t, but I do have an idea…’

  He tilted his head to me.

  ‘I thought I knew my ex-boyfriend, Henry, but I didn’t.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He died too.’ I half whispered.

  He frowned. ‘Sorry. I thought you said you had lost your son…’

  I nodded. ‘I lost them both.’

  Callum dared look at me. The hurt I’d caused him was still etched on his pale face but it had faded slightly.

  ‘Shit. W-what happened?’

  Was I really going to do this – spill my whole heart out? Perhaps it was the only way to move on. I took a breath.

  ‘I had a missed miscarriage, where you go for a routine scan but they can’t find a heartbeat.’ I swallowed the lump in my throat. ‘Henry became distant after I lost Sam – that’s what we named our son. He shut himself off from me, from everyone, and focussed his energy at the bottom of whatever bottle he could get his hands on to drown his sorrows.’ My eyes flickered to the half-empty glass in my hand. ‘Two days after I had to ha
ve the medical procedure to remove my son from me, Henry was on a work night out. He was drunk, well wasted, and got separated from his friends and fell into a canal. He didn’t make it out. In the space of forty-eight hours I’d lost the person I loved most in the world, and our future.’

  Callum stayed silent.

  ‘I hated him for leaving me, just as you probably hate Abbie for lying to you. In my mind, Henry changed from this man who I thought would always be there for me, to this coward who couldn’t handle the same thing I was going through. That his stupidity had cost him his life. He didn’t think about me at all. God knows, I wanted to get obscenely drunk as soon as we left the sonographer’s room, I wanted to forget, but I couldn’t. I had to stay strong. I didn’t deal with losing either of them very well.’ I bit my lip, hoping to stem the tears. ‘What I can’t ever escape from is the fact that although he refused to open up to me, I should have tried harder. Forced him to talk to someone about how he was coping, encouraged him not to hit the bottle so hard. He lost his baby too but it was all I could do to concentrate on myself and surviving.’ I paused. ‘The truth is that I could have saved him.’

  ‘Grace! It wasn’t your fault.’ Callum sat up straighter.

  ‘The hardest part was that I never even got to say goodbye.’

  He looked confused.

  ‘With Sam, I was in too much shock with everything else that was going on to take it all in. I remember the doctor giving me a pamphlet on cremations for tiny babies, a line about a shared service with other grieving parents at the local crematorium. It was too horrific to contemplate.’

  Callum winced.

  ‘I couldn’t go to Henry’s funeral. I was too upset, too lost in the grief for Sam. My own physical reaction to this miscarriage meant it took priority over dealing with the loss of Henry. My body sort of went into shock mode, to protect me in some way I guess. But because of how Henry died, and how angry I was at him for doing something so foolish, I didn’t want to say goodbye to this version of him; I couldn’t begin to comprehend how he had done this to me. My Henry would never have left me alone, he would never have put alcohol before me, before us. I was too consumed with rage to contemplate blending in with the other mourners. I wanted to ignore everyone and everything. Hoping it would go away. But it’s something I regret more than anything. I wish I’d had a service, that last moment in time with him, with both of them. I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to my son or my boyfriend.’

  ‘Is that why you really became a funeral arranger?’

  I nodded, finally admitting the truth. ‘I needed to get so close to death it wouldn’t hurt me.’

  Chapter 40

  I’d woken up in the same position I’d fallen asleep, facing Callum on opposite sofas. Our breathing eventually fell into sync. I allowed myself a few seconds to take in his peaceful face. His eyelashes fanned shut, his hair tousled and lips ever so slightly parted. The need for the toilet forced me to break the intimate moment.

  Abbie’s toiletries were still dotted about the surfaces of the upstairs bathroom. He must have become skilled at ignoring them. Shiny glass bottles, expensive creams, and half-empty make-up remover glared at me from the tiled cabinet. How had he been able to look past them? How had he managed to spend these months in their home, when her presence appeared to radiate from every surface? It was assaulting my senses.

  After freshening up a little, I slipped out of the house, wanting him to sleep for as long as possible. I nipped out to the nearest corner shop and bought every possible breakfast item available. I needed to start making amends.

  ‘Hey. Someone’s been busy…’

  ‘You made me jump!’ I spun to face Callum. He’d had a shower, his hair wet and skin pink. He was wearing a pair of grey jogging bottoms and a faded band T-shirt.

  ‘I thought you might be hungry.’

  ‘Grace, you didn’t have to do this.’

  ‘I wanted to do this.’ I pushed a mug and the cafetière in his direction as he pulled out a stool from the breakfast bar. ‘Coffee’s just brewed.’

  We quickly fell into a comfortable silence, moving around the other as we had done over the summer. It felt nice, like nothing else had happened, that we hadn’t changed since that version of Callum and Grace.

  ‘You not cutting it a bit fine to get to the office?’ He glanced at the clock.

  It was almost nine.

  ‘Ah, yeah, funny thing actually…’ I tried to say as lightly as I could. ‘I’ve been suspended. It’s actually because of you.’ I hurriedly waved my arms around. ‘Not you. I mean, my actions with delivering Abbie’s ashes. Let’s just say it wasn’t quite by the book.’ I felt the flame of embarrassment burn on my cheeks.

  ‘What?’ He frowned. ‘You’ve lost your job?’

  I gave a half nod, half shake of the head.

  ‘I, er, didn’t get you to sign the right forms and, well, I should have asked you to come to the office to collect them…’ I thought of the foolish reasons why I’d done it. Why I’d been snooping around Abbie’s things. How stupid I’d been. How I should have stayed out of her life, both of their lives.

  ‘Oh.’ He rubbed his stubble. ‘Er, sorry?’

  ‘No! It’s my fault. To be honest, I was letting other things slip too. I’m sure it’ll all be sorted soon enough. I’m on gardening leave so it’s not like I’ve been properly sacked…’

  An unspoken yet hung in the air.

  ‘Grace, you’re too good at your job to let it be taken away from you. What you do is… well, it helps a lot of people, probably more than you’ll ever know.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You might want to think about staying off social media though.’

  I sipped my coffee and blushed.

  ‘The Balinese sarongs? The umbrellas? It makes sense now. I knew I’d never told you about us going to Bali.’

  I cast my eyes to the floor, my cheeks warm. ‘I learnt about it from Abbie’s Facebook page. I know it’s hard to get your head around, but I honestly had my heart in the right place.’ I sighed. ‘Truth be told it was exhausting. Wanting to deliver the perfect goodbye nearly broke me. Not that I expect any sympathy,’ I added quickly.

  ‘But Grace, who is this “perfect goodbye” really for?’ He made quotation marks.

  ‘The family.’ I answered in a beat.

  His eyes widened and he let out a sort of laugh. ‘I don’t want to be rude but fuck – I can’t remember half of what happened at Abbie’s funeral. I don’t know what was said, what hymns we picked, or even what colour flowers we had.’

  I tried not to let his words hurt me, but I was shocked. Was that how he really felt?

  ‘I couldn’t have even told you who was there on the day – you’re in such a state of shock. It’s all about survival mode, time ceases to exist. Like the days between Christmas and New Year. I’m guessing most of the people you deal with at work are the same. Those days are just utter numbness; you’re on autopilot, dealing with the unbelievable, waiting to wake up and for it all not to be true.’

  I paused. ‘But you’d remember if it all didn’t go to plan. People remember the disasters.’

  ‘Yeah, you’ve got a point there, but that doesn’t mean you have to go to such extreme lengths. However you go about it, it’s still a messed up process for people to get their heads around. There is no such thing as the perfect goodbye; the perfect goodbye is not having to say goodbye in the first place.’

  I glanced out of the kitchen window, thinking about what he was saying, my eyes resting on the garden we had poured so much time and energy into.

  He caught me looking. ‘You think we’ll win any awards for largest courgettes or anything like that?’

  ‘Who were we kidding?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean this, the summer, us hanging out and thinking that a spot of gardening would fix all our problems.’ His voice rose and crackled slightly. His eyes remained fixed on the lawn. ‘All this time I’d been d
esperate to keep busy so I wouldn’t have to face up to the reality of a life without Abbie, when all along I hadn’t had that anyway. I should have known. I should have spotted the signs.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I need to give Mel a call and fill her in. She’s going to be doing her I told you so face. They were never the best of friends.’ He tried to flash a smile but didn’t quite pull it off.

  I nodded, lacing my fingers around my mug.

  ‘Thanks for opening up to me about what you’ve been through.’

  ‘We make quite the pair, don’t we!’

  ‘You could say that. But, you know, these things that happened to us didn’t happen because we’re bad people, Grace.’ He sighed. ‘I’m still getting my head around what the hell has gone on. The only thing that is clear to me is that I thought I’d lost control but really, I never had any control to begin with. No one does.’

  He was right. I’d tried to claw back control in my life by making things as perfect for others as I could. It had been the only thing to keep me stable after it felt like everything was spinning away from me. Henry dying. Losing our baby. I had lost control and had been determined never to feel like that again. What I hadn’t realised was that I’d become manic, almost, in my desire to feel in control again.

  ‘I know.’ I nodded, my voice barely a whisper. How could he be so observant so soon after the shock he’d received?

  Callum cleared his throat. ‘I think I’m going to go away for a while.’

  I looked up at him.

  ‘To clear my head, you know… The house, this place, it’s all feeling a little claustrophobic…’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Maybe up to Rory’s for a bit, then take it from there.’

  ‘Will you go for long?’ I picked at my thumbnail.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t really know, Grace.’

  Silence fell between us again. What more was there to say?

  ‘I should be heading home.’ I desperately needed a shower and a change of clothes. ‘Are you going to be OK?’ I asked, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, waiting for him to say something. Waiting for him to say what we both wanted to hear.